October 2023 Version Update

It was just a storyline, that gave us much better end rewards than I would've expected. It was never advertised to add new mobs, zones, etc; as nice as that would have been.

Comparing ROV to TVR just doesn't make sense to me. The 2015 dev team was almost positively better staffed than the 2020+ team.

If XIV were a spiritual successor to XI with better graphics and a better UI then sure. It is not. The two games could not be more different.

1.0 probably burned them so much they didn't want to risk making a hardcore game like XI and having it fail.

Didnt they say there would be a new endgame area with TVR?

Sortie?

I guess it's not new since it's Vagary

Using that logic FFXI should have ended after CoP because it ended the Zilart storyline completely. This is the ToAU of FFXIV. Honestly, the story for XIV was great through Endwalker, and the stuff since dealing with the 13th is interesting and opens up the possibility of an expansion there, or on any of the other remaining shards. I completely disagree with you.

YES. And SE dashed this RNG's hopes of a double light endgame event in Valhalla, for more darkness and more running.

And honestly, I'm of the belief that the game gained almost nothing from TVR- the storyline was all over the place discombobulated, the ending was a massive letdown, and the result of it is driving players away from XI faster than the plague.

Some really great rings? That justifies wasting resources on a bad storyline and unwanted content? nah. I love my Lehko's, but not that much. I'd rather they have skipped it completely and put those resources somewhere else in the game.

Would've been double dark anyway

Double Dark so you can more easily land sleep.

Dems da rulez.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eZB_ngFuc4&t=2441s

@ 40min40sec~

seems like Sortie is what we got instead of this? :<

Oh yeah TVR was smoke and mirrors and slog through content. They really made us go back and forth across Vanadiel and talk to every last *** npc. That wouldn't be so bad but that's what we already did with Rhapsodies. Clearly they told the creators to stall stall stall and make it lengthy... I mean that was their developer goal... not to be fun, just to stall content.

I think it took like a year+ and they promised the world the whole time but it fell so flat.

The rewards arent bad for the slog, but the way they rolled it out is beyond laughable.

Yeah that looks cool as hell and we got nothing that looks like it. Just like they didn't finish up with the NPC during the Siren quest that I assume is Rem because they never said his name and kings clearly live forever in Adoulin

not as bad aS WOTG tho lol

When your options are TVR or nothing, I choose TVR. Make no mistake, those absolutely were your options.

I was perfectly fine with RoV being the end of the story and it seemed so were SE as the end of RoV felt like the end. The song, the choir of players, the thanks to us for playing etc so for me TVR seemed pointless and a half-assed attempt of trying to give 'new' content. I would have been fine without it. Content for the sake of content isn't it for me, most of TVR has been meh and soured me on the game when I returned to complete it.

Now if TVR was the beginning of a new arc and a new chapter in the story of Vana'diel where we knew we were getting more stories and more expansions then that would have been cool.

That's some food for thought I guess.
On one hand I absolutely agree with you.
On the other hand, I don't really know.

Is TVR (and everything related to it) better than nothing? Well, yeah?
Would that (little?) money been better spent with something else, with just content and no new story, which as many said here and I can't disagree, wasn't really all that necessary?
Well, we can't say of course, but on a hunch I'm afraid that yes, it might have been better.

RoV was, at least to me, a really epic ending to almost all of the FFXI stories, a truly nice closure.
TVR instead is, I dunno... I apreciate their effort, I apreciate the fact that they tried to tie together loose ends, they focused on secondary chars that got skipped during RoV, they really put a lot of "effort" in trying to dig old, barely mentioned stories, and try to build something bigger upon them.
I truly, truly apreciate that they did that sort of work.
But at the end of it all I personally find that the final result was still quite unimpressive and disappointing.

So yeah, part of me thinks that all that "effort" might have been better spent in more game content without any particular story.
FFXI really didn't need a new story after RoV, I'm afraid.

I would have preferred to not do TVR. The story wasn't good. We already got a recap in Rhapsodies. It was 100% chore and no stakes.

I don't care why I'm murdering the same recolored mobs for psyche every month since it doesn't go to Valhalla or a new zone or anything. No Sky, No Sea, No Jima, No Abysea.

All I needed was access to Sortie, uncapped galli, and the ability to start a prime weapon. Here's your grind players. Get to it. It's like Vagary again but there are new weapons in there so you'll do it.

Done. That's all I needed.

Sortie is short and cheap like Meebles, so why am I doing the work that is usually associated with unlocking an entire endgame area with more than 1 thing to do in it? The whole experience was further diminished by a generic story that was intentionally dragged out for the Anniversary. So the extra little bit of perceived dishonesty is probably why my opinion of TVR is so low.

New mobs, zones, etc was off the table from the beginning is the issue.

What more can they really do while only using older zones/mobs/mechanics?

You don't seem to understand. You are supposed to work on prime weapons. Everyday. From there you just keep going and going. If someone isn't on that day replace them. You can't stop or you are wasting time. Now keep grinding prime weapons. Don't... I repeat, Do not stop. Now once you get that weapon to tier 5. You make another one. Do not stop. Keep making another. Every... day...

