2107: Dark Knight Chronicles

Continuing to level Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I wasn’t quite prepared for how much more powerful it feels than Paladin, but I’m really enjoying the overall feel of it a whole lot — much more than Warrior, which seemed enjoyable enough, but didn’t quite “click” with me for some reason.

I think the reason I like Dark Knight so much is that it appears to be a little less dependent on strict rotations to perform its job most effectively — or, rather, there’s more than one rotation to play around with. I particularly enjoy the fact that when playing Dark Knight it’s absolutely okay — even encouraged — to drop out of Grit, the main “tank stance”, in order to do some additional damage. This appears to be of particular benefit when fighting single-target bosses, since taking fewer overall hits means that Blood Weapon (increase attack speed, drain MP from enemy with every hit, only available when not in Grit) becomes a more efficient means of restoring MP than Blood Price (gain MP when taking damage).

Even though many of the abilities are somewhat similar in function to those found in Paladin, they somehow feel more satisfying to use. Dark Knight has an area-of-effect damage over time skill called Salted Earth, for example, that bathes an area in black and red lightning, whereas Paladin’s nearest equivalent is Circle of Scorn, which has its own little pyrotechnics display but somehow doesn’t feel quite as enjoyable to use. Dark Knight also has Scourge, which is a damage over time that can be immediately applied rather than only used at the end of a three-hit combo like Paladin’s Goring Blade. When everything lines up nicely and you can apply Scourge and Salted Earth to an enemy before letting rip with a non-Grit Dark Arts Souleater combo for a significant amount of damage, it’s a great deal of fun.

Learning my way around Dark Knight has been enjoyable, and it’s helping me rediscover my respect for Final Fantasy XIV’s combat system. People who come to FFXIV from more traditional, customisable role-playing games are sometimes a bit put out at the relative lack of personalisation FFXIV offers in terms of abilities — everyone gets the same abilities at the same levels, and the only real flexibility is in any cross-class skills you choose to use, but even here there are only certain ones that are particularly useful — but in practice it works enormously well, behaving, of all things, more like a fighting game than anything else. A slow-paced fighting game, admittedly, but a fighting game nonetheless.

Allow me to clarify. Modern fighting games demand that players learn specific button and directional inputs to perform various special moves. In order to get good at a fighting game, you need to develop a certain degree of muscle memory to be able to pull these moves off automatically. Once you’ve done that, you need to master the timing of these moves to chain them together into effective combos, and then you need to understand what the most appropriate situations to use these individual combos are.

Final Fantasy XIV is exactly the same, just at a fraction of the pace of your average fighting game. Positioning is important; responding to your enemy’s moves is important; using the right ability at the right time is important. Even muscle memory is important, particularly if you’re playing on controller — while you’re not doing Hadoken button inputs to throw a fireball at someone, you do need to be able to remember where you put all your most important abilities and be able to practically automatically perform combos with no gaps for the most efficient possible damage output. For example, on Dark Knight, my average combo runs something along the lines of LT+Y, RT+Y, LT+A, LT+RT+X, A, LT+RT+B, LT+X, RT+B, RT+X, RT+A, RT+LT+B, RT+LT+X, RT+LT+up, RT+LT+A. This pulls an enemy with Unmend, cements aggro with Unleash, kicks them in the bollocks to stun them for a few seconds, drops a Salted Earth on the ground, applies Scourge, blasts them and anything near them with Dark Passenger, does my three-hit aggro combo then my three-hit, Dark Arts-buffed Souleater combo for a nice chunk of damage. And this isn’t even getting into the situational weaving in of various defensive cooldowns to ensure that I don’t take too much damage, or other skills to support the battle.

That may all sound exceedingly complicated, but I’ve done it so many times now that it feels “automatic” to be able to perform these abilities in the order that seems to work most effectively at my level. I’m sure I’ll have to shake things up a bit as I get closer to 60 and challenging more difficult content, but for now it’s extremely satisfying to nimbly pull off these combos without breaking a sweat.

Onwards to 60 then… I should hit 54 tonight, all being well.

2105: Into Darkness

The official trailer for Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.1 came out recently, and it’s looking simply marvellous. I am happy about this, because although I feel like I’ve got over my “rut” with the game, I’d still love to see something new at last. It’s been a long time coming, after all.

My initial reaction to the announcement of 3.1 was slight disappointment, but in retrospect this was rather silly. I’ll tell you my thinking, though: previous content patches for the game tended to include three new dungeons, a new raid (either a 24-player casual raid of the Crystal Tower ilk, or an 8-player hardcore raid of the Coil ilk) and maybe some new quests and minor mechanics here and there. And gear, of course. 3.1, meanwhile, only includes two new dungeons, one of which is a “Hard Mode” version of an existing dungeon — Pharos Sirius — which immediately made me feel a bit let down that we weren’t getting as much new stuff as we had in the past.

But then I considered things a bit more, and there are plenty of interesting things happening outside the dungeons, because dungeons aren’t the only interesting thing you can do in the game. They’re cool, sure, but I get the impression that Yoshi-P and the FFXIV team very much want to try and shake up the basic formula of the game a little bit having got it where they want to be over the course of A Realm Reborn and vanilla Heavensward. In other words, that means getting people out of the “grind the same thing over and over” mentality and into doing more varied things.

Perhaps the thing I’m most intrigued by — and most mystified by — is the new Exploratory Missions system, whereby individual players, parties, alliances and Free Companies can fly off into the Sea of Clouds with their airship(s), explore a region for 90 minutes, kick the shit out of some monsters, find treasure, complete objectives and gather stuff. This has the most potential to shake up the basic structure of the game, and I really hope it turns out well.

Details are still a bit thin on the ground as yet, but it seems like there will be three difficulty levels for these exploratory missions, with the hardest level being pitched towards Free Companies with their own airships. Monsters will have difficulty ranks between 1 and 6 instead of conventional levels, and there are apparently Hunt-esque “marks” to defeat as well as regular monsters. There will be objectives to complete that will allow players to earn the all-important Tomestones to upgrade their equipment, and treasure chests that contain new Aetherial equipment with randomised stats.

The randomised element of the Exploratory missions is the thing I’m looking forward to the most, to be honest. Exactly how random it is I’m not entirely sure as yet, but I know at the very least there will be several different areas that you can fly to when you start one of these missions — it seems you won’t be able to explicitly pick where you want to go and will instead be assigned a random landing point in a random region. The equipment you can find will be scattered in bronze, silver and gold chests, and presumably tracking these chests down will involve actual exploration of the area rather than the current situation in dungeons, where equipment can be found in boss chests and stuff in all the other chests is fairly underwhelming in its awesomeness, usually consisting of either potions or crafting materials.

Aside from the Exploratory Missions, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is the new Minstrel’s Ballad trial, which is a considerably expanded version of the final boss fight from the Heavensward story quests. This was an absolutely spectacular fight, albeit not particularly difficult, so it will be exciting to have the opportunity to see this realised as something closer to what the creators apparently originally intended. It will be a ten-phase fight — they stopped short of going for thirteen phases to match the thirteen Knights of the Round — and will apparently be on par difficulty-wise with Extreme-level primal fights and the first area of Alexander (Savage). Hopefully this doesn’t mean it will be a glorified DPS check like Alexander is, but from the little I’ve seen of it so far, it looks like there’s going to be some interesting mechanics at play.

Anyway. Patch 3.1 is coming in early November, which isn’t far away now. I’m really looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, and actually a little bit thankful that the new Relic weapons — which are apparently known as “Anima Weapons” — aren’t coming immediately, instead inviting us to grind ourselves into oblivion from patch 3.15 onwards.

In the meantime, I’ve got Dark Knight to level 50 today, so only ten levels to go before I can officially retire Paladin for the most part and start playing a tank class with a bit more damage output at high level! Darksiiiiiiide!

2038: Vacation from Eorzea

Astute long-term readers will notice that I haven’t been talking much about Final Fantasy XIV recently. And the reason for that is simple: I just haven’t been playing it that much.

It’s not that I’ve gone off the game per se — I still see myself playing it for many years to come — it’s more that I’ve got out of it what I wanted to get out of it so far. The Heavensward storyline was exciting and dramatic — and, for my money, better than A Realm Reborn’s main quest — and the Alexander raid dungeon was an enjoyable challenge, though we’re still yet to clear its Savage incarnation.

Trouble is, outside of levelling alternate classes there’s not a huge amount to do at level cap right now.

This is the exact situation A Realm Reborn (and, I imagine, most MMOs) found itself in at launch, of course; the difference here, however, is that whereas it took me a good few weeks to make it to 50 in A Realm Reborn — I reached the level cap a while after the more dedicated players in my Free Company — I got through Heavensward pretty quickly. This was deliberate, of course; I binged on the new story content because it was enjoyable and interesting, and also because I wanted to see everything that the expansion pack had to offer. I also wanted to avoid inadvertently being spoiled on the storyline, since Final Fantasy XIV is that rare example of an MMO where the story is actually worth paying attention to and even told pretty well.

