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. Jabborwacky
    Jul 8, 2015
    7
    FFXIV: Heavensward provides more of what players have already experienced, only more refined and with flying mounts. While it is true that the story is much improved over the original FFXIV:ARR story arc, such praise needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The original story contained plot holes that were big enough to cause a well intentioned reader to look at the story as a thing in needFFXIV: Heavensward provides more of what players have already experienced, only more refined and with flying mounts. While it is true that the story is much improved over the original FFXIV:ARR story arc, such praise needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The original story contained plot holes that were big enough to cause a well intentioned reader to look at the story as a thing in need of fixing rather than something immersive. The current story is not only free of derailing plot holes, but is actually pretty good. Character's develop naturally through the story, and you can see their personal growth as they experience the events the story is composed of. There is a genuine sense of loss and triumph at multiple points throughout the game.

    The storytelling benefits extend to a great portion of the side quests as well, making them feel more meaningful then typical fetch and kill chores. If only all of them could be said to be so improved, as I found myself grinding my teeth in the churning mists helping less than capable NPCs for several hours. A mixed bag, to be sure, but no less improved.

    But enough about the story. What about the game that lies beneath it? Little has changed from FFXIV:ARR, and that becomes more apparent the closer one gets to the end game. MMORPGs are games played for long stretches at a time, but the dungeons are little more than static corridors with better than average loot. It encourages players to romp their way through them repeatedly, but, much like watching the same video on repeat, it gets old quickly. The dungeons are by all means beautiful, well rendered, and have their own unique music scores to help with their ambience. It's unfortunate that the development team hasn't come up with a way to keep them fresh for more than a few play throughs.

    The problems with dungeons make raising secondary jobs incredibly painful in comparison to the first play through, which explains the over the top ratings from many reviewers. Other activities are presented to try to even things up, but the sheer mountain of experience points and better gear offered by the dungeon corridors encourage players to put themselves through dungeon repeat hell in order to end the pain faster.

    FFXIV:ARR is also plagued by an inventory system that is grossly inadequate for the kind of multiple job system it is built around. Those running multiple jobs will, with time, completely fill their inventory space and be forced to purchase more retainers with real world money. The space issues are caused by the accumulation of equipment, which can be used by multiple jobs and for vanity items. The pre-heavensward equipment has heavy overlap between different classes, so unwary players may end up stowing gear beyond its expiration date in case they might want to raise another class using the same equipment. Without taking drastic measures like jettison all unused vanity items into space, trying to raise multiple jobs will lead to several retainers full of green dungeon loot with little room to spare.

    The current solution is less than satisfactory: Increase your monthly subscription fee and you get another retainer. The calls for an inventory system fix have been very loud at E3, being asked repeatedly on multiple occasions, and the demand will only increase with time as they continue to add even more item sets. In any case, the long running effect of the inventory system is that players will only be able to play a small handful of the jobs regularly. So even if they did find a way to freshen up dungeons and the grind, players would be unlikely to take advantage of those systems.

    Finally, there is the the wait times to get into content as a damage dealer. What should have signaled the death of the Tank, Healer, and Damage Dealer trinity of old continues to haunt the MMORPG world to this day. Had someone told me that these problems would persist over ten years into the future back when I was struggling to get into a group as a mage in World of Warcraft, I would have thought the person totally nuts. Yet the improbable has come to pass, and developers lazily implementing the systems of old with no care for the problems they cause has led to yet another decent game being brought lower than it should.

    I think far too many a professional reviewer has overlooked these important aspects of the gameplay, and have posted their reviews far too early. Until you've played with several different waves of people, how can you honestly review a game built around an open social experience? Expect wave one reviews to give FFXIV:Heavensward a shining ovation. Those that truly wish to rate the experience over the long run, as it should be rated, will likely give it a more humble 7 or 8 out of 10    … Expand
  2. pizzasandwich
    Jun 25, 2015
    5
    Overall, I must say I found this expansion a let down.

