my ffxiv hot take is that arr is fine actually and all the veterans telling new players to just hold out until heavensward are doing more harm than good
my ffxiv hot take is that arr is fine actually and all the veterans telling new players to just hold out until heavensward are doing more harm than good
ARR has some okay stuff going on, but I think it's fair to say it's got some real garbage in it. The lead up to the Titan fight where you're doing the dumbest fetch quests known to man almost put me off the game, and if I hadn't heard it got better it would have.
I think it's fair to say ARR is weaker than heavensward. And stormblood wasn't the strongest plot wise either.
Though I'm gonna say here that I actually wish more games would go back to using heavily written segments. You can drop a lot with them with good writers, and also they're not exhausting to my neruodivergent arse
Elden Ring has a deep and rich lore that spans eons and reflects on the nature of the divine and death and religion and rebirth. It considers whether or not your actions have any real impact on anything or if it all is just meaningless chaos.
It's just that to uncover any of this story you need to read random item descriptions, access characters that have absolutely no instruction on how to find (and you can completely miss without any notification) and the payoff to three lines of dialogue doesn't happen for a hundred hours.
And you don't have any in game record of any of this so you just kind of thin, sure I think I remember that lady?
I can't remember anything about Elden Ring because there are too many similar names. Godefroy, Godfrey and Godrick and they're all different dudes? Fuck you
I can't remember anything about Elden Ring because there are too many similar names. Godefroy, Godfrey and Godrick and they're all different dudes? Fuck you
the only thing i do in the three time i've fired up elden ring is hang around that one first encampment spot you reach with all the soldiers and the big wagons. i scoot around there and kill a few monsters for about 30 mins then quit.
FF7 and FFT are still two of my favorite games of all time. FF9 is up there too.
I also played and beat FF8 and FF10, but those were more out of a sense of completionist obligation than enjoyment, honestly.
I should go back at some point and pick FF6 back up again. I played it for the first time when Anthology came out for Playstation, and I only got about a quarter or so through the game I think.
Yeah, quality game. Much better than that CoD rubbish
Solar on
+1
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
ARR sucks and if you try to tell someone it's good, after they have spent a couple hours doing fetch quests to prepare for a dinner they would be well within their rights to never trust your opinions again.
Also the Elden Ring story is very straight forward, but people confuse lore for story constantly
in fact i would largely say that when people say that video game stories are good, what they actually mean is "there's a lot of fun characters that talk at you." this is where bioware planted their flag for example. terrible plots. pulp-like without the fun of being pulpy. but it's still fun when an alien tells an anecdote about their past.
this is largely what pulls final fantasy 14 out of the ARR writing. the start of ff14 is bad because it's about you. it's trying to tell a story about the player character becoming a hero. no one gives a shit. you're a video game character, you are gonna be a hero, done. once people start saying that ff14 gets good it's because it stops trying to tell a story about you and starts focusing on the characters that accompany you, to the point that a large swath of the first expansion is a classic JRPG party of you and 3 other NPCs making their way on a pilgrimage to a major plot location. it realizes it can take for granted that the player character is largely just "a guy who is happy to go on adventures and do the right thing" and it doesn't really need to provide a ton of justification past that point.
Man this is cynical to a degree that it makes me feel bad for you! I'm sorry that video game stories have been so disappointing that you have decided the entire medium sucks, I guess!
I still tend to enjoy video games myself and I think the story of FFXIV was great.
On October 26th, Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink in an act so lame that the birth rate in the surrounding twenty-block area will be depressed for decades to come.
Since then, he has lost enough money to fully fund every public library in the United States for a year.
Oops, misread my own notes. He has lost the annual operating expenses for every public library in the United States every five days since October 26th.
On October 26th, Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink in an act so lame that the birth rate in the surrounding twenty-block area will be depressed for decades to come.
Since then, he has lost enough money to fully fund every public library in the United States for a year.
Oops, misread my own notes. He has lost the annual operating expenses for every public library in the United States every five days since October 26th.
jesus christ!!!!!!!!
