Ok this time we ACTUALLY go to the Crystal Tower! BUCKLE UP.
Support us on Patreon! ► http://patreon.com/playframe
___________
Playlist! ► https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvFQJa1XAXzzXrfl_cbsGvEl4AbTt5SMG
___________
0:00 – Introduction
0:33 – QUEST: “Labyrinth of the Ancients”
8:29 – A PSA on how we’ll be doing raids….
10:36 – RAID: Labyrinth of the Ancients
23:34 – QUEST: “Labyrinth of the Ancients” (continued)
27:40 – QUEST: “For Prosperity”
___________
Want to join our Free Company? See the unofficial PlayFriends Discord for details! ► https://discord.gg/PlayFriends
___________
Check out the PlayFrame Store! ► https://store.dftba.com/collections/playframe
Dan’s Twitter (@DanFloydPlus) ► https://twitter.com/DanFloydPlus
Carrie’s Twitter (@CarrieFloyd) ► https://twitter.com/CarrieFloyd
PlayFrame Twitter (@PlayFramePlus) ► https://twitter.com/PlayFramePlus
To hear Dan talk MUCH more about game animation, check out New Frame Plus! ► http://www.youtube.com/c/newframeplus
___________
Edited by Daniel Floyd
♫ “Pray Return” by Chris Logsdon
https://lnkfi.re/pray-return
#PlayFrame #FFXIV #FinalFantasyXIV
source
i cant wait to visit Durmin and the DTC once datacenter travel becomes a thing next patch
Crystals… It's always crystals….
My favourite thing so far this episode is how quick it goes in unsync and Dan trying to keep commentary. "So in this encounter, we have to keep these guys away from the main bomb and deal with these balloo–it's dead"
Cracks me up!
21:22 the "you call that a labyrinth" achievement suddenly makes a lot more sense with an un-synced crew.
I'd liked to see you do the raid properly. 😢
What a shame
Always sad Nero didn't bring that absurd hammer with him.
CT released in 2.1, 2.3, and 2.5. It always alternates with the 8 man raids, which typically release on X.0, X.2, and X.4.
It is pretty funny seeing this run unsynced, though I will say that the level 50 Alliance Raids do still go by pretty quickly even when doing it properly, this first one especially.
I want to stress again how grateful I am to you for doing this video series. As someone who both tends to get an unhealthy obsession with certain types of games (like MMOs) and so needs to avoid them for mental health reasons, AND as someone who has social anxiety bad enough to where the idea of even assembling a crew (even of random people) seems an insurmountable task, I would NEVER be able to experience this game first-hand.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
Dan never mentions spoilers, but I'm glad he's noticed that we've been restrained.
Up we go! Up we go! UP WE GO! UP WE GO!
Not sure if anyone else has said it or not but kinda hope Dan does the Hildebrand quests just for the sheer tone swerve and the facial rig testing….
It's really fun and interesting to watch this as a wow veteran. Can't wait to see the evolution of ff14 raids
king behemoth and phlegethon my beloathed. even with other players' effects turned down, there's so much visual noise in those fights i can easily miss behemoth charging meteor or phlegethon charging ancient flare. tho at least with phlegethon i can see the other players booking it back to the pads and follow suit if i notice in time. otherwise sorry healers.
that said, actually getting the hang of these fights was very satisfying as it was largely left to my own trial and error (and a couple memes i found)
it seems like, if you're worried some knowledge in the crystal tower could be too dangerous if it falls into the wrong hands, it's rather foolish to invest a ton of effort pioneering a way to break down the very sophisticated and hard to breach defenses on the crystal tower. Feels like you're making it easier to let knowledge fall into the wrong hands.
not going to lie, seeing this raid just BLASTED though soo fast is extremely cathartic
Spoiler: There will be many, MANY more snack deliveries!
When these things were first released, how did the players learn to understand the mechanics? Is it just trial and error for the first 'hell yeah imma do this' players and then they disseminate the information? Is there a tradition to NOT disseminate the information for a while so as not to spoil the joy of discovering the mechanics? (This may be absurd questions, but I'm not a player of this sort of thing so I really do not know!)
You know, if doing raids unsynced is going to allow for this series to feature some, if not most (if not all?) of them, that sounds like an excellent compromise to me! The raids have probably been my favourite part of the game so far in terms of gameplay, but they also all have a unique, fairly involved and (usually) really cool storyline and while I was really hoping we'd get to see some of that in this series, but I assumed that given the time investment requiried we probably wouldn't get to. There's so much cool stuff in this game!
Completely unrelated to today's episode, I had this weird thing hit me:
"Little Ala Migho", for whatever reason sounds to me like some kind of "we're totally a Mexican restaurant, and these are totally real Mexican recipes" spot where nothing is even trying to be even Tex-Mex, nevermind actual Mexican.
Dun dun duuuuuun!
Anyway, IMO these raids aren't as hard as Dan makes them out. I went in knowing nothing about what would happen, and did ok. I just followed everyone else and attacked who they were attacking, and it worked out.
