Patch 6.5 is done and with it the best Alliance Raid series we’ve had and finishing out the Zero arc of the MSQ. Today Mike looks at these two pieces of content and discusses what’s next for FF14.
00:00 – Alliance Raid
07:40 – MSQ
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This is a full spoiler talk, so if you've not done this content yet, probably don't watch… you can leave a like anyway though 🙂
Play Nier madge
but like, this literally isn't the end of the MSQ? We still have Growing Light Part 2, 6.55.
Dont want to be that Ashtually guy, @TheDailyPreach but cannot be done for darkness because there is no Crystal Tower in the 13th
people keep saying its like the 'warrior of darkness' storyline, but having to wait 2 years for a potential storyline to come back WHILE introducing cyella and unukalhai WHILE introducing Gaia WHILE having dawntrail's storyline just feels really bad in the moment with 4 months between patches.
the WoD storyline did not have as many threads as the 13th and 1st do. I trust the writers but it doesn't make me confident if its not Ishikawa or the Alliance raid writers doing it.
I don't think all of Dawntrail will be absent of conflict. But I think its perfectly fine to go in to the MSQ as "this is your vacation and exploration story" and then all the sudden about halfway through the MSQ as often happens with the MSQ, a switch will get flipped and we get some massive conflict. Someone dies, someone betrays someone, someone tries to take over the world. Some other shard invades us, so and so forth. But after a 10 year story the WOL and the larger story of Etheryis deserves some breathing room, some vacation time as it were. Though I definitely don't see this calm before the storm lasting the entire main expansion MSQ, I think it will be the first Act of the MSQ. Most MSQ stories are divided up into 3 or 4 acts. This definitely isn't the last we will see of Gaia, Ryne, Zero/Cecil and Golbez. Everything in this game happens for a reason. This isn't WoW, where plot threads just disappear never to be heard from again.
I'm confused didn't Preach do the last alliance raid on release? And he loved wiping if I recall correctly.
Yeah I thought the MSQ was really filler but in the same way the Warrior of Darkness story was
I have faith that Ishikawa will use the 13th in 9.0 or something and make it really good like CT was used in Shb and EW.
OI! Cut it out you!
Keep in mind the MSQ is not done yet, we’re getting the second half of the 6.5 MSQ in 6.55.
On the topic of side content characters that should have been but were not featured in the 6.x MSQ and bothered me to no end that they weren't involved in any way were… *ShB Role Quest Spoilers Ahead*
Cyella and Unukalhai. The entire time in this 6.x MSQ quest series I was screaming at the screen for both of them to get involved and it bothered me to no end that we never got them more involved. I get why they weren't pushed in to the story, being that they come from the ShB role quests, but damn it feels so bad to have two former residents of the 13th not taking a more active role in the story to save their home.
They did give them some dialogue to acknowledge your adventures in the 13th if you talk to them and at the very end even suggests Unukalhai is working off screen on the first in this endeavour to save the 13th, but it still bothered me so much that they weren't more prominently featured. I really wanted to see them both interact with Zero when Zero was visiting the first at the very least. Didn't even get that. =(
Totally agree that while the stories may be cliche, the execution can save it if done well. For the most part, I think FF14 has done that well overall. There was nothing groundbreaking in either the MSQ or the alliance raid story and both ended in exactly the way a lot of people predicted, but that doesn't mean it's terrible. I've appreciated the setup we've done in 6.x patches (not always loved it, but I can appreciate it), although my main gripe is how badly paced Zero's character development was. It felt like she went from "husk of a human being" to "MY FRIENDS ARE MY POWER" way too quickly, but that's likely due to the nature of the patch cycle and having to close her story within those patches. I still do really like Zero, but it wasn't until Gaia showed up that I actually sat up straight. Back when I did the WoD storyline when it was first introduced, I thought it was the dumbest Saturday cartoon woo woo shit, like "what if WoL but DARK? OooOOOoooOooOOo", but they brought it back so well that I can't have anything but faith in the writing team. I'm excited to see where they take it!
I think the Eden raids need to become mandatory like the Crystal Tower was and the SHB role quest storyline needs to be altered slightly so it can be progressed like patch MSQ (no role requirments). The role quests should also explain who Unukalhai is for people who didn't do the HW trials, and then point players towards that optional content should they choose to learn even more.
Myths of the realm was amazing as a whole!
+1 for Star Trek TNG analogy
I for one am getting more than a little annoyed at the mandatory sad thinkpeices every expansion about how the game is getting easier, and was SO much harder back in (insert expansion the person in question started in).
1. No, you're just objectively wrong. The game has not gotten easier. It has actually gotten somewhat harder. You've just been playing it longer, so it's easier for you.
