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Anyone else get this feeling playing HW?
Pratt2112
Member UncommonPosts: 1,636
So, this goes to anyone who's played ARR since re-launch and has followed its progress over time, as major patches were released, etc... I suppose people coming later, when all the content was already in might sense it, too (if they do at all), but I don't think to the same degree as those who were there for the release of each patch...
Obligatory disclaimer: this is all my opinion of course. I'm just curious if others out there might be kinda getting a similar feeling.
Anyway...
Playing through to the (epic and heartbreaking... but hopeful) conclusion of 2.0's story, and now moving through HW's story, I kinda started thinking back over how the game has developed since its re-launch.
Thinking back, I feel like the first release, and the earlier 2.x patches/updates, felt like Yoshi-P and team kind of "finding their footing", working out what kind of game FFXIV:ARR would be; the kind of experience it would create. At a very high level, you can see that they sorta relied on a few core concepts, and worked those... such as the introduction of each primal. It was new content, but still grounded in the same overall idea, gameplay-wise. Same with how dungeons were introduced and then iterated through Hard and Extreme modes, etc. It feels, by comparison to HW, like they stayed kinda "restrained" in their scope, etc. Hopefully that makes sense (I haven't had coffee yet, so hopefully I'm not talking gibberish here lol).
Not that the game or content wasn't good or fun, it's a very fun experience. But, to me, it was definitely rough around the edges, some more than others.
As an analogy, it's kind of like a band releasing their first album... the music's good and there's definitely talent, but it's not fully "honed", yet. It might be a bit "inconsistent", with songs shifting between different styles as they try to find "their sound". By the second album, though, they've found their sound, and established their identity. Consequently, their second release could be much better, with a more established, refined sound, better songwriting, etc.
By the end of 2.55, it feels like SE found their footing; they'd found their sound, so to speak.
It's like "Okay, we've established a foundation, are familiar with the tools and technology, and know what we're doing with this game now... Now let's really dig in".
Personally, playing through Heavensward, I feel like they've elevated it to a whole new plateau. Everything.. the story, the writing, the characters, even the voice acting (which I found painful at 2.0's release), just about everything so far... It's just so freaking well put together.
Anyways... hopefully I explained that well.
So, anyone else have a similar feeling? Or not? Or am I just nuts? 
Comments
The writing and mechanics took a massive upswing over the course of the patches atleast from 2.3 onwards.
2.55 ranks up there with TSW and Swtor as some of the best storytelling I have seen in an mmo, it was cheesy, troped up to hell and I loved it because it was delivered with real emotion.
The HW story has been good, full of plot twists and felt like a short Final Fantasy game, but the pacing of it.
in ARR there was too much filler for the main story, Banquets etc that were clearly there just to provide me with XP
In HW there was none of this, but the result was massive gaps between chapters which I found made the whole thing disjointed.
I wish they would just make the main story take you all the way from start to finish of the current level range, and leave side quests for secondary classes but I appreciate that doing that might make the journey too quick.
But yes, the writing was great, and the adventure was real.
I kind of put FFXIV out of my mind since i was not happy with it and do not plan to return however...
I am pretty sure those primal fights were suppose to be there on launch,but everything was just rushed in sales.Also those primal fights look like rushed content,they are not Fun or good in any fashion.Matter of fact,soon i saw them,it was the nail in the coffin that made me quit.
I have been spoiled by FFXI i guess so now i compare all content in games to FFXI.Sure the Avatar fights were also confined to an instance area but you could actually kite the Avatar up and down the ramp.End result you got to have your own primals to call out for your Summoner class.Everything in FFXIV just seems to be done on a lesser scale,everything except graphics of course.
They could have done a LOT better job with every aspect of the design and i see it,so it bothers me.I just cannot support that kind of effort,especially when i KNOW Square can do a better job,it was simply a rush job.
I expected reasonable housing,i expected more mounts than just the Chocobo.I expected more Guild options to bring players together than just login to meet up for a primal run.I expected to see some ..ANY form of viable grouping in the world,not just in those instance areas.
I expected a better fishing min i game,i wanted to actually see the fish,again it just seemed like every aspect of the design was done with a lazy effort.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Played-Everything
Playing-LoL
Well, i totally disagree with all you said.
In particulary for the primals, which are extremely well designed.
I believe FF11 old players are the biggest critics for this game.
Maybe they believe it will be basically the same game than ff11 just with better graphics, but it's a totally different game.
FF14 is fine, it's not just made for every one.
