Good Morning Friends! Remember yesterday when I said I was hesitant to finish up the Final Fantasy XIV storyline? Well… sometimes I contradict myself because I did precisely that. I was about maybe a third of the way catching up on the story when I started this mission over the weekend. I am honestly surprised at how fast that I managed to catch myself up. I went into this not being certain I would actually play Dawntrail, and now I find myself rather pumped for it. Truth be told I would have rather the Thirteenth storyline tied into the expansion, but I guess I am relatively happy to see it concluded for the time being.
As happy as I am with where the story wrapped up, I want to talk a bit this morning about the worst freaking part about this game. At two points last night I had to stop the flow of the story, to run to the market board and buy a piece of gear so that I could get over the arbitrary item-level gating requirements. Now I came back before the last set of crafted gear was put into the game so when I bought my way to relevancy I bought most of a set of 610 gear for a few million gil. This meant that my item level was sort of all over the place. I bought a new weapon when the last gear set went in giving me a single 640 item level item, and this mishmash was good enough to get me all the way to the last dungeon of the expansion.
When I set forth to do The Lunar Subterrane I needed an item level of 620 and I was sitting at 617. So I went to the market board, replaced my lowest-level item, and was able to get past this gate. It cost some 300k gil, but I figured I was probably good to go for a bit and could at least finish out the story. Then a few minutes later when I unlocked the final Trial… I was hit with a 5-level jump and again needed to make up the last two points to get over that hurdle. So once again I had to break my way out of the flow of the story to go pay my way to freedom again. It just feels awful to know that you have to keep getting nickeled and dimed by the market in order to see the conclusion of the story.
What I find most frustrating about this situation is… that Final Fantasy XIV has some rather damned good scaling tech. It would likely be trivial to scale players up to the minimum item level for a dungeon so that they can complete the story. Yoshi P has freely admitted that a large chunk of the player base returns right before the launch of a new expansion to catch up on the story… plays through the new expansion… and then disappears again until another expansion launches. It seems somewhat ludicrous that this has been a problem for EVERY expansion… and yet there has been nothing done to ease the pain. I am not saying that scaling should always be there… but folks catching up on the MSQ should be given a one-time pass of that gate so that they can actually see how things sort out without a lot of grinding. I have plenty of gil… it was easy for me to buy my way to freedom but not everyone has that option.
I think what makes all of this worse is that I am really rather pleased with how the post-Endwalker content was resolved. I had a lot of fun playing it. But there is this base level of resentment that I feel towards the game for draining my wallet just so that I could see it to its conclusion. Maybe I am just too used to Guild Wars 2 at this point where I set up a single set of gear several years ago and have been able to do everything in the game without ever needing to change it. I’ve gone through this with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker so I knew what I was getting myself in for. That does not make it feel any better to keep having to return to the Market Board to try and limp through the story gates, however.
All of that said… I am legitimately looking forward to Dawntrail. I am looking forward to seeing the new continent and I legitimately like Wuk Lamat. She reminds me of my friend Shandrah but with a Spanish accent. I don’t love some of the setup where we will be on opposite sides of a conflict from our friends, but I feel like before all is said and done we will end up together. I am very much looking forward to adventuring with Krille, and I am hoping that before all is said and done we get to see Zero once more. I became really invested in that character and want to see far more of her story and that of the Thirteenth. I’m also curious how the fuck Solution 9 fits into all of this because a weird cyberpunk city does not seem to make sense.
The post The Worst Part About FFXIV appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This is going to be a bit of a tangent post, but given that, I don’t have anything terribly pressing to talk about… I am going to roll with it. I have a problem with goals. What I mean by that is not that I necessarily have a problem setting goals, but that I have a problem with accomplishing them. There is something baked into my brain that upon accomplishing a goal that required quite a bit of work… I suddenly want nothing to do with the thing after achieving it. This has been a curse for me throughout the years, that upon cresting that hill and accomplishing whatever it was that I thought I wanted… I no longer want it anymore. For example, I set forth the goal of getting to level 100 in Diablo IV this season, and instead of reveling in the accomplishment and joining in all of the reindeer games that are gated behind that level… I mostly checked out of the experience.
