Posts Tagged Shadowbringers

4 results.
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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