Is FF14 worth it? Let me explain...
I come from EverQuest, originally, and love playing World of Warcraft a lot (mostly classic versions). My preference is always the protection tank warrior, for PvE content. I enjoy learning dungeons, and then leading them. I hate lore and cutscenes. I just want to play the game, and I feel unskippable cutscenes lower the gameplay for me. At some point I enjoy watching a youtube video about them, where they're all in order and watching all at once. As, I enjoy not having long pauses (defeat this boss, then you can see the next cutscene) between them.
Is it possible to level up in FF14 without going through the storyline, or quests? Can I skip the cutscenes? Is it possible to level via dungeons, like in WoW?
I would like to skip the story, but I don't want to skip the leveling process. (I don't want to buy the boost to end game) Thank you.
this is bait but you should still have a nice day for even joking about skipping cutscenes.
This is not a joke post. I've seen youtube videos about the dungeons, and it looks interesting. When I want to see the cutscenes I'll go watch a full video with them all, so I don't have to wait to see them all at once. The story isn't important for me, in a game. I enjoy the gameplay. I don't look down on those who enjoy it, it's just not for me.
No, absolutely not.
Assuming this isn't bait, the answer is no. 100% of content in FF14 is tied to the main story quest. If you want access to all the dungeons raids etc, you will have to go through the entire story and there is a lot of story to go through even for the base game instances. You can skip cutscenes but there are a lot of cutscenes and a lot of unskippable solo story instances.
If you enjoy EQ and classic WoW dungeons you will not get much out of FF14 dungeons either. Outside of very VERY rare exceptions, they are all completely linear affairs that play out largely the same (5-10 mob groups followed by a boss repeated 3 times) with the main difference being the context of why you're there and the visual/audio design.
>Is FF14 worth it?
No.
FFXIV its only worth it if you wanna follow - at least - the main story quest. Everything is designed around it.
Come for the story, stay for the casual racism in Limsa general.
>skipping story in an FF game
My guy.
Can't play without going through story but you absolutely can skip everything, I have about 5k hours logged on a char and never watched a cutscene
You have to go through the main story, but all cut scenes are skippable.
It definitely doesn't sound like the MMO for you as it's very story based, especially in later expansions when they realised a lot of people were playing it solo and most people were playing for the story.
Its probably the most story driven MMO there's ever been, to the point its borderline a single player game now, you just team up with people to do dungeons.
>Is FF14 worth it?
No, it's complete shit. Don't fall for the meme.
No.
>My preference is always the protection tank warrior, for PvE content.
Tanking in XIV is peak AIDS.
>I enjoy learning dungeons, and then leading them.
XIV doesn't have difficult dungeon content so it doesn't matter.
>I hate lore and cutscenes.
Cutscenes sure, but lore? Worldbuilding is an important part of immersion in an MMO. To each their own though.
>I just want to play the game, and I feel unskippable cutscenes lower the gameplay for me.
You can skip a vast majority of the cutscenes. I know there were some level 50 story dungeons which had unskippable cutscenes, but they made those single player recently...So not sure if they made those skippable now too.
>Is it possible to level up in FF14 without going through the storyline, or quests?
While you can skip all the cutscenes outside of it following the story is 100% mandatory to unlock content. You can't just ignore it grind up to level 50 and start Heavensward for example.
best race in ff14?
they're all shit
Dunesfolk
> Bless the maker and his water. Bless the coming and going of him. May his passage cleanse the world. May he keep the world for his people
no, FF14 is not a good MMO
it's a fine game, but it is not a good MMO
Tanking is absolutely dumbed down to oblivion. dungeons are dead simple and only the boss encounters have any sort of difficulty spike (And even then, people usually clear in the first month because it's mechanic-gating and not gear-gating), but if you like learning an encounter, you might see the appeal for the raids, which are just 4 bosses in 4 arenas. There's multiple unskippable cutscenes and well over 300 skippable ones, and the game is extremely story-centric to the point that, as you've seen, players get real mad when you skip the story.
Story is absolutely required to unlock everything, and that includes the dungeons you'd need to level, even if the story quest EXP is enough that you only need to replay a dungeon a couple times during the story for levelling reasons.
You are looking for a more arcadey MMO, of which FFXIV is absolutely not. Give this one a hard pass, it's only going to get more story-centric and casual in the future.
But but yoshi p is so wholesome! How can the savior of MMOs be completely fricking incompetent in every category of MMO content? God FF14 players are fricking cancer. Tanking is shit healing is double shit dungeons are shit raids are ddr on a time limit and gearing is non existent. Frick these players propping up this piece of shit when everything carrying FF14 is on the backs of people who haven't been at Square since Mistwalker. And Soken. So enjoy paying 15 bucks a month for a music concert in a circular arena I guess
FFXIV is the most arcadey mmo on the market. It's literally just a collection of game modes that barely interact.
PVP is literally dead, no wonder since the mein people playing are coomers and pussies.
200 hours in, it's not
no
dont fall for the meme
its an incredibly boring game
literally about 400 point to to point b quests without audio just in the base game
it doesnt get better
the story doesnt go anywhere
the combat is respective and stale
the entire game never goes beyond go to point c, kill 1000 of mob d and return back to C
look into mabinogi
The problem I had with this game is that the skill ceiling is so fricking low that the game basically plays itself. Combine that with the fact that everything takes a million years to do and the story is essentially single player? Yeah it's trash, but it's the best mmo out right now, shows you the state of the market lol.
The graphics and art style are fricking amazing though. That's basically what kept me going for the 1000 hours I put into it.
> The graphics and art style are fricking amazing though.
The first time you notice eye tracking in this game.
Otoh, storywise, these three can get rekd. Societies should throw barmy horned mutants from the Tarpeian Rock, not put them in authority.
>The graphics and art style are fricking amazing though.
i too like eating shit and have no eyes
Do you want to pay $15 for a jank laggy JRPG? Yeah FFXIV is that.
If you're expecting an MMO experience, look elsewhere, FFXIV is a single player story game with an MMO tacked on to justify stealing money from JRPG gays and MMO refugees alike.
LOL the original base game still uses ps3 textures, ARR and heavensward is literally eyecancer
Textures I don't care about. I'm one of those weirdos who likes the idea of nearest neighbour texture filtering from the quake & unreal days. Hell. I even like integer scaled games running in 720p (for 1440p) and 1080p (for 4k).
What does bother me is anti-aliasing and performance and that's where XIV goes to hell, you want MSAA or clean AA? You better be using 4x DSR with 0% sharpness. Want something slightly less demanding without the smearing? You better be playing on 1.75 or 2.25x DLDSR with smoothness cranked up.
There's no real good middle grounds for performance on a CPU from the last year or two or a GPU even from last gen, it's one or the other.
Same shit with the UI, scaling on that is awful to the point that double res and either 100 or 150% scaling options are better if you want any degree of real scalability and that means you can toss integer scaling out the window too. So even if you can say "frick I don't care about the graphics give me decent framerates" you're stuck with a cancer UI.
No middle ground at all.
FF14 is beyond moronic. it is basically robbery that you consent to.
how?
Do NOT play this game as an MMO, you will hate it. Play it as an online singleplayer game with occasional co-op. The story is enjoyable. The online content is garbage.
My advice if you're interested in the story is to watch a supercut on youtube or something. I'm not going to argue about the quality of the story in XIV, but the medium through which they choose to tell it just doesn't fit. It's telling a singleplayer story through an MMO. 90% of the quests are awful filler because the game is designed to pad its runtime, the cutscenes are generally low quality and because it's a theme park MMO, there are basically no stakes for the drama they want to tell.
>you got captured and are being held for essentially execution!
>btw here's an escape route so you can go do fishing quests if you like, but make sure to return for your execution
This problem isn't exclusive to XIV of course, but considering how many people recommend the game for its story I feel like I'm the only one who thinks the effort required to suspend disbelief for it to work isn't worth the mediocre gameplay you have to suffer through to absorb it in the first place.
I'd disagree unless the "supercuts" have the flavour dialogue from the other NPC's.
