Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward

 PC
User Score
9.1

Universal acclaim- based on 1083 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 989 out of 1083
  2. Mixed: 25 out of 1083
  3. Negative: 69 out of 1083
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  1. shoukanji
    Jun 25, 2015
    3
    Once again a let down offered by Square Enix.

    For new or returning players, good luck to you for doing the hundreds of useless and uninteresting fetch quests in between "real" main missions. Other than that, Heavensward is A Realm Reborn all the same, a beautiful and empty game, destroyed by the laziness of the dev team. Story : it is a bit more well-written than in ARR but we are    Once again a let down offered by Square Enix.

    For new or returning players, good luck to you for doing the hundreds of useless and uninteresting fetch quests in between "real" main missions.

    Other than that, Heavensward is A Realm Reborn all the same, a beautiful and empty game, destroyed by the laziness of the dev team.

    Story : it is a bit more well-written than in ARR but we are once again swimming in clichés and predictable cliffhangers, with forgettable characters and, for the most part, forgettable story. It has nothing to do with the story of a real FF, it is just a story that wants to be like a FF story, and fails, miserably.

    Quests : even more fetch quests, terribly done and lazy work but you should do them for some free HQ pieces of equipment and unlocking aether currents for flying. Prepare to cross the map back and forth several times for two lines of dialogue.

    FATEs : most of the people hated them in 2.0 but hey, they're back and they're the same, but give less exp proportionally.

    Monsters : ironically, the new monsters look terrible except for those directly stolen from other FF (mainly FFXI). Yoshida said that they were going to be hard, well hard only means "HP bags" and hit a bit harder, no new mechanics, all the mobs are the same with different skins, you won't die if you think and play well.

    Dungeons : corridors, nothing new to expect from these, trash > boss > trash > boss > trash > final boss. Again, no new mechanics, no paths to be chosen, nothing.

    Zones : the new zones are indeed quite big, somehow good-looking but bland and useless since there is no open world content except FATEs, hunts, sightseeing log... Even more useless since you can fly.

    Primals : nothing new, same mechanics as ARR. Oh, and Ravana, the "primal created exclusively for FFXIV" looks awfully close to Narakas in FFXI, again lazy work.

    System : no new retainers and no increase in inventory space, Yoshida said the servers couldn't handle it. But you can buy even more retainers now if you wish.
    The animations and effects look and sound terrible, flashes everywhere, but it's a nice way to hide the lacking animations, most of the people just disable effects.

    Jobs : the new jobs have no identity and essence, just like all the others jobs, they're pretty much all the same with different skills.

    Exploration : you don't explore the way you like, you are forced to explore to be able to fly after unlocking all the aether currents in a zone. Play like the devs want you to.

    All in all, Heavensward is aimed at easy-to-please people, who like to follow an easy story with no subtlety and easy content that looks like it is incredibly hard. If you like chocobos, moogles and whatever FF references put here and there with no thinking and without making any sense, this is your game. If you love and respect FF, you will quickly see that this game is a joke that takes its players for stupid people.
    If not, come and pay your sub, buy stuff in the cash shop, buy monthly retainers, buy a lazy extension every year (the next one won't be that "huge" !) and make Yoshida happy, he hasn't been sleeping and eating for so long.    … Expand
  2. stanelis
    Jun 25, 2015
    4
    Awesome main story quest and some interesting elements of level design in the new area.

    But I have loads of issues with the game : - Very few new dungeons, which are very cool visually but too linear. - The new areas don't have any open world dungeon for the player to explore. - The monsters in the new areas are just huge HP bags. - Fates are still as uninteresting as they were in    Awesome main story quest and some interesting elements of level design in the new area.

    But I have loads of issues with the game :

    - Very few new dungeons, which are very cool visually but too linear.
    - The new areas don't have any open world dungeon for the player to explore.
    - The monsters in the new areas are just huge HP bags.
    - Fates are still as uninteresting as they were in ARR.
    - All the optionnal quest make you do the same things (eg kill a few monsters or gather a few item by clicking on stuff on the ground or talk to a few NPC).
    - The gear threadmill at level 60 is exactly the same as the one in ARR (dungeon farming then hunt farming).

    I'm quite concerned with the longevity of the game.    … Expand
  3. savionen
    Sep 27, 2015
    4
    I was initially excited about Heavensward, the story is much better than ARR, new areas to explore, etc. The main problem arises from the limited amount of content. When you hit endgame, there's 2 dungeons, 2 primals, and 1 4-boss raid. That's it. TWO DUNGEONS. The first primal is a one-kill and then you'll never go again. The 2nd primal takes a bit of work, but for most people will stillI was initially excited about Heavensward, the story is much better than ARR, new areas to explore, etc. The main problem arises from the limited amount of content. When you hit endgame, there's 2 dungeons, 2 primals, and 1 4-boss raid. That's it. TWO DUNGEONS. The first primal is a one-kill and then you'll never go again. The 2nd primal takes a bit of work, but for most people will still be a one-kill. The crafting system was destroyed in the expansion, as they made it infinitely more grindy while making it less rewarding, and there's simply very little in the game to do other than farm old content. Classes were also greatly homogenized. I feel like whatever uniqueness FFXIV had in the MMO market has been destroyed in the expansion.… Expand
  4. klkevinkl
    May 23, 2016
    3
    Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward is by far one of the worst MMO expansions that I have played, especially one that costed nearly $60 since the expansion did not come with a subscription fee. While the initial story was intriguing, all of the build up from the previous entry was thrown out as the characters fled North after the end of the previous game. Numerous character deaths were undoneFinal Fantasy XIV: Heavensward is by far one of the worst MMO expansions that I have played, especially one that costed nearly $60 since the expansion did not come with a subscription fee. While the initial story was intriguing, all of the build up from the previous entry was thrown out as the characters fled North after the end of the previous game. Numerous character deaths were undone and the story itself held no meaning until you got to near the end of the game, when they are finally able to kill an Ascian only to introduce the Warrior of Darkness and end on a to be continued. The game makes numerous callbacks to previous entries in the series, with the final boss having a memorable attack from Final Fantasy 7.

    The three new character classes do not offer anything new. The Dark Knight is just a combination of a few existing tank classes. The Machinist is just another form of a summoner. The Astrologian just replaces traditional heals with heals over time and is probably the most unique of the three classes to me.

    If I had to describe Heavensward in one word, I would say tedious. One of the benefits of the game is to unlock flying for your chocobo, which can only be done by exploring the entire map. The problem is that the map is designed extremely awkwardly with wide opened empty fields everywhere you look. Each map only has one major city and tiny small outposts yet it takes more than five minutes to run across the map by chocobo without flying. There's even a map that's divided into level 51 on the bottom half and level 57 on the top half along with a misleading road that leads you north only for you to find nothing but dead ends. The only thing enjoyable to a degree are the dungeons, but the problem is that many of them now feature absurd puzzles and just pointless DPS checks instead of strategy while most bosses rely more on luck than anything else.

    Enemies in Heavensward are made tougher, but the problem is that it ultimately makes it unrewarding. Experience rewards are low and tons of quests involve obnoxious levels of exploration that uses the elevation of the game against you because your map is unable to show it. I eventually found myself back in Northern Thanalan doing FATEs at level 58 to 60 instead because it was much more rewarding.

    The main problems of the game still remains. Your drops are limited on a weekly basis so it is impossible to gear up a class to prepare for the next content release for more than one class. As a result, the ability to play as multiple classes do not really serve much of a function since there's no way to make more than one raid viable at any point. The end game raids still feel more luck based and have arbitrary time limits placed on them. The puzzles are interesting at first, but it quickly becomes whether or not you can finish the raid before you repeat the same pattern for the third time. Whether you fail a dungeon or not can depend on whether you get either a tank or a healer pulled out from the battle or the two DPS characters are sent to die on their own as they are split. Go too long and everyone dies from damage stacking by the enemies.

    There are better choices for paid MMOs out there and FFXIV is one that I highly recommend that you skip over, especially if this is all an expansion is offering a year after its release. At $14 a month and incredibly slow updates, there's much better games to play. All they have to support them is the promise of a better game, one that they have failed to deliver and instead have begun to repeat the mistakes of the past.    … Expand
  5. leeber
    Oct 24, 2015
    4
    Everything bad about this expansion is circling around the false promises that Yoshida made us to buy it.

    He said it will be tougher areas > They just increased the HP pool of enemies, no new mechanics or real sense of danger, this only make the battles a chore. New leves, more difficult and rewarding > Not difficult at all and very expensive to sign on them. It's just better to    Everything bad about this expansion is circling around the false promises that Yoshida made us to buy it.

    He said it will be tougher areas > They just increased the HP pool of enemies, no new mechanics or real sense of danger, this only make the battles a chore.

    New leves, more difficult and rewarding > Not difficult at all and very expensive to sign on them. It's just better to grind dungeons to gain more EXP or equipment.

    Crafting will be more open and reward players that stick on a single disciple > You still have to level up all crafting classes to make a single item for your class. The amount of materials of other classes that you need to make a single (and useless) item of your own is silly and frustrating. And, beside of that, crafting equipment are useless compared to the ones you get on raids, tomes and, the worst, even dungeons. You, basically, do crafting only to completion purposes there are not utility behind it.

