FFXIV: How I Ruined a Realm Reborn…

My son was pretty excited to get a new laptop for his birthday. He immediately wanted suggestions for MMOs he could put on it. The laptop was a Macbook Air, so EverQuest and EQ2 were right out. (You could play EQ, at least, on an Intel-based Mac, using a Windows emulator, but I doubt the new Macs can do that anymore).

That left World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. We made goblins in WoW and ran around a bit. When he tried FFXIV, though, he said that THIS was the MMO he wanted, and so we restarted in a server not connected in any way to my old server (new server: Leviathan in Primal data center; old server: Brynhildr in Crystal data center). Now I could do a World Transfer to get my character over to the new place, but I opted to start over.

I did play FFXIV, original recipe, before they took it off the market and rewrote it. I bounced off before my first month was over, though, so I am not in the annals of heroes that shows at the end of the A Realm Reborn (ARR) main story quest (MSQ). If I’d known that would happen, I would have kept playing, but, alas…

I was excited to connect with the main story again. The first time through, so, so long ago, was right before the first expansion, Heavensward, opened. There were always a lot of people around, it wasn’t hard to find a group, pretty sure the Duty Finder was already in place at that time. I didn’t pay too much attention to the story — I was just excited to be there and be leveling up. Eagerly watching each new MTQCapture video so that I wouldn’t embarrass myself in the dungeons and raids, working on my first glowy weapon, making Mor Dhona my new home. There was a lot going on, and the story was always going to be there.

I didn’t know until the expansions came out just how much foreshadowing was going into the main story quest. I played to the end of Shadowbringers, the last but one expansion. (Endwalkers is the latest one). Everything in the previous expansions had been hinted about way back in the beginning, in ARR. Going through again, I could pick out the bits and pieces that would have much more meaning in the future.

And even more context. For some reason, maybe because I skipped cutscenes (horrors), I completely missed the backstory for the opening of the Coils of Bahamut raids — it’s all there. I missed a lot of the Allagan hints. I think I even missed that evil spirit Lahabrea had taken over Thancred’s body. Sure, when I was doing the Praetorium raids, it was hard to miss, but I’d forgotten how it started.

So, lots of nostalgia going on. But there are changes.

Back in Shadowbringers, there was this option to do the main story quest dungeons with fellow Scions of the Seventh Dawn. It was more fun and frequently faster to do it with other players, but if you just wanted to learn the ropes or didn’t want to wait for a group, there was this NPC option. You could level them up, too. The game was encouraging you to use them. All the raids and trials were still real player only.

And secondly, previously, they added the grand company ability to recruit and train your own squad of NPCs, and take them to a selection of dungeons in ARR. And I think there were some Heavensward dungeons in there, too. That was fun when leveling up new classes for the early levels. Paths of the Dead was another option, but sometimes you just wanted to do things in your own time.

Well, they have doubled down on this. Every main story quest dungeon and trial can be done with NPCs (this is called the Dungeon Support system). Optional dungeons and trials and, I assume, the hard/extreme mode variants are still real players only. But you can go through all of ARR without having to group with any other people if you like.

It’s a trap. You get to do things at your own pace, watch all the cutscenes, you get all the loot, why wouldn’t you take this option when you could?

Well, for one, at some point you’re going to need other people to get to the fun bits. The hard mode stuff and the raids. The Crystal Tower raids are ripped right from Final Fantasy III and are super important to Shadowbringers.

Anyway. It’s a trap. But this isn’t why I am angry at Squenix and wonder why they hate their game so much. What I really can’t understand is, why they went easy mode in the dungeons.

Almost all the early dungeons have been simplified. In Thousand Maws, you had to collect stuff to open the boss fights. Gone, don’t have to do that anymore. Also, the snare pods are entirely gone, and the dungeon is more linear. Copperbell had some fun mechanics. Gone, replaced with “don’t stand in the fire” mechanics, and the final boss doesn’t bring adds. Stone Vigil has excised most of the wandering mobs that made the dungeon so much fun. Brayflox Longstop has taken all the positioning strategy of the final boss away, replaced with don’t stand in the fire mechanics. Haukke Manor has fewer adds and the final boss fight removed all the fun mechanics, replaced with don’t stand in the fire. Stone Vigil second boss removed the “fire cannons” bit entirely, and the randomly moving tornadoes just travel on a straight path now. Etc etc etc.