This is the worst gameplay loop I've seen in a while. I'm impressed not only with how bad it is but how SE doesn't even bother to address it. I think they believe they did an amazing job with this and with the 20th anniversary. My opinion on why the players have been silent is because SE did a good job dressing it up with how long it took to implement the whole thing (Sortie coming out with a 100k cap, Fakely push-back updates so no hype for content would generate. Weapons were never teased or shown until the day of release with no one able to test which was worth creating, making it a leap of faith with their playtime) Perfect control of the implementation made it coincide with the anniversary so the game could whither away without a peep

I remember when Sortie was released I was like "No way this the final event SE is making" Boy was I wrong.

anything to keep people playing. Im glad i broke the circle. Stopped playing for a few months now. The only thing i miss is doing stuff with my online friends :/
I did try 1 month and stopped again. Nothing changed. Everyday do the same thing is getting boring. Sortie-ody 2hrs max online and you're done for today doing it again tomorrow. Nah i cant do it anymore.
Dont miss the rmt shouts btw. Thats one of the mayor things that made it more annoying to play.

I keep alternating between positive (hopeful) and negative sentiment towards SE. All I can rationalize at the moment is: "Let's see what happens after February, when FF7: rebirth comes out and the developers get redistributed all over again."

WOTG was actually good for the most part when it came to the story. The problem with it was laundering money towards xiv bombing and the wait between patches. Walk of echoes may have been bad, but they were only secondary issues compared to the fact that you had to try and relearn what the plot was each time because it had been 6 months since the last time you saw the npcs.

This is one of the things that honestly rubbed me the wrong way. And then they just removed the galli cap later and said "hey now you can stockpile points for that weapon". They didn't even do that with Odyssey segments (at launch, you could stockpile points before Gaol was released). They REALLY went out of their way to strain your time with Sortie. It was intentionally designed to waste your time: from the extremely convoluted Ruspix's plate system, the low drop rate (but exorbitant galli cost) on starstones, the absolutely TERRIBLE Earring system without any reward exchange process, the insanely huge maps that made travel boring and redundant, and the one per day event style was all deliberately created to force people into Sortie every single day without breaks to drag out the content as long as possible. They didn't even try to hide it.

I'm trying to post less here. Honestly, I hate being negative. I want SE to wake up but they aren't even in this area code to even care.

This week we try Arebati V25 again. timed out at 6% - 2 weeks ago and could hear groans of 6 different IP Addresses

I imagine they saw that some people had stocked up 1m+ segments, basically enough to never run the content again, then applied that as a lesson to Sortie and capped it to force people to keep participating.

I think it was a dumb way of doing it, but I suspect that's where that came from.

You could have stockpiled 50 bajillion muffins and multiple stacks of all -drites. Still wouldnt matter because you're subject to 5 Voracious Psyches per month.

I just forced myself to do Meeble Burrows for the first time. An ilvl version with ilvl versions of all the gear (including the ones buyable with points) would be great content and easy to make. Keep everything the same but ilvl the mobs up, add a 2nd type of currency (so you can't just do old meeble burrows and buy new gear), and adjust the time you have to do them on some if needed.

Telling you that for years. It ain't the first time they've deliberately designed things maliciously.


It's a lesson learned from delve 2 and finally applied.

I don't even think many of the NA players even stocked 1m segments, mostly everyone was late to the party. I saw one JP player in a video at Goal release with like 180k, but that was when point total was like 5-6k.

I'm less concerned about the potential for players to store 1m points before the release of the bigger event; I'm more bothered with the initial design of sortie and Gallinaufry in general. It forced you to spend your points instead of save them for empyrean+3 upgrade if you couldn't get a starstone, which in some cases was one step forwards two steps backwards. Ideally, you could have done an upgrade every two days, but if you were unlucky and couldn't get a stone, you had to buy one, but then take an extra 1-2 days to farm back up the points. The 100k point cap created a frustrating bottleneck where you sometimes weren't making consistent progress towards gear. It's relieved now, but they intentionally made it miserable at launch so players wouldn't finish too quickly, which is kind of lame. Besides, primes require a monthly roe item anyways, so even an initial surplus of points would have been eventually bottlenecked, so the launch 100k galli cap was really just an annoying roadblock to stop players from getting gear too fast. Artificial limitations just because.

How about NO? :-P

I mean it's obviously a highly subjective matter and I'm speaking specifically about the plot and not the expansion as a whole (which had several very good aspects in the end, imho).

I dunno, in my opinion several things improved from one expansion to another, like the dialogues, translations, cutscenes, animations, but if we're talking specifically about the plot WotG feels like it's a teenager light novel to me.
It has that sort of style.
And at its core it's a huge series of retcons to create plot from... nothing?

If they really wanted to set an expansion in the past, then it should've been truly the past, not the past from another dimension, not adding the multiverse so early into FFXI, and let us explore the really cool parts of Vana'diel's past, Tavnazia, all that sort of stuff.
I dunno, to me the WotG plotline was a huge mess. Then again I hated the "cuteness" of the protagonist princess Lilisette, which I think instead is probably the most liked character by FFXI players? So it's clear I'm the strange one here, I guess.