Figured it was time for some house cleaning. I’ve updated the blogroll to clean out the deprecated blogs (except Isey, I hold out hope!!!) and some other bits and bobs that were no longer working. I should change my blog image header at some point, but it’s also bee the same for something like 12 years now. Like an old sweatshirt… it just feels comfortable.
I followed the Blaugust and read a pile of blogs there too. That’s the next logical step to update those. I’ve got a bunch in Feedly now, just need to take the time to curate it a bit more. The discord channel is super useful as a way to keep up to date as well.
RL has been ultra busy lately. I’m a head coach for one of my girls, helper for another, and it feels like I’m also a sort of guidance counsellor for new coaches/managers in the association. September has always (except last year) been a rock and roll month, and I am looking forward a bit to have a bit more wiggle room with my time. A week or so and things should be good.
I’m on a dozen “positive” posts for FF14 of late. They are not effusive in praise, just that they tend to finish on a rather positive note. Looking back on my WoW post history, I don’t think I’ve gone more than 5 in a row without a gripe post, or armchair design item. Heck, my Anthem series has 1 positive post total (to which my brother kindly asked why I was playing it at all). Hindsight here is that I was playing WoW out of habit and small bits of fun – I was clearly not enjoying it as I once did. It was somewhat cathartic to hit the uninstall button a few months ago.
I do need to find the balance in some constructive (?) comments with regards to FF14. It’s not perfect… nothing ever is, but it’s leaps and bounds the best themepark MMO out there, across pretty much every meaningful system. Now, there are some bits that are a bit harder to swallow…
New player experience. I am somewhat convinced that FF14 has given up on this as for almost any practical purpose, you’re better off buying the MSQ skip + level boost. By doing so, you actually lose out on all the tutorials (there are many) and the rather solid on-ramp experience from 1-20. That player counts are growing is astounding to me.
MSQ time spent. I enjoy the MSQ, I think it’s well written and consistent. You can’t actually see any of the Scions outside of the MSQ, so there’s no weird time travel issues here. (Compare to Khadgar being everywhere and nowhere in WoW). That said, you’re looking at 40 hrs per expansion, with a good 75% of that stuck in cut-scenes. Relevant for the current expansion, but good golly, anyone trying Endwalker for the first time has nearly 200hrs of content to get through. A more obvious way of getting to NG+ would help here.
Glamor & Customized looks. Given the small inventory size and multiple jobs, it’s a right mess to have a set of customized looks at the top end. Which is kind of odd, since FF14 really is a glamor competition.
Gil costs. Ok, this is not really an issue for top-end players, but it is for anyone going through the MSQ and doesn’t understand the Aetheryte system. Teleport costs don’t scale with level, and the sources for Gil are not readily apparent for anyone who is leveling. Plus, the process of gearing for any MSQ post-campaign quest is stupidly expensive. I don’t think it makes any sense to force an ilvl for a dungeon that you can faceroll through.
The default UI. Clearly designed to be console friendly, the base UI is a mess to look at. You don’t really understand how bad this is until you’re in group content and half the real-estate goes away. You can (and should) manually change a bunch of settings/layouts, but if ever there was a place to mod, this is it.
Job variety. I guess this depends on your perspective. There are really only 5 classes (tank, melee, physical ranged, magic ranged, and healer). There is not objective difference in playstyle between two warriors. Jobs are akin to WoW-specs which change the buttons, and order of button presses, to execute the same goal. That means there are currently 17 (19 with Endwalker) variations in play. This DRAMATICALLY helps with balancing. Look at WoW and the 36 specs, 4 covenants, half dozen ‘valid’ talent choices, and the nightmare that results (36*4*6 = 864!). I didn’t add Shards or Legendaries either (note: covenants, shards, legendaries will all be wiped in next expansion too, making this a borderline dumb approach to design). tldr; if you like min/maxing, FF14 ain’t really the game for you. Is that a negative? Maybe?
