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 hubsOverall, 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 felt different. Crabs had high HP and defense boosting skills. Worms could not move like normal enemies as they lacked legs, but could cast magic. Often they would bind you in place and then start pelting you with spells. Mimics would draw your character in so you could not run from then and would poison you. Tonberry’s had everyone’s grudge, an attack that did more damage based on how many tonberries you have killed (which could be reset by paying a tonberry priest), and throat stab, a high damaging move that came out quickly that you had to pay attention for because there were no obvious telegraphs. Enemies like dragons and manticores were naturally tougher than crab or caterpillar enemies that were the same level. The enemies were even more unique in FFXIV 1.0. 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.
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 tomestones (basically dungeon tokens) 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.
The new classes look quite cool, but all the classes in the game are quite homogenized.
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
Final Fantasy XIV: HeavenswardYour Score0 out of 10User Score
