Bellular & Matt have a quick discussion on scaling balance & talk about how ARR is long but still feels rewarding!
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Not only do NPC dialog change, but even future cuts ends change based on what jobs (classes) you have unlocked.
In Heaven'sward, if you have Dragoon job unlocked, you will get different dialog during HW cutscenes.
Pretty neat.
I remember watching a clip of someone starting the elevator in Prae and them going for a run around their block to get back before the CS finished.
If I ran it I'd debate on doing pushups or the like during the cutscenes.
There is a ton of flavor text that changes with the large story quest completions
I remember the wine quest being one of the things that really pushed me forward in the story. Specifically the imperial deserter stranded in Eorzea who was driven mad by solitude and haunted by his memories of the war and his late wife… It was one of those moments old WoW used to do really well with its zone side stories but seems almost completely absent these days.
I beg to differ, I find it a complete borefest
they cut this fun quest before you encounter Ramuh where the tempered Sylphs disguise themselves as various Scions and attempt to play tricks on you
they still mention it in the quest, but it's just been totally removed from the game
Prae has become the daily wind down and relaxation ritual. Boot up a new episode of a show you're watching between cutscenes or brush your teeth and get ready for bed. I have ample time to do everything while still being able to make it back in time for the series of active gameplay. Prae helps min-max life and exp.
I washed and folded my clothes during prae, another time I went and did almost an entire workout during it
Shrug, I've played very grindy MMO's. AAR is a delight to me.
Can confirm: every time I get Praetorium, I do all the dishes. PC is right next to the kitchen area so I can keep an eye for if a cutscene is ending and just get my stuff done. I love it.
I like ARR a lot 🙂
It's all a matter of perspective when it comes to the story being slow. For example, when I was playing through ARR it didn't feel slow at all to me, UNTIL, Heavensward came out and I couldn't access it until I finished all of the late ARR patches. In the expansions they only have to make the story fit into ten levels. ARR is fitting it into fifty levels. If you're a new player, even if you're content to play through the whole story, you're going to be anxious to see the newer content and that will make those fifty levels of story feel drawn out and slow. And as you play through the expansions you start to appreciate everything that was being set up in ARR.
My problem is I simply can't afford to pay the sub for ff14 rn. Where with wow I can just spend gold to keep my sub going. Considering the fact that square enix from what I understand takes care of bots a lot better than blizzard I don't see a reason why they couldn't have a way of spending gil for just game time. And just don't let people buy Gil with real life money like how with the wow token you can spend 20 bucks to get whatever the wow token current price is. Make it so you can only use Gil to buy game time only.
I always tend to chat it up with whatever party I'm in for Praetorium. Today we talked about Winona Ryder and how she was our Tank's waifu, or so he wishes.
Doing ARR for the first time was absolutely fine and enjoyable after playing through wows god awful questing gameplay, however after finishing the entire MSQ ARR is quiet bad compared to it, as expected of course.
Does Bellular have twitch or youtube videos of him playing through FFXIV for the first time? i'd love to watch them
When you think about it, and do so deeply, that are so many games which people have played start to finish without levels and gear scaling. Why do we continue to use levels and gear with stats/level on them. Look at the Mage Tower, people loved it: Challenge + Rewards (it was all people needed). If games removed all that BS power-scaling they would have content forever challenging and rewarding. Another issue is how WoW does Classes where they just constantly every expansion juggle their abilities, talents to refresh them: It's honestly not needed at all (and they spend 1/2 the year rebalancing only rebreak it).
Imagine an action MMORPG: all cooldown, no mana/rage/energy/chi/runes/whatever. Content always engaging, challenging (depending and if chosen for cosmetic rewards). No power-scaling, but instead fully skilled based with class synergies and maybe environment stuff like collision (hit into a wall) lightning attacked while in water.
Even open world PvP, but without magical fully invisible POS classes. Not being out-leveled or out-geared (you can actually smack those pesky kids into place). Imagine if games were designed to be FAIR and thus actually FUN. (ya, i won't ever do WoW in PvP mode).
Yeah, we're lucky enough to not get something mediocre the past decade and probably next decade too. Asking for gaming to evolve and really put any heart into their games is asking and dreaming far far far too much.
I think the ARR quests are fine as they are now, there's some drawn out stuff but interactions done during that tend to become relevant later on.
It'd be great if they could streamline it more without compromising the payoffs but for now it's ok.
It's a bit of a stick for new players with the carrot being the promise that after that what they've been doing won't be meaningless and questing will be much better.
Also, I've seen a lot of streamers not talking to secondary characters during main quests (maybe to keep the streams more engaging) but, in case some players don't, please do speak with them.
Dialogue for NPCs around you is constantly changing between each step of a major quest.
Talking to others in the Rising Stones (for example) will give much more context, lore, backstories and even have funny interactions once in a while like the girl that's torn between having a Roe PLD bf.
Start is not even slow really. old geezer mode Its just fucking zoomers got no patience dammit
„And people don’t mind“ I do lol. I’d give anything to make those cutscenes skippable and you will too once you’ve done it for the millionth time
Can’t wait to see you guys talk about Shadowbringers MSQ
Praetorium is my laundry folding mission.
I still dont do MSQ roulette… I remember my first ever prae/castrum run because of watching cutscenes, everyone skipped ahead and the experience was horrible. So kudos to them for making it unskippable + also beefing up the EXP reward as a result. I still hate doing it. Only if the mood strikes, with a bunch of friends/my partner + a movie.
Unlike in WoW where I feel like most of the NPCs barely know who I am other than some guy that shows up and does the crappy jobs, the NPCs in FFXIV make me feel like: 1) they know and respect me; and 2) they couldn't have done this thing without me. I ran some of the ShB Dungeons with the Trust characters and it actually a good story experience–it added (IMO) to the story to do it that way.. plus the Trust system actually seems to work decently. Maybe they should do Trust versions of the current MSQ dungeons. I love running into Estinien here and there (because I did DRG) because I feel like we are Bros, lol.. and he acts like we are Bros.
Actually back in 2.0 the average ilvl of people doing Praetorium for the first time was around 50. The best gear would have been your first Artifact set, which was ilvl 50 for every piece but the body which was 55. You'd still have a pre-50 weapon and accessories as well.
Just a point of clarification, there really hasn't been that much potency increases to skills in comparison to the ARR days. The reason potency is higher is because SE removed resistance down skills that lowered an enemies resistance to things like slashing or piercing. When they removed the resistance down skills, they buffed the potency of skills to make up for the damage loss.
The actual power creep comes in three ways. The first is the removal of accuracy as a stat and the inclusion of direct hit. Accuracy worked the same way it did for WoW. You had a chance to miss, and you need a certain amount of accuracy to guarantee a hit. This number varied based on the content and the position you were striking the boss from. However, accuracy doesn't increase you damage, it just prevents you from losing damage. Direct hit on the other hand is a substantial dps increase. They buffed old world content HP awhile back to try and compensate, but they didn't go far enough imo.
The second and more subtle power creep are the rotation changes that have happened over the course of the game. For instance, the resistance down skills in the ARR rotations often your weakest combo that you could do. You did them once every 30 seconds keep up the debuff, but optimally you would want to use something else. Once you no longer need to keep up the debuff, you were free to use your stronger combos, and thus your overall damage goes up.
The third and perhaps most subtle are the QoL changes. Mana and TP (basically mana, buy for physical damage jobs) could easily run out without proper management. Not performing the correct combo and letting your resistance down dubuff or DoT to fall off was incredibly punishing. I am not saying that the skill ceiling of Shadowbringers jobs is lower, but the skill floor has definitely been raised up, making it easier for most players to reach a higher percentage of the damage their job is capable of doing.
This all might sound like nitpicking, but the point is that balancing ARR content to be more accurate to its time is not as simple as "potencies go up." If it were that simple, balancing this would be easy. Balancing it around entirely new stats and nearly a decades worth of incremental rotation and QoL changes is far more complex.
2 weeks in, ebjoying the game so much. It is so rewarding, relaxing and fun. You can live in this game, so much activities, that are nicely tied up together instead of wows deparate systems which work only for one expansion.
Everything in base game content in ff14 is relevant and I don't feel like an idiot who plays on Azyremyst isle, while everyone else in the playerbase just moves between other planets month of gameplay ahead of me.
Also I didn't feel like ARR was slow. Maybe because it just gets better and better. Currently playing through post base game patches and the plot is getting better and better. And people say, that it will continue until the current expansion
Honestly I always thought Stormblood's story was a lot worse than ARR. For me at least SB was full of important events, but even while taking part in those events I felt like I was just doing filler content. It had only 3 less dungeons than HW, but for whatever reason HW felt a lot more engaging, and I felt like I did dungeons a lot more frequently. That's not even considering some of the questionable story choices that happen in SB, whether it's how characters act, events seeming to end one way but actually ending another, and all sorts of weird inconsistent choices like that.
*First off, ARR spoilers after second paragraph, so don't read past if that matters.*
As a veteran player (started back in HW) I can definitely say that the potency bloat has affected how content runs. Yet they also did a tank/healer rebalance at the start of Shadowbringers, and tanks are a lot less durable than they used to be, with the goal that healers need to be more engaged with play. I see the "standard double pull" of the past resulting in wipes, even for relatively easy content. The rebalances have made some of the older content less braindead to run, and that actually is more appealing.
I did want to address another aspect of the rebalancing, and that has to do with side quests. Back when I started, you would hit Main Scenario Quest lockouts very commonly during ARR. Run your few quests until the next duty unlocks, and you would be lucky to get enough experience to progress with just that duty. You would need to either run side quests or do a leveling roulette to continue, and that is the habit pattern I grew to have. Now I find myself massively over leveled with an alt doing that same practice, so I compensate by leveling 3-4 classes at the same time to spread out the experience.
*Spoilers ahead, stop now if you're not done with A Realm Reborn*
When I started, when you had the Scions' meeting before the Black Wolf's Ultimatum, you were stuck at level 46, and you had to hit 49 before you could proceed into Cape Westwind. There were 4 side quest stories that began at that point, rallying the populace of several smaller communities to aid you in free up the Grand Company resources so they can assist your efforts in dealing with that new threat. We were expected to not just grind out all 4 of those story lines, but also roulette and grind FATEs or other experience generating content to make it to the end of the base story. The experience rebalance in Stormblood made it so you could level one class, start to Castrum, without an experience drought or lockout being an issue. This was a major shift in progression and the deemphasizing of the side quests in favor of the main story. I think there might be something lost from this, but you can just do the side quests as they appear to understand the original path the tale took. But this change of focus is likely why many older FFXIV players see that the base game was slow and lacked focus. We had a lot more to do to continue back in the day, and that's been streamlined out a bit now.
I just feel like wow players had extremely low standards for years on what to expect in a game. Blizzard spend a decade fine tuning their online addiction methods so that players kept playing all of their game’s.