Consequently, I got to the “end” a lot more quickly than I did with A Realm Reborn, and consequently I’ve found myself with a lot more “dead time” with stagnant content. Sure, I could run Alexander over and over again to try and get some more gear sets. Sure, I could level other classes — I probably will do this at some point. Sure, I could run the current two level 60 dungeons over and over to get as many Tomestones of Esoterics as possible to gear up one or more classes.

Trouble is, I simply don’t have a lot of motivation to do so right now. And that’s sort of fine by me, really; whenever I play an MMO I always find myself in a weird place where I’m really enjoying the experience of playing the game and getting good at it — I maintain that Final Fantasy XIV is one of the few games I genuinely consider myself to actually be pretty good at — but also feeling a strange sense of “guilt” that I’m not playing any of the other million and one games that have been staring at me from my shelves for the last few years. Conversely, I play a game that isn’t Final Fantasy XIV and I feel a similar sense of “guilt” that I’m not playing Final Fantasy XIV more. I can’t win. Stupid brain.

On balance, though, this “dead time” is actually proving to be rather welcome, as since I have little inclination to log in right now for anything other than my weekly raiding commitments — and the group as a whole is pretty half-hearted about the whole thing at the moment, to be honest — I am having plenty of time to delve into other experiences. I managed to get the Platinum trophy on Omega Quintet. I’m working on the Platinum trophy for Hyperdevotion Noire. I am loving the shit out of Sword Art Online on PS4. And I’m also really enjoying Splatoon, Heroes of the Storm and any number of other games right now.

The trouble with any hobby that has a lot of different elements to it — be it gaming, music, reading, movies or whatever — is finding that perfect balance where you can enjoy all those different elements at different times and not feel like you’re neglecting any of them. Right now, even though I know that I don’t have much motivation to play Final Fantasy XIV, I still feel like I’m neglecting it because I’m not logging in to talk to my friends. So perhaps I still haven’t quite found the right balance there. But eh. I’m not going to worry about it for the moment — a new content patch for the game might rekindle my interest for a while, but in the meantime I’m going to cut right back and enjoy the other experiences I have on the go right now.

1988: The End of Ascalon

Finished the Heavensward main story quest today. WOW.

Spoilers ahead!

I was pleased that the team went all-out and gave us a full-on Final Fantasy finale. The final dungeon, the Aetherochemical Research Facility, gradually gets weirder and weirder as you progress through it, until you eventually reach what is clearly The Final Boss Room, in which you’re set upon by not one but two Ascians, the dark-robed ne’er-do-wells whose evil machinations have been behind most of the Bad Things happening in Eorzea throughout the Final Fantasy XIV narrative.

Delightfully, this battle against the Ascians even does the typical Final Fantasy thing of unfolding across multiple forms, with the “merged” form of the two Ascians creating “Ascian Prime” and battering you with some of the most spectacular attacks in the entire game. Lest you thought that Final Fantasy XIV would lose some of the series’ trademark spectacle owing to the fact that its multiplayer nature makes cinematic camera angles and lengthy spell sequences impractical, this confrontation very much dispels that notion.

That’s not the end, though. The battle against Ascian Prime — the conclusion of which finally sees recurring villain Lahabrea apparently dealt with once and for all — is followed up by an eight-player Trial in the research facility’s Singularity Reactor, in which you face off against Ishgard’s Archibishop, Heavensward’s main villain.

This being Final Fantasy, however, you don’t just fight a doddering old man with an obscene amount of hit points. No; shortly before your battle with him, he draws upon the power of the Eyes of Nidhogg to channel the spirit of Ishgard’s legendary king Thorden — he who, with his knights twelve, originally laid Nidhogg low and took the great wyrm’s eyes — and become a Primal incarnation of the ancient king. Naturally, this involves him growing to approximately ten storeys in height in the process, and his bodyguards, the twelve knights of the Heaven’s Ward (do you see what they did there) undergo similar transformations prior to your final battle against the whole sorry lot of them.

The actual battle against Thorden and the knights is amazing. Final Fantasy veterans will doubtless recognise this setup as an excuse to bring in the notorious summon “Knights of the Round”, and indeed the final boss battle is effectively you fighting Knights of the Round, complete with ridiculously overblown attack animations — including, at one point, the reactor in which you’re fighting seemingly floating up into space, then your entire screen shattering to bring you back to reality. (This animation is pretty much a direct reference to Knights of the Round’s appearance in Final Fantasy VII, whose attack animation “Ultimate End” was the most powerful ability you could equip your characters with in the whole game.)

