When starting off the game introduces you to the world through colorful cinematics, unfortunately the game is dated and only a few of the main stories will have voice over work, which mostly means you get silent mouth moving and hand gesturing characters in beautiful cinematics with text below.
Of course speech for characters is only something we have come to expect in recent games such as SWTOR, GW2, WoW since MoP, TSW, Star Trek, Neverwinter…ok every MMO that’s been released in the last several years has voice acting, even if it’s shitty.
The game starts off with the typical quests to introduce you to the various areas and facilities of your starting city and expands from there. As soon as you step out of the city is where you will encounter quests that have you running back and forth across the same zone, and ultimately each sub sequential zone. Unfortunately this is where the first of the bad decisions is seen and will carry on throughout your entire adventures within the world of Eorzea. One of the things that Blizzard learned when they redid WoW with Cataclysm and many MMO’s have now adopted is a streamlined quest system that guides a user through a zone without the need to have them constantly retracing their steps. In FFXIV it’s almost as if they specifically designed their quests in such a way as to increase player frustration for unnecessary time in game.
For example You’ll often encounter an NPC you who will have a series of quests, a fetch, followed by a kill, followed by a delivery. The items, mobs and NPC you need at the end will all be located within the same exact location and you will find yourself running back and forth repeatedly between the same area over and over until you can get the a new quest from the NPC who will do the same thing. It makes for a very repetitive and bland experience.
Fortunately most quests are actually not something players are rewarded for doing, meaning that for your first character the Main Story Quest will level and gear your character without the need for many side quests to be completed. This also leads to another interesting design choice of forcing users to play content they may not have otherwise engaged in.
The Main Story Quest gates a lot of the world’s content, meaning most dungeons are not available until unlocked through the Main Story Quest (MSQ) and are required to be completed before progress can be made. While you can level beyond your story it’s not beneficial as you will need to complete certain activities to gain access to new areas later on.
This isn’t the worst decision ever made, but in some cases, such as the Hard Mode options a player must complete, I could see folks who do not like dealing with long queue times as a DPS class or do not like hour long dungeon crawls would be turned off by this.
Of course a thirty minute wait time for a dungeon as DPS isn’t so bad when you have a companion or party member to play with right? Wrong. FFXIV focuses on the single player game by forcing users to dismiss their companion if they want to queue for a Dungeon, as well as you often will be required to disband your party so you can experience a cinematic or MSQ mission solo. For some classes it can be a long boring wait and often leads to users standing semi-afk within towns and cities asking in general chat for a tank or healer to join the queue.
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