The worst thing about the raid is that the UX designers decided to put the raid party widgets in the middle of the screen, so it was hard to see what was going on. And I couldn't very well go into the UI editor while the fight was happening.
Who knew archaeology involved so much hitting things with big sword and big axe?
19:00 I love seeing mixed level parties just hanging out and having fun in part because you'll notice things like the lvl 90 healer giving your lvl 59 Dragoon 3 health bars worth of shields on the left hand side.
I appreciate the option to run stuff unsynced, but it always feels a little like you're bullying the bosses ^^'
I played these raids many times and understood maybe half of what was going on.
Since Dan was uncertain, I'll say that LotA was released as part of Patch 2.1, the first major patch of ARR. The way that raid releases work for expansions, is that both the 8-man and 24-man raids are released in 3 pieces across the lifespan of the expansion. The 8-man raid is released on the X.0, X.2, and X.4 patches, while the 24 man raids are released on X.1, X.3, and X.5 patches.
So LotA was released on 2.1, and the other parts of the Crystal Tower series were released with patches 2.3 and 2.5. Meanwhile, the Binding Coil of Bahamut, the 8-man raid for ARR, were released with 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4.
…So the plan to protect the technological secrets of this super advanced, ancient civilization is to… permanently destroy the defenses left by said super advanced, ancient civilization, that could only be bypassed with the best craftsman in the world working with 8 super rare materials, each individually costing a small fortune… then send the most accomplished adventurers in the world to kill off all the living defenders and disable all the traps… So that the smart guys can find out the technological secrets of the super advanced, ancient civilization that you don't want anyone to know, probably writing everything down… So that they can turn the tower off and shove it back underground somehow… instead of just leaving it alone, in a state capable of defending itself from basically anyone who isn't running on the power of plot convenience…
And then some evil guy walks in through the door you all left open and learns all the secrets of the super advanced, ancient civilization? Gasp! Who could have seen it coming!?
Also, G'raha Tia is definitely someone's original-character-do-not-steal isn't he.
The Crystal Tower series, and the Omegascape series that lifts fights from FF5 and 6, are some of the most shameless references to other Final Fantasies in the game. Evidently this bothered the writers, because they have gone back retroactively and re-centred these raids in the lore and made both raids directly relevant to the plot.
I'm actually looking forward to server visit so that I might be able to get in on one of these.
Yes! seeing raids in super fast guided tour mode is very cool 😆
When I hear the word "maze" or "labyrinth" I expect a spatial puzzle with directional choices. I do not expect to simply walk straight forward. :/ Perhaps the original name translates poorly from the Japanese. Perhaps calling this area the "Antechamber of the Ancients" would have been more fitting and, given its stature, a more humorous name as well.
I like the shout out to people being good to spoilers and stuff. Saying the subtle stuff hasn't really been subtle has me smiling, and makes me want to try my hand at it. I don't actually know anything of Final Fantasy 14, I played a bit of it when it was free last year… or two ago and I know it has ties to the Final Fantasy Tactics Isidale world concept. But I think that was brought up as review during the videos in this series about FF14 before the revamp and current iteration. All I could really make jokes and guesses on are general themes.
There's going to be some Technocratic group. Either they want power or a power hungry person is exploiting a researcher's curiosity.
Story events will involve CRYSTALS… That's an old joke, Final Fantasy involving crystals goes back to FF1.
Eventually working with nature will be strongly beaten into some characters head as a moral.
I'm sure I could make a larger bingo card, but then I'd have to look up names and figure out what the armor people are called and if they're different than the armored nation in FF12. I think that was addressed in the early videos of this series as well.
"This is a cool fight so there's mechanic here and- it's dead."
The largest arguments I have gotten into in FF14 is what music is best. It is all just good fun between people (though my favorite is truthfully the best).
Phlegethon is one of the rivers of the underworld in Greek mythology (also Acheron). It was the giant river of flames you spend so much time navigating during during your Hades playthrough.
Also, I could very faintly hear the fireworks, fyi, but there's a pretty good chance I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't pointed them out 🙂
Ah, you live near the International District? I grew up about a mile east of there.
Sometimes I'd hear the fireworks from my bedroom.
Dan mentions the poison before the first boss, but I think it's also worth bringing up that the game will often use these "trash" encounters, as they're called, between the bosses to show off fight mechanics for the next boss. This is by no means unique to ffxiv, but it is nevertheless really cool that the game will introduce these early.
Also, Dan, those A/B/C markers are placed by players. You can save configurations to place later, or place them manually. They're a great tool for the game, because they make navigating certain bosses' mechanics much easier, and they can do things like this, indicating how the alliances should split.
Dan: "Highly reccomend picking up some soundtracks"
Working on it! Apparently the official FFXIV soundtracks are only available on physical Blu-Ray, and a Blu-Ray reader I do not have. If there is a download option, it is not mentioned on the store page. Or at least last I checked, which was half a year ago.