Smile
I'm not really sure how they acted out of character in 2.55, I thought they were pretty consistent.
I think you misunderstand me (or I just worded it poorly).
I was saying that, in hindsight, compared to Heavensward, ARR - the 2.x content (at least up 'til 2.4 or so) - felt very "restrained"; like they were sticking to a few main systems, not expanding too far.
I didn't get that impression playing through it, of course, because there was nothing to compare it to. With Heavensward, however, it feels like they really dug in and elevated everything about the game to a new level.
In fact, the further I get into the story and the content, the more I feel that way.
So, I wasn't saying Heavensward feels restricted, not at all. Quite the opposite.
I hope that clears it up a bit
I'm curious about this. How do you feel they acted out of character?
**** Possible Spoilers-ish Ahead ****
I felt that while their actions were, indeed, extreme - compared to everything up to that point - they'd never been put in that kind of situation up to that point. The Scions did what they needed to do to insure the WoL survived to continue doing what they needed to do. Their ultimate purpose was not merely for their own survival, but for that of the world. When pushed to an extreme situation, they had to take extreme measures.
Louisoix gave his life to save ours, as well.
Do I feel they could have probably handled it in a different way? Sure. But, that's not what the story requires, so they did what they did.
And really... we don't know for sure if they are really gone. I've a hunch they aren't. Important characters presumed "gone" have a way of showing up so far in FFXIV. So... I'm bummed over present circumstances, but I don't feel they're permanent.
That's my take, anyway.
To be sure I understand you, it sounds like you haven't played FFXIV since early in 2.0? Some of your statements seem to indicate that, particularly the "only chocobo mounts" comment. That hasn't been true since soon after 2.0 launched. Hell, technically, it hasn't been true since 1.x, as they introduced Goobues.
Anyway, if that's so, if you haven't played since that early on, then I really don't understand why you'd be responding to this thread anyway. You clearly aren't part of the group I'm addressing, so you have nothing to contribute to the discussion.
Your disappointment over SE not making FFXI-2 is well-documented, and is not relevant to the subject. Please stop derailing the thread. Thank you.
For me personally, I have been in love with the game since 2.0 (couldnt get on with 1.0) I think for me, having a strong narrative matters a lot. Like, I used to play WoW as my "main" fixture for MMO playing, but with WoW and many other MMO's you never really feel heroic, you might do heroic things, but you kinda act as a secondary character to a story unfolding.
Whereas FF14 has you as the main character in every sense of the word, everyong looks up to you, you inspire people and there have been quite a few touching moments to tug on the old heartstrings.
But the main thing for me, is that there is a massive focus on the biggest character in the MMO which is essentially The World, which has its own narrative to it, it tells its own story and I love that frequently visit the world over and over rather than say, complete all the content for Ashenvale (in WoW) and never return there again... ever.
I never had an issue with the level of quality of the games patch by patch progression, mainly because I so chuffed to feel included. Its like kids at school playing five-a-side football, but no one passes you the ball, but in FF14 you not only get the ball, you're the star player.
Well said, and I agree completely about the world being a major character. It really does tell a story as you travel around, seeing the landmarks, etc.
Nah I just misread your post it seems, no I absolutely agree with how you felt all throughout the 2.0-2.55 patches. I feel that ever since 2.0 launch, SE has been playing a catch up game due to the large amount of work 2.0 was to complete. Having two really boring dungeons and just turn 1-5 for content for a good chunk of the games first year really gave you the understanding of the undertaking that remaking a MMO is. Major patches (6 month intervals) ushered forth new dungeons/tokens and mid patches (3 month intervals) brought crafting/vanity/worldy-type content such as housing/choco raising/gardening and later the golden saucer. So while the game brought a lot of really cool "alternative entertainment" systems that kept refreshing "that part" of the game, the gear progression content was a lot of the same.
I'm willing to assume when you talk about "restrained" content you mean battle content. One thing that SE didn't stray from in the least was that you knew every major patch will bring a new set of 3 dungeons (two rehashes as hard modes of older dungeons and ONE totally new one) and another 4 platforms of bahamut with a primal that was deemed worthless after the first week along with the well timed in between LFR LoA/CT/WoD as catch up content. From this aspect I feel that the reasons for this very cut-dry and VERY predictable content release schedule was to keep it coming at a blistering pace all the while working on HW. I feel a lot of the new ideas and thoughts from the playerbase to better game were thrown onto HW since it was too late in the games meta to make any major changes due to lack of manpower.
