So many people fundamentally misunderstand Final Fantasy 14 and the experience you are meant to have.
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Fellowship of the Ring sets up the other 2 movies for example. Starting at Two Towers makes no sense if it's your first time. But I don't necessarily agree that they're just there for set up. By itself it's quality content. ARR also tells it's own story not just there for HW. Stormblood too with Shadowbringers. I'd argue there's more in expansion story than set up. That said if you boost to Stormblood for example. Yeah your experience won't be as enjoyable compared to someone that played ARR and HW because of character and world development. So both isolated and set up story telling matters.
Love it – I agree! Wishing you the best on writing, would love to buy your book one day! 🙂
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts about Stormblood (I absolutely love it)
THANK YOU!!!
Without A REALM REBORN, all future Expansions are nothing.
This tired narrative started during 2016 from then content creators that were pretending to be fans, and it is so aggravating.
ARR > SB > HW > SHB > 1.0
ENDWALKER so far is between ARR and SB for me.
I will not officially rank it until 6.5 is released.
You have to build up slowly something in order to have a massive payoff.
PS:
All expansions have 2+ Main Writers.
The thing with STORMBLOOD is that the one of the original main Writers left FF14 to Direct FF16 (being made by the same studio as FF14 with YoshiP as Producer), and they promoted a new main Writer for STORMBLOOD (she had already written side stories, Raid Stories and Job Stories in ARR and HW, and went on to Write SHB and EW).
They nurture talent that KNOW and UNDERSTAND FF14 and that there is continuation, and STORMBLOOD ended up the better for it.
It helps that no matter the writer, they have a unified vision with YoshiP, musical vision with Some, world and lore creator Banri Oda, and localisation head that also contributes to the creation of the Lore directly in Koji Fox.
So, they are all in the same page, and nurture newer members that GET the world.
STORMBLOOD is a masterpiece that has WAY better Pacing and a more coherent theme than HEAVENSWAD for example.
Don't listen to the "need adrenaline events all the time" crowd.
They massively underrate ARR and SB, and they WILL underrate 7.0 too in the future.
We've gotten to the point where too much of the community just reflexively apologize for ARR when there is nothing to apologize for.
Agree! I get disheartened when people say "don't worry, it get's better". This gives the impression the story/game isn't good, and that sprouts are going to have to slog through another hollow MMO until it "gets good" later on. Not enough emphasis is put on how good ARR is on it's own and how well it sets up everything that is to come. When Heavensward is a 10, it makes ARR "seems" like its not that good, when in reality it's an 8. Hence the "it gets better", but again the language used doesn't serve sprouts/potential sprouts very well because they have no context, outside of other games.
– Another note that should be considered as well, the pacing of ARR assumes this is someone's first MMO, or game in general. It's not just made for people who are already familiar with the genre. If you have played games/MMOs before, then those first training wheel steps in every game seem especially slow. (Ironically, also funny when "Vets" skip the tutorial stuff in XIV, "yeah, yeah, yeah, lets gooo!" and are lost later, then complain "why wasn't this info explained earlier!") ——– Love the vids and takes, keep up the great work!
ARR with patches still suffers from some needless fluff that can be removed as it doesn't move the story forward or the characters. the bigger issue with ARR is the lack of voice acting. this will just hammer you with dialog where before you had to grind out some level in between those windows and without voice acting it is a brick to just read past.
it doesn't suffer in story however.
I know some people liked it but I disliked Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. But that's because it was a massive world building movie and I never read the books.
Two Towers was better. Return of The King was fantastic… Or rather, once the world building was done, the story could flourish. The first movie was never BAD.
Same with ARR leading HW.
6.X is going to build a lot of the new story, so 7.0 might not be too bad with pacing/world building
the 6.X patch series is going to start the world building, set up hooks and bait (and look back at stuff that might have been left in the back burner since 2.0) and THEN 7.0 proper will flesh out the base for the next 10years
I started playing in June of this past year, and I always took ARR for just that. Its the pillar that sets up the base world, the base lore and introduces you to characters that will be in your adventures throughout the journey. Its the major world building piece that everything else is built from. Without it. You don't have the rest, at least not with the impact/immersion that we do now. Removing ARR would be a travesty to the game. Lets not pull a WoW here and make the base game worthless skippable content. People need to sit down and play through it. It gives you time to retrain yourself as well, it preps you to pay attention and to read everything and learn to enjoy reading everything. I had to retrain from WoW Brain and I almost didn't make it but I did it and it was necessary that I did.
The problem with ARR for me is that it expends a lot of time building lore in a world that I was still not fully invested at the time, that's bad pacing, you don't start your story with a huge loredump.
Also there's some humor out of place that robs the weight of the story you are trying to tell (the snake reference during a important cutscene for example) and some questlines that are just bad (Titan… I really want to kick that blind lalafel).
I was very forgiving tho, I knew the circumstances in which ARR came and soldier through the bad stuff and loved the post ARR content.
Stormblood is a fine expansion in my opinion. Not as good as the others but I fully enjoyed my time playing it.
I totally agree. People give ARR so much crap and it annoys me to no end when they go around telling every new player that they're going to hate ARR but to just get through it. I heard that and decided to mostly ignore it and just let the game speak for itself, and I enjoyed ARR plenty. For a 10 year old base mmo experience, it's plenty good. It feels like a certain subset of people hated it, and they think their feelings/experience are fact and not opinion, so they feel like if they hated it then everyone is going to hate it. Which obviously isn't true.
It also seems that there's a certain subset of people that just have zero patience for a story, even if it's good. I saw a yt comment complaining about how you deal with these big world ending threats but also do smaller stuff that they felt was meaningless (like helping a side npc deal with a personal problem or something like that), and this person played all the way through EW. They were essentially saying they just wanted a Michael Bay movie, where all you do is big, action filled stuff and have zero downtime. Which is not how you write a good story.
ARR wasn't the best thing ever, but it's by no means this torturous chore that everyone makes it out to be.
ARR lays foundation. People that complain about arr are more so complaining about the fluff and what could only described as filler content. Granted a lot of the filler and fluff had been cut out over the years. So it is no where near as bad as it used to be.
People who haven't experienced FF14, ARR lays a very solid foundation for the rest of the MSQ. Even the latest expansion the Endwalker would not have the impact if it weren't for the ARR. Many of my cry scenes were setup all the way from ARR. So please, do not underestimate ARR by skipping.
I utterly love world building it makes everything about a universe so much better than if it wasn't there
Want a perfect example of world building at its best
Middle Earth
Putting ARR in the same weight as HW, SB, SHB and EW doesnt do the rest justice.
It's Episode 1.
Season 1 even
It's what sets the world up
I don't agree. It's like saying "This show is great but you have to get through the first season first" obviously you have to watch it to see what's going on but know it's not as good as what's coming. That doesn't mean the first season isn't bad, it's just required reading/watching.
Imagine if the next wow expansion is around the covenant leaders in the shadowlands and it's amazing, does that make Shadowlands good retroactively because that introduced the covenants and their leaders? Don't get me wrong I don't consider ARR bad but it definitely isn't as good as most of the other expansions. Not to mention they actually improved the MSQ from ARR because it had a bit too much old school MMO filler quests. But just because Heavenwards built on ARR doesn't mean you can't like HW without also liking ARR.
But I do agree with other parts, like patches x.1-x.5 tend to be more world building and set up; and I'm fine with that. Hell I like lore and world building. However each x.0 expansion story can be judged by what happens in it, to include what came before it. Saying 7.0 won't be as interesting because it's a world building expansion is kind of insulting the writers. That's basically saying they can't write an interesting adventure and also build the world for the 8.0 expansion.
Funny you mentioned the 7.X thing. Yoshi and his team actually came out in one of the previous LL and tell everyone not to expect 7.X being as big as EW. After this big adventure, we are going to slow thing down a bit.
Agree completely, ARR gets a bad rap but I found that it had just as many enjoyable elements as any other expansion. The highs might not be as high but it was a perfect foundation for the things that came after.
I don't really agree with the general sentiment of stormblood being bad, i think it was really good especially with the patches, even better than heavensward on some cases imo
Didn't want to ruin the 123 likes, but i agree with you so much i just had to.
6.1 – 6.55 will be the slower parts from the next expansion, i'd imagine.
I don't think the problem was that ARR was bad, it's that the quality of their storytelling was lower. If the new writers could go back and redo the 1-50 experience the storytelling would be much better, even if the story itself was the same.
ARR is good as well as important. The thing is, most people are coming from other games, so in their minds starting from 1 and pushing to 50 puts them in a shitty mindset to begin with. But it is absolutely necessary. I always tell people who come to XIV, to forget everything you know about other games, and just enjoy the experience and pay attention to everything and make mental note of it. It will all be touched on later. This game is loaded with payoff. One of the many reasons I love it.
Agree. Don't forget that ARR has the base storyline for all job classes (battle, crafting, gathering) and sets up for Heavensward and Stormblood where afterwards we get role quests.
I feel it has the most content as a result.