+12
BroloBroseidonLord of the BroceanRegistered Userregular
I can't remember anything about Elden Ring because there are too many similar names. Godefroy, Godfrey and Godrick and they're all different dudes? Fuck you
Gatekeeper Gostoc
Gideon Ofnir
God
Godeon
Godefroy the Grafted
Godfrey
Godefroy the Granted
Godrick the Grafted
Godrock the Heavy
Godwyn the Golden
Godwin the Goldish
Goldeen the Goldfish
Goldmask
Goldy the Maskless
Goldfinger the Villain
Godot the Waiting
Gowry
Ghostface Killah
Gromit
Gromit and Wallace
Grunty the Cunty
Gungrave the Series
Gunther the Herman
Gurranq
A gas range is inestimably superior to an electric (not induction, old-style “big lightbulb filament in the open air” electric).
However, even a big-lightbulb-filament style oven is inestimably superior to a gas oven?
Different use case, different tradeoffs. If our society wasn’t sixty per cent culture war brainworms by weight, people would be super excited about subsidies for actually good cooking tools. Alas.
Now admittedly I'm a huge fan of retro games, and in fact Zelda 2 is a perfect game and I will hear no arguments to the contrary, but I feel that FF4 and FF6 tell compelling stories despite oddities in translations and the tech limitations of the time. Like firing up FF4, and you're Cecil, a dude who is already an accomplished warrior who has become a Dark Knight to better serve his king? That's a hell of an in media res right there.
Oh shit also a retro Twitch channel chat made me aware of Halo 2600, a 2010 version of Halo for the Atari 2600, and Intellivania, a modern port of the original Castlevania for the Intellivision, and seriously how badass is all that
If FF14 didn't tell a compelling story, and not just "by video game standards" but an actual good story by any standards, I wouldn't be watching other people playing it just so I can see their own reactions to the stuff I saw and see them piece together things slowly revealed over time since the very start. Endwalker in particular I enjoy hearing what these other people are taking away from it, how they respond to the messages and themes.
As for ARR being bad, I don't agree but I also don't see that as a disqualifier when there's plenty of good media that has a weak start and only gets stronger over time. Discworld series for instance, where every time I see people saying don't start with the first one.
If FF14 didn't tell a compelling story, and not just "by video game standards" but an actual good story by any standards, I wouldn't be watching other people playing it just so I can see their own reactions to the stuff I saw and see them piece together things slowly revealed over time since the very start. Endwalker in particular I enjoy hearing what these other people are taking away from it, how they respond to the messages and themes.
As for ARR being bad, I don't agree but I also don't see that as a disqualifier when there's plenty of good media that has a weak start and only gets stronger over time. Discworld series for instance, where every time I see people saying don't start with the first one.
If I tell someone to start with a later Discworld book, they can just do that, they don't have to buy all of them in order to get to the good one
If someone starts FFXIV, they're stuck in bog standard MMO-town for at minimum a few dozen hours unless they want to pay to not play through that part, it's a totally ridiculous comparison. Video Games that only get good at some nebulous later point are a tough sell because broadly speaking you can't just skip straight to the good part.
If FF14 didn't tell a compelling story, and not just "by video game standards" but an actual good story by any standards, I wouldn't be watching other people playing it just so I can see their own reactions to the stuff I saw and see them piece together things slowly revealed over time since the very start. Endwalker in particular I enjoy hearing what these other people are taking away from it, how they respond to the messages and themes.
As for ARR being bad, I don't agree but I also don't see that as a disqualifier when there's plenty of good media that has a weak start and only gets stronger over time. Discworld series for instance, where every time I see people saying don't start with the first one.
If I tell someone to start with a later Discworld book, they can just do that, they don't have to buy all of them in order to get to the good one
If someone starts FFXIV, they're stuck in bog standard MMO-town for at minimum a few dozen hours unless they want to pay to not play through that part, it's a totally ridiculous comparison. Video Games that only get good at some nebulous later point are a tough sell because broadly speaking you can't just skip straight to the good part.