    For the rest of the game, special currency grinding to get better equipment is becoming a major flaw of the game. Generally speaking, all grinding aspects of this game are maddening but the ones who revolves around acquiring tomes are just infuriating.

    Old content is getting obsolete and a new player who wants to make old raids depends to find a good FC that want to make old content just for fun because the queues to enter with party finder seem infinite.

    Fighting classes are overbalanced. They just feel and play the same. They have added a healer that plays like a mixture of the other two healer classes, a tank that plays somehow like the Warrior and a DPS that is nearly a carbon copy of the Bard. All the traits that made old classes unique are diluting. Right now, there is no reason (more than completionism) to switch between jobs of the same type.

    The worst thing of all, is that all this things are making what it was a good community into an enraged, unpolite and selfish one.

    History is as great as the main game left and, sincerely, is the only thing that would make me come back. That, and the fantastic atmosphere that Nobuaki Komoto have created.    … Expand
  6. yousuck1
    Aug 21, 2020
    0
    SucksSucks.,.................................................. ...................
  7. aetce
    Sep 18, 2020
    3
    tldr: great if you have friends and/or like lore.

    For an MMORPG, its not as resource intensive as something like GW2, which has an agenda to cook everybody's CPU. Even on laptops with a dedicated (low-end) GPU, you can hit a reliable 1080p60fps (granted you turn everything low), and even if you're playing on integrated graphics, its still playable. Kudos to the Square-Enix for putting a    tldr: great if you have friends and/or like lore.

    For an MMORPG, its not as resource intensive as something like GW2, which has an agenda to cook everybody's CPU. Even on laptops with a dedicated (low-end) GPU, you can hit a reliable 1080p60fps (granted you turn everything low), and even if you're playing on integrated graphics, its still playable. Kudos to the Square-Enix for putting a lot of customization into their character creation since if you're playing this game for the lore, you might as well take some time designing your character to look like an NPC in the game and mashing the "fantasy name generator" websites until you hit a name you like. (Honest opinion, I think this sort of phenomenon only happens in games like GW2 and FFXIV, I've yet to see anyone play other games where they name themselves into a character outside of joking purposes. I guess players really want to become part of the story. If that's the case, this is an alright game).

    Are the FFXIV veterans gone? Good, lets go to the actual review.

    For a game with a lot of skills for each class (and the other classes that the base classes later transform into), unless you're a healer or tank, you won't be using them for the most part. Sure, there might be a combat MSQ once on a blue moon, but its mostly a post office simulator in that you're carrying messages from one (complex) map to another (complex) map.

    On the positive, this game is very solo friendly -- if playing in open world is all you plan to do. If not, get yourself some friends and play as a tank/healer because the queue times for dps players in dungeons is 30minutes (you can make 10 whole bags of popcorn). But at that point, if you want to play solo, good luck. And if you have no friends and are forced to play solo, might as well switch to another class and regrind those levels.
    I guess the positive to these long queue times is that I was able to clean my room, and when I got back, I was still queuing (0 tank, 0 healer, 1/2 dps). What an amazing game!

    On the negative, why doesn't this game allow you to freely move around servers within a datacenter region? Siren's always full and you'll be sitting in queue for a while. Square-Enix seems like a smart dev team, yet they can't implement it. I mean, even the original Runescape back in the 2000's allowed you to freely choose worlds (and more if you're a paid player). FFXIV came out in 2010 (least what google says), and chugging along in 2020, still doesn't have it figured out.

    Lore wise, this is a nice game if you like games and stories. But if you're just want a game for stories and social interaction, you might as well play a dating simulator. Least that won't make you wander around an area for a long time because the objective is on the floor below you, but the map system is so complex that you cant figure out how to get down there. The combat in this game really feels like an afterthought. And why are there so many skills for all (is it 10?) jobs if you won't be using them most of the time. Hey, Square-Enix if you're reading this, just make this into a story book or something and save everybody's time, clearly the combat was an afterthought that you threw in there to appeal to the MMORPG community. In terms of other things S-E doesn't understand, the meaning of the word "Final". Final means "last", how did you manage to get up to 14?