It’s a fitting end for Heavensward’s story, which has overall been a great addition to the ranks of Final Fantasy narratives throughout history. And it leaves some nice open teaser threads at the end ready for future content patches and the continuation of the story — most notably the character Estinien’s possession by the spirit of Nidhogg, the latter of whom is understandably pissed off at the world for numerous reasons, not least of which being the fact that he had his eyes scooped out, and some thousand years later, was killed by some young upstart claiming to represent the spirit of the planet itself.

Anyway. It was good stuff, and sets the scene nicely for the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, which must be due pretty soon now. (Indeed, the ending cutscene shows Alexander rising out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, though it is as yet impossible to enter the great iron giant.)

I’m glad I beat the story (and the two “post-ending” dungeons Neverreap and The Fractal Continuum, both of which are a lot of fun — and pleasingly challenging) and am looking forward to seeing what’s next. In the meantime, I have an official full-on review of the expansion to write for Gamespot, so watch out for that soon.

1987: At the Gates of Heaven

Back to “reality” for Andie and I now, and we’re both closing in on the finale of the main story quest in Heavensward. It’s been a pretty spectacular journey up until this point, which I shall endeavour not to spoil to a significant degree in this post, largely because I don’t yet know how it all ends.

Heavensward has achieved that which I wasn’t sure it would be able to do: it’s surpassed A Realm Reborn in almost every possible way, but particularly when it comes to the main story. While A Realm Reborn had a solid narrative that chronicled your character’s humble beginnings up to their awakening as the Warrior of Light and beyond, taking in their victories over the fierce Primals of Eorzea and the Empire’s ultimate weapon in the process, I found the Final Fantasy XII-style political manoeuvring that made up a significant part of the plot to be less interesting than something a bit more, for want of a better word, “JRPG”.

Heavensward, meanwhile, feels more like a “Final Fantasy“. This isn’t to say that A Realm Reborn didn’t feel like Final Fantasy at all — I described it as one of the best new Final Fantasies in recent years back when I reviewed it for USgamer, after all — but Heavensward feels more like a traditional Final Fantasy.

It achieves this in a number of different ways. For one, it tones down the political machinations that gradually built up over the course of A Realm Reborn, and which came to a rather shocking climax at the end of patch 2.55, Before the Fall, which acted as a prelude to Heavensward. These narrative threads are picked up and explored further — though some look as if they’re going to remain unresolved until a later content patch — but for the most part Heavensward is an all-original story.

For another, the narrative feels more like an epic journey. In A Realm Reborn, you spent a lot of your time going back and forth between the three main areas, and, aside from the initial quest where you leave your starting city to go and visit the other two, it didn’t really feel like the typical JRPG journey of gradually getting further and further away from your starting point, with more and more outlandish things happening as you go. Heavensward, meanwhile, does adopt this style of journey, beginning in the familiar snowy wastes of Coerthas, some of which we had the opportunity to explore in A Realm Reborn, but before long giving way to the lush forests and rocky mountains of the Dravanian Forelands, the otherworldly floating islands of the Churning Mists and the Sea of Clouds, the mysterious abandoned city of the Dravanian Hinterlands — an important location to Final Fantasy XIV lore as a whole, as it turns out — and, ultimately, a final region which doesn’t feel at all like a typical MMO field, instead very much feeling like an authentic JRPG The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

The journey you undertake throughout the narrative is emphasised by some lovely narration from David Warner upon your first entry to each area. A Realm Reborn had plenty of florid prose, but Heavensward refines this with some almost poetic writing that gives the game a very distinctive voice and tone throughout. It feels strange to compliment the writing in an MMO, a type of game not particularly known for stellar storytelling (Hi, World of Warcraft!) but Heavensward really doesn’t skimp on this front, and it’s all the stronger for it.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how the story ends — and, of course, getting involved with what comes after that. It can’t be long now until the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, and I’m very intrigued to see how all that fits in with the overall lore. Previous raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut turned out to be extremely relevant to the original game’s lore — and even more relevant to Heavensward, as it happens — so I’m looking forward to experiencing Alexander’s encounters and story to see what happens.

For now, though, I’m still flagging a bit after all the excitement of the weekend, so I think it’s time to get some sleep.

1980: A Right Way and A Wrong Way

I know I said I wouldn’t write about Heavensward again today and I’m not going to focus on it too much, but it will enter into the discussion a little, for reasons that will shortly become apparent.

The separately-sold “expansion pack” as it existed in the ’90s and early ’00s is something of a rarity these days, typically confined to the MMORPG subgenre, while other types of games tend to leverage the high-speed Internet connections most people have these days by offering lots of smaller bits of piecemeal downloadable content.