If you want to skip straight to the good part then you can go ahead and do that in FF14 too. There's skips you can purchase to get you straight to Heavensward or later, just because you mentioned it in aside doesn't mean it's not there. Although, if someone wants to just "skip to the good part" of a story then frankly they're not someone who I would be recommending the game to at all because the entire point of FF14 is the story, unlike other MMOs where story is secondary or even lower. And that's fine, different strokes for different folks. I personally had no issues with ARR considering I binged its entirety in the span of a month from start to finish just before Heavensward, still carrying the baggage of ten years of WoW with me. Does ARR drag at times? Oh yes very much so, I greatly disliked things such as fetching Tataru her tea leaves from the north pole for whatever reasons. Do I regret playing through it? Absolutely not, because there are several critical moments in it that I still remember and which resonate all the way to present day in the game's storyline. I don't regret the time I spent in ARR at all.
If FF14 didn't tell a compelling story, and not just "by video game standards" but an actual good story by any standards, I wouldn't be watching other people playing it just so I can see their own reactions to the stuff I saw and see them piece together things slowly revealed over time since the very start. Endwalker in particular I enjoy hearing what these other people are taking away from it, how they respond to the messages and themes.
As for ARR being bad, I don't agree but I also don't see that as a disqualifier when there's plenty of good media that has a weak start and only gets stronger over time. Discworld series for instance, where every time I see people saying don't start with the first one.
If I tell someone to start with a later Discworld book, they can just do that, they don't have to buy all of them in order to get to the good one
If someone starts FFXIV, they're stuck in bog standard MMO-town for at minimum a few dozen hours unless they want to pay to not play through that part, it's a totally ridiculous comparison. Video Games that only get good at some nebulous later point are a tough sell because broadly speaking you can't just skip straight to the good part.
If you want to skip straight to the good part then you can go ahead and do that in FF14 too. There's skips you can purchase to get you straight to Heavensward or later, just because you mentioned it in aside doesn't mean it's not there.
i do not think "you can pay them additional money to skip to the story people say is good" is a good argument!
If FF14 didn't tell a compelling story, and not just "by video game standards" but an actual good story by any standards, I wouldn't be watching other people playing it just so I can see their own reactions to the stuff I saw and see them piece together things slowly revealed over time since the very start. Endwalker in particular I enjoy hearing what these other people are taking away from it, how they respond to the messages and themes.
As for ARR being bad, I don't agree but I also don't see that as a disqualifier when there's plenty of good media that has a weak start and only gets stronger over time. Discworld series for instance, where every time I see people saying don't start with the first one.
If I tell someone to start with a later Discworld book, they can just do that, they don't have to buy all of them in order to get to the good one
If someone starts FFXIV, they're stuck in bog standard MMO-town for at minimum a few dozen hours unless they want to pay to not play through that part, it's a totally ridiculous comparison. Video Games that only get good at some nebulous later point are a tough sell because broadly speaking you can't just skip straight to the good part.
If you want to skip straight to the good part then you can go ahead and do that in FF14 too. There's skips you can purchase to get you straight to Heavensward or later, just because you mentioned it in aside doesn't mean it's not there.
i do not think "you can pay them additional money to skip to the story people say is good" is a good argument!
Way to completely miss the followup where I explicitly say that while it's an option I wouldn't be recommending the game to anybody who would want to use that option because it's antithetical to the game's design. I'm just saying it exists, not that it's good.
Posts
The life of my first horn for another third person anime city building/adventurer management game
man i miss that game
Tanuki Tornado is a great name for like a Japanese ska band
Like, a trumpet?
ARR has some okay stuff going on, but I think it's fair to say it's got some real garbage in it. The lead up to the Titan fight where you're doing the dumbest fetch quests known to man almost put me off the game, and if I hadn't heard it got better it would have.
ARR was fine.
Though honestly I don't understand people's dislike for the company of heroes feast quests, that shit was hilarious to me. Maybe I'm a weirdo.
Though I'm gonna say here that I actually wish more games would go back to using heavily written segments. You can drop a lot with them with good writers, and also they're not exhausting to my neruodivergent arse
Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/id/TheZombiePenguin
Stream: https://www.twitch.tv/thezombiepenguin/
Switch: 0293 6817 9891
elon's evil knows no bounds
Other FFs I've beaten are 15 and Theathrythm.
Was that the heart of darkness one?
It's just that to uncover any of this story you need to read random item descriptions, access characters that have absolutely no instruction on how to find (and you can completely miss without any notification) and the payoff to three lines of dialogue doesn't happen for a hundred hours.
And you don't have any in game record of any of this so you just kind of thin, sure I think I remember that lady?