Similarly, I had a blast with Mists of Pandaria Remix in World of Warcraft while I was grinding towards an objective. I wanted to unlock all of the gear slots, which required me to complete all of the heroic dungeons, and heroic scenarios, and complete all of the normal mode dungeons that I had to get groups for manually. Once I completed that… I fell into the routine of farming World Bosses every day and then checking out… basically losing all forward momentum. It isn’t just that I lose focus and fail to set a goal… I began to reject whatever activity it was that I was doing and hop furiously over to something else. In the case of PMIX I tried leveling a few more alts but never really gained the same level of enjoyment out of it.
Honestly, I am not sure why I am so surprised by this each time it happens. I know I experienced the same thing when playing through Dragonflight. I finished the story, did a few days of world quests, and then decided that I was mostly done with the game in its entirety and bounced. Even in my beloved Path of Exile, I have experienced a bit of this. I’ve made far fewer characters in this league than I have in any previous. I set forth a series of goals but the major overarching one was completing the Gruelling Gauntlet Grinds challenge, and after finishing that I mostly checked out of the league only to return recently when a friend needed assistance with something. It is like there is a toggle switch in my brain that flips when I have checked something off my “to-do” list and then immediately wants to shed any presence of that thing from my brain.
I think in part this is why I occasionally drag my feet when I am enjoying something. For example, right now I am having a blast in Guild Wars 2 again. I am slowly working towards crafting my third legendary weapon but trying not to grind it out so much so that it becomes one of these overarching goals of mine. Similarly, I’ve yet to finish up the Secrets of the Obscure campaign because I am somewhat afraid that once I do so I might check out of the game again for an indeterminate amount of time. It is like I am trying to keep the fun going for as long as I can before finishing things up. There is something about that finality that I have never liked. I hate finishing a book series for example, and have been dragging my feet on reading the 4th book in the Stormlight Archive series because I know… that is all we have for the time being.
I’ve been back in Final Fantasy XIV playing through the post-Endwalker story and have honestly been having a lot of fun with it. I did not expect to become emotionally invested in it quite in the manner that I have. Similarly, I am afraid that when I catch up to the story, I am going to “nope” out of the game as I have done before. Prior to the launch of Endwalker, I went on this whole mission to level everything to 80, and I accomplished it… then was mostly done with Endwalker the second I finished the story. Basically, I know that I do not personally have a healthy relationship with finishing things. I am not exactly certain how I played World of Warcraft for as long as I did. A lot of that was the fact that I was heavily engaged in a raiding community and with that many goals that were never fulfilled. As a solo player, I find that I get easily distracted by the next thing on the horizon when I finish with anything.
Maybe all of this is okay, and I should just learn to accept myself. However, I find myself jealous of folks who can stick with the same thing day in and day out without wavering. The folks who get super engaged in a single community baffle me, especially given that I was once one of those people. I am not sure what changed in my brain and whether or not I can recuperate the part of me that used to stick with something for years at a time. Granted I tend to hyper-focus on a single thing at a time, but also quickly burn through it. I am hoping to delay the inevitable with Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV for as long as I can so that I can at the very least see my way through Dawntrail and see the content drop for Janthir Wilds.
All of this said… I know that major distractions are looming on the horizon that will claim me. I know I will play Last Epoch Cycle 2 when it drops in early July. I also know that I am very likely to play my way through Path of Exile 3.25 when it drops in late July or early August. So maybe it is okay that I keep jumping ship to the next thing because ultimately given enough time… I return refreshed and ready for more. At some point, I want to dig back into Valheim or New World, because I feel like I am never 100% done with a game that I have hyper-fixated on in the past… I am just done with it for the moment. Maybe I am just living that content locust lifestyle.
I’ve joked and said that blogging is often therapy for me and that I don’t set out writing a post with a fixed ending. This is one of those cases because I started out the post pretty down on myself because of my inability to follow through after accomplishing a goal, and now suddenly feel less bad about that practice as I near the end of this post. Anyways if you have made it this far… thanks for sticking around for my nonsense.