In some ways, this works well; the “a la carte” approach of piecemeal DLC means that you can pick and choose the things you want to bolt onto your game for a lower price without potentially being stuck with some things you don’t want. On the flip side, however, in my experience, a lot of DLC — though not all — is significantly less substantial in terms of content and value for money than your average expansion pack. There are exceptions, of course — Oblivion’s Shivering Isles DLC springs to mind, as does Burnout Paradise’s additional island whose name escapes me right now — but those are actually both getting back into “expansion pack” territory again, and thus are outliers to a certain degree.

Bungie’s MMO shooter and “thing that isn’t Halo” Destiny had its new expansion announced recently, and it’s kicked up a bit of a fuss, specifically over its pricing. The base game of Destiny has plummeted in price since its original launch, meaning that the new expansion — which costs the same as a full game at £40/$60ish — will, in most cases, be more expensive than the main game. But that’s not what’s got people riled up: the problem is that there’s a super-expensive “Collector’s Edition” coming that features some exclusive content that can only be acquired through this special edition.

Nothing unusual, you might think, until you hear that the Collector’s Edition is only available as a bundle deal including Destiny, its expansion and the pieces of DLC that have been released to date. This means that fans of Destiny who want to get their hands on the exclusive content pretty much have to buy the game and DLC again just to play the expansion. And the alternative means of buying the game for new players — a bundle including Destiny and its expansion for around the £55 mark — effectively means that new players are getting the expansion for considerably less than veterans.

I can’t say I care a whole lot personally because Destiny simply isn’t my type of game, but what surprised and dismayed me a bit about the whole situation was this interview on Eurogamer with creative director Luke Smith — a guy I don’t know that well myself, but who used to work with my brother and was, as I recall, part of the 1up crew. Smith was, to my recollection, always rather outspoken about things, particularly when it came to companies doing shitty things, so it was a tad disappointing to read his responses to Eurogamer coming out as little more than PR-fed “we can’t talk about this” nonsense. And if it was PR-fed, the PR company wants sacking, because Smith’s responses did nothing to alleviate the concerns of players who are upset over all this, and more than likely infuriated them further.

The reason I brought up Heavensward at the beginning is because it’s actually in a similar position to Destiny’s expansion. Final Fantasy XIV itself can be picked up for a pretty low price these days, but Heavensward is not-quite-full-price-but-nearly. The difference, however, is that both existing and prospective players have plenty of choices of how they pick it up. They can buy A Realm Reborn and Heavensward separately. They can buy a bundle including both A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. They can buy Heavensward by itself, in standard and special editions. And they can buy most of these options in both physical and digital formats.

As such, even though Heavensward might seem expensive for an expansion pack — though it’s worth noting that in terms of content, it’s seriously rivalling A Realm Reborn’s base game, at least in terms of story length, sidequests and open-world areas — the player base has had absolutely no objections to how it’s been positioned and sold. In fact, I’ve seen more new players in the game in the last week or so than I have for a very long time — and those new players won’t even be able to touch any of the Heavensward content until they complete A Realm Reborn and its five subsequent content patches.

But they don’t mind, because they’ve been given options, and those options have been made clear. Where Bungie is falling down with Destiny — and where they’re going to lose a lot of previously loyal players if they’re not careful — is this communication side of things. Smith’s responses suggested that Bungie was either unwilling or unable to listen to player concerns on these matters; it may well be a matter of the company’s hands being tied by publisher Activision, but still. That’s not how you build loyalty. That’s how you destroy loyalty.

P.S. Heavensward is amazing. (Sorry.)

1979: One More Post Where I Gush About Heavensward, Then I’ll Find Something Different To Talk About Tomorrow (Probably)

Level 56 now, and I’m starting to really get a feel for the new skills that have been added to Paladin.

Paladin often drew some criticism — or, rather, accusations of being “boring” — for the fact that it was a relatively straightforward class to play, with only two real combos of abilities to use in different circumstances compared to a much wider array of things to do if you’re playing a Warrior. Its main perk over its raging counterpart, however, was its survivability; Warriors have a ton more HP than Paladins, but they also take more damage, while Paladins have fewer HP but a lot more in the way of defensive abilities to mitigate or even nullify damage.

Still, though, I understand the criticisms; once you unlocked all the abilities to form your basic combos, it very much became a case of pressing ability 1, 2, 3 and occasionally stepping out of enemy ability telegraphs. Post-50, though, things get a lot more interesting.