If they ban it is Wednesday my dudes I swear to god
the only thing i do in the three time i've fired up elden ring is hang around that one first encampment spot you reach with all the soldiers and the big wagons. i scoot around there and kill a few monsters for about 30 mins then quit.
the game is real boring.
I also played and beat FF8 and FF10, but those were more out of a sense of completionist obligation than enjoyment, honestly.
I should go back at some point and pick FF6 back up again. I played it for the first time when Anthology came out for Playstation, and I only got about a quarter or so through the game I think.
Yeah, quality game. Much better than that CoD rubbish
Also the Elden Ring story is very straight forward, but people confuse lore for story constantly
Man this is cynical to a degree that it makes me feel bad for you! I'm sorry that video game stories have been so disappointing that you have decided the entire medium sucks, I guess!
I still tend to enjoy video games myself and I think the story of FFXIV was great.
On October 26th, Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ carrying a sink in an act so lame that the birth rate in the surrounding twenty-block area will be depressed for decades to come.
Since then, he has lost enough money to fully fund every public library in the United States for a year.
Oops, misread my own notes. He has lost the annual operating expenses for every public library in the United States every five days since October 26th.
jesus christ!!!!!!!!
Gatekeeper Gostoc
Gideon Ofnir
God
Godeon
Godefroy the Grafted
Godfrey
Godefroy the Granted
Godrick the Grafted
Godrock the Heavy
Godwyn the Golden
Godwin the Goldish
Goldeen the Goldfish
Goldmask
Goldy the Maskless
Goldfinger the Villain
Godot the Waiting
Gowry
Ghostface Killah
Gromit
Gromit and Wallace
Grunty the Cunty
Gungrave the Series
Gunther the Herman
Gurranq
I kind of like how each character has maybe five voice lines and that's all. The voice actors can really go ham.
However, even a big-lightbulb-filament style oven is inestimably superior to a gas oven?
Different use case, different tradeoffs. If our society wasn’t sixty per cent culture war brainworms by weight, people would be super excited about subsidies for actually good cooking tools. Alas.
Your Ad Here! Reasonable Rates!
Oh shit also a retro Twitch channel chat made me aware of Halo 2600, a 2010 version of Halo for the Atari 2600, and Intellivania, a modern port of the original Castlevania for the Intellivision, and seriously how badass is all that
As for ARR being bad, I don't agree but I also don't see that as a disqualifier when there's plenty of good media that has a weak start and only gets stronger over time. Discworld series for instance, where every time I see people saying don't start with the first one.
I was excited about replacing it with one of those fancy as hell induction stoves, and hopeful the subsidies are sufficient for us to afford it
If I tell someone to start with a later Discworld book, they can just do that, they don't have to buy all of them in order to get to the good one
If someone starts FFXIV, they're stuck in bog standard MMO-town for at minimum a few dozen hours unless they want to pay to not play through that part, it's a totally ridiculous comparison. Video Games that only get good at some nebulous later point are a tough sell because broadly speaking you can't just skip straight to the good part.
Behold my first horn, Blatty the First
Need to clean it up and display it better
If you want to skip straight to the good part then you can go ahead and do that in FF14 too. There's skips you can purchase to get you straight to Heavensward or later, just because you mentioned it in aside doesn't mean it's not there. Although, if someone wants to just "skip to the good part" of a story then frankly they're not someone who I would be recommending the game to at all because the entire point of FF14 is the story, unlike other MMOs where story is secondary or even lower. And that's fine, different strokes for different folks. I personally had no issues with ARR considering I binged its entirety in the span of a month from start to finish just before Heavensward, still carrying the baggage of ten years of WoW with me. Does ARR drag at times? Oh yes very much so, I greatly disliked things such as fetching Tataru her tea leaves from the north pole for whatever reasons. Do I regret playing through it? Absolutely not, because there are several critical moments in it that I still remember and which resonate all the way to present day in the game's storyline. I don't regret the time I spent in ARR at all.
i do not think "you can pay them additional money to skip to the story people say is good" is a good argument!
Way to completely miss the followup where I explicitly say that while it's an option I wouldn't be recommending the game to anybody who would want to use that option because it's antithetical to the game's design. I'm just saying it exists, not that it's good.