[quote=@SleepingSilence]


On a separate note, a question for everyone who makes FF14 their addiction. Just how much "I'm a final fantasy fan, I know the lore, I played the games" are you on a scale of one to ten?

[/quote]


I've played every mainline FF game, a lot of the spinoffs, and have written far too many essays about various games in the franchise. Even if I wasn't a fan of them, 14 would still be appealing to me just as a narrative, though admittedly I like slow burn things and will freely admit it often takes too long for 14's plot to go anywhere other than meandering - especially in the early going before they figured it out. At best, being a fan of the franchise mostly lets you appreciate some of the less obvious references (like the Crystal Tower raid in 2.0 just being Final Fantasy 3 again) in the same way that Final Fantasy 9 works as a standalone but also is filled to the brim with references of the games prior to it. 

I think the concern of FF14 not being exploration based is valid if that's what you enjoy out of the genre. For me, something like Tera is fun only in the smallest bursts because quest design in that game doesn't do anything to disguise its grind, meanwhile I've tried and failed to get into Guild Wars 2 like seven times and while I like the platformy viewpoint stuff, I hate the world quest shit that seemed to be the only way to really progress outside of story content. 14 is certainly an MMO that is focused heavily on its narrative but at the same time its held back by the fact that it has a console userbase in mind - and nothing against them, but there's also a reason why the console versions of STO and Tera are, like, basically dead. (Also because who wanted them anyway) 

Exploration never really becomes its true focus but at least in the expansion zones they don't just hand you full map completion for entering the area the first time so it's...something. 

As someone whose main MMO for years was SWTOR, I can tolerate a...mediocre MMO if I enjoy the narrative and fortunately 14 is above mediocre, even if it takes, for me anyway, way too long for a class to truly feel 'good' to play. And nothing is worse than when you're used to how a class feels at max and then oops now you're doing Sastasha again have fun idiot all your cool shit is unusable and it's like fuck I forgot.