The oddly-named Sheltron, for example, is an ability whose usefulness doesn’t become immediately apparent. What it does is guarantee that you will block the next physical attack you take. Blocking an attack is usually determined by random chance, influenced by the stats on the shield you’re wielding alongside your sword. Sheltron guarantees a block, and while blocking doesn’t nullify damage altogether, it does reduce the damage by a significant amount. It also has the handy side-effect of restoring some of your magic points when the block goes off, meaning that the Riot Blade combo is no longer the only way to regenerate MP.

Blocking also allows you to counterattack with a move called Shield Swipe, which is actually one of the Paladin’s more potent offensive moves, and also inflicts a status that prevents the enemy from using abilities of the “weaponskill” type. It’s not quite as good as a Stun or Silence, but it can be helpful and give a moment’s grace. The damage is very nice, though — particularly as it’s been buffed since its original incarnation — and it also now generates aggro, meaning you’re not losing out by weaving in a Shield Swipe when it’s up.

The other ability I’ve had the opportunity to play with now is Goring Blade, which follows on from the Riot Blade combo, previously used just for regenerating magic points to allow you to keep casting Flash, your main means of controlling larger groups of enemies at once. Goring Blade, meanwhile, has a solid initial hit followed by a damage-over-time effect. Paladins don’t do a lot of damage generally — it’s not their role, after all — but adding the ticks of damage to what you’re doing anyway — particularly if combined with other DoT effects like Circle of Scorn and Fracture — you can actually put out some fairly respectable numbers. Plus Goring Blade has like the coolest visual effect of all Paladin’s moves that I’ve unlocked so far.

I just reached level 56 this evening, which is a level at which I unlock another new ability. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I’m very much looking forward to finding out and experimenting with it — one of the most exciting things about the new expansion is the fact that everyone is getting these new abilities at the same time, so there isn’t yet an established “right way” to do things. As such, experimentation is key, and it’s really rewarding to work out an efficient use of abilities for yourself.

But anyway. That’s three days in a row I’ve talked about Heavensward. (It’s really, really, really good.) I promise I will attempt to talk about something else tomorrow. Probably. Maybe.

1978: Some More Heavensward Thoughts

Spent some more time playing Heavensward today and am having an absolute blast with it.

It’s been an odd adjustment to move from the rather freeform, “pursue your own goals” gameplay of a level cap character back into the routine of doing quests, exploring and all manner of other things. But I’m enjoying it a lot, particularly as so far Heavensward is proving itself to have a wide variety of things to do and ways to earn those all-important experience points.

The main story quests have been very good so far. They always were mostly quite interesting (though in the post-50 ones there was quite a lot of lugging boxes around and other menial tasks in between the more dramatic moments — not exactly the Warrior of Light’s finest hour) but Heavensward has raised the bar somewhat.

One way in which it’s done this is through the use of instanced quest battles — scripted encounters that take you out of the main multiplayer world and put you in your own private little area to complete objectives. In A Realm Reborn, these were usually fairly small scale but fun; in Heavensward they’re much more ambitious affairs with their own unique mechanics. One particular highlight relatively early on sees you running through one of the earlier dungeons by yourself in the attempt to rescue a prisoner — while you do so, their captors start filling the place with poison gas, so you have to deal with that as well as finding a way to release them.

The main story itself is interesting and feels more focused than A Realm Reborn, too. Taking a somewhat darker overall tone, the plot thus far has seen the Warrior of Light (you!), one of your erstwhile companions and two other characters who each played roles in A Realm Reborn exploring the lands beyond Ishgard in an attempt to stop a war between the Dravanian dragons and Ishgard that will doubtless end with much death and destruction on both sides.

A Realm Reborn set up dragons mostly as fearsome, dehumanised foes to be treated with respect but defeated nonetheless. They played a relatively minor role in the overarching storyline until the latter hours and the Binding Coil of Bahamut storyline, but they were there nonetheless — and as you progressed, particularly through the Bahamut narrative, it became very apparent that they weren’t quite the simple foes you might have expected them to be based on their appearances in other fantasy media.

Heavensward runs with this theme, with both the main story and sidequests going some distance to help us understand the dragons a little better. One questline in particular sees you helping out an Ishgardian who is essentially a “racist” of sorts against dragons — he refuses to believe they are anything more than monsters, but as you complete his quests, both you and he come to see that the dragons apparently have feelings and society just like the humanoids of the world.

The sidequests are kind of interesting in that they further your understanding of the game world much like in A Realm Reborn, but unlike the base game, the darker tone seeps in quite often, with many quests ending in less than perfect circumstances. In some regards it feels like some cues have been taken from Nier — also published by Square Enix — by demonstrating that sometimes, even with your best intentions and god-felling skills and abilities, you simply can’t bring about a happy ending for everyone. It’s sobering, but very much in keeping with the overall tone.

