Square-Enix's marketing is certainly effective, as it turns out. I hadn't seriously played Final Fantasy XIV since 2014 when the game was first rebooted. I reached level 50 on my dragoon and promptly stopped. Although I really enjoyed my time with the game, I didn't feel compelled to continue playing or even level up other classes. In retrospect, I'm not totally sure why that was. It might have had something to do with a WoW expansion coming out at the same time and then getting burned out on MMOs in general. After all, there are a lot of other less time-consuming games out there to play.
The recent promotional videos for Shadowbringers, the game's brand new expansion went a long way toward winning me over. The game features such a wide variety of classes now that I felt like I was really missing out on something great. I really liked the game even when I first played it, but I've always wanted to jump back in and try some of the classes I missed like red mage, samurai, and ninja. The new gunbreaker and dancer classes are just icing on the cake at this point.
When I returned to the game, I discovered that I technically hadn't even beaten the game's original main storyline. It makes sense. I tend to have a habit of reaching the level cap in MMOs and getting out, citing the genre's tendency of never ending as my reasoning. Still, FFXIV is an MMO that has a very clear delineation of where the story of a particular outing ends. When A Realm Reborn ends, it does so in dramatic fashion. Just this weekend, my girlfriend and I played through the climactic final battle of the base game. It was actually very thrilling, even though we were a bit frustrated at the dizzying pace our group maintained throughout the final dungeon runs.
I played a bit more of Final Fantasy XIV around the time Heavensward came out, but even then I never managed to get into any of the actual expansion content. Even now, we're slowly making our way through the Seventh Astral Era quests that serve as the A Realm Reborn postgame. It's slow-going, because there sure is a lot to do. We've embarked on a series of quests to unlock The Crystal Tower raid, hard modes for a slew of different dungeons and trials, as well as migrated the Scions of the Seventh Dawn away from The Waking Sands to Mor Dhona. Although the amount of content we've unlocked is overwhelming, I'm actually really looking forward to doing as much of it as I can. I'm blown away at the general quality of a lot of this content.
Because Final Fantasy XIV syncs your party to a level appropriate for the content you're tackling, it always seems possible to experience these challenges in the way the developers intended. I can't help but make the comparison to WoW, where power creep and the advance of time rendered early group content entirely impotent. The last time I played, everything up to maybe level 80 was absurdly simplistic and boring, which just wasn't the case when a lot of that content originally debuted. FFXIV expertly sidesteps this issue. Although early dungeons are certainly more simple than later content, they do an admirable job of onboarding you with the class and role that you've chosen, instead of serving as a mindless button-mash serving only the purpose of accruing as much experience as possible.
My main concern at this point is that because there's so much content in the game, I'm wondering if I'm going to be able to make it up to expansion content before I'm buried in other new releases. Fire Emblem: Three Houses comes out in about a week, for instance, and I'm definitely going to devoting a significant amount of time to it when it does. I guess it's not a big problem to have at the end of the day. If Final Fantasy XIV needs to get sidelined, it will. I know it'll always be there waiting for me.
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