2. The main, e for everyone, section of the game SHOULD NOT BE HARD. Accessibility is a good thing, it means new players can get into the game and not be excluded from the majority of the content just because they don't have multiple years of previous MMO experience behind them. If you want hard content, play the hard content, don't gripe and moan about how not everything is hard content.
I hadnt done eden prior to finishing 6.5, and didn't get that cutscene with Gaia
I agree. It doesn't matter if it's cliche, it's the joirney
I think they need to wrap the game up and get on with something new. You build up to many abilities over time, and once you've fought gods, it makes no sense that random enemies have the power to hurt you. It's my same issue with all MMO's. Run for 10 years and make something else so you can reset with newer graphics, and not have to deal with all the old overburdening code base. The beauty of FF is that it's a new story every time, so unlike WoW there's no history constraining it that people can complain about. If Yoshi P was smart he would have started developing a new game at the five year point of FFXIV, and he could have wrapped it at Endwalker.
The issue with the alliance difficulty is not that we think it should be hard, it's that it's on the easier side even for an alliance raid
I sure hope the void ark series will be a MSQ requirement soon because its all about the void. The history of the 5th Umbral era was crazy, and also the void was mentioned in ALL of the expansions, including A Realm Reborn. I think the void is going to be one of the last expansions for FF14 because it keeps tabs with us. Its for sure going to be something.
I had this theory that the new expansion would take us to Meracydia and it would connect to the void arc in which, because the country was ravaged by voidsents on the war against the Allagan Empire, I was imagining that during all this time the continent has been secluded from the rest of the world, they have been recovering and pulling themselves back together but carrying a huge amount of hate against the void, pushing their efforts of development and, once they would hear about us traveling to the void, they would actively start a campaign with the goal of destroying the entire 13th shard and the voidsents that live in there, and it would be up to us to defend them.
I'm pretty sure you missed the point on that question about conflict.
Obviously the story needs a conflict, the point is that it doesn't need to be some massive, world-ending, somehow even bigger than the annihilation of the entire universe that we got in the last expansion, scale of conflict.
Conflict does not have to be a constant escalation of stakes, to feel meaningful. On the contrary, that's one of the fastest ways to render it meaningless. If every threat is fate-of-the-world serious, then threats just don't mean anything anymore. See: WOW.
Dawntrail is a reset. It's an opportunity to take the story back down to the scale of the character themselves, and their friend, and the region they're in. We already know there's a succession crisis, and this is ff14 so of course there will be something more to that than is immediately apparent, but I genuinely think they're too good of story tellers to not understand that lowering the stakes at this point will make for a better storyline in the long run.
I feel they have exhausted most things by this point. Remember, this is a 10 year old game and we have seen many many things. What they can really do is focus on things like savage 24 men raids, jobs being more interesting. Having more stuff to do for both casual and hardcore. Introduce new races like Garleans or something. Introduce new face and body templates(it's been over ten years. I am tired of seeing the same faces and characters. Give the game more individual expresions) Look how beautiful some NPC are and how they tweak the face templates just for them.
Regarding the story, as I said, they have exhausted many things; however, as we all know there are other reflections which are in need of saving. We could not even save the 13th at the end so there is that. The only problem with the reflections is that we are gonna have shadowbringers all over again but instead of light it's gonna be other elements like wind or something.
regarding the optional side content, there's been a lot more of such things since stormblood onwards, i.e. something that may have started in MSQ but then got relegated to side content and because it's in side content that may or may not be done, it can't "come back" to the MSQ.
Main examples are Gaius and Omega, they both originated in MSQ but now are locked to side content (werlyt and 4.x raids) so if you look from the perspective of only MSQ, both of those entities seem to have indefinitely disappeared. Gaia at the very least has only ever appeared in the Eden raids with no prior MSQ introduction.
This dichotomy over MSQ vs side content also led to things like how the 6.x patch content visited the 13th, yet NPCs who have a very strong historical association with the 13th (Cylva, Unukalhai) can't participate as they aren't canonized in MSQ. The most you get from them is a few lines of bonus dialogue. In FFXIV history, probably the only side content NPC to have gotten promoted from side content to full MSQ canon-recognition is Estinien.
The end of Endwalker gave me the vibe that I had with post Heavensward storyline. With that in hindsight, I have faith that story from the Void will come back. For now, I'm just waiting to see if they will deliver more content as they've promised us in Dawntrail.
im kinda eh on this 24 man raid series. Day 1, server up first run….. never wiped. (except scales) All blind… Never wiped on any of them.(scales) It IS too easy. ..