Since the Main Story Quest (MSQ) in FF14 is mandatory to get access to pretty much everything, it acts as a sort of secondary leveling metric. If you’re playing only a single job (class), then you should never be lacking levels in that front to get to the next stage of the MSQ. If you’re swapping around jobs, then yeah, you’re going to need to supplement the exp gains.

Each expansion has a set of MSQ, then there are post-content MSQ that prepare for the next expansion. Of interest is the following:

• ARR – 185-188 (starting city makes a difference)
• ARR+ – 20
• Heavensward – 94
• Heavensward+ – 44
• Stormblood – 122
• Stormblood+ – 40
• Shadowbringers – 107
• Shadowbringers+ – 51

That’s 663 quests to get through, most where you’re just talking. Some where you kill 1-2 monsters, or delivery an item. About 10% of them unlock a dungeon or raid.

I’m currently at quest 87 within the Stormblood campaign, which is about 70% of the way through until the end of this pack. I’ve reached level 67, which is right in line with expectations. I’ll have some thoughts on it once I get to the tail end. That also puts me at 430 quests of 663 total to reach the end of current content before Endwalker comes out – or 233 to go.

I started at the Heavensward+ content about 2 weeks ago. Works out to something like 60 or so quests done a week. If that trends continues, then it’s a month+ to get through all the rest. If I was to look at the entire journey, it’s 11+ weeks of content at my pace… and someone more slow paced may be seeing 4+ months of quests before joining the end portion.

I’ll add a counter to the website to keep track.

Skip MSQ or Not?

I like the MSQ, I really do. The storylines are decent enough, in line with most FF games. There are still the weird bits that often pop up, like literal Ninja Turtles. The villains are often nuanced enough to understand why they do what they do, without some larger puppet strings being pulled. It’s always a larger arc, with a foundational set of NPCs to go through it all.

The real benefit however is the unlocking of various “things” and effectively training wheels for new players. I’ve long been a proponent of this model (WoW’s proving grounds are a lost opportunity), so that new players can be eased into the game’s systems. Be it group combat, crafting, social structures, raids, stuns, flying, retainers, swimming, glamour and so on. There’s a logical structured path to uncover these systems, as many of them depend on each other.

The downside is the length of time required to get through all this. If you “skip” the MSQ, then you automatically unlock everything and likely have no idea how any of it works. WoW is deceivingly simple in terms of systems – very few of them ever interact with each other (think about it, what mechanics from Legion are evenly remotely relevant today?). They can become complex, if you so choose. FF14 is quite the opposite, where trying to do one thing likely requires doing a half dozen other steps first. Skipping the MSQ means you don’t understand it. Plus, compared to many MMOs (LotR excepted), the entire story is relevant.

It would be nice to have a mini MSQ, where there was still some training wheels for the various systems, but that it didn’t take half a year to get through. You’re still a sprout for like 170 hours, so perhaps there’s something that could be done there… it would be a coding investment and now that the game is entering the 4th expansion, I’d be curious if that was worth it.

I think Dark Souls is a solid game. Punishingly difficult at times, but well structured and balanced with a focus on smart hit box usage. I think this model existing with Ninja Gaiden prior, and personally preferred the flow of that game. The campfire mechanic (healing in exchange for enemy respawns) is certainly the twist that pops out the most, yet the open world nature is also a highlight. It really bears mentioning that DS games are somewhat slow, gameplay-wise, as choices are deliberate.

From a design perspective, giving the player a choice to respawn enemies in exchange for healing allows for a challenging design that has some safety net. It moves from the prior design choices of checkpoints everywhere and auto-generating health. The former rewards skill, while the latter rewards speed. So sure enough, plenty of games have tried to emulate this new design model.

I wouldn’t say that this has been terribly successful overall, though there are some standouts. Jedi Fallen Order is the closest to this model with widespread success, if you look at games outside of FromSoftware. The Surge (and sequel) are closer mechanically, but don’t really work as total game packages (not bad games mind you). There are others, Steam has enough curated lists.

