The story and the gameplay are often at odds with one another in Final Fantasy XIV.
At the halfway point of this run - 12 hours in - I've levelled my main class to 17 and two secondary classes to 14 and 11. I've focused on keeping my hunt logs fairly up to date, jumped into most Fates that I've run across at least once, picked up any quest I've seen that unlocks something/anything, and entirely avoided using Fast Travel.
It would be nice to say that I'm taking this approach in order to experience all that the game has to offer, and that is true, but only up to a point. I'm also doing it this way to avoid spending too much of my time on the Main Story Quest, because Story and Gameplay are the estranged parents of Final Fantasy XIV who sometimes come together for the sake of their MMO child, but it's all very awkward because they really really don't get along.
There'll be time enough in future posts to discuss many aspects of the Main Story Quest - the characters, the story, how it's all presented - but I like to keep these posts to a reasonable length and so for now I'm only really talking about the structure of the MSQ. For a start it's more or less possible to advance a character - in one class at least - exclusively through the MSQ and appropriate class quests, wih a few Fates thrown in here and there perhaps. Given now much focus is given to the story in this game it's a natural enough approach to take, and I certainly did so on my first character. When I'm constantly being told that the world is in danger and only I can prevent its destruction my first instinct isn't to wander off and poke around looking for side quests.
The problem is that it doesn't take long for the MSQ (and the class quests) to fall into a pattern of sending the players to a distant location to talk to someone, and perhaps have one short fight, before sending them on to another equally distant location to talk to someone else and, perhaps, have another short fight. Alternatively - and this becomes very common later on - the character is sent literally halfway across Eorzea to talk to someone and then has to go straight back to wherever it is they just came from, and this loop can be repeated several times in a row.
I don't necessarily like the quest hub model that places every objective within walking distance of the quest-giver. It can make the world feel very small, and strains the believability of the setting when the horde of rampaging monsters I'm being sent to kill are idling on the other side of the nearest hill. Putting some distance between quest-giver and quest objective can be a good thing, but FFXIV takes it to extremes. It's rather reminiscent of those moments in the Epic Story in Lord of the Rings Online where the character has to keep running back to Rivendell to have another quick chat with Elrond.
(When I've praised Guild Wars 2 for the brevity of its storytelling it's in part because I was playing that game concurrently with my initial experience of this one. As I mentioned a while ago it was a relief to find the three representatives of the Orders of Tyria I'd been sent to speak to all in the same place, rather than being sent halfway across the world and back again.)
Not much happens during a lot of these sequences that could reasonably be described as actual gameplay, and faced with this seemingly unending runaround it doesn't take long to get into the habit of picking up a quest, opening the map to see where it takes place, using fast travel to go straight to the nearest hub, and then running/riding/flying to the quest location heedless of anything else going on in the vicinty. The second most frequent criticism I see of FFXIV is that the open world is irrelevant,* and it's during the MSQ that this impression is most prevalent. Once the story is sending the character back and forth across areas they have long since out-levelled there's very little reason to stop along the way.
*I'll talk about the most frequent criticism of the game in my next post.
All of this comes up from time to time early on, but spirals entirely out of control later during the level 50 content that leads into the first expansion, Heavensward. I'll talk about that more when and if this character is unfortunate enough to get that far, at which time I imagine I'll beat on this dead horsebird at length, if only because I'll need some outlet to get me through all that interminable nothing a second time.
For now though I've been able to avoid the out-levelling problem by levelling up a variety of classes at different speeds. Already I've switched more than once to Thaumaturge (level 11) while en route to the next MSQ location where I can then switch to Gladiator (level 17) and continue the story. Doing so makes it much more likely I'll come across an on-level Fate* or hunt log mob along the way, and if I pick up a few more classes - as I intend to - I should have at least one in the right level range to add interest to most areas for the forseeable future.
*It is possible to level sync to Fates, making it viable for higher level characters to participate in them, but I find them much more interesting when I'm actually on-level.
So I haven't been using fast travel, for now, in an attempt to squeeze as much as possible out of areas I'd otherwise race through. I still use the chocobo rides from time to time though, because who can say no to a chocobo? Not me, and especially not when the chocobo theme music accompanies my journey.
I should say that sometimes it's not just a quick conversation and maybe a fight that awaits the character at each far flung destination. Sometimes there's a cutscene or three as well.
It may seem redundant to criticise a Final Fantasy game of all things for excessive use of cutscenes, but I'm going to do it anyway. Again I'm not discussing the quality of these sequences, or what happens in them, except in the most general terms, but only of how they impact the experience of the game as a game. I will say in passing though that these aren't the spectacular sequences so memorable from earlier games in the series - those do exist in this game, but it's mostly people standing around talking. There's more action in an episode of The West Wing.
When I decided to take the slow path on this character I mostly had in mind the aforementioned run up to Heavensward, but only because it had slipped my mind that at the point where I am on this character the MSQ goes into about forty minutes of consecutive cutscenes, broken up only by about five minutes of go-here-and-talk-to-this-person gameplay.
As I said in a previous post, having been through this before on another character does provide some much needed content to this massive info-dump, particularly during the flashback to the battle of Carteneau. Literally two thirds of that sequence are bafflingly opaque to a first time player since the leaders of the other two city states - in this case Gridania and Limsa Lominsa - share equal screentime with the only one the player has as yet been introduced to. There's a lot of wait... what... who? involved in watching this for the first time.
(Shortly after this there's another sequence which introduces the Garleans, but this is much more comprehensible. The magitek Darth Vader armor, red and black color scheme, casually killed minions and the music all make it abundantly clear that These Are The Bad Guys.)
The flashback to Carteneau comes at this point because this is where the three stories that take new characters through their respective starter cities all come together into one story - the main main story quest, so to speak. Lord of the Rings Online does the same thing in Ered Luin when the Dwarf and Elf stories converge in Gondamon*, and while opinions will vary on which game does it better there's no doubt that LOTRO does it faster. It's not often I can say that about a game that intentionally emulates the narrative style of JRR Tolkien.
*LOTRO also does it a second time when all of the racial prologues lead to the Prancing Pony, where chapter one of the Epic Story begins.
That Final Fantasy XIV takes so long to tie the initial stories together - and at the time of writing this post it still hasn't finished doing so - would perhaps be excusable if this was a one-off, but this is far from the last time the MSQ will bring the pace of the game to a screeching halt.
I daresay many players come to FFXIV specifically because it is Final Fantasy, and for those players long story sequences are as much a part of the series a great fight music and chocobos - they'd be unhappy if they weren't there. I also have to say that if I'd played the original version of Final Fantasy XIV I'd have spent this entire post praising this particular story sequence as one of the best things I've ever seen. The entire Warriors of Light/Carteneau sequence is a long, lavish and loving tribute to the player characters of FFXIV 1.0 and viewed in that light it's beautifully done.
(Still doesn't excuse all the later ocassions when the game forgets it's actually a game though.)
I don't have that emotional connection to the game, and that's my loss. For me FFXIV is one MMO among the many that I play, and as such I'll inevitably view it as an MMO first and as a Final Fantasy game second. In doing so I can't avoid the conclusion that while there's a lot of good content in the Main Story Quest it should absolutely not be the main focus when playing the game. It has to be done - progression in this game is mercilessly locked in step with progression through the MSQ - but this time around I'm going to take every opportunity to look around and explore the world. There'll be time enough later to save it.
Comments
Post a Comment