Of the Eorzea Alliance, the Garlean Empire, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, and the Crystal Braves. This grand tale of the Warriors of Light and Warriors of Darkness.
Sure, there's fetch quests, kill quests, dungeons, and raids, but what makes Final Fantasy XIV beloved by its players is that story. You've spent 100+ hours in the lands of Eorzea and your adventure is now taking you to the far off lands of Othard. It's you the Adventurer and your squad - Lyse, Alphinaud, Alisaie, and Tataru - striking out into a new lands to make change in the world.
Stormblood, and Final Fantasy XIV, feels like an actual journey. When you step off the dock into Kugane a few hours into the expansion, you feel like you've made it. It's about pacing, instead of a breakneck rush towards the biggest, shiniest thing. Final Fantasy XIV trusts its audience to wade through the talking, the meetings, and the average lives of its people to get to the big moments. It's not enough to show a bad thing happening, to make a player or viewer feel, you have to anchor them emotionally within what's happening. When you step into Rhalgar's Reach a few hours after helping these people and the story introduces its villain, it matters. Stormblood wants you to understand the plight of the Ala Mhigan Resistance before everything falls apart. Perhaps I'm too above-it-all, but I think having killed the Elder Primal exempts me from finding your missing sacks. I'd argue killing multiple manifestations of elemental forces seeking to destroy the world has probably proven my worth, but that's neither here nor there. It'd be like if you saw Lebron James, Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk, Queen Elizabeth on the street and said, "Hail, person, do you think you could go to the store and buy me some milk?"įFXIV calls this out directly in some dialog, noting that helping folks with simple problems is how you continue to prove your worth. You are the Warrior of Light, Slayer of Gods, Rider of Dragons, Savior of Ishgard, but you are also the person random folks will ask to help them with all manner of mundane tasks. I'll diverge here and say I always find it funny how the player character is part-errand boy, part-messenger, and part-godkiller. There are some "Kill X to get Y" quests, but many of those are optional quests for local NPCs. In fact, if you're new to Final Fantasy XIV and reach the Stormblood expansion through the use of jump potions, then you might be surprised at the lack of fighting in the main story quests overall. You meet the people who live there and understand how their lives have been ruined, not just by the Garleans, but also The Griffin, a local resistance fighter. "This is Rhalgar's Reach," the game says to players, and then it explains why the place is important. It's a slow burn, with early quests barely involving combat, just ferrying you from place to place, teaching you about the people of the region. In your ongoing fight against the Garlean Empire, this is your next step, fomenting rebellion in the displaced people of the region. Instead of sending you directly to Kugane and the far off lands of Hingashi and Doma, Stormblood drops the Warrior of Light into the region of Gyr Abania, where the occupied Ala Mhigo lies. Having this rapt (or captive?) audience allows the team at Square Enix to have some breathing room in how they approach expansions. Since Square Enix knows their audience cares about the game's plot, to the point that many laud the game as the best Final Fantasy title in a long time, they can tackle Stormblood differently than many other MMOs. If they didn't, FFXIV would be something of a long slog of a game. They care about characters like Thancred, Urianger, Alphinaud, Raubahn, and Hildibrand. They care about the war between the Garlean Empire and Eorzean Alliance. FFXIV players are invested in the story of the Warrior of Light and the Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Though I have issues with the requirement that players have to get through all of the previous story content to play the latest stuff, it results in a different playerbase.
There's always this fear that you're going to lose the player if you don't always hit them with the bright and shiny.įinal Fantasy XIV (FFXIV) is different. That's what expansions do: they show off the highlights immediately, so they can get players hooked. Most massively multiplayer online (MMO) games would offer an action-heavy quest with some cinematics and then thrust you into Kugane. Kugane is every bit an ornate masterpiece and it's definitely the primary hook of Stormblood. It is a city of merchants, of power struggles behind the scenes. This medieval Japanese-style city is the only port on the island of Hingashi, allowing citizens from around the world to come and trade. Many hours into Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, your character, the Warrior of Light, steps off a boat onto the pier of Kugane.
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