One I picked up on sale on the Switch is Blasphemous. It’s a merger of the Metroidvania (think Symphony of the Night) with a campfire mechanic. It’s a weird game, where it exchanges planning for this healing mechanic. In a more standard Metroidvania game, enemies will respawn if you leave 2 screens or if you die – and those games are about getting around rather quickly. Blasphemous does not respawn enemies until you die or use a healing lantern (which are not exactly common). And the low use of those lanterns means that you’re rarely ever presented with an actual choice of respawning enemies in order to heal. Like you won’t go 2 screens, take so much damage that it’s worth backtracking and trying again with enemies back. You’ll go one screen more, die, and then proceed along the same steps as if you did heal.

I wouldn’t even say that the difficulty is on par with Souls games, where you should aim for semi-perfection in order to progress. Death here is often related to knockback effects rather than outright damage… or the odd pit trap for insta-kill effect. That seems like a negative take, and in terms of advertising as a ‘dark souls-like’ game doesn’t really work when meshed with the Metroidvania genre. It already has those mechanics built-in.

Where Blasphemous does work, is in the exploration aspects and multitude of hidden quests. Each zone has a particular flavor with somewhat unique enemies. The lore is obscure enough to give a sense of foreboding, without being confusing. There is a lot of backtracking as you unlock more and more movement skills (extra platforms, higher jumps, poison immunity, etc..) The downside to any game based on exploration is the discovery phase. There are breadcrumbs of a sort, if you look at the item and the lore. But even then, there’s a whole lot of guesswork and no in-game ability to track the 2 dozen odd quests here.

The combat does bear some note. You’re only ever given your sword, which gets marginally more powerful as you go through the game. There are (very few) magic attacks, and you’re open to attacks while casting, which truly negates most of the benefit. There’s a block/parry feature, but the logic behind it is somewhat inconsistent. The dodge/poke attack however… that doesn’t get old!

I guess I could talk about the lore, but frankly, that’s best experienced in-game. Clearly inspired by Catholicism a few hundred years ago, what with the constant references to ‘guilt’. But it’s a sort of grotesque take on it all, which given the material, is towing a tough line on ironic. I will say that it’s consistent in tone, which is more than I can say for Dante’s Inferno.

The game’s foibles are primarily quality of life items, which from a small dev-team perspective aren’t exactly deal breakers. That said, there are (free) DLC items for the game, the last of which will launch in December that address some bits. And a sequel in 2023. I’d expect that given the solid bones here, that the sequel will find a way to add these items and therefore broaden the appeal. It’s an interesting experiment that somehow works.

There are a LOT of features in WoW that simply amaze me in their lack of vision. Conceptually they are rock-star ideas that with a bit of work can be long-term gaming pillars. Island Expeditions is the only good new idea to come out of the last 2 expansion, and it’s treated like a lead paint eating cousin. Proving Grounds dates from MoP and is without question the best way to train any player on how to play their class/role in a controlled environment. Timewalking Dungeons is the other bit, where the devs have built over 120 dungeons over the life of the game, and only a half dozen are ever relevant. Every so often they add a half dozen more from a given expansion (and then nerf any reason to do them). There’s obviously been effort to add scaling to these dungeons, so there’s no reason that the pack of them can’t be cycled in/out on a regular basis.

FF14, sensing this relevance issue a long time ago, built-in scaling to dungeons from the start (well, ARR start). This was built from the clear design goal to have dungeons be part of the main story – and ensure there are always people around to make those groups happen. To make this work, they put in categories of dungeons, of which players can select at any point in their class career. The main reason this works is simple – FF14 has from the start, used tokens to bridge the gap towards max level gear. Completing items within this roulette awards tokens, at varying rates, depending on your level, the amount you’ve completed, and the class ratios (e.g. needing tanks).

Heading back to WoW, it’s entirely possible to never see any dungeon that isn’t in the most recent expansion. And way more likely that they’ll never set foot in any given raid. Even to this day, I’d bet there are less people who have done Throne of the Four Winds vs a single pet battle. I mean, that sort of fits in WoW’s more recent design penchant to only build temporary systems, rather than incremental ones. Garrisons, Class Halls, everything Azerite – none of it even matters an ounce today.