ARR's story is pretty much all about soft worldbuilding and stakes being raised as the beast tribes keep stacking more and more aether to summon their gods but there's other parts in there, you can see thancred being changed and notice his necklace is different, you barely know him in ARR unless you go out of your way specifically to talk to him..
There's the other scions of the seventh dawn that you'll see at the PRAY RETURN hut and there's little parts of story in there too about them coming together after forgetting the past and eventually you'll find them dead.
You'll see the rapebabby himself Arenvald show up, you'll see them talk about their missions and how he's conveniently out of office while the slaughter ensues..
There's a whole lot of flavour dialogue with NPC's once you reach Mor Dhona too.
Now. They stripped out a LOOOT of ARR if you look at it and people say they could strip out more but I'm of the opinion that if you want to do it right, you want to build to that end cutscene and have the stacks raise through the post game then it's actually kinda okay. There are certainly parts that don't work quite as well though and yeah, could be a bit more slimline or updating the quests themselves to be less of a drain such as:
Trailing through coerthas to find the illustrious engi comedy duo
Almost the entirety of the sylph quest line leading up to your job stone trails for a long time [spoiler]but THAT in itself is build up to Ramuh [/spoiler].
-And of course the buildup to Titan with the hated fetch quests [spoiler]which again build up partly the Costa del sol & limsa regions which are called back in the SAM job quests later.[/spoiler]
So supercuts. Yeah, if you're wanting to speedread it. The quests are the issue, not the story.
I would assume any good one would include it, since yes there's a lot of flavor text any time you end up somewhere new and that was a nice little touch. Every time you stop for a quest it's possible to chat with your party and get at least a little more out of them.
>The quests are the issue, not the story.
Yeah, basically. To be honest, the worldbuilding isn't the part I have a problem with. XIV disappointed me a lot because I like the world (I'm a big FF fan in the first place), and the MSQ does indeed do a job of leading you through the entire thing. But when it comes to the actual "story" there's basically no part of that which couldn't be done better by a singleplayer game, and being in an MMO actively hurts it. The story is at its best when you're exploring the nature of the area you're questing through and at its worst when you're chosen by the crystal who can view glimpses of past events and etc etc. Like you said the story is an online singleplayer game which would be fine if that made any sense at all and they didn't charge you monthly to experience it.
>Play it as an online singleplayer game with occasional co-op. The story is enjoyable. The online content is garbage.
It's great that there's now trusts for ARR's 2.0 story dungeons, they're doing the optional ones soon right and Heavensward through to Stormblood? That'd make a huge difference in making them more enjoyable but yeah that IS a problem with XIV and a problem with their game balancing for older content.
Content that once would have been fun is now braindead thanks to job and class kits being stripped down so they don't have ability and button bloat in EW content, kits don't scale down well.
To add to that? The MMO community? There's ONE way to run it to 75% of the playerbase and it's efficiently by grouping mobs, spamming AOE then doing the bosses. The community ONLY wants W2W pulls so every dungeon is the fricking same and once you get past ARR the dungeon design is almost exactly the same every time too. You're not required to think, you're not required to learn anything it's sprint, press your AOE keys, rinse, repeat.
The way mobs are placed, the strat to just sprint, everything about it is just mediocre which only makes the trials and raids worth doing and those have the same problem of being braindead until you start hitting SB & ShB because your kit has had everything good stripped out.
You don't see duties take a long time because it's the same shit, if there's any duty that does take a bit longer or has mechanics that can't be steamrolled then the casuals fricking cry and cry and in the case of alliance raids they grief everyone but ilvl cheesing.
Yoshida doesn't wanna do a XIV classic, 1.0 is a bad stain for him but the jobs being stripped down really frick over old content. It's great players can still do them thanks to the way roulettes work but those terrible design choices do take a lot of the fun out.
I just want an mmo with a good story, I don't even really want to play with other people outside occasionally doing dumb shit with my friend.
can i do this?
pretty much yeah. the content is so pathetically braindead you can basically auto pilot everything and ignore other players.