Competing Hobbies
Let me be honest for a moment here… For the past few weeks, my free time (that is, the time I usually devote to writing stuff here) has been slowly eaten away in an uncontrollable way by Final Fantasy XIV. Since the entire point of this exercise in blogging is to write article in a somewhat regular way, I feel driven to write something, yet those days my mind is more often wandering towards that game rather than towards finding my next topic.
As you may recall, I already mentioned getting recently acquainted with Square’s star MMO in a previous article. And for a while it was alright. I like MMOs, I have some extensive experience with the genre and generally know what to expect from them. And although I was surprised to enjoy FFXIV more than I thought, my experience with the game for the most part stayed within my expectations.
For reference, I first heard of FFXIV when the game was rebooted a few years ago. My go to MMO at the time was Star Wars: The Old Republic, which I liked a lot for what it tried to do with its story, but more importantly because I had a bunch of friends there and we were progressing through end-game at our pace. The usual gotcha of MMOs more or less; play for your friends, not for the game. Eventually, we grew bored of the game, split up and some people left to FFXIV. I didn’t follow though… At this point, I was quite over story-heavy MMOs, and given Bioware nearly spotless track, I didn’t expect something fundamentally better, story-wise, than SWTOR (which in retrospect, was more or less accurate given what FFXIV:ARR was at that time). So I went back to a more gameplay-driven MMO, namely Rift, for a while before dropping the genre entirely for a few years, like I have been doing for the past 15 years or so.
Then FFXIV continued to grow and continued to get more and more popular. To the point that I couldn’t ignore it anymore and decided to give it a try. And, again, for the most part it was completely within my expectation.Most of ARR is on par with SWTOR story-wise. It’s compelling, but feels a bit grindy, and have that weird feel where you are playing a MMO that sometimes plays like a solo game. FFXIV did something new though, it locked all it’s content behind story progression, and gated story progression with, pseudo raid bosses.
Honestly, that’s something insane in terms of new player experience. It means that if you want to play with friends being already established in the game, you have a 100 hours buffer period where you have to grind the story, and do challenging (by MMO questing standard) content — or you could just pay for it, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
But FFXIV kept growing through the years. And while it may have been on a somewhat similar level as SWTOR after its reboot, it started to become more. The first expansion was clearly a step-up story wise. Embracing even more the idea of being story-driven, with a long, convoluted, main story. The game started to feel less and less like an MMO and more and more like an actual cutscene-heavy RPG, with crazy bosses and epic fight gating the key moments of the story. Though it was clear the game remained a MMO nonetheless. The second expansion is, if you ask me, a bit below the first one, but mostly it continued this trend. Writing improved a lot and it started to feel like a working formula.
When I started to read about the third expansion though, I saw a lot of people calling it “one of the best, if not the best, FF story” and while those are claims easily made in the wake of post-release hype, it felt a bit too much widespread to be just that. Now, I don’t know anything about other FF games, but playing through Shadowbringers feels more like playing a traditional RPG than a MMO. For better and worse. Some RPG tropes are starting to show (collect the McGuffin, liberate X regions with a boss in each one) but they serve the storytelling in a beautiful way, and if anything they are tried and true ways to deliver an impactful story.
I never thought it would be possible to have a story like that in a MMO. It’s not even a question of whether the story is good or bad — it is very good though. It’s that the direction and the storytelling are the ones of a RPG, not a MMO. That’s shadowBringers’ tour-de-force. It feels like a story-driven RPG, implemented into an MMO game.
By any means, FFXIV’s Main Quest Scneario (MSQ) is both its best and worst quality. With a story that is thrice as long as it originally was the question of whether there is even worthwhile to get into FFXIV today deserve to be raised. And I won’t blame anyone thinking that it is too late. But if you do humor the overextended MSQ, then you get to experience where FFXIV really shines.
By the time you reach Shadowbringers, you have at least 150 hours of play behind you. Which means two things:
1) You have assimilated all the mechanics of the game and the only things that remain to explore is the story.
2) You have been “living” with those characters for hundreds of hours at the very least (and multiple years if you are an veteran player).
When writing in a pre-established setting, having those two points holding true for nearly 100% of your audience usually never happen. Mostly because it is globally considered a bad idea to force your audience to experience everything in order. Ideally, if you are going to write a sequel to anything, you want people to be able to jump in without prior knowledge and have fun. FFXIV has made a bold choice, to not allow that, and see where it can go from here. And I must stay, the result is something I never seen before. Full glad I am they went that way. It is a bold choice, one that put creativity and long-term player commitment a priority; which is all too rare in video games, and especially MMOs, today. For the game to be rewarded for it with critical and popular acclaim is only icing on the cake.
Finally, ShadowBringers does one last very clever thing that might explain why it stands apart from FFXIV’s previous extensions. The first thing that happen in the story is a soft-reboot of the world. Something that you usually want to do when you want to allow new player to directly jump-in into the new content. Though there is no way to do that in FFXIV, you either skip everything (and pay), or go through everything. That way, the story is free to goes in completely new directions while retaining the emotional attachment player have to characters and their personal stories. It feels like a new game, (or at the very least a new story) but built on the common ground that everyone up to this point is already familiar with: hundred of hours of background, lore and character development. To do this with this extent of success is only possible because of the MSQ and ultimately that is the reason why ShadowBringers feels like something completely different from what came before.
