#dunno when i'll come back to ff14. maybe tomorrow. maybe next week. maybe by summer. i'm just glad that my brain is happy in skyrim again.

[racke7]

Me vs FF14 part... 3?

Sooo... recently I've gotten a bit frustrated with FF14.

A lot of this is due to FF14 locking a lot of cool items behind their subscription-paywall. (All PvP stuff, lots of dungeons, impossible-to-get materials, etc.)

However, this frustration also made me glance at the "game timers", from things like Treasure-Maps and the Command-Squadron (18h refresh-rate), to the refresh of the dailies (every 24h), and realizing that this is such a blatant case of psychological manipulation.

See, if you want to "optimize" your time playing the game? You effectively have to play it on an ever-rotating schedule (instead of just "at X time every day"). And whilst this level of dedication is very unlikely to be very common (it's not that important, surely), it does highlight a clear attempt of pushing its players to play: "several times per day, but not necessarily for very long".

And that's... basically the exact same manipulation-tactics that predatory mobile-games are going for (I should know, I was playing Arknights every day for well over three years).

And, as someone who recently quit one such game and greatly enjoyed the experience of not having to deal with that shit anymore?

Even if I've enjoyed dungeon-diving in FF14 (it really is a lot of fun, and you meet a lot of interesting characters), this has somewhat soured me on the game once again.

(I feel like I could probably shrug it off if I had a stable income and could just subscribe without worrying, but my long-term financial stability is very much in question, so...)

I'm definitely not uninstalling it tomorrow or anything, but my frustration with FF14 finally convinced me to pick up Skyrim again.

(Where I immediately made an incredibly bullshit-powerful character, because it's been so long that I forgot that attaining godhood is something you need to be actively counteracting if you want to have a good time in Skyrim.)

And as I was playing through Skyrim with a new-new character (that was very handicapped), it occurred to me that for all that Skyrim is incredibly shitty for many reasons, a lot of its early quests are actually remarkably dynamic and flexible.

FF14 has its MSQ that just goes on and on and on, and other quests and dungeons are interspersed between these events. You play through the MSQ (that is insanely long) to unlock the rest of the game basically.

In comparison, Skyrim really said "if you don't wanna, you can just focus on something else, no pressure". A few things are required for unlocking certain things (you need to be Dragonborn in order to get through the Civil War, etc), but generally? Pick a direction and start walking, the world isn't going to stop you.

The thing that specifically made me pause was Bleak Falls Barrow. As the first real dungeon, it obviously got a lot of extra-love, but still. You can end up at this dungeon in three different ways.

You talk to the shopkeep in Riverwood, and he asks you to track down the bandits that stole his unique-looking ornament.

You talk to the court-wizard of Whiterun, and agree to fetch some ancient wisdom-McGuffin from a deep dungeon filled with the undead.

You happened to stumble across it as you hiked through the mountain. (I don't think that the dungeon is locked, but I could be wrong.)

Regardless of how you got to that point, upon entering you're treated to a scene where a bunch of bandits talk about a "treasure" to be found. This sets the stage for when you find the ornament, along with notes about how it's apparently supposed to be "the key" for finding this treasure.

Then you go through the dungeon yadda-yadda-yadda, and now you have an already-used key along with the knowledge that this key was stolen from a shop in Riverwood. You also have a mysterious McGuffin, and if you go to Whiterun, the court-wizard will be very happy to see you already in possession of it.

It's a combination of two quests, and it basically sets both of them going in such a way that it doesn't matter how you got to that point, because you now have (almost) all of the knowledge to just finish both of the quests. And it's... honestly really smooth? I don't think I've every really paused to think about that before.

Skyrim has a well-deserved reputation as a buggy mess, with both boringly generic quests and incredible amounts of spaghetti-code. And there's definitely a lack of being able to really make choices, but-...

But when you compare Skyrim's freedom to FF14's? Holy shit, Skyrim is actually a marvel of its genre.

That's not to say that FF14's extremely linear MSQ is bad, it's just a very different kind of storytelling and gameplay than Skyrim. And I feel like I've spent so much time listening to gripe about Skyrim (and tearing my hair out over Skyrim not fucking working) that I feel like I've forgotten that it really is an incredible game in its own ways.