Player housing. I personally think that there shouldn’t be any, only guild (free company) housing, where you get a room (and perhaps a fee for a slightly larger room). You’re just not going to find any (problem A) and the design interface is really rough (problem B). I am continuously amazed at how creative players are in regards to decorating – just wow.
Inconsistent mechanics. This is a personal one. FF14 does a great job at using a set base of UI elements to train responses. Red = bad, blue = good. Rotating arrows show direction. Icons above your head indicate stacking or spreading. There are however times where there are either no indicators (meaning you need to look at a boss, with particle effects going all over) or the indicators do not correspond to the learned behavior (e.g. the stack icon but you should not stack). These feel like anecdotes that players need to memorize.
That feels like nitpicking. There aren’t any systems that are inherently bad. Everything in the game has a purpose and even stuff from 8 years ago is relevant in some fashion today. When’s the last time you tended your garden in Pandaria, or even visited your class hall in Legion?
What would be interesting to see is FF14’s ‘quit wall’. The point where players generally decide to stop playing due to the effort no longer being a match for the rewards. I’d be super curious to see how many people make it all the way through the MSQ, how many folks have a 2nd job, and the type of content consumed on a daily basis. Even with New World launched, I still have a daily queue on Cactuar, so anecdotally there are still a LOT of players logging on. How long will this increase go post-Endwalker?
When I rejoined FF14, I was in the middle of 3.1, the first content piece after Heavensward. It’s been about 5 weeks now and I just completed the 5.0 MSQ, with just over 50 quests left to do in order to be prepared for Endwalker. Well… prepared isn’t the right word, perhaps ‘able to take on the first quest’. There is plenty of stuff to do once at 80. This post is instead going to reflect on the MSQ proper, less the stuff around it – so some spoilers here (not the 5.x stuff yet).
The biggest benefit for Shadowbringers (ShB) is that it follows Stormblood (StB), as the former took a tangent to the main story villains and meandered for a long time. ShB goes right back to start of ARR, with the Source and the 13 split shards from the initial sundering. You end up on the First, after it has been swept by the light (this makes sense once you complete Heavensward’s extra MSQ). In short, it focuses on the Scions (good guys), Ascians (bad guys), why the world is the way it is, and what’s at stake.
FF14 has a habit of applying nuance to the world and less the characters. Bad guys are just bad, but the people on their team may be good. There are a few characters that have some backstory to try and explain their actions (Yotsuyu is a really good example), yet most just undergo a heel/hero swap (Fandaniel, Nero, Gaius). ShB does the same thing here for nearly everyone – except the Ascian villain. Emet-Selch provides a ton of backstory to the Ascians, how Zodiark came to be, and the loss of his world. It’s extremely similar to Zanarkand in FFX. You know from the start he’s a bad guy, but you’re also hanging on his every word. When you finally reach Amaurot, there’s a lot of sympathy for what came before.
Tangent. Remember Man of Steel? Where Zod is convinced that to restore Krypton he has to kill everyone on Earth? That was dumb, because there was no empathy for Krypton that was – all we ever saw was war. It had as much weight as if he wanted to put a shopping mall. The good news is that ShB learned that lesson well, and you can have some appreciation for what was lost way back when. Now, why stuff went wrong is certainly something Endwalker is going to address.
The general pacing of the story is an improvement as well, where you start in the main hub, and then branch out to restore areas in line with the larger story arc. You gradually restore the Scions, uncover more of the history of the First, and get access to some rather interesting locales. The pyramid zone and work with the Talos are memorable enough. The Tempest seems a bit of a bolt-on near the end (though the ride to get there is damn cool). It feels like they forgot that they needed an underwater level and just plopped it here (which makes sense, since the Light doesn’t reach the sea floor)
Eulmore is the heart of this expansion, not because of it’s location, but because of what it represents. If the end of the world is guaranteed, you’re going to have people simply accept it and try to go out with a bang (see Snowpiercer for a great example). The apathy and desperation of this city is really something to see… it bleeds into everything. Ran’jit is the perfect example of this… someone who spent years fighting only to suffer loss after loss, and he’s just plain broken. When that larger arc ends, it feels like the expansion is capped.
