Really think you should give FFXIV a deeper thought beyond just looking at the store and finding the level skips.
Even if you were to buy a skip, there’s still a considerable amount of game in front of you to play. They are only meant to get people to modern content without having to (to some people) slog through hundreds of hours of older stuff. It’s not a p2e micro-transaction by any means — far from it.
I agree with this whole-heartedly, there’s simply no way any reasonable person would consider skipping story content as buying power in the context of how FFXIV works as an MMO.
It lets players jump right into the new content without worrying about dozens or hundreds of hours of prior story they may or may not want to play through to get to the latest content at the same level as everyone else starting out, that’s all.
The money makers here want you to play their game. The more time you invest, the more money they make in subs. If you want to skip all that game and thus, in some ways, get all that progress done without having to pay all that sub, you’ve gotta fork over some cash.
You don’t cost them anything for not playing part of their game, and you don’t owe them anything.
If your interpretation of why they do this is right, it meand they want you to believe that “modern content” is a reward for playing through the rest. Nobody should think like that. Playing the game is the reward for playing the game.
It’s like if Netflix made you pay an extra as you start watching a series on season 4, because you didn’t pay your subscription through the three previous seasons.
Hopefully you understand why I was a little suspicious!
But I tried it out, and holy moly it feels like a different era. My brain can’t compute the fact that I just got a free to play game (Just have the demo, which honestly sounds like a ton of game) and it’s not trying to sell me anything in game? The tutorial was all about game play in universe, and never once told me about premium currency? My ui doesn’t have 5 different things? Crafting doesn’t involve long cool downs that I can 5 gems to speed up?
Like it feels like a different era of game, thank you for being persistent! I’ve only played a couple hours, but so far it feels like it’s going to become a comfort game at the very least.
loved it as well, caught myself thinking about it very long after playing. i was really impressed with how it captured a feeling of nostalgia for a digital community and for an internet of another time, I think hypnospace Outlaw is something quite relevant for many of us now who moved away from r*ddit
With the Steam Deck you can just hit the power button and it’ll suspend immediately. Press the power button again and it’ll resume your game immediately. I don’t believe the Ally or any Windows devices has that instantaneously feature. Its been so awesome for quick game play sessions throughout the day around the house. Or when I’ve traveled.
So what is the most recent game in the series that I can start with that is worth it to play and wouldn’t confuse a newcomer?
All of the FF games – baring the ones that are explicitly sequels, like X2 – are totally separate from each other, you can jump in anywhere. At most you might miss some references or easter eggs.
If you want the most recent then, that’d be XVI, although I’d personally recommend looking up what the gameplay is like in the different games and starting wherever you feel you’ll have the most fun! There are some weirder ones out there, like crystal chronicles (my own first final fantasy game) and tactics, so you have a lot of options!
Hah, no kidding. Before I read that remark in the OP, I was going to mention it given it’s completely free up until the end of Heavensward, but given OP’s disclaimer and how many people get filtered by the slow burn of ARR it’s probably the worst suggestion in the case.
I wonder how many hundreds of hours I have in that game now… I’ll /playtime next time I log in. I’m still in the patches after Shadowbringers, but I’ve also been known to focus more on roulettes and such than actually making progress in the main story
Hah, snap. I’m also somewhere around the end of 5.3, and have far too many hours logged (comes with levelling all jobs to somewhere between 70 and 81).
The ability to pick something up easily, make some progress, pause it, and resume quickly at the next available window appears the best way to go.
Then you want the steam deck. This thing is powerful enough to run elden ring at a pretty stable 30 FPS, sometimes even up to 60, while being portable enough to fit in a backpack. I take it with me on business trips and it’s perfect for flying, bussing, wherever, with the caveat that you want it plugged in more often than not - the battery life is a little on the low side for those high-impact games.
Damned if I know. It's possibly the stupidest decision I've ever seen in a big name game. But yeah sometimes you'll be walking around and just all of a sudden get obliterated out of nowhere and it was because you got mapped by an NPC rocket with damage tied to frame rate. There's YouTube videos of people proving it works this way iirc; I know people used to post testing videos on R.
My experience as someone who owns a HP Omen gaming laptop:
Not as portable and convenient as you may think. It weighs about 5 pounds, like a bag of potatoes. It uses a lot of power and needs to be plugged in if you want to play for longer than 45 minutes. The charger consists of a heavy cable a power block. I can however move it from the Study to the Living room if I wish to.
It boots up extremely quickly. I can go from power off to playing a game in about 5 minutes. I can exit a game and leave the power turned on, and then reopen the game and start playing within a minute.
It has a 2080 super graphics card which means I can play any game I want. I have never had any performance issues even playing games like Elden Ring on max settings.
It was expensive. Seriously look into refurbished options if possible. I got mine refurbished, works like brand new and have had no problems over the past 4 or so years. I saved about £3k doing this if I remember correctly.
Steam Deck seems to be a good fit. If you wanna get a gaming laptop, maybe wait until there’s one where you can easily swap out the batteries / components. I’ve seen videos about Framework laptop, and that does sound like a good investment for longer period.
I heard there were issues with ROG Ally, the device gets too hot, and the fan exhaust was near the SD card slot. So it frequently dislodges the SD cards from the slot because of the heat.
You have one “frame” where you just do everything: read the player input, do whatever actions, calculate collisions and physics and whatever, and draw everything when all those calculations are done.
Then you move on to the next frame and do everything again. Everything lines up all the time and always happen in the same order. Simple, quick, and consistent.
To decouple calculations and framerate, you don’t know when the game will try to draw something. It might be in the middle of when you’re calculating collisions, or moving the units, or calculating physics. Or you might end up doing multiple calculations while the GPU is slow and can’t draw anything.
So you have to add an extra layer in between, probably saved to some memory somewhere. Now every time the GPU draws something, it has to access that memory. Every time you calculate something, you also access that memory. Let’s hope they DON’T try to read and write on the same spot at the same time, that could cause bugs. And so much memory access, you’ve basically doubled your memory bandwidth requirements.
It’s complicated, more resource intensive, and introduces potential bugs.
And not just easier, but cheaper. On lower end platforms it’s expensive to do floating point calculations all over the place because you don’t know how long it’s been since the last frame. If you can assume the frame rate, you can get a lot of performance back too.
I’d start with 6 (sometimes referred to as 3 in the US). The writing is solid, there are plenty of choices to make and characters to play with, and it moves along nicely. You can put a bunch of time into maxing everyone out and grinding out the highest difficulty areas, but you don’t have to.
Great story, great characters, and one hell of a female lead especially considering the era it was released in.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne