Archive for MMO

72 results.
Nov11

Newfound Memory

by Rindis on November 11, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

So, we’re approaching the halfway point of the patch cycle between FF XIV: Endwalker and the next expansion. 6.25 came out a couple weeks ago, and Smudge and I have been spending a lot of time with the new Variant Dungeons feature, and enjoying it!

Now, there’s a couple of raid options on this called Criterion Dungeons, but we haven’t tried that yet. For one thing, we want to get through the regular part first. For another, it’s much more interesting to us, since it is meant for 1-4 characters, and Smudge and I are going through it together, whereas the rest needs four or eight. The general idea with the Variable Dungeons is that it branches at certain points, and each branch has an ending associated with it; there’s 12 endings, and a lot more than 12 branches. Sadly, we had to give up and look up a guide for the last ending we needed. We generally got the first eleven on our own, which is better than I thought we’d do.

Beyond that, the mechanics of the place are interesting, as you always have two boss encounters, and the first one is always the same, even when on different branches, while the last one depends on the door you went through at the very start. However, the mechanics those bosses present you with depend entirely on the path you’ve taken. There’s common themes and the like, but there’s a lot of variations built into the main fight, and that is a very interesting idea.
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Feb22

Endwalker

by Rindis on February 22, 2022 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, a bit ago, Smudge and I got through the main story of FF XIV: Endwalker.

It… was quite a ride.

Overall, I’d say Shadowbringers is still the best the story has been, but this came really close, and largely falls down on a couple of smaller bits. The story, if anything is bigger (in content) than the massive epic that the previous expansion was. So big, it’s really easy to get caught up in later portions and forget just where the story started. Which is a really successful bit of immersion, but also, the story is just too big for your head without really stepping back to try and look at it again.

[Massive spoilers of the entire expansion plot ahead!]

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Sep10

Death Rewritten

by Rindis on September 10, 2021 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

It’s been a while since I’ve taken time to look over just how Final Fantasy XIV is going these days. Just about nine months in fact. The next expansion, Endwalker, has been announced, and I’m busily avoiding as much spoiler material as I can.

I did, however, get the benchmarker and try it out, along with a bun-boy.

Not that I have time for alts, mind you….

Spoilery discussion of patches 5.4 and 5.5 ahead…

The latest two big content patches of course have set up the plot for the next big story arc, the one that’s apparently going to finish off the main arc of all of this, and then everything after that will effectively be a sequel.

But first, lets talk about Ishgard:
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Dec12

Reflections in Crystal

by Rindis on December 12, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

By the time you read this, patch 5.4 will have come out for Final Fantasy XIV, and I’ll be starting down the road leading to the fourth (currently unannounced) expansion for the game. I’ve just come off a week of vacation, and I spent far more time in-game than I meant to (I meant to spend more time reading and in Stellaris and EU IV than I did; par for the course).

Last time I wrote on this, was just as 5.3 was getting ready to come out, so lets start with the big things. The content for that patch was mostly wrapping things up from the main Shadowbringers story, and taking care of the main dangling plot threads. And I can say that that was just as well handled as the rest of the story has been, and came to a solid stopping point.

(Things might get a little spoilery for a bit here.)

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Aug10

Vows of a Fallen Star

by Rindis on August 10, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

I’ve been meaning to say a few things about Final Fantasy XIV for a while now. Since my last post, patch 5.2 has come out, and patch 5.3… hasn’t come out.

By the normal schedule, 5.3 should have been out in early July, but with 2020 being… the mess that it is, SquareEnix had to delay things, and it’ll finally be out about a day after this post.

While frustrating for a lot of people, this has actually been very good news for me, as it means I’ve had a lot of extra time to get caught up on more side-projects in game. First off, I’d kind of given up on crafting after getting crushed by difficulty of high-quality crafting in the Heavensward level range. A bit ago, SE really went in and re-did crafting, and took a lot of randomness out of it. There’s still the good-excellent-poor conditions to deal with, but the bulk of the abilities lost their 90-70% success rates, so you’re not gambling on something working at all.

At any rate, I’ve now gotten my four primary crafting classes up to max, and have gone through the associated stories. In addition, both mining and botany (which was a secondary for me) are maxed out. I’ve got more I’m working on, and I’m a bit behind on getting the Skysteel Tools (the relic ‘weapons’ for crafting and gathering), but this is the best shape that’s been for ages.

In addition to that, Thayrin and I have gone through the two available beast tribes for Shadowbringers. These are the FF XIV version of dailies, where you grind reputation… and get to learn more about the non-(demi)humans in the world. We did the latest first, the Qitari, who are a small, peaceful race returning to Rak’Tika now that the lightwarden is gone, and they explore some of what the Ronkan Empire was like. The other are the pixies, notably those who deal with the dreams of children, and you get go to the dream realm, which starts out plain, but ends up as a fairly heavily decorated mini-zone:

(The slides actually work. Sadly the roller-coaster/tram—the red platform running across that shot—does not.)
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Jan20

Shadowbringers

by Rindis on January 20, 2020 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Okay, since last I wrote here, Smudge and I have caught up with the story in Final Fantasy XIV, bringing us to a place we’ve never been before. This includes the latest major patch, 5.1, which I’ll get into another time. Right now, I’m just talking about the latest expansion, Shadowbringers.

First off, I have to say it’s excellent. FF XIV has gone from a ‘recommend, but remember it needs a subscription’ to ‘recommend, but the best parts are late in the game’, to ‘it doesn’t matter, you should see this’, and it’s all because the writing has gotten better each time.

I… was nervous about this expansion when it was announced. I don’t like ‘darker and grittier’, I don’t like anti-heroes, and didn’t want to be put in the role of one. Thankfully, that’s not what’s going on. In fact, it comes down to a semantic shuffling that ends up equating Astral aether/magic with darkness (instead of the assumed ‘light’ or ‘good’) and Umbral with light. (Urianger, I’m going to need that explanation again.) So the flood of light that got talked about waaay back in Patch 3.4, is Umbral in nature, and is a tendency to shut down all activity, producing stasis.

(Um, yes, I’m headed deep into spoiler territory from here on, keep reading, or even looking at the pretty pictures at your own risk! I’ll also note that Shadowbringers is much better without spoilers! Previous story didn’t have nearly as big events going on.)
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Aug09

Legend in Moonlight

by Rindis on August 9, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Well, Smudge and I have beaten my estimated FF XIV schedule. Kind of. I figured we’d finish off post-Stormblood content about a month after Shadowbringers came out. We actually beat that by a couple of weeks, finishing off in mid-July. However, we have yet to dive into the new expansion, as I’m trying to get Paladin up to 70 first. Apparently, they’ve largely skipped class quest chains this time (too many to do), and instead have chains by role (tank, healer, physical DPS, magic DPS), and I actually have a class ready in each, except for tank, which I was already leveling. So, we’ll dive in once that’s done. I have a feeling we’ll be pausing a few times in main questing for me to get four different classes up to speed….

As far as what we’ve actually been doing for the last couple months, the STB+ story was once again well done, though there’s still an annoying dangling thread or two. The first two parts concentrated on the fates of the two villains that were central to the two tracks of Stormblood: Fordola for Ala Mhigo and Yotsuyu for Doma. Fordola gets attention first, but after some good development, she just gets dropped from the plot, and never shows up again (though there is a short story giving what is next for her).

Yotsuyu gets a lot more attention; I always get the idea she was a favorite of the developers. Her arc is longer, and more developed, though Fordola’s probably asked harder questions. Yotsuyu also, in the best traditions of Japan loving Shakespeare, gets to be in a tragedy.


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May29

Stormblood

by Rindis on May 29, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Smudge and I recently finished off the main story for Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood. I’m amazed, I figured we’d still be at it when the Shadowbringers expansion comes out at the beginning of July. Not that we’re caught up or anything, there’s five big patches of content to get through too. If we take three months on that… we’ll be about a month behind when the expansion comes out.

First off, the Stormblood storyline features a fair amount of travel. And they provide a pretty decent map of the world as it’s been revealed so far:


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Feb26

Gears of the Horde

by Rindis on February 26, 2019 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Smudge and I are still going strong on FF XIV, and the last three months has been spent with various tasks, but we’re spending more and more time on the storyline, and are about ready to transition into Stormblood. Overall, there’s been a couple of distinct phases of the story, with the first one covering patches 3.1-3.3. That was a pretty nice end point for business left unfinished at the end of Heavensward.

As usual, there’s a number of different threads going on at once, but the dominant one was actually managing a stable peace (or even cease-fire) between Ishgard and the dragons. Nidhogg is still thirsting for revenge for a thousand-year-old betrayal… and trust does not come easy to a people who’ve been lied to for all that time. Despite the complications, this part remains reasonably straightforward, which works a lot better for SquareEnix than the more complex story they tried leading into Heavensward. It eventually centers around two things: a ceremony to celebrate the peace, and a final confrontation with Nidhogg, which also finishes off Estinien’s story (which started back in the level 30 Dragoon quest). The former involved a new iteration of a piece of art we’ve been seeing around to commemorate Shiva and Hraesvelgr.


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Nov28

Tales of the Zodiac Braves

by Rindis on November 28, 2018 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: MMO

Smudge and I finished off Heavensward a bit more than three months ago now, and you might expect that we’ve been getting well into the post-Heavensward content of FF XIV….

Not so much.

There are a few things from before the expansion that we had not finished up, and our efforts have been going to that. So not only have we not gone into Patch 3.1 yet, but we haven’t seen a lot of the newer zones lately either.

First off, we’ve been working on the Postmoogle quests, generally doing one per week. We’d probably just work on that while also doing 3.1 content, but the main thing we’re holding back for is getting our main-class relic weapons through all the stages they went through before Heavensward. Technically, you can just skip ahead to the beginning of the post-expansion versions, but Smudge has been determined to see it through (and it does get some extra achievements, along with some background and story for NPCs who won’t be going away any time soon). As expected for something originally designed to keep people busy when all the current story is done, every step along the way has its own brand of frustration, and takes a fair amount of time.

Possibly the most frustrating part was the Animus Zodiac weapons, which have you go through nine books, each of which has certain monsters, FATEs, Levequests, and dungeons to do. This was time consuming, and quite repetitive by the end, as there were only so many places of the right level range for them to draw from. After that, attaching 75 materia to a star scroll took some time and organization due to getting the materials, but we generally had the materia to hand. And then the next step of gathering light points took a bit simply because it was a big job, and we didn’t burn out on it. One of the most efficient ways of doing it was the three ARR+ raids, which we went through for a few weekends in a row, so we finally got familiar with them after also skipping by that on our way to Heavensward.

After that, the plan cooked up by the NPCs is to create an all-new weapon with better potential, and pour all the soul-energy of the old one into the new weapon. This required a fair amount of running around for more materials, and some things needed to be crafted. Luckily, between the two of us we have all the crafting classes in good shape… but part of it is taking apart (or desynthesizing) relatively expensive vendor items to get materials that only exist that way. Most of our desynth skills were not already up to the task, so that took some extra effort. I have gotten a better idea of how those skills work as a result, and why getting them into Heavensward levels is such a pain….

And once everything is ready, and you’re about to sacrifice your old weapon, the game warns you, twice:

Maybe I needed more soulbonding with it?
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