How does original FFXIV compare to the expansions?

As you can see I'm still a low lvl and I'm what a lot of people in this game call a WoW refugee.

I'm not rushing through trying to get to endgame stuff. Instead I'm just enjoying the game and cruising along. But I am curious how the game changes as it goes.

ARR wasn't the greatest but improves during the 2.x portions. Heavensward was probably FFXIV's main shining expansion that casually went up and down but was definitely higher during it's 3.x portions. (The Vault(lv57 dungeon) was a pain). Stormblood definitely lacked what Heavensward had but definitely made up for it with it's beautiful scenary and music which were at least on par. Though Shadowbringers looks to become a contender for the best expansion yet, for ffxiv, if everything they do pans out how it should. I look forward to what's to come. All my personal opinion I might add.

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Originally Posted by disturbedcobra

ARR wasn't the greatest but improves during the 2.x portions. Heavensward was probably FFXIV's main shining expansion that casually went up and down but was definitely higher during it's 3.x portions. (The Vault(lv57 dungeon) was a pain). Stormblood definitely lacked what Heavensward had but definitely made up for it with it's beautiful scenary and music which were at least on par. Though Shadowbringers looks to become a contender for the best expansion yet, for ffxiv, if everything they do pans out how it should. I look forward to what's to come. All my personal opinion I might add.

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From my understanding, however, ARR (2.x) is a VAST improvement upon the 1.x system, which was a huge win overall. I am glad they've made such significant progress over the years, and over the expansions, to find ways to make it work and improve on it :)

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Originally Posted by JWag12787

From my understanding, however, ARR (2.x) is a VAST improvement upon the 1.x system, which was a huge win overall. I am glad they've made such significant progress over the years, and over the expansions, to find ways to make it work and improve on it :)

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The thing about the overall changes, they carryover from one expansion to another so only those that were part of the transition during their releases will have seen the difference. Those barely joining will only see the overall system changes that came since Stormblood as that basically piggybacks off the Heavensward changes.

The ARR story (1-50) is a bit more generic story wise compared to the expansions. A lot of that is due to it having to do a lot of world building and set up since people would be coming to it without having played 1.0, but the story kicks up the intrigue in the patches that run up to the Heavensward expansion. I think Heavensward has the tightest story since it's focus is purely on the conflict in Ishgard and then Stormblood has the most sweeping one since it focuses on conflict on a more global scale. Enjoy the ride though! This was my first ever MMO and I've enjoyed every step.

ARR was fun but a lot of the world and side adventures hadn't been fully fleshed out. Stuff like Glamours, Challenge Log and the Golden Saucer didn't exist yet. The difference wasn't as jarring as classic to current day WoW (that doesn't even look like the same game) but it's come a long way in feeling like a more complete world.

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Originally Posted by OhnoozeMyToes

As you can see I'm still a low lvl and I'm what a lot of people in this game call a WoW refugee.

I'm not rushing through trying to get to endgame stuff. Instead I'm just enjoying the game and cruising along. But I am curious how the game changes as it goes.

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Compared to ARR, the endgame right now is super fun in terms of gameplay, what I mean is that jobs feel more fleshed out and fun to play than they where on ARR, an example of this is summoner, the story has it's ups and downs but in general is actually interesting, FF14 is the only MMO that I actually care about the MSQ.

You can be sure that things will change for the better as you advance in the story and lvl your character.

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Originally Posted by OhnoozeMyToes

As you can see I'm still a low lvl and I'm what a lot of people in this game call a WoW refugee.

I'm not rushing through trying to get to endgame stuff. Instead I'm just enjoying the game and cruising along. But I am curious how the game changes as it goes.

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I also just noticed that you are GLD. That is actually one of the worst jobs early on also, but gets way better Post-50. It is a rough climb but gets so much better as you get leveled. CLEMENCY FTW!!

Well, since you're asking for an opinion, I'll give you mine. This likely means a lot of people won't agree with me. *shrugs*

ARR, before the two level 50 8-man dungeons at the end, is kinda just a back story at this point. You get to see why your character becomes the Warrior of Light, the Champion of Eorzea, etc, in the first place. However, there's quite a lot of fetch quests between dungeons and trials. I personally didn't mind it all, but others hated it with a passion, and still do.

Between the end of ARR and the start of HW exists a lot of patched-in quests. From the looks of how and when they did some of the HW lore and character reveals in some of those patches, I would speculate that Square Enix didn't initially know what they were going to do for HW. If they did, they may have been struggling to find a way to tie HW and the base game together. The early patched-in quests were filler. There's no beating around the bush on that one. Eventually, they start to "build up" to HW, but only after a horrible grind. If you don't let your spirits get crushed, you'll be in for a reward.

First thing you'll notice when you get into the first overworld zone in HW is that the zones are HUGE. Not particularly packed with content by any means, but still fun to explore for a bit. Stormblood keeps up with this trend. As for the story, the expