While I loved those games as a teenager with infinite free time, I now hate games that don’t respect the players time. I mean, come on? Which adult has the time to play multiple 80-hour-long RPGs a year? How does one keep up with the influx of good games these days?
The fun thing about FFXIV is that it’s free to play up to level 70. You’re only gonna be missing the last 2 expansions and then the one this summer. So you get 1/2 at no actual cost to you.
You only put in as much time as you want to get out too. There’s no real downside to taking longer beside things not being “relevant” anymore.
For me it was the opposite. I had low expectations and the longer I played it the more it grew on me, especially with the sheer amount of content. It’s actually probably in my top 5 FF games.
I tried 13 multiple times. Steam says I have more than fifty hours in it. I know the last time I got all the way to the open world segment. But I just can’t get into it and was mostly making myself play because I bought the entire trilogy on a sale. The game’s insistence on putting all the plot in a menu made it much more difficult to follow along or to get attached to any of the characters. I know I read everything as it became available and I honestly have no memory of the vast majority of it. I’m not even sure I could name the fully party.
On top of that, the gameplay itself just wasn’t great. Party composition was almost always dictated by the plot and character growth was completely linear, so there was very little opportunity to experiment with the game’s systems. And when I did get to experiment with it, encounters were so rigidly structured and my characters’ levels being capped by plot progression meant there was no wiggle room to actually experiment. Throw in traditional FF problems like debuffs being useless and new ones like AOE attacks being heavily luck based and it didn’t even have fun combat to fall back on.
The open world fights while easily cheesable offered enough spectacle to keep my attention, the trails were interesting to me (at least by comparison to the rest of the game) and the final boss was decent but given how little of the game that takes up it’s absolutely unacceptable.
It’s a shame too because all the elements of a potentially stellar game are in there but never given a chance to shine due to the reasons you mentioned.
Well I mean, it’s not really like that in this case. Every story expansion just requires you to have cleared the previous parts of the game.
The base game/before the first expansion isn’t bad per se, I had a fun time with the game at that point. But there happens to be a remarkable step up in quality starting with the first expansion, and the game pretty much keeps getting better from there.
Also during the last few years they have been revamping the early-game extensively, adding modern visuals and refreshing the design of the dungeons and boss fights. But having played before these changes, I still wouldn’t call the beginning of the game “filler”. I found it quite charming, and the multiplayer aspect is also fun in its own respect at that point.
Just my 2c, I’m not one to defend large corporations but I don’t think the trope really applies to XIV
Perhaps the confusion is my fault for acknowledging that the game did indeed improve over the course of its ten year run, which is…obviously…the best possible case scenario.
But if you read my comment again, you may notice that my point is the exact opposite of what you’re joking about. I don’t believe there really is a multi hundred hour “rite of passage” to get to “the good part”. Not only is the beginning already pretty good, but, as I said, they are actively modernizing it to bring it more in line with the later parts (which are even better).
Is there a subtlety here that I have simply failed to convey? Is the idea of a decent game becoming a masterpiece really indistinguishable from the idea of a fundamentally worthless game dangling the hope of a better game out in front of you like a carrot on a stick? Really help me out here
If someone says to you that they tried playing the game for a couple hours, but it was kind of boring and the quests have a lot of filler, what would your response be?
The meme pokes fun at the idea that many people who love the game would encourage that person to continue until they reach the first expansion so they could experience that, as you call, masterpiece.
It’s not so much that they find the first part fundamentally worthless, just even if you don’t like it, you should maybe keep playing because it gets so much better.
If someone says to you that they tried playing the game for a couple hours, but it was kind of boring and the quests have a lot of filler, what would your response be?
At the end of the day we are talking about like a 600 hour story driven RPG, the actual structure of the game doesn’t change much as it goes on so you can tell pretty quickly if you’ll like the game in general (hey, that kind of sounds like, the opposite of what the meme is saying, right?).
With that in mind I would say if you aren’t thrilled with the story straight off but you otherwise enjoy the game, you may as well keep playing, and if things pick up later then hey, bonus. If you don’t like the moment-to-moment gameplay I am here to tell you that it does not get better lol. So no worries, the free trial is the way it is for a reason.
