I have played Final Fantasy XIV for over 2,500 hours. That is over 105 days of raw 24 hour play time that this game has taken up of my life, for a game that has only been out since late 2013. While that may not exceed the most extreme players, it’s obviously a significant investment. Yet, if you talked to one of the other guys here at the Beautiful Boys and asked them if I even liked the game, they might not even be able to answer, or you'd get a different answer from each one. They might even say I disliked the game. Another might say that I loved it. I complain so much about and offer tons of praise about this game at the same time. It may seem like I’m loving it one day and then wanting anything else, but XIV another. And the thing about it is, neither of these hypothetical answers they could give are really long. I have kind of a complicated relationship with this game. Let’s see how I got there
I started playing it in phase 3 of the beta tests for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (also known as “2.0”), which was the relaunch and total remake of the original Final Fantasy XIV Online (also known as “1.0”) that we all know ended up being an absolute disaster. I was hooked before I had even played the real thing. I hit the cap in the beta on multiple jobs, even knowing that the servers were going to be wiped. I was totally grasped by this game and I began absorbing everything I could about the game. I've played many MMOs before, I guess you could say that I am the MMO guy of this band of merry boys along with ol’ Dakota. None have ever really grabbed me very much though, which is ironic to say against that previous sentence. Excluding World of Warcraft, I haven't put a significant amount of time into many of them, and even dislike a few of the popular ones like Guild Wars 2. I've played Final Fantasy XI (although not when it was relevant to the industry anymore and after XIV), Runescape, Warhammer Online, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Tera, Neverwinter Online, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Everquest 2, The Elder Scrolls Online, Rift, Wildstar, The Secret World, Black Desert Online. Pretty much if it says "Online" in the title, I've probably played it, if not I've at least heard and read about it. But as mentioned, I never really grasped MMO's outside of World of Warcraft, which I was already a huge fan of coming from a childhood adoration for Warcraft 3.
Which leads into XIV hooking me. It's not too much of a surprise that Final Fantasy was another series that I adored in my childhood and still do to this day. I've played through every single game in the main series, and many of the spin offs as well. In phase 3 of ARR’s beta I saw this Final Fantasy fanservice everywhere. It was like the game was made for me and other hardcore FF fans all over. Every time you level up you get the FF fanfare jingle, every time you finish a dungeon, fanfare absolutely everywhere. And the job system! I am an alt-aholic in MMOs, I love making new characters to try out and tinker with as many classes as I can find interesting. The fact that I could level and play every class on the same character was a godsend. The fact that they were all classic jobs I knew and loved from mainline Final Fantasy games only served to make it better. Going through a dungeon was like going through a dungeon in a single player FF, just with the rest of my party controlled by other, real people! I can fight Ifrit and Shiva and Bahamut! This game was a Final Fantasy fan's dream. Needless to say, I come back again for beta phase 4. This phase, however, was going to carry over into the final game. I was finally able to begin my journey in XIV for real. Again, I capped out my jobs in the beta phase to the maximum level allowed in the beta, this time getting to keep my progress, and jumped into the retail release with a head start.
I fell into a total addiction to XIV. Almost every waking hour that wasn't studying for college was spent playing it. A long term romantic relationship even blossomed out of the game that turned into a real life, in person one that lasted multiple years. As of a result of these events, though, I was beginning to neglect long term friends and social gatherings. A backlog of games I wished to play was backing up. All these and more even caused me to fall into a minor depression, which certainly didn't help matters and seemed to fire back into life any time I got too deep into an MMO. Eventually I pulled back from the game (and have since learned to better pace myself and my addictive personality with MMOs to avoid further depressive episodes). The relationship has since ended. I began spending more time speaking to and gathering with my friends to make up for time lost. However, I still continue to play XIV off and on to this day.
See, part of what ended up (thankfully, in the end) pushing me away from the game was the game itself. And so begins my complicated relationship with it. XIV has become stagnant, I continue to do the same things in it that I did almost 5 years ago, and doing them in the same ways. It all hit hardest when the first expansion, Heavensward, dropped. Usually in an MMO when an expansion drops you get some big sweeping system changes, everything that was old can feel new again. New ways to do things, new systems to explore, alongside your familiar mainstays like dungeons and raids. Except in Heavensward, that's all we got. Just more mainstays. In fact, we even got less. Throughout the patch cycle of A Realm Reborn, we got 3 dungeons every patch. With Heavensward we were told we would now only get 2. Outside of the addition of the 3 new jobs, the launch of Heavensward just felt like one glorified patch. And even then, the 3 new jobs weren't exactly thrilling either. Dark Knight was just an angry Paladin, Machinist was just a Bard with a gun, and Astrologian was just a healer with a "play like White Mage with tarot cards" button and a "play like Scholar with tarot cards" button to swap stances. You may not know exactly what each of these jobs are, but they were all basically rehashes of ideas that already existed in the base game.