    Good things first. The main story is way more interesting and well told than ARR’s original storyline, which was quite awful. The voice acting has improved and the music, of course, is wonderful. The new zones look great and flying is fun. Not so good things. The zones, while great looking, are still just quest grind hubs filled    Overall, I must say I found this expansion a let down.

    Good things first. The main story is way more interesting and well told than ARR’s original storyline, which was quite awful. The voice acting has improved and the music, of course, is wonderful. The new zones look great and flying is fun.

    Not so good things. The zones, while great looking, are still just quest grind hubs filled with generic and mind-numbingly easy to kill monsters that exist solely to be killed to complete fetch quests. You don't even need to kill them for loot, as your retainer, the npc that you store and sell items through, can be sent out to retrieve items for you while you do other things. Square-Enix stated the monsters would be harder this time around, but all they did was increase their HP pool. It is nearly impossible to die from these enemies unless you disconnect or pull several at a time and just sit there and let them wallop you. They all have very easy to dodge telegraphs, and other than that they just basically auto-attack you. And, of course, you can always just run 10 feet away to leash the monsters should you somehow not be able to kill them before they kill you.

    Nearly every single non-dungeon quest involves killing these boring enemies or clicking on objects on the ground. They really went for quantity over quality. Despite the vastness of the zones, I never felt like I was on an adventure. All you do is tedious busywork. You’ll end up doing the same quests with a different script a hundred or more times. There are no dangerous open world areas at all. You can even attack an enemy that is engaging in conversation with another enemy and the other enemy just sits there doing its talking animation while you bludgeon his friend 10 feet away from him.

    The blandness of the enemies is a big problem with both the original game and the expansion. All enemies feel the same. They all either have one or all of the following: a cone/line AoE, a point blank AoE around them, or a targeted circular AoE. None of them feel unique. They’re basically all the same monster just with a different model. These telegraphs are incredibly easy to doge. And if you’re a healing class especially you can just stand in all of them and easily live.

    This is in stark contrast to SE’s previous MMORPG, FFXI, where each monster had different strengths and unique abilities. When you attack an enemy in FFXIV, you do not take in consideration what the enemy is at all, because it doesn’t matter.

    Even dungeon enemies suffer from this blandness. Aside from bosses, all enemies in dungeons are boring trash enemies that are pretty much impossible to die to unless the tank chooses to pull too many packs at once.

    Some of the bosses are fun, albeit quite easy, but, again, you have to wade through trash enemies to get to them. The dungeons are also all linear corridors, just as they were in the original.

    The awful FATE (FFXVI's uninspired version of public quests) system is back, but now FATEs give less exp than ever before, despite the enemies having giant health pools. As a result, I see very few people doing FATEs in the new expansion zones outside of the first ones you get dumped into for story missions. People quickly learn they are pointless to do.

    They also decided to bring over the Hunt system into the new zones. The Hunt involves an enemy spawning every x hours that is either a rank A or S (B rank enemies respawn immediately and offer no reward unless you have a quest to kill it). When these enemies are found, people either post the location in their hunt linkshell chat or shout the position in the chat. After some people show up, the enemy is then obliterated within seconds. This is how you currently upgrade your gear. You spam a handful of easy dungeons hundreds of times for token and then zerg easy monsters mindlessly. Basically, it’s the exact same gear treadmill as ARR. Equipment still just boring +base stats. No unique or interesting special effects to be found on the gear in this game.

    Players complained about both FATEs and Hunts being boring and terrible, yet SE decided to implement them again without any changes.

    The new classes look quite cool, but all the classes in the game are quite homogenized and whenever a class is able to stand out in some trivial way it gets the nerf bat. White Mages, for example, were able to speed up trash pulls in dungeons by spamming their high MP cost spell, Holy. SE nerfed this because it was apparent "unfair" that they were better than the other healers at killing garbage monsters.