In summary, I understand what the meme is saying, but have I said that? Let’s step away from such massive games for a second. I believe the best part of Horizon Zero Dawn is the ending few hours, by far. Story just really hits for me then, as it should, because we want things to get better as we play them. Is this perspective, “the best is yet to come”, the same as, “it’s worth slogging through the boring part until then?” Have I called the beginning boring, actually? Have I suggested anyone should slog through it?
That’s my personal estimate for the game if you simply sit down at the beginning, and progress the single-player* storyline from start to finish, up to the end of the current expansion (a new one is coming out in a few months actually lol). Reading the dialogue and cutscenes, playing through the required quests, dungeons, and trials, and also playing through some of the optional (but also story driven and highly recommended) content.
So I guess it depends on what you mean by “story”, there’s dialogue and important story content happening during the actual fights most of the time. But in general I would say the vast majority of that time is pure story, to the point where I wouldn’t recommend the game to someone who didn’t like visual novels. Some players probably could do it in like 300 hours if they skim or even just read really fast, and I know many players who have taken well over 1000 hours as they took their time and did lots of side content.
*the vast majority of the game has optional multiplayer. I think the best way to play is with others but many people feel the opposite lol
Yes I can see how funny it would be were it directed at somebody who embodied in any way the sentiment of the original meme. It seems to me that I have repeatedly argued the opposite, care to share any insight as to why you so easily imagine otherwise?
Maybe me and the other guy are the only ones but you feel like the person from the OP to us. The extremely serious attitude about a joke just adding to the humour of it.
Oh, well, as long as that’s just how you feel, no worries. The heart wants what the heart wants. Others have read and engaged with the actual words that I said, which is normally why I comment, so it seems like everyone gets to walk away with something today
Just finished Drakengard 3 and feeling empty - both because the final boss fight took me 4 days to beat and because, despite many issues I have with the game, ending still managed to hit pretty hard. I love this shitty game.
See if there wasn’t only online and Denuvo I would be able to mod that shit out. But because it has Denuvo I will wait until someone cracks it then pirate it so I can mod what features they pay walled to play how it was intended to be played by the honest developers
I don’t think she’s the only one able, just willing. Isn’t there still someone who consistently cracks Madden games or something similar? Also fitgirl maybe, but I think that’s just repack stuff.
Shrug mods seemed to work for me, got 999 portcrystals and metamorphosis books and didn’t get banned, should be good now. The re engine is super easy to modify
I’ll just wait until it gets the Dark Arisen treatment and all the MTX and pre-order content becomes freely available in the game and the limits on port stones and the random currencies that aren’t just gold for shops are removed.
The original game originally had limited fast travel, too. But it was eventually made non shitty and you can just buy the stones you drop as FT points at a shop in the main city.
I almost always find myself using a full arms’ span of cord, which for me is around 5.5 feet, so I generally carry two of that length, one wrapped up, and one in a loop with a diamond knot, which I find convenient in place of a carabiner.
I’ve used it once to try to recover something stuck in a tree 😅 The length is quite long for some uses but perfect for hojojutsu. I also used to carry a shorter length in the form of a keychain for more mundane uses.
The most insane part to me still isn’t necessarily the money-grubbing shit, because capcom has been doing that in basically every game they’ve made for a while now. It’s sad to me that dragon’s dogma is kind of, the outlet for getting shit on, with this, basically because the other games they put out have built-in fanbases and engagement that are gonna ignore the monetization. But maybe they also have more easily ignored monetization, and it’s not as though dragon’s dogma doesn’t have a fanbase, even if the fanbase is much smaller than the others.
Anyways, the thing that really baffles me about this game is that it’s not multiplayer. That seems like an obvious sell. Is there like, some idea there that they’d be cutting in on monster hunter’s turf, or something? I dunno, the pawns just seem kinda annoying, and the game, overall, seems kind of mid. I haven’t seen a large amount of it, in any case, but maybe it’s just sort of, the monetization and denuvo is kind of the final and most prominent cherry on top of a dog shit sundae, and nobody’s talking about the actual game itself being maybe more mid because of that. I dunno, though, I legitimately haven’t seen much on this game outside of this.
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