Now, I’m not advocating of keeping everything relevant. One of FF14’s main challenges is massive bloat to get from level 1 to level 80 – a good 100hrs to get through it all, and you will have to participate in nearly every single system along the way. They have done some pruning along the way (stances, skill variety, class balance, etc…) to try and “flatten” out the bump, but it’s still a crazy amount of content to get through. But FF14 also celebrates the value in they journey, and goes to great lengths to keep it meaningful and valuable for everyone. This breadth of content creates some really weird scenarios where you are gated from one activity and no real indication of how to get over that fence.

For the last bit, let’s consider the tail end off an expansion for a second. The structure of WoW (I guess old WoW) was that an expansion was only relevant for the necessary DINGs to get to the next one. The actual content and mechanics were meaningless. In new WoW (post-SL), there are entire expansions that are fully ignored (Vanilla, TBC, WoLK, Cata, MoP) because WoD is so generous with XP. And if you were waiting for SL to drop, there was no reason to do anything but ding 50 in BfA in terms of prep. FF14 won’t let you pick up the first quest in a new expansion unless you’ve done the 40-50 post-expansion quests from the previous tier. If you bought WoW today, and wanted to prep for SL, you’d be good by the weekend. If you bought FF14 today, you’re a few months away. And if you bought a story boost, you’d still have ~60 hrs of content to get through.

It’s sort of like going to a buffet and not being allowed to leave until you try everything that’s on display. There are limits to what a person can take. Way different perspectives depending on awareness of how much of the buffet is left to work through. I’d honestly recommend that people buy the story boost to get to the more recent bits, get to max level, and then start the new game + that allows you to replay the skipped MSQ. At least that would turn the buffet to being optional.

In the rare WoW space, but given the sort of apples to orange dialogue in my mind. These are “final” expansion overviews.

• Vanilla – Heroes win! No lasers.
• WoLK – Frostmourne laser, and then Tirion’s laser
• Cataclysm – Green jeebus shoots a magic laser on Deathwing
• MoP – Heroes beat Garrosh! No lasers.
• WOD – Archimonde uses the green laser to close the portal
• Legion – Space laser takes out Sargeras
• BfA – Titan laser takes out N’Zoth
• SL – dollars to donuts pretty darn clear that a laser made of the 4 zones is going to take down the bad guy

There are a half dozen Blizzard tropes over the years, the redemption arc being top of pile. But the dependency on lasers, and in particular lasers not used by the heroes, wasn’t one that really came to mind. I mean, you are a player are there, but you’re more of a peon or an enabler of someone else.

This came to mind as I was working through the FF14 MSQ, where the game goes to great lengths to make you the agent of change, even on the final battles. Nidhogg goes down at the end of Heavensward, but the cinematic has you pulling the stuff from the remaining dragoon. Not that FF14 spends all it’s time in the concrete, it is a story about the struggle between the god of light and that of dark. There are some really “out there” scenes.

I get that I’m in a sort of honeymoon phase here. No different than when you get a new car, or change jobs. Things that you normally take for granted really start popping out (blind spots in cars… that’s a pet peeve). It’s clear that FF14 took massive inspiration from WoW, just like WoW did from EQ, and EQ from UO, and so on. Just like Toyota took inspiration from Ford, or Yamaha from Harley. And in those last 2 cases, ended up doing better than their inspirations.

The GCD in FF14 is 2.5 seconds. It can feel like molasses as compared to pretty much any other game on the market. And yet, given the mechanics, I can’t really see how that goes faster without a whole bunch of compound issues. Most MMOs are so complex and intertwined, that one change in in an area can have multiple consequences elsewhere.

First to me is the sheer volume of choice in any class toolkit. Take a look at a Dark Knight guide, in particular the opener’s list. I get that this is super optimized and FF14 really doesn’t requite that much planning in general, but the volume of buttons is the big one. With that many choices, it takes time for the human brain to process which one should be used in a given situation. Dropping the GCD turns this into more of a twitch-based gameplay, and some choice paralysis. It’s less optimization and more plain ol’ survival. As a White Mage, I have 2 full bars of things to press, often things that do similar things but on different timers. Compared to my Monk in WoW who had half that total that mattered.

Folks that are running multiple jobs/classes, hats off on the toolbar management!