    So despite how little effort was seemingly put into the quests, enemies and basically everything outside of the music, storyline and zone-design, creating the expansion was apparently so difficult for the FFXIV developers that Yoshi-P promised in an interview that they would never make an expansion this big again, which I find worrying and bizarre when the expansion isn’t anything amazing. It’s very average.    … Expand
  3. curzon_dax
    Aug 9, 2019
    6
    Overrated game from old veterans of the franchise. The story of this franchise is generally extremely hard to follow; the player is presented with very disconnected parts of a story that are shoehorned here and there to reach the final destination the creators wanted you to reach anyway.
    While the single-player aspect is clearly better than WoW and the graphics slightly improved, it has    Overrated game from old veterans of the franchise. The story of this franchise is generally extremely hard to follow; the player is presented with very disconnected parts of a story that are shoehorned here and there to reach the final destination the creators wanted you to reach anyway.
    While the single-player aspect is clearly better than WoW and the graphics slightly improved, it has nothing more to give than being a WoW clone.    … Expand
  4. zaftgun
    Dec 27, 2017
    6
    Zero notable improvement on the original game. As stormblood was already release a little while ago, the game is getting big, equipment levels are high, the original trials are not getting done much anymore. It will be extremely hard to find enough people to start a game and those fights are the best the has to offer.

    Music is very average and does not fit with the theme and    Zero notable improvement on the original game. As stormblood was already release a little while ago, the game is getting big, equipment levels are high, the original trials are not getting done much anymore. It will be extremely hard to find enough people to start a game and those fights are the best the has to offer.

    Music is very average and does not fit with the theme and surroundings. Flying is crude once again and unenjoyable.

    Overall other than the visual environment, its a poor effort and a poor job.

    A big big time waster.    … Expand
  5. loliance
    Dec 11, 2021
    7
    In my opinion this is the best expansion.
    Good class balance, excellent raids, beautiful locations.
    Much better story than ARR.

    The main critic I have is that there just isn't enough content compared to other MMOs on the market.

    Still lots to be desired on making the story more "alive" though, the lack of voice acting in the vast majority of the Main Story Quests breaks immersion.
  6. MoofiaBossVal
    Dec 26, 2021
    7
    The story is pretty meh. Unsatisfying conclusion to the Ul'dah plotline from ARR. The trailers for Heavensward promise an epic war against dragons, but it never really happens ingame. I wasn't really into the aesthetics of grey castles and knights in grey armor and grey dragons.

    However, Heavensward brings with it quite a lot of content, much more compared to later expansions, so I view    The story is pretty meh. Unsatisfying conclusion to the Ul'dah plotline from ARR. The trailers for Heavensward promise an epic war against dragons, but it never really happens ingame. I wasn't really into the aesthetics of grey castles and knights in grey armor and grey dragons.

    However, Heavensward brings with it quite a lot of content, much more compared to later expansions, so I view it more favorably.    … Expand
  7. KinimodYunmi
    Mar 3, 2023
    6
    Das zieht sich ganz schön und es gibt viele unnötige Gespräche, mich wundert´s, dass sie nicht jeden zweiten Satz sagen, dass sie noch eben atmen müssen.

    Es wird aber tatsächlich immer etwas besser, wenn auch nur langsam, allerdings war das Gebiet ganz am Anfang am schönsten. Ansonsten sind Drachen auch einfach immer eine gute Wahl. Was mich aber entorm ankotzt sind die Solo    Das zieht sich ganz schön und es gibt viele unnötige Gespräche, mich wundert´s, dass sie nicht jeden zweiten Satz sagen, dass sie noch eben atmen müssen.

    Es wird aber tatsächlich immer etwas besser, wenn auch nur langsam, allerdings war das Gebiet ganz am Anfang am schönsten. Ansonsten sind Drachen auch einfach immer eine gute Wahl.

    Was mich aber entorm ankotzt sind die Solo Instanzen, die sind viel schwerer als alles andere und man darf sie nicht mit seinen Freunden zusammen spielen, das ständige Auflösen der Gruppe ist total bescheuert!
    Man muss auch erst einmal sterben, damit man auf leicht oder sehr leicht switchen kann, wenn man es gar nicht erst auf normal versuchen möchte. Man kann sich zwar auch einmal sterben lassen, oft schaffen die erst paar Gegner das aber nicht und man reizt es hier komplett aus, dass Spieler so viel Zeit wie möglich wasten!    … 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.
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  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.
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  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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