ALLGEMEINES

WAS BIETET FF14

MEINE WERTUNG 2020

A Caveated Recommendation

The Bad

• Buying the game can be frustrating. There are two methods: through Steam or through Square Enix's websites. If you buy it on one platform you cannot use it on the other. I HIGHLY recommend looking something up to walk you through it.

The Middling

• This is a story-driven game. It can be difficult to play with friends to go through quests since many of the main story quests will have you go into an instance by yourself. There are hundreds of hours of main story quests (it's thicc af), and almost all of it is good; however, some expansions are better than others and each have their own theme and build off of each other. ARR (vanilla) is arguably the worst, but begins to pick up about halfway through, and the rest of the expansions are excellent with Shadowbringers being one of the best narratives I've seen in an MMORPG.
• You can skip entire portions of story quests by purchasing story skips from the Mogstation. If you have disposable income and don't really care for the story, then you can buy these.
• Add-ons are against the terms of service since PC players and console players are playing together and add-ons that affect the game's code create unfair gameplay between the two. However, the game functions just fine without them.
• Buying the current expansion also unlocks all of the expansions before it. However, BUY SHADOWBRINGERS BEFORE BUYING ENDWALKER. IF YOU BUY ENDWALKER EXPECTING TO HAVE EVERYTHING ELSE, YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PLAY THE CURRENTLY RELEASED CONTENT UNTIL ENDWALKER RELEASES.

The Good/Excellent

• Your character can be every single class and profession (in FFXIV terms, jobs) and you can switch between them with literally a click of your mouse. This game respects your time immensely. Tired of playing the Archer/Bard? No problem! Switch on over to your Gladiator/Paladin and nothing changes except your class. Not only that, but classes receive something called an Armory Bonus that increases experience gained up to your maximum leveled class.
• Classes are all unique and morph into specialized classes. Class categories share a small pool of general abilities, like basic defensives or casting modifiers.
• There are daily quests, mostly in the form of Beast Tribe dailies. You can do 12 of these a day, and they reward you with unique currency that you can spend at the factions along with reputation. It might sound like a small amount of dailies, but the reputation gain is proportional. And better yet, flying isn't gated behind getting reputation with these factions (thank god). The reason this is a pro is due to the fact that it holds no bearing on anything else in the game and nothing is locked behind it (other than faction-specific mounts and pets and whatnot).
• The subscription is cheaper than WoW, and they give you veteran rewards every few months that you're subscribed.
• Chocobo racing and Gold Saucer nonsense. Be sure the play the mini and jumbo Cactpot (I call the jumbo Cactpot the Cuckedpot though because you'll never win the jackpot).
• The UI is entirely customizable down to the colors of enemy and friendly health bars. No need for an add-on or anything to change stuff around.
• Random drops exist, but that's not really the focus of the gear game, especially at end game content. Many duties (FFXIV's equivalent to dungeons and raids) will reward you with both random drops and tokens or currency to trade in for specific pieces of gear. This means you don't have to grind the same raid or trial for the specific drop for weeks, and instead just buy an equivalent piece instead.
• Gearing up a class at endgame is incredibly fast so that you can get into the meat and potatoes of the hardcore raiding content.
• The duties are all unique and bosses rarely repeat mechanics from other duties. Most of the duties don't have artificial difficulty scalers, like arbitrarily more health or damage. Instead, bosses rely on complex and interesting mechanics. Savage, Extreme, Unreal, and Ultimate boss fights will also scale with health and damage and will require a certain DPS check, but when you're doing these you know what you're in for and what is required.
• Duties have their own unique soundtrack, and many bosses also have unique soundtracks and battle music. Honestly, most of it is top tier music.
• Almost all previous content is brought forward into the new expansion or content patch. Dungeons from ARR still reward currency that is usable at max level. Some unique content from previous expansions are expanded on and given new activities to do. Gear/stat scaling is applied in a remarkably balanced way. Square Enix routinely patches current and past content, all the way back to 2.0 (ARR vanilla).
• The game is pretty. Gear sets are unique to each dungeon, trial, or raid, and many have dyeable versions that can be crafted (I'm looking at you, WoW, with your reskinned gear sets from every dungeon in an expansion). Most harder difficulty content of the same duty rewards equipment that looks completely different from the previous difficulty, or they follow a certain theme. Regardless, the equipment will look different and rarely is it recolored.
• Raids and trials aren't long endeavors that take hours upon hours to complete, or even days. Almost all of them can be completed in less than an hour, and if you're there for more than an hour then you're doing something very very wrong.
• The crafting in this game is just chef kiss. The same materials are used more or less throughout the whole game and can be farmed very easily. Not only that, but the game incentivizes you to use the crafting abilities to make high-quality craftables. In fact, it gives you the option to craft it quickly or take your time to really get that good good. There are also a few different types of crafting activities that involve items that are classified as collectables and reward special currency for nifty mounts, minions (pets), and cosmetics.
• The list goes on, but go see for yourself. The free trial includes ARR and the award-winning Heavensward expansion up to level 60 with no restrictions to the amount of time played. There are, however, some restrictions regarding social functions and in-game marketboard stuff.

The Verdict: 9/10