11 years? Damn, time flies. I waited in line for the 1.0 release and took a week off of work to play it. I really need to give XIV another shot once I’m done with XI.
Can this game be played mostly solo? I’d just be interested in the story mainly.
Definitely one of the most easily single player mmo’s I’ve ever played lmao.
You can pretty much play without ever talking to another player. The dungeons and duties are on a roulette system that encourages people to actually go through older dungeons, so you just get randomly paired with people whenever you queue.
Very little of it is a lot rarer, and more likely to find other players on a Japanese server though, and basically not solo-able unless you’re a vastly higher level than the content.
I played the whole game solo. The big boss battles take in a lot of people, but you don’t really need to interact with them. Just watch what they do and do your best to keep up, help out, and not die.
You can solo all of the main story quest except for 8-player boss battles and one required 24-player alliance raid series.
And that can be done through group finder and the wait is very short. However if you’re just into the story I’d recommend watching a YT video that cuts it together since the gameplay loop is really really boring
Shout-out to the Dan Floyd and his PlayFrame channel, where he’s been doing a condensed playthrough of the game with just the MSQ, the interesting side-content, and highly cut segments of the interim gameplay. It’s only near the end of Shadowbringers right now, but it’s what got me into the game (as someone who was never into and mostly still isn’t into MMOs).
Also, the few points others are talking about needing others, there’s a group-finder and I’d say most people running those raids in group finder groups don’t talk at all, so you can just pretend they’re NPCs if you want.
Sometimes you end up in groups and you really wonder if they’re npc or not
Graphics updated for entire game, or just the newest expansion?
Edit: upon getting my lazy ass to read, it says the whole game! Nice.
They’ve done new lighting and stuff like DLSS that applies to the entire game, and they’ve also done a bunch of new textures and art assets for some of the game.
Sorta the whole game, like for example gear textures are mostly for new gear, I think the same applies to npc textures
No before and after shots, lazy writing, bad article.
Do they still slow you to a snail’s pace as soon as you progress to a new area? It felt so scummy losing my flying and mount speed as soon as I hit an expansion in a subscription based MMO. “Let’s slow that roll there gamer, can’t have you beating that content too fast. Why not buy a few more months play time?”
The progression is absolutely time gated, and they definitely calculate the travel time to make each zone take some given amount of time to complete. When they need to pad out the zone a bit longer they add one of the trailing quests (autoscroller). It’s the business model and the same reasoning for why they don’t increase the weekly tome cap and also why there’s a weekly loot lockout during the raid tier, if players could grind out all the gear they need for a patch in 1 week, they would. That said if all you want to do is the msq and normal content, you can probably beat that in 30-40 hours watching cutscenes if you can dedicate a weekend to it and unsub until the next patch. I finished the msq + all aether currents in about 16 hours after launch with a couple friends, skipping all cutscenes, and the leading edge progression groups were probably done in closer to 10-12 hours so they could hit the EX trials.
It made it so I couldn’t play the game, because my computer didn’t meet the spec requirements.
Not saying it was a bad call. My computer was old and shitty, but now I’m out another $900.
Maybe it could work with some FSR settings? And yeah in this case it would have been better if they did allow to use two game clients, old and new.
Midrange systems from 3-4 years ago are the ones that are struggling a little bit. It’s playable but noticeably slower. It can mostly be mitigated by turning all the bells and whistles off though, and I guess if we really wanted the extra frames we could turn down the resolution. But playing the game at 720p for instance is a serious disadvantage, theres not enough pixels to see your hud elements and the fight mechanics without a super ultrawide monitor or a zoom hack. 1080p is ok but 1440p or 4k are ideal
Is it not all shades of grey anymore?
You joke, but I did a ten year old dungeon earlier today and the group talked about how much more colorful it was.
Yeah it never looked good in the first place without mods haha, I’ll have to check it out this year then I guess