I feel like a lot of the critics for this game were 1.0 players that stuck around at the point where the game wasn't utter shite. 1.1.9 still showed the game had a lot of work yet to do but the game itself established itself as its own true entity among the MMO scene. FFXIV 1.0-1.1.9 nor 2.X-3.X were FFXI 2.0 despite many FFXI players who were currently unhappy with the post abyssea era of FFXI were wishing it was. Regardless of what your feelings about the first year of 1.0 were there was one unfortunate fact of FFXIV is it had two options:
1. Let it continue its current course and see if it could get better with more patches/fixes.
2. Completely can it and rebrand/remake it by giving the effect of it falling to ashes and being REBORN hence the ARR title.
Many of the 1.0 players that stuck around/hopeful FFXI vets knew in the back of their mind what needed to be done. Despite knowing the inevitable they still hoped for the best, this false hope was what made the 2.0 launch sting far worse than just watching the game fall into obscurity. The aftermath of the incident created a following of players that were so salty they could produce more sodium than the african salt mines (this was me included, but after some help from our wonderful MMORPG.com staff I decided to simmer down a bit.) The reason for such devastating buttmad syndrome was that the only way FFXIV was going to have another shot was by the latter, and god damn did that make us mad. The ironic thing was that the motion to remake FFXIV was put into place months prior to the "miracle patch" of 1.1.9 which reached a lot of critical acclaim from the playerbase and was getting a lot of attention from the community. Since SE had no way to predict that this outcome was going to happen all it managed to do was to the effect of rubbing salt on that open wound so damn well and it still stings to this day.
In the end a lot of people that genuinely felt the same way Wizard and me felt, seeing the game go from something of its own to a predictable themepark instance grinder simulator was a very painful thing to watch. In the past few weeks I have finally come to terms with the fact that Yoshi P went the safe route and he is not creating the game I truly wished for. While I feel he gets far more credit than he deserves, actually playing HW made me feel like I can accept his peace offering of a solid foundation and he better give me some new shiny things moving forward. I felt like enough things changed for the better in HW and bitter FFXI/FFXIV 1.X vet or not the story is well worth the 40 bones alone, even though Alphinaud sometimes feels like shinji 2.0. If FFXIV doesn't give me enough battle content to do I'll simply play it casually like Danwest suggested and play it along side FFXI. All the while I will patiently wait from the sidelines and hope this game can become the next gen FF MMO we deserve while patiently waiting for them to release Blue Mage and Puppetmaster and hope they don't eff it up.
I found Heavensward to be a huge step-back in almost every field from the original.
I was plagued with crashes for the first 3-4 days of the expansion. The servers where destroyed yet again, as if they did not learn their lesson the first time. It is rittled with fall through bugs and it has a massive memory leak now, from a technical standpoint they raped the core of the game.
The story was okay, but I feel like they tried to hard to make everything you do seem related to the main story, which I understand and this is total opinion. I do think the flow from 50-60 was much better executed.
Every new class is beyond OP, I get balancing needs to be done, but its a bit extreme.
I like the expansion pack and I'm still playing, Dark Knight 56 woot woot, but I was hoping for more from the expansion pack.
The technical problems are what really make me dislike it also, between the bugs and crashing I find it hard to enjoy my time in Ishgard.
Strange, my experience doesn't match yours at all. Then again, I've been a long term supporter of the game so maybe I'm a bit biased.
It took two hours to get logged in at Early Access launch and that was because everyone was trying to cram in at once. Since EA, I can count on one hand how many times I've been disconnected from the game. I haven't had any performance issues with any of the new graphics settings. I just needed to fine tune the DX11 settings to have the game run smoothly for me in higher populated areas.
The story in Heavensward is hands down better than it was in ARR. Much better character development (I'm thinking the absence of the Scions from 1.0 has helped in this respect) and you feel like you have some real attachment to some of the major players throughout the story.
I don't understand how you think the classes are OP. They've only scaled up with new gear. The item level has jumped up an average of 50 with the current best available gear and that will make a huge difference. Some of the harder content (Ravana Ex) will make you feel rather humble at times.
The bugs and crashing sound like it's a problem with your own system. Maybe you need to tweak with settings or get new hardware or something.
Me, my BF, and 2 of my friends all play together and we all waited for 3+ hours before it let 1 of us log in, the other 3 of us got kicked from queue several times. We play on Faerie from what I read on the forums the wait time and kicks varied from server to server which I understand and this was a launch day.
The story was very compelling and I did love the original cast and you may be totally correct on my reasons.
I play a SCH it was my first class to 60, but my friend played a Astrologian and we compare are numbers pretty regular now and his healing is a good 10-20% better than mine in the same gear. The spells are way overtuned. This is probably my biggest complaint with the expansion I was a top tier raider pre-expansion and my heals have always been great but I feel weaker in comparison. I have resigned myself to waiting for more content and getting deeper in raid fights before I make my final call but on my server its a trend that Astrologian is the strongest healer atm.
I play on a pretty good rig.
i7 3.6ghz 6 cores
AMD R9 290x x2
16 gigs of ram
The crashing issues are not limited too me either, although it does not extend to all my friends either me and 1 of my friends have issues. Which we both use crossfire which I believe may be the problem, but this does not change the fact that it was not a problem before the expansion pack release. As far as performance goes I can play on max settings with no drops in FPS but I crash about every hour sometimes it will give me two.
Regarding AST, there is a lot of criticism about it on Reddit having lower healing potencies than SCH or WHM, but I think that's due in part to how it synergizes with the other two healers and through the use of the cards. I personally haven't played it, but I've been in groups with them and it's always been a good experience, so I'd like to think the people playing the job are enjoying it despite it having lower healing potency.
If you're getting random crashes like you say, you might have some other piece of faulty hardware, or your system is overheating. Bad RAM is a common culprit of crashes, or bad sectors on a HDD. While it's not as prevalent in motherboards made 5+ years ago, a swollen capacitor on a motherboard will cause a ton of issues as well.
you where a top tier raider and you only considered sch for the healing numbers? hard to believe
No opinion on the healing/healer aspects, as I don't play those kinds of jobs.
However, as for people talking of frequent crashing, I can offer this. For one, I've had exactly 1 crash since the expansion's release,and that came after having the game running all day, for easily 12+ hours.
I'm running everything at max (except for the parallax occlusion; that's at normal because the high setting is just ugly, IMO), and it runs smooth as can be; I'm at or around 60FPS, unless I'm in highly populated areas, or there's *a lot* going on environment-wise. Granted, I'm on a system well-suited to run at those settings (AMD FX8350, NVidia GTX 970, 8 Gigs RAM, running off a SSD).
I mention my own system specs because I'm noticing that, among the people I know who do have more frequent crashes, they seem to be running the game at settings beyond what their hardware can really handle. That maybe related, or it may not be. Either way, it's a pattern I've noticed among the few people I know of having issues with crashing.
As it's not affecting everyone, or even most from what I've seen, it def. seems like it's something that will have to be ironed out over time. That's one of the down-sides of PC software development, versus console dev... it's impossible to account for every hardware/software config out there out of the gate. There's always going to be those cases where things don't play nice together, and devs can't deal with it until they've seen it happening and can identify the cause.
I've played through Heavensward and the only thought going through my mind is "What the heck were they thinking making mindlessly droning fetch quests and kill quests a requirement for flying? Why haven't they done anything about the housing system and the horrible player distribution due to legacy servers vs other servers? What is going on with the inventory space?"
They can improve the story all they want, but it feels like that is just to help cover up or distract people from the gaping flaws the title currently still has.
I'm not sure where I said that I did not consider WHM. My point here is AST is the new meta, you want a AST over a WHM or SCH. You will want WHM/AST or SCH/AST but AST is the default. When adding new classes it should not push the others out. WHM has extremely high numbers but is limited by MP. SCH has utility and decent numbers and passive healing. AST has both and limited MP problems, plus buffs that blow WHM and SCH out of the water for DPS which will be priority number 1 for downing bosses in the first weeks.
I'd still rate the game as a 6 or 7 out of 10, which is pretty good for an MMO RPG. Comparing this to games like Witcher 3 or Bloodborne and saying it's on the same level is just madness. The multiplayer experience is at the core of an MMO and any kind of problem that impacts the community, such as a poorly crafted housing system and inventory system, are going to gnaw at people throughout the entire experience. I'd rate it higher if the issues were still fresh, but this has been ongoing for a long, long time now.
Really, the only reason people keep playing these titles even if they are medeocre at best is due to the community being self driven to keep up with itself. Anyone not that deep into the social experience would pick this up, play it through in whatever time is needed to get through main scenario, and leave. The best games are the ones that can keep you playing without this self driving community aspect, and then have multiplayer options that let you enjoy the title with friends.