I play FFXIV. I’ll break it down by expansions, but it’s the one that didn’t follow the general downwards trend so much.
1.0 - trash. They couldn’t figure out how to work together. One guy spends forever making the best looking water wheel ever, in the background, that you never interact with. It’s too graphically intensive, and flows the wrong way from the water. It doesn’t match the building it’s attached to. Meanwhile, they forget to add roads towards main cities. It’s an unplayable mess. It’s literally unplayable, as they killed it off to replace it with:
2.0, A Realm Reborn - they really fixed it under one guy’s leadership. It’s playable, and works. It’s outdated somewhat today, but has a lot of moral grey areas and twists. There’s a lot of running around and time wasting, which was common back then.
Heavenward - they made a great story. It’s one of the best expansions. Streamlined and faster. No needless “talk to 5 villagers” quests like previously.
Stormblood - not as great. There’s a lot of setup they use later. The world building is really great, though. Some of the best looking areas.
Shadowbringers - the best expansion they’ve ever made. Perfectly balanced world building and characters, and story. This is peak FF, with the best music as well. Probably because they can ditch much of the old A Realm Reborn story.
Endwalker - ties it all together. The story leads up to “death is inevitable for everything that has ever lived, so just die now” kind of depression hopelessness that you wonder how they’ll get out of it. Well, because it’s Japanese and FF, it’s the power of friendship that saves the day. But, this really feels like the culmination of everything they’ve learned in the previous expansions.
Dawntrail - this is the downward slide. They force you into a role to support someone for ruler that is almost slapstick bad. Characters don’t make logical choices. The theme is all over the place and can’t decide what it wants to be. Many people say to stop at endwalker, but we’ll see how the next expansion goes, which is years away.
There’s plenty to say about the game otherwise, but the general thought is that they’re gradually cutting corners, taking longer, and under delivering as they’re stretched too thin. They’re feeling the same pressure everyone else in the world is - not enough money. Which is crazy, because FFXIV is THE game keeping Square Enix alive.
I don’t really care for them anymore. I think they’re still very well crafted games from a passionate team, but I haven’t really felt great about a FF game since 10. Ignoring the MMOs:
12 was decent but the story was pretty dry in the first half and Vaan was just not a compelling protagonist at all.
13 was reasonably fun to play after finding the “rhythm” I think they intended from the combat, but I never loved the story or any of the characters aside from Sazh.
15 had a lot of potential in the story, I actually liked the “dudes on a road trip” concept, but that awful sword hanging mechanic was always so unreliable that it eventually killed my progress in its tracks.
After that, I skipped 16 entirely.
The 7 sequel was actually really good, but everything I liked about it came directly from the original or built on top of it in a transparent way. The spooky ghosts and action combat were changes I strongly disliked and endured just to see the extended original story, but I thought they were huge steps back. It was a very good game that constantly had me wishing they just stuck to expanding the original story which is plenty convoluted on its own.
I still haven’t played the 7 sequel part 2, but I expect I’ll feel pretty much the same - in awe of the world and expanded story but constantly annoyed by spooky ghosts and mediocre action combat.
I really think the 7 sequels show that the Final Fantasy franchise has a place in the modern JRPG scene, but they would benefit from a return to form. I’d love to see the next FF game sporting a fast paced Persona-style turn based combat system combined with maybe an Akira-style dystopian techno-futuristic setting. All the parts are in there somewhere, they just need to figure out how to put them together in the right order.
If you kind of liked the XIII games, I highly recommend Lighting Returns. Time limits make me deeply anxious but that game’s timer is VERY generous, especially because you can stop time pretty much forever. I 100% my first run in, like, four days out of thirteen.
The story is wacky as hell (I honestly didn’t care much after XIII-2), but gameplay’s solid and exploration is fun.
As for the last question, I think that they should go back to their roots. They pivoted away from the JRPG genre with each title, but recent successes from similar games (such as Persona 5 in the AAA department, and Sea of Stars in the indie category) proved that people still crave a more traditional turn-based system.
On high end hardware the game runs fine, not good but okish. On console they use FSR1 at a really low resolution, making everything look really blurry. On PC at least FSR3 is available for lower end hardware but don’t expect too much if you don’t have a Nvidia 4000+ or AMD 6000+ series card.
Digital Foundry has performance videos for console and PC up already.
I have a 3060 12gb OC edition, Ryzen 7 5800x3D, 32gb ram at 4200, and installed on an m.2 SSD.
And I should expect much as the medium settings requirement is nvidia 2000 series… And DLSS also makes the game look like a shit sandwich even on quality.
And DLSS also makes the game look like a shit sandwich even on quality.
Correct, I’m on a 7900 XTX and was able to get the best experience on Ultra by using FSR only for anti aliasing (native resolution) and turning on FSR frame generation. There are still artifacts but they are not nearly as bad as with upscaling.
Without frame gen I hover at around 60, good enough for controller but a pain with mouse.
Still, your 3060 is most likely going to output a clearer image than what your PS5 can do with FSR1. Did you give the benchmark on PC a go?
Beta wasnt optimised at all and frame gen was broken in them which was funny, capcom said this was the case and is why we got 2 more betas hehe. Full game is better optimised but still has some hickups. Id suggest to run the benchmark, which is free and is a lot more updated than the betas ( and runs better )
Playing on ultra on r7 7700 and 6750 ( 12GB ), 1080p and its running 43-60fps. They also released a high res texture pack but its recommended to only use with min 16GB of vram ( free dlc ) which i havent tested yet.
So try the benchmark and see. I think the medium settings should be fine
I only have 12gb of vram. I would be fine if the game ran on high with DLSS OFF and native 1080p at 60-80fps. But it just doesn’t, even though my PC should have 0 issues according to their spec requirements. I’ll wait for patches and sales I think. Or maybe a demo is a ailable? I haven’t looked.
i tried the benchmark today. medium settings, native res i get 50fps average… im not playing this for a while lol. that’s insane for what is recommended vs what i have for specs. medium should be at least 80fps on my computer.
Almost every game is fun, and there are some that are amazing. Valbrace has fully captured me currently, probably due to my love of the old Wizardry series. Avianos is brilliant too, I’d like to go back for the cherry on that one.
Yes, Wizardry is a very old school rpg. Both that and Valbrace are “explore the dungeon in first person and you’d better be mapping them if you don’t want to be hopelessly lost” style games. I find the mapping to be very satisfying but I’m probably an anomaly because all games have auto maps and objective markers these days.
So far I kinda like it but haven’t played much, just arrived at the docks.
The art style is nice and you really can see the love for details. The voices feel a bit off, for a non-nativ english speaker it sounds like americans trying as hard as they can to speak with a british/Victorian era accent.
For those who’s playing on PC, check mods for performance. After some tinkering I’m getting solid 120+fps @1080p with high/max settings with RT enabled (FSR quality and FG) on a RTX 3060 and a Ryzen 3600.
I will give an update as long as i don’t forget it
Soooo… I think I’m about to leave the first proper map. The voices aren’t as bad as I thought at the beginning. Some NPCs have stronger accents than others, taking the backstory of the island to account it totally makes sense since a lot of people are coming from different regions.
I love the comments from the companions every time you stumble across a new region, street, house. It really lets you feel like they know the way around and you’re the visitor.
The story picks up a notch and gives enough choices for every mood. Also it lets you remember some of your choices and opens new ways to solve some quests. Combat feels better and better as more you dive into. All weapons are viable and are well balanced. I started as a heavy two hand melee but now my second loadout is a book with a pistol…
The map design is really really nice IMO. You really have to take a look behind everything to find something. The loot is plausible. Enemy placement don’t feel off.
After all it’s a good solid game. Maybe not a full priced one but for 10-20€ off a really nice worth to be played one.
I hope it doesn’t fall off the more you play…
Performance got worse in Paradis but still is around 90 in my case.
I played through all 3 games again back-to-back a few years ago (having previously only played separately as they released), lots of stuff tie them all together and loop back to familiar scenes and incidents from different angles and times, even a 2 part DLC for Infinite. Basically looping back to where the first game starts that kinda makes it an Infinite story loop…very well done.
Also, there’s a book that prequels the first game- tells the story of Ryan building Rapture and how it all got started. Lots of back-story and lore on quite a few characters…especially “Fontaine” and how he ended up as the fish merchant…
Never buy “gaming” audio gear. Audio is the same no matter what you use it for. Buy something in the $100 price range marketed for audio production. The design will be plain and solid black, but you’ll get at least 50% more value for your money. Sennheiser is usually good.
I played a lot (1400+ hours) of The Long Dark up until a few years ago. I’m checking out the DLC content I missed, and it’s very good to be back. The “new” content and maps are very good.
Also, Alan Wake 2 after Control is quite enjoyable, but I think I like Control a little more. The tv ads in AW2 are very funny though, compared to the creepy puppet bits in Control.
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