The game continues like this through the content updates of Heavensward. It's all the exact same stuff we've done since the launch of ARR, but with a different skin. With an expansion, I expected more...Expansion. It was all just a repeat, aside from one new feature, known as the Diadem, which has been the second biggest failure the game has had since 1.0. It took a lot of development time and slated to be a big feature that basically ended up all for naught. This was the big feature that caused the team to drop a dungeon in order to free up their workload. It was an attempt at large scale, open ended content that ended up being pointless and tedious to do and overall very poorly received by the community. To top it off, this big piece of content was also the major feature of the first patch after the launch of the expansion, which had already been delayed because the entire dev team had went on vacation after the launch of Heavensward. Not only was there a lull in content, the content that did finally come was just a trainwreck in the first place. This is when I began to fall out of favor with XIV. The same old grind had finally lost its luster, and I began to drift away. This game has a very ardent fanbase, so it was difficult to find others discussing the game the same way I felt about it. Over time I did begin to see a subset of players becoming disenchanted with the game. Because of that ardent fanbase, they are typically shouted out and any criticism of the game on the popular r/ffxiv subreddit (which is the largest Western forum for the game) tends to get quickly downvoted. In Q&As when the development team is asked about certain things or features, it is all too common to get an answer of “that would be really difficult” from them. While I imagine these things would be quite difficult, and even more so in the live environment of an MMO, it kills the morale to always see this come up almost in a reluctance to attempt difficult things. That reluctance to attempt difficult things goes hand in hand with a reluctance to attempt new things in my opinion as well. As I have heard from others before, it’s almost as if Square Enix is afraid of the fanbase. They’re afraid of 1.0 happening again. They’re afraid of the reaction they might get if a new idea or system goes awry again like what happened with Diadem.
Enter Stormblood. This is now the second expansion for the game. And as you probably expect, it’s the same old, same old again. Except now we’re getting less. Again. Now we have been told we are only going to get 1 dungeon for the first patch, then 2 for the second, then 1 again for the next, and repeat until the end of Stormblood. We’re getting less dungeons again. This time it’s to free up even more workload to work on even more alternative content. One of these has already saw the light of day, and it is the Ultimate Coil of Bahamut, an extremely hard version of the original raid that launched with A Realm Reborn, The Binding Coil of Bahamut. However, this is not your typical challenging content. This is the hardest content the game has ever gotten, it is meant for only the most elite of the elite players, and therefore won’t be content for most players, including myself. However, for this very small crowd, it seems to have been a success. The general community seemed to enjoy watching the best players in the game compete and race for the world first completion.
The more important piece of content overall for the game, and for most players, though, is a new system called Eureka. This is supposed to be a large area, with open ended content to go and challenge. Does it sound familiar? It almost sounds like Diadem again. This time we will have our relic (an end-game, long term progression project to maintain your best weapon called your “relic”) tied to progression in this Eureka. The problem is that it has been delayed multiple times, and has still not released while Stormblood launched back in June of 2017. Most recently, when asked about it, Yoshida (director/producer) said that he didn’t wish to talk about it just yet, because people would “get the wrong idea” if they heard about it. It is sounding ominously like it could be Diadem all over again and he’s wanting to try to avoid giving that impression. Currently we’re expecting to see it some weeks after patch 4.2 hits on January 30th, but we’ll see what happens.
With Stormblood came two of my favorite jobs in Final Fantasy, Samurai and Red Mage. They have quickly become some of my favorites to play in XIV and Samurai in particular even took me away from being a tank main, but it doesn’t fully shake the feeling of “I’ve already done all this” going into our second expansion now. In the end, I do actually love this game. It’s been at least a small part of my life since it launched and I’ve met many cool people through it. Because I love it is why these expansions being so plain hurts so much. I look at WoW and I see them doing interesting things. Like with Cataclysm where they revamped much of the geography. Or in Legion where they experimented with you only having one weapon the entire expansion that you develop and maintain. Or now in Battle for Azeroth where they’re getting rid of raid tier sets. While all of these may not be beloved by everyone, they are undeniably huge changes. Changes that have the potential to change up the game. If nothing else, they’re interesting. They’re risky. It’s change, and for MMOs, the fact that they’re always changing and offering something new is part of the appeal. XIV has remained stagnant for far too long in my opinion.
It’s because I love the game that I have complained about it so much, and it’s the reason that I still continue to play off and on today. I’ll get an urge at some point after not having played for a while and decide to resub and catch up on all the content I have missed while I was gone. While that is all fun and interesting while I’m doing it, it typically doesn’t take long until it falls back into the same daily tomestone (a currency) grind that we’ve done since the launch of the game without a single change up to it. I worry for the game, because right now, while Stormblood has the highest subscriber count that the game has ever had so far and the game continues to grow, a lot of that is new players coming in after trying the new free trial, that lets you play a significant amount of the base A Realm Reborn content and get invested. They haven’t gone through 5 years of this same kind of end game system that we have. Eventually, they will have had their fill too. I don’t want to see this game go F2P, and I don’t want to see it die either. That’s why I’ve got such strong criticisms of it despite loving it. I hope Eureka is a success and puts our fears to bed. I hope the stagnation ends, and I hope that XIV remains around for a long, long time.
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