    Lastly, if you're stuck and think you need help, you don't. If you aren't praising FFXIV like the community is, ignoring all the possible downsides, you'll get mocked at for trying to ask for help figuring out how to do X thing. But I guess when you've already sunk hundreds to thousands of dollars into the game, you gotta ignore the faults else that investment doesn't seem worth it /shrug.    … Expand
  8. erazor2021
    Aug 18, 2021
    0
    If you don’t like the Trial / “Realm Reborn” take my word, you won’t like any of it…

    New players hope you are ready for 200+ hours of MSQ which is mainly reading text. I fell for the recent hype. To all the people who says “it gets better” seriously, what is wrong with you? This constant insincerity is what kept me going. IT DOESN’T GET BETTER (a least to the point it serves as a    If you don’t like the Trial / “Realm Reborn” take my word, you won’t like any of it…

    New players hope you are ready for 200+ hours of MSQ which is mainly reading text.

    I fell for the recent hype. To all the people who says “it gets better” seriously, what is wrong with you? This constant insincerity is what kept me going. IT DOESN’T GET BETTER (a least to the point it serves as a valid argument).

    I just finished Shadowbringers 5.5 MSQ, and let me tell you, this is an “interactive Novel” more than it is a video game.

    Sure with each expansion the game (novel) gets a little better, in terms of graphics, animations, storytelling, but the CORE of the game doesn’t change, it is still this outdated mmorpg tab targeting, with its main FOCUS on MSQ, which is basically walls of text.

    Your quests in order of occurrences is: talk, travel, click objects, kill NPCs, do dungeons/trials/story instances.
    They added one different mechanic in Stormblood lol, which is to “click stuff in FPS mode”.

    I can count the EPIC moments of the story in one hand! 3 of them were in Havensward and 2 in Shadowbringers (forget RR and SB).

    The main focus of this game is the MSQ, but the problem is; the MSQ is 90% fluff pointless writing and storytelling, you could cut out 80% of this writing and still get a concise accurate description of the story, albeit just more on point.

    What Square Enix is doing is inflating game time content with more and more text and sloppy animation screens, which I’m not kidding stretches the MSQ than it really needs to be. I’m not even talking about important background build up, I’m talking about content you won’t even remember because it served no purpose in the grand scheme of things. (Anything you wont remember a month from now isn't worth reading about).

    Because the MSQ is mainly storytelling, and single player orientated, why not just play better solo video games that are much, much better technically advanced in gameplay, like GTA 5, Witcher 3, red redemption 2, and hundreds of others titles?

    There were times I was so desperate to just “play” the game, because there is so few dungeons/trials and killing quests in-between all the walls of text.

    One could always pay a story skip potion, but the fact is MSQ is the focus of this game, the endgame is extra stuff. Players and Square have both said that MSQ is the focus of the game, and the more casual player base.

    WoW = focuses on repeatable endgame content after a short introductory (and often crap) storyline.

    FF14 = 200 hours of MSQ (at minimum) at which point you can cycle through some endgame content and get max ilvl gear fairly easily. But levelling others job/crafts, which has its own questlines seems be one of the most popular things to do.

    I won’t be buying Endwalker. People who enjoy reading fluff for hundreds of hours to see one good cutscene here and there, you do that, enjoy! I’ll watch it in a recap YouTube video and do more productive things with my life than read FLUFF MSQ content, which is intentionally used to extend game play time.

    “You can always make more money, but you can’t make more time” think about if you’re really enjoying that 200 hours or if you’re only enjoy small amounts of it. Whilst the epic moments were epic, the pain of going through so much unfun content to see it was not worth it. The balance is definitely not there.

    Even most fans think the post RR quests are so bad, yet square hasnt fixed it by just removing it for new players by using a short narration cutscene to bring players up to date for havensward. (And i heard it was even worse, oh dear God).    … Expand

Awards & Rankings

13
#13 Best PC Game of 2015
48
#48 Most Discussed PC Game of 2015
61
#61 Most Shared PC Game of 2015

Critic Reviews

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Metascore
86

Generally favorable reviews - based on 14 Critic Reviews

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 14 out of 14
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 14
  3. Negative: 0 out of 14
  1. RPG Fan
    Nov 5, 2015
    95
    An extensive and well-planned expansion that makes Eorzea an ever-more compelling place to get lost in.
    Read full review
  2. USgamer
    Aug 14, 2015
    90
    In addition to flying, players get an all-new storyline, new Primals, a brand-new raid dungeon, and three new jobs to level up. FFXIV still retains a few annoying issues here and there, but Heavensward is one of the best MMO expansions I've played.
    Read full review
  3. GameCritics
    Aug 9, 2015
    75
    The music is often phenomenal, the translation and dialogue are exquisite, and the world is one that's worth spending time in. However, it's all based on grind-heavy gameplay, and it's still subscription based. My advice is to buy it, burn through the new content, and then put it aside until the next substantial expansion is released.
    Read full review
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