The second bit that’s been covered a lot is the “don’t stand in the fire” structure of the game. FF14 tripled down on the AE attacks that are telegraphed well ahead of time, and often they are constructed in such a fashion that they are 1 hit KO effects. In most cases, you want to stop any cast/wind up activity to get out of there, potentially using another one of your buttons to absorb that attack. Assuming you are avoiding those attacks, and you’re not a tank (tank buster moves can do 40%), there are very few cases where people should die in combat. I forgot how much I enjoyed this model, where it actually removes ownership of player death from the healer and moves it to the individual players. The core here is on damage avoidance.

I need to compare to WoW here, on this particular topic. True, a lot of damage can be avoided by brain power on the DPS, but the game is also constructed in that most difficulty curves are based on unavoidable damage. And the mechanics of the game are such that this fact doesn’t become evident until you’re 2 steps from the finish line. The core here then becomes on damage mitigation.

The third bit, the one that isn’t truly evident until you’re well into the game, is that the game forces you to adopt a slower pace and it reduces the overall stress level of the game. You are rarely presented with more than 1 problem to manage at a time. and then a good chunk of time to digest the situation, think of options, make a decision, and then execute that action. If you die quickly, the feedback is instantly related to a telegraphed area attack. It becomes more intuitive and less on hidden mechanics where you need to consult a combat log to make sense of events. By dropping the stress levels, that has massive impacts on the group dynamics. It’s the difference of fighting a grease fire in your kitchen and painting your walls. If the doorbell rings, you are likely to have a much different reaction given those 2 starting conditions.

From a game design perspective, FF14 really is an interesting case study in looking at a given state as inspiration, figuring out how it could map to your design principles, and then consistently apply that thinking forward. It’s like a foundational bit here is “make sure people get along”. Oh there are plenty of bumps in the road, no question, but jeebers it’s fun to see a different set of answers to the same sort of problems.

FF14 has a weird server architecture, at least by my understanding of how this should work. There are 3 data centers which impact overall latency, and each holds 8 worlds. To say that there’s been an uptick of players is an understatement… and the servers are struggling. Queues are present daily (you see your position, but not time estimate). S/E tried to fix this with a near 12 hour patch on Monday, with no real success (nor failure!)

As of this draft, of the 24 worlds, 12 of them will not allow new characters to be rolled – and one data center is completely locked. Side note, I transferred to this data center with less than 24 hours before they locked it…blame me I guess.

My field of work intersects with DC architecture. I know there are a lot of efforts to move out of the mid-00’s data center design, into the PaaS-type of design. This is not easy, as there are often specific lines of code in software that relies on specific OS/HW configurations. The ol’ hook/pull coding nightmare that all the cool kids thought was going to save the planet with their custom code. Upgrading is hard, you can’t break anything, and odds are you can’t fully test the load until you turn on the switch.

Yeah well, we’re still picking up the pieces of those decisions… and we’re going to be in a long tail of migration for a good chunk. Most large enterprises still have legacy code somewhere that they just can’t port over for A/B/C reasons after all. And in the gaming space, this particular code portability is the primary driver for sequels. No need to port if it’s brand new code!

Side note – a few years ago WoW updated their database architecture, which had a pretty darn big impact on skill calculations. They were using a DB structure that dated from Vanilla (well, more like 4 years prior to launch), and it was quite painful to move forward. They did it though! And the overall system load (if you read those reports) was significantly reduced. That requires some serious planning and smart people to deliver.

FF14, from the information that’s published, is talking about OS configuration issues and replacing some equipment with HPC. I do understand why they would not be moving to commercial cloud… that is a really bad idea for an MMO. Commercial (or even semi-private) cloud is absolutely not the silver bullet that some folks may believe – just like a buffet is not the best type of restaurant for all your food needs. Given the on-going supply chain issues, this is going to be a long-term effort to expand given capacity, let alone upgrade the components.

Hats off to S/E for the forthright nature in this issue. Fingers crossed that this is actually something they can actually address before November. Cause if queues exist before launch… well delaying launch is going to be right on the table.