Then you have boss fights in which you and seven friends take on a giant insect god with a penchant for swinging four gigantic swords around at once, and you remember that this is still very much a Final Fantasy game at heart — and oh, do I love it for it.

1977: To The Heavens

Well, it’s finally here: Final Fantasy XIV opened the doors to its first full expansion Heavensward today — for those who preordered it, anyway — and I’ve spent literally all day playing it.

It’s good.

The story follows on directly from the end of the 2.55 story arc, which I won’t spoil here for those who haven’t seen it in all its ridiculous and tragic glory. Suffice to say, however, that it provides good reason for the Warrior of Light (that’s you!) and occasional companion Alphinaud to head in the direction of Ishgard, a region which had previously been closed off to outsiders, but which became a little more open-minded after seeing how you (and seven friends) fended off an absolutely massive dragon towards the end of A Realm Reborn.

The city of Ishgard itself is beautifully rendered, being somewhat similar in design to a cross between Final Fantasy XI’s cities of San d’Oria and Jeuno. It has its own very distinctive character that is separate to the three previous city-states we had the opportunity to visit in A Realm Reborn — the verdant, nature-filled environs of Gridania; the tall towers and tall ships of Limsa Lominsa; and the juxtaposition between extreme affluence and extreme poverty of Ul’Dah — with an austere, almost unwelcoming facade and some beautiful architecture. The kind of place where you’d be slightly afraid to touch anything, lest you befouled or defaced it in some way or another.

Outside the city, things get interesting. Early on, the main scenario quest sends you off in two separate directions: in one direction lies the Coerthas Western Highlands — a snowy, mountainous region similar to the existing Central Highlands region, but with more in the way of sheer cliff faces and inconvenient but impressive-looking lumps of rock all over the place — while in the other lies the Sea of Clouds, a floating archipelago of islands in the sky where skies are often clear and blue by simple virtue of the fact that the islands are above the clouds, but whose altitude drops the temperature to less-than-inviting levels. There’s a huge contrast between these initial two areas; Coerthas is drab, monochromatic and somewhat grounded in reality for the most part (huge dead dragon corpse aside), while the Sea of Clouds is dramatically colourful, the stuff of pure fantasy. I haven’t proceeded further afield just yet, but the main story is shortly to have me heading for Dravania, home of the dragons, so I’m interested to see how that compares.

One really striking thing about Heavensward is its sense of scale. A Realm Reborn was no stranger to sprawling environments that were impressive to behold, but Heavensward takes it to a new level. Ishgard is gigantic and imposing in the same way an old cathedral is; meanwhile, the field maps are huge in terms of both surface area and variation in altitude — the latter aspect of which is, in part, designed to accommodate the new flying mounts you can ride around after completing the surprisingly enjoyable task of hunting down a number of hidden “aether currents” scattered around the region.

Another striking thing about Heavensward is nothing to do with its architecture, however: a good 80-90% of the original voice cast appears to have been replaced, meaning some characters sound quite different to how they sounded in A Realm Reborn, with several even having picked up regional accents (primarily Yorkshire so far) in the intervening period. It’s initially somewhat jarring, but overall the quality of the voice acting is much better than A Realm Reborn. This isn’t particularly difficult, however, because although A Realm Reborn had an excellent localisation (albeit one that diverged quite a bit from the original Japanese script and took on something of a life of its own) its voice acting was passable at best and woefully awful at worst. At least in English it was, anyway; the Japanese voice acting makes use of well-known voice talent like Rie Tanaka (Hyperdimension Neptunia) and Eri Kitamura (Senran Kagura) and as such has always been pretty good, but it’s clear that the English dub was perhaps, to put it politely, done a little bit on the cheap side.

It’s not entirely surprising, mind you; A Realm Reborn was a huge risk for Square Enix given Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0’s critical and commercial failure. As such, the decision to perhaps skimp a bit on the voice acting budget — many scenes in A Realm Reborn and indeed Heavensward also are unvoiced — was understandable. However, since A Realm Reborn achieved the seemingly impossible and rescued an all-but-dead MMO from oblivion, turning it into one of the company’s greatest success stories in the process, it’s gratifying to see that a bit more effort has been put into aspects of the presentation such as voice acting — even if the change in some characters’ voices is a little surprising the first time you hear it.

