One thing they did nearly across the board is bring up ceiling heights, a small-seeming change, but one that makes a preference for a zoomed-out camera view far less stifled in this content. Well, it is surprisingly thorough in scope, but not itself the sole fix that chapter of the game needs.įirstly, while the team was coy with the updates made to older dungeons, being less open about changes they planned for early leveling content, the dungeon changes are large and comprehensive. Endwalker has actually exacerbated this in some ways, because in Shadowbringers, an expansion with an excellent story that can stand alone, recommending a story skip wasn’t as difficult, but Endwalker ties in to so many moments of the ARR backstory and the deep lore of the game that it becomes less tenable to recommend a skip, which most people (myself included) wouldn’t recommend in the first place. The FFXIV team is definitely cognizant of this, as they made extensive streamlining efforts to the core questing structure of the ARR content back in Shadowbringers patch 5.3, but the work left a bit to be desired, mainly in that the game still has moments where it feels a smidge slow and the ARR content is still a dense slog at points. It is understandable that telling someone the real good stuff is over there, when “over there” is the other side of a steep mountain climb, is a bad deal that a lot of people won’t take. Eventually is, in this case, something like 40-100 hours of gameplay deep. If I want to recommend the game to anyone, it involves a hand-wringing explanation of how those early hours feel sort of slow and that the game takes time to get to the really good stuff, but that the investment pays off eventually. One distinct weak spot in the FFXIV pitch is that the ARR content sort of…drags. This is, I think, an interesting thing to look at, both from the outside and from within the game’s playerbase. 6.1 brought the first round of changes, with heavily-publicized changes to the MSQ capstone dungeons of A Realm Reborn, with Praetorium being split into 3 different duties, Castrum Meridanium being simplified, and all of this content being made into 4-player dungeons, save for a couple of boss fights which were made into solo duties like a lot of capstone bosses currently in the game. One of the headlines that came out of the early live letters around patch 6.1 for FFXIV was the idea that the team wanted to make the leveling experience of the game single-player capable, to take ideas that have been introduced in newer content (the Trust system for leveling and MSQ dungeons, mostly) and use that to adapt older dungeons for modern audiences by letting players continue to do them in parties or to instead run with NPCs.
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