Last week I uninstalled WoW and D3. I tend to keep my desktop icons relevant to the active games that I play, or at least indicators of those that I should be playing. WoW has been on the desktop since beta. Looking back on my posts for WoW, aside from really liking the world/art/music, there hasn’t been a positive post on the state of the game since Legion. Cripes, that was nearly 5 years ago! The whole ABK was just that larger realization.

I figured I’d give FF14 a shot again. The irony here was that I had not played since just before Legion, so just before the mid-pack of Heavensward. Playing 2 MMOs at the same time, in the way that I play them, required just way too much time. Sunk cost in WoW and all… FF14 went on the shelf.

Getting back into FF14 meant a choice – start anew or where I left off. Having completed 2 entire expansions (and ARR is quite long), I figured I could better use that time with an account restore. To do so, I needed to remember my old password. Let’s not shy from the fact that Square-Enix has invested a total of $10.25 in web UX design. Finding anything that makes sense here is an exercise in frustration.

I did finally find the password recovery page, which has security questions. 2 days. That’s how long it took for me to enter the correct answer to the security question. The button for “forgot security answer” doesn’t go anywhere. The answers appear to be case sensitive. And it would appear that I was forced to reset my answers in the past, as this is the only place, across all similar questions, that I put in that specific answer (which came to me while doing something else).

With the account restored, I needed to figure out the rest of the bits and bobs on the account. Back to bad UX design, actually getting another expansion is a 3 step process. First, I need to figure out which one to buy… Endwalker says it includes it all, but you can’t actually access it until the game launches later in the year. Fine, base version of Shadowbringers it is (making sure it is NOT the Steam version, which I don’t think you can buy anywhere but Steam). Buy that, then realize that it isn’t linked to my account. I need to find the game key, then add it to my account. Ok, done. Now to add game time, which is another weird process (since there are 2 levels of accounts, one which supports alts, which are an insane option in this game).

FINALLY, all the bits in place to actually log in!

Did I mention that this meant multiple downloads? I get a quick start download to get the client running, but it’s multiple large Gb downloads after that. I can’t think of any other game or platform that does this. Sure, maybe you’ll get a day 1 patch after you’re pre-loaded the game. But this is not pre-load, and we’re at the tail end of the current expansion. ARGH.

This time, I’m able to log in. Brynhildr is where I set roots long ago. I log in to a barrage of visual spam. Where WoW is a ghost town in almost every area that isn’t the current expansion’s capital, FF14 has people a plenty. The neat part here was that it automatically prompted me to join a “returning players” channel. That was a nice surprise, and woooo, were there things in that chat which were helpful! Still, as much as I liked that character (and time invested) I wasn’t interested in staying there. I logged out and went through the relatively simple (again, horrible UX) process of transferring to another server – Cactuar.

That took about 15 minutes to process, and I was finally off to the races (or perhaps, re-learning the races). If I exclude the time it took for me to restore my account, getting the rest all set up was about 2 hours of work. Perhaps this is a relic of the Playstation UI to help players get in the game. Still, with a few month’s work and a relatively small investment, the UI for the store/account system could be dramatically improved. This feels like the same comment I made way back when. One can hope!

Next steps are all about following the MSQ through the 2 expansions. I don’t think I can get all of that done before Endwalker comes out. Where I could plow through WoW’s content in less than a week to get to end game, it’s more like 40+hrs per expansion here. Let’s see how much fun this ride can deliver.

Way back in the olden days (2015), a conceptual game called 12 Minutes was pitched. The concept was that you’d be stuck in the same 12 minute time loop and need to find a way to break out. The game released on Thursday, and I dove in headfirst.

Time loop as a story mechanic is really hard to get right. You often need some sort of book to keep track of what’s going on. Only a few movies have tried it. Primer has like 40+ timelines on the go at one point. ARQ is a simplified time loop film, and really focuses on the anticipation of the next steps, similar to Edge of Tomorrow (which is almost a video game). Groundhog Day, well… that’s a form of hell if you think about it.

In terms of games with this model… is Mario Bros a time loop game? I mean, you die, and the loop restarts. Most incremental games have actions in one loop impacting the next. It’s so common we don’t think about it anymore. But in the strictest sense, where the purpose of the game is to break the loop, really Outer Wilds is the only one that comes to mind that did this in any way successfully. Like GotY successful.

That’s a heck of a bar to reach for any indie game! I guess that explains all the years of dev work. And the results…

A game that merges interactive fiction and point and click adventure mechanics, with incremental changes on each loop. There’s no “speed run” this game, you need to go through at least a dozen loops before you have enough bits and bobs to get close to the finish line. More than once I thought I was close, then quickly realized that the rabbit hole went even deeper.

The voice acting is solid (hard not to, how did they get these actors?), and there are some QoL aspects that let you speed through dialogue if you’ve heard it already. The graphics are passable, but it’s not like that truly matters in this type of game. Every puzzle has a logical answer, with plenty of breadcrumbs unveiled as the game goes. Even the music here is darn near perfectly placed to convey the emotional tone.

Side track on puzzlers for a minute. Some of them suffer due to size, or ridiculous solutions (Sierra!). 12 Minutes takes place in an apartment, one you can’t leave as it resets the loop. This smaller footprint dramatically reduces frustration as you know the answer is right in front of you, it can’t be anywhere else. And with only a dozen or so items to collect, it’s more about the order of using the items than the items themselves. Like if you do an action in front of an NPC, they will see you, but if you close the door, then you’re good to go. And if you’ve seen text before, it highlights in a different color, so you know what’s new or not. And the dialogue is the real puzzle here, every puzzle is about unlocking a new part of dialogue.

I will say that the only downside here is when you’re focusing on actions near the end of a loop and need to restart. Getting back to that point can feel a bit long, especially when you’re talking about 1 action that takes 2 seconds to perform. It does mean that you have to be considerate of time management and sort of plan out what you’re trying to do before you do it. There was a point where I was stuck in what felt the same loop for an hour, just not quite sure of where to go next. But that’s no different than being stuck in the belly of a whale, trying to tickle it’s “uvula”. 1988 and I am STILL ticked off at that.

I can’t talk about the plot at all. Really, any indication here would spoil the ride. I can say it’s a good ride, bordering on great.

I think the best compliment I can give 12 Minutes is that it’s one of the best examples of interactive fiction to come along in a long time, supported through a time loop mechanic that really delivers. This is the sort of game that can only come from an indie developer, and one I’m sure others will try to copy.

An interesting bit from Stephan Frost, in relation to MMO development. If you recall, he was one of the leads on Wildstar, a spectacular example of MMO failure.

In the conceptual layer, the items described apply to any long-dev cycle of an evolving product, not just games. You’re competing against a finish line that is always moving, mainly because you’re competing against established market forces. Big bang successful launches are ultra rare in existing markets, they instead start small and grow over time. MMO’s are rarely given that luxury, as they are competing against expectations from long-established products. New World has 50 other MMOs to compare against… it’s got to be focused and refined to have a chance. You need a super clean vision and new flawless execution to have a remote change.

Wildstar, to kick that dead horse, had an incoherent vision and launched about 6 months too early. I had a blast in the leveling portion and really liked the crafting system. Hell, it had social housing and tons of cosmetics. It was a solid setting, with a decently solid 1-to-max experience. And then it shifted to the same place WoW has turned, the ultra competitive + fine tuned playerbase. It had no social tools for nearly a year, and all group content was either against a clock or required twitch reflexes to get through. Raids being only 20/40 was an insane choice that only works worse the farther we move away from it.

Could Wildstar have ever succeeded, even with more time in the cooker? I like to think so, as the bones were solid. Had social tools been there from the start, had the “timer” dungeons been an extra tier instead of the wall of quit (WoW ran with this as Mythic+), and had raids been much smaller, perhaps we’d be having a different conversation. People can understand balance issues at launch, but systematic issues are tougher pill to swallow.

Is this due to dev cycles, or poor vision? Maybe they just copied the wrong mechanics and should have pulled from FF14’s bag of tricks. I don’t think we’ll ever truly find out, at least not until there’s a deep dive on the topic with such a purpose.

Which is a right shame, as we’re seeing a larger push for games as a service, MMOs in nearly all respects, and those lessons just don’t seem to be learned. Or perhaps they are simply not being listened to while the bean counters run the show.