I’m yet to try out a huge amount of the new gameplay features — I’m concentrating on levelling my main class Paladin to 60 before levelling anything further — but the new skills for existing classes look interesting, and the altogether new classes seem to be really cool, though it looks as if “lolDRK” is going to become the new “lolDRG”. (Context for those unfamiliar: for the longest time, Dragoons (DRG) were notorious for dying a lot, due in part to their low magic resistance but also due to awkward animation locks on certain skills making it difficult to move out of the way of attacks; hence, “lolDRG” as the response to a Dragoon’s inevitable death; Dark Knights (DRK), however, appear to be ready to take up the mantle for themselves, from what I’ve heard so far.)

Oh, and the music is amazing. And the story is interesting. And I’ve fallen in love with this stupid game all over again. There goes the next few years of my life…

1952: Orderly Play

With Final Fantasy XIV’s first expansion Heavensward coming in about a month’s time, I’ve been doing some thinking, particularly as I’ve dialled back the amount I’ve been playing vanilla Final Fantasy XIV during this “lull” between the story finale a while back and the launch of Heavensward next month.

You see, this “lull” period has allowed me the opportunity to get caught up on some other games — or, well, if we’re honest, to dive head-first into the rather wonderful Omega Quintet, which I adore — and I’ve been enjoying that a great deal. This may sound like a “first world problem” of the highest magnitude, but anyone who has ever indulged in an MMO will likely be familiar with how easy it is for such games to “take over” to the exclusion of anything else. It’s not necessarily a problem when it happens, but when you have lots of other games that you really want to play, and never really seem to have any time to play them, that’s when it needs to be addressed — or you need to make some tough decisions as to what you might “sacrifice”.

Anyway. The short version is that I have no intention of stopping playing Final Fantasy XIV completely as I’m too invested in the game experience as a whole, including the friendships I’ve developed as a result of playing it. But I also have no intention of sacrificing the (probably literally) hundreds of other games I have on my shelves and haven’t played yet. As such, then, some sort of compromise would appear to be in order.

Then it struck me — actually not for the first time, since I’ve had these thoughts before. A relatively straightforward solution to the issue — and one that I’m aware won’t be ideal for everyone, but which I think I might be able to stick to — is to treat gaming like any other hobby that requires a significant time investment: schedule and organise it.

This may sound like a bit much for something that many people regard as lightweight, somewhat “disposable” entertainment (though, I hasten to add, I’ve never been one of those people) — but think about it. Someone who’s really into tennis probably doesn’t play tennis every time they have some free time. Someone who’s a member of a book club isn’t constantly attending meetings. Someone who likes live music isn’t constantly at concerts. There’s balance; you do different things at different times, particularly when there’s a social element.

As such, I feel that going into Heavensward, it would probably be a good idea for the sake of my own sanity and satisfaction to specifically set aside times for playing Final Fantasy XIV — as a sort of “weekly event” or meeting — and times for playing other things. And then stick to them. That way, I won’t feel the strange “guilt” I feel about not playing Final Fantasy XIV when I’m playing something else, or the corresponding and equally strange “guilt” I feel about playing Final Fantasy XIV as my backlog of PS2, PS3, Vita, 3DS and PC games continually grows faster than I can complete them. The inherent benefit of something like this, too, is that it allows me to set some sort of schedule for experimenting with things that I’d like to explore more, like streaming and recording gameplay videos.

I’m not entirely sure what the right “balance” is as yet, but that’s something I can probably work out over the course of the next few weeks as we count down towards Heavensward’s launch. It’s something I’m keen to get right, though, because as I’ve already said, I have no intention of giving up Final Fantasy XIV, but I also really don’t want to feel like it’s eating into opportunities to play other things, too.

So I’m thinking I might experiment a bit starting this week. I’m going to try having maybe two Final Fantasy XIV evenings that are reserved exclusively for FFXIV purposes; one of them will probably be Monday, as that is one of the two nights we customarily raid, and I’m thinking that the other will probably be Friday, since that’s the end of the week and consequently a good opportunity to stay up and socialise with others. Weekends I’ll take as they come; I’ll play FFXIV if I feel like it — and we raid on Sunday nights anyway, even if I don’t play any more than that — and I’ll play other stuff without “guilt” if not.

If two days midweek doesn’t feel like enough time to Get Things Done in the game, I’ll consider it again. But we’ll see.

This has probably not been a terribly interesting post for you to read, dear reader, and for that I apologise. However, it has been helpful for me to “think out loud” in this way and come to some sort of conclusion. So if you stuck around and watched me do that, uh, thanks for your commitment and understanding, I guess? And perhaps I’ll see you in Eorzea on Friday!