I kept hearing how bad ARR is but personally it wasn't bad. I really enjoyed it and it was pretty entertaining. Heavensward onwards just made it more amazing. Each expansion definitely has its charm. Overall, i love the game.
ARR being important story building blocks DOES NOT EQUAL ARR is good. There are plenty of GAMEPLAY reasons people say this, and gameplay beats story for the experience of a game ever single time.
ARR is slow as hell, very deliberately so. Class combat is borderline brain dead on even Healers and DPS for much of it which is why people hate Satasha in Leveling Roulette when they're in the 80's. There's very little voice acting and what IS there is generally nowhere near as good as the HW cast swap (probably because they weren't directed that well, they just sound more stock anime than taking things serious).
That's not to say ARR isn't important and still should be played if you intend on experiencing the story, because it is and you should. ARR MSQ isn't necessarily a fun video game to play in 2022, though, even with the trimming.
Danerys…..Its like only referring to Raubaghn as Flame General
ARR still needs some serious work. Replace the original voice actors with the current cast, voice more scenes, get some of that ShB EW camera work in there. Done.
Thank you! I've been saying this for years! People have been trashing ARR since Heavensward came out. I've always liked ARR and I think one of the reasons both Accolonn and I like ARR is because we both took our time and experienced the story. Alot of people that joined FFXIV after Heavensward sped through ARR just to get past it. It is the greatest story ever? No. It isn't but it tells a decent story overall and it leads you through your WoL carving out their own place in Eorzea. Meeting all the important characters and building rapport with them. Having moments with them that stick with you. Learning about the world and becoming comfortable with it. It's your home. You always come back to it. ARR is the what grounds you in the world of Hydaelyn.
With Stormblood, everyone liked it when it first came out. We all agreed it wasn't as good as Heavensward but it was fun. Then Shadowbringers came out and everyone started trashing Stormblood. Stormblood is the get the stuff done expansion we needed. We helped Ala Mhigo and Doma. Pushed the Empire back. We got a lot of stuff done in Stormblood. Plus, it was fun.
To be honest, 2.0 AND 1.0 basically setup everything else when you think about it. It's just that not as many people played 1.0. Yes, 1.0 got retconned but there are still elements in 1.0 that are important to the whole arc. You can basically consider 1.0 a prologue.
I think their aim is to dump the world building into the 6.x series patches and start the actual new adventure in 7.0. This is probably why they decided to end the Hydaelyn/Zodiark Saga in 6.0 to use the patches to build the new story. This means people might find the Endwalker post-patches to not be as epic as they are accustomed to and overall Endwalker as an expansion may not be remembered as fondly as it is now but it is necessary for world-building that these slower-paced patches exist. The good news is that although the pacing will slow down story-wise for the next patches, the content itself should remain at level or improve. After all, though the launch story stumbled (note that it picked itself back up during the post-patches), the Stormblood duties, dungeons, trials and raids are some of the best content in the game and show a marked improvement and evolution in the creativity and design of the game activities.
I have really enjoyed your journey in FFXIV. The insights and analysis you bring is top tier.
One advantage 7.0 will have is the team has 5 patches to prep for it instead of 2.
Im all for 7.0 world building the next ten years😁
And that's why SoulsoBreezy's take is so bad since he skipped the reason why everything else makes sense. The Foundational structure of FFXIV is A Realm Reborn. If you skip the Foundation you miss the important tidbits of the other expansions. It would not make any sense in why you are playing the game if you skipped it.
Edit: Soul did say he skipped ARR paid for a skip to Skip the Foundation of FFXIV and that's why his bad takes on Shadowbringers and Endwalker were garbage.
I just made a new character and have been slowly, over the course of a month so far, been leveling through ARR. It has been absolutely fantastic. I have been doing any fate I'vebeen near, doing my daily dungeon roullette and using the quest experience on 4 seperate jobs to keep myself on level. Only level 38 now and it feels amazing, just getting through Coerthas.
I agree and disagree. Yes, ARR is def all about world building, setting up lore, introducing important characters, etc. and actually does a fantastic job at that. But, ARR’s writing was not great in a lot of places and the voice acting was really bad.
If Yoshi-P had the resources, I think they would definitely rewrite the story, dialogue and add new voice acting. It’s a stark difference in quality once you get to Shadowbringers. But even with ARR’s blemishes, it achieves its main purpose of world building and setup
Also, Stormblood gets a bad rep in retrospect because it is a B+/A- story (in totality) stuck between two S++ tier expansions. It’s still good, just not up to the god tier levels of HW, ShB, and EW.