But it’s not, and then you reach Amaurot. I won’t spoil this part too much, but it has a dungeon that feels like a WoW raid in terms of visuals. If this is where Endwalker goes in terms of storyline/visuals, that would make me very happy.
The final boss of Amaurot… the beauty of the scene offsets the chaos of the fight.
Another tangent, when it comes to villains. The best FF villains are those you interact with, not just speeches but actual action and consequence. Kefka is memorable because he’s just always around the corner (plus he actually wins if you think about it). Sephiroth the same. Who’s the villain in FF12 again? I’m picking on FF here, but it applies to all video games (and most movies). You need that interaction to see more than a 2 dimensional character. ARR had Gaius, Heavensward didn’t really do this part well, Stormblood’s main villain you saw twice, and finally in Shadowbringers, Emet-Selch is practically in your party.
While it’s not the best FF story, it certainly feels the strongest of all the FF14 stories told so far, or perhaps the one that returns most to the series roots.
I purchased a gaming laptop in 2019 (17″ MSI Ge75 Raider / RTX2070 / i7-8750) for a decent price. At the time I was debating a full blown PC, knowing that the 30X0 series was due in short order, and that it was likely to be a generational change (like the 20X0 series prior). I had done the math – I could not beat the price of the laptop and had little interest in just swapping out a GPU in a year. One key bit here is that I have 2 kids, so hand-me-down laptops, in particular gaming ones, can last for a very long time, rather than just having PC hand me downs which are a real PITA to manage.
Still, one I have an itch it’s darn hard to scratch it. The 30X0 series was announced and for a bunch of reasons, including the pandemic, there’s been a massive shortage of components for a year now. I can’t blame the companies for the shortage – supply chain issues are crazy complex today. I can blame them for not doing anything about the scalpers/bots. Best Buy in Canada won’t let you order any of them online, and you can only get 1 in-store. The last batch had people waiting 20+ hours for it. Now, can they flip those cards for 1 day’s wait? For sure. But 1 card is a much easier thing to swallow than the bot rampage of multiple cards.
I can buy a card now, but I’d be paying scalper markups. A $1000 MSRP is easily double right now. It’s already hard enough justifying the lower price to play Minecraft in 4k. There are maybe a half dozen games a year where a dedicated PC rig would actually matter. Control is the last one I can think of where it actually would have mattered, and I’d be stretching if I said it mattered for Outriders. The Ascent would be one I guess.
So the base kit would be something like ($CDN)
ATX mid tower – 85
IAO cooler + fans – 150
750w 80+ gold PS – 90
1Tb Samsung 970 – 190
2x 8G DDR4 3600 – 110
B560 ATX board w/ WiFi- 280
i7 11700 – 500
That’s around $1400 and I don’t have a 2nd drive (so maybe another $200), and it doesn’t go all out on RGB or color coordination. I’d need an OS ($20 OEM), plus a keyboard mouse ($150) and finally a decent monitor ($300). So let’s say that brings it up to $1900.
Video cards should be (small rant here but Amazon sucks something fierce to search cards):
3060 – 700
3070 – 1000
3080 – 1400
3090 – 3000
The 3090 makes no sense to me, so it’s really a choice between the 3070/3080. So the total rig goes between $2900 and $3300 – add another $1000 if I want to buy from scalpers. I can get a 17″ laptop, with similar specs and a 3070 for $2500. Well, stock levels seem to be there now.
It would certainly be cool to build a rig, and share that experience with my daughters. Maybe in another year when this stuff sorts itself out… or I win some lottery of luck.
Leo's Life 