I was randomly invited to a free company after I created my character, and as expected, they are all end game and off in places I’ve never been, but I did ask, why all the changes? Well, they said, Squenix wanted to get people ready for late game dungeons by moving some of those advanced mechanics into earlier dungeons.

Fug that. They removed fun stuff and replaced it with “don’t stand in that obvious highlighted area”.

But, I thought to myself, I still have the raids at the end of ARR to look forward to Cape Westwind, the most fun thirty seconds of raiding I will ever know. The fun of cheesing Castrum Meridian. And of course, the multipart epic of the Praetorium, which would elicit groans from the raid whenever it popped, because here come the unskippable cutscenes and forty five minutes of chatting with everyone……

All gone. All gone. They tore it apart.

Cape Westwind is no longer a two party raid (a “Full Group”). It is a solo fight. Hope you brought a DPS job! Castrum Meridian is a one party dungeon with most of the dungeon skipped and is really pointless. Instead of destroying three field generators, you just do one. The boss fights simplified. Livia is just a tank and spank without all the missiles you had to fire before. And you can’t cheese the two colossi at the end by starting the Livia fight early anymore either.

Well, at least I have Praetorium to look forward to.

Ha.

This is the climax of A Realm Reborn. Everything comes together in this raid. Used to be five fights — Colossus, Nero, Gaius, the Ultima Weapon, and then a fight with Lahabrea/Thancred at the end to free your friend. This was the perfect place to perfect your job, and it had fun minigames like the mech armor stomp down to the lower levels.

Now it has been split into three. A light party, four person run ending with Gaius, a light party trial against Ultima Weapon (which has, again, been simplified), and then a solo encounter with Lahabrea (hope you brought your DPS job!).

The Gaius fight was changed a lot; it looks like they copy/pasted the Odin encounter in, but it still is just avoiding the glowing bits. (But there’s a lot of them). (I did read up on these new fights before I started).

I played Castrum Meridian with a group of players, but when it became clear there was no reason for the other people to be there, I did Praetorium and the Porta Decumana (Ultima Weapon trial) with NPCs. I’d actually forgotten the Lahabrea capper, since it was usually over in a minute or so. So it was a little unexpected when they left me off of Porta Decumana in front of a portal to this single encounter.

Cape Westwind took me two tries (and I saw that, if you lose, instead of making you more powerful due to your Echo strengthening your resolve, it now offers Easy and Very Easy mode). I did Lahabrea in one. His fight seemed copy/pasted from one of the fights in Stormblood.

Finished with that, make the cinematic escape from the citadel as explosions destroy everything, credits roll.

I’d show more pictures, because it was pretty thrilling, but while I had OBS running, I wasn’t actually streaming (I found out) so no record of all this. I could go back and look at the cutscenes in the inn room, but that doesn’t have any of the NPCs in it.

Wait, I’m going to go do that just to make more pictures for this post. But it’s not real time.

So how is this all my fault?

Because I started treating Final Fantasy XIV like a single player game. I grinded on those NPC dungeons in the grand company squad and then in Shadowbringers because I didn’t like the “gogogogo” pressure of playing a Paladin or White Mage in those dungeons. It was super stressful. And I didn’t like the long queue times for Dancer, my DPS job at the time. So I would just go with NPCs or the Scions. Less loot, but there was some.

So I didn’t do a lot of trials, or a lot of raids, and grouping with NPCs was boring, so I just parked in the Gold Saucer and spent a few months on Mahjongg and Cactpot. And then then pandemic hit and they said they wouldn’t demolish homes, so I quit, knowing my home was safe.

They did eventually demolish it. I got the money and the stuff that was in it. I could participate in a lotto to get my property back, but I declined.

But see, it’s easy to just go it alone. But it isn’t very much fun. You never really have to get good when it’s NPCs because they have zero expectations and all the time in the world.

It’s a trap. MMOs should encourage playing with other people, and they are discouraging it. I did the final ARR things with NPCs because I could. And while I did have plenty of time to read everything and think about how it was setting up future plot points, I can’t I had any good conversation or potentially meeting a new friend.

My son logged in and did a Thousand Maws dungeon. I talked him through it. I pointed out that the tank was a dark knight, the healer was a sage, the other DPS was a dragoon so I could talk about how dragoons become important in the Heavensward. I couldn’t have any of that sort of conversation with NPCs.

Soloing the game with NPCs is easy. Maybe MMOs shouldn’t be easy.

Yes, of course, there’s the hard and extreme mode content. But after soloing entirely to that point with NPCs, who could be ready for that?