It's fractionally prettier, the UI is cleaner, and they've streamlined some features. At first glance, the game hasn't changed much. If you skip the early parts, you'll miss out on all of that.Īll that sounds nice if you're new, but if you played A Realm Reborn at launch and then lost interest, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. Some side-stories even unlock new dialogue options hundreds of hours later when their events reconnect to the main story.
A seemingly pointless aside about a kingdom's political structure ends up vital when heroic action fails. Even when you're doing busywork early on, it's actually stealthily introducing characters who crop up later. Part of why FFXIV is so good is because it never forgets. Some suggest buying a microtransaction item to skip past the story of A Realm Reborn (the 2013 base game), boost your character level and jump into the first expansion. The gentle ramp-up does have its issues if you're an MMO veteran, though, as it can be slow going, mechanically and narratively. FFXIV teaches everything from fundamental concepts, from movement to party dynamics. If you're one of the newbies, even to the genre, then that's fine too. High-level players also earn rewards for playing low-level dungeons, and their stats are scaled down so they don't ruin it for newbies. Also standard is that Tanks or Healers find parties faster, but you'll seldom wait more than a few minutes whatever your class. As is standard for MMORPGs these days, you can get through most of it solo, with the exceptions of dungeons and major boss fights, and there's automated matchmaking for those. Luckily for solitary beasts like me, no friends, guilds or talking are needed to play FFXIV. These are familiar elements to FF fans, although its world is a patchwork of callbacks and references, in FFXIV they are self-contained and part the game's separate story.
Chocobos are giant canaries you can ride like horses, Morbols are awful monsters that hit you with every status ailment at once, and there's an engineer named Cid. "Ah, my sweet summer Chocobo, there's probably a hundred Final Fantasies, but that doesn't matter", I reply, and swiftly abandon this gimmick.
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"But how will I understand anything if this is the fourteenth game?" I hear you, who have not played the full series, hypothetically ask. But with everyone else so far ahead, is it worth starting six years after the game's rebirth and re-launch? I think so, yeah.
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It's recently received another hefty update with the Shadowbringers expansion. It has held my attention for five hundred hours, and it's updated more regularly than any comparable game I can think of. It has made me cry over a bizarro-world Chocobo, and now features one of my favourite RPG villains ever. While ostensibly a subscription-based World Of Warcraft-alike, Final Fantasy XIV is secretly the biggest and probably best-written JRPG out there.