The post Problems With Goals appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Yesterday I did something that I did not think I would actually manage to do… and that is get back into the Final Fantasy XIV Main Story quest. I’ve been saying for months that I left off at Rubicante but in truth apparently, I had played far enough to get right up to the Barbariccia fight. Look all of the vaguely Italian archfiend names from Final Fantasy IV have always flowed together in my head. When I last played the game I was apparently sitting at the Trial fight, so yesterday the very first thing that I did was dive into that. I feel like it is Pandaria Remix that is to thank for breaking my mental block against grouping with other human beings.
I’m actually somewhat into the storyline at this point. I did in fact play through to the point where I just finished fighting Rubicante and have plans to do some nonsense. The other thing that I did not expect is that I am now really invested in the character of Zero. I feel like I had just been very much locked in ARPG gameplay mode and coming back for Pandaria Remix has flipped a switch in my brain so that I am once again in “MMORPG Enjoyer” mode. I had been bouncing pretty freaking hard on anything that was not Guild Wars 2, which sort of sits in a happy medium between the ARPG and MMORPG genres. I figure that I will without a doubt catch up on the story before the Dawntrail head start begins at the end of the month. I am now actually finally in the mood for it I think.
Speaking of Pandaria Remix, I’ve now dinged level 70 on my Tauren Paladin over on Drenden. I’ve tanked a few world bosses at this point but have not gone so far as to tank any of the raids. I feel pretty weak at only having around 500k hitpoints. I still have a number of gear slots that I have not upgraded to the maximum dropped item level and in theory, I should probably do some more questing in order to get some more raw stats on my cloak. I really feel like blizzard screwed up on the cloak because they should have made the stats account-wide. It would have felt significantly better to play alts if everything you played was contributing to the same nonsense stat bomb.
I’ve also created a Viera Hunter over on Eonar that I am now starting to level. I named the default Cobra pet that you get “Smooples” but I think I am going to have to venture forth into the Isle of Giants and tame me some cool Dinosaurs soon. I’ve not had much desire to grind out bronze for the purpose of gearing, but I am enjoying leveling alts which in itself creates a large stockpile of bronze. At this point I am pretty close to buying most of the mounts, and then will start handpicking my way through the cosmetic gear sets that I want to collect. The only thing that I do not really care about in the least are the toys. Toys are one of those things that I completely forget exists in the game 99.9% of the time. However, I did see one that I would love to have so I need to figure out where it comes from… essentially it was a portable ocean allowing you to fish from anywhere.
The new summer-themed mounts and cosmetics are up on the tender store… and I am honestly not sure how I feel about them. Firstly I am throwing some side eye at this mount because it feels pretty much exactly like my memories of a mount that was available in Wildstar. I am weirdly against Fantasy characters wearing “real world” gear. Like Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV have a bunch of non-adventurer citywear and it sort of bugs me anytime I encounter someone wearing it. The other day I saw a Charr in a T-shirt and Cargo shorts and it sort of broke my brain. I don’t talk about it much because I don’t want to harsh anyone else’s fun… but I sort of hate the Fortniteification of World of Warcraft at times. I get that the Korean P2W MMORPGs did it first… but Fortnite was really the game that popularized in the West the “anything goes” style of cramming everything into a single game. Side note that is the preview on the Tender store… I did not buy the mount and likely will never buy it. It just is not my vibe.
Now that my brain seems to have had its switch flipped… I also want to get back into Guild Wars 2 and finish out the Secrets of the Obscure content. I’ve not unlocked Inner Nayos but I think I am getting pretty close to doing so. Hopefully, your week is amazing. We have a bunch of thunderstorms over the next few days but hopefully, they will not produce “twisty weather”.
The post Actually Rubicante appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammosart, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Apologies for another missed show last week but Bel very narrowly missed some Twisty Weather. This week we start off the show with a discussion of Grace’s recent experiences in Diablo IV and how the game has changed for the better. From there we talk about Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail and how a number of us are on the fence about playing it. Ammo shares her thoughts about the expansion. Bel talks about his recent experience with Pandaria Remix and how it has jarred him out of his stupor when it comes to forming groups and playing with other human beings. Bel also shares some of the recent happenings with the Frogger incident. Tam discusses his dive into Warhammer Orks and how they are maybe the best that game has to offer in the vibes department. We close out the show with some discussion about a weirdly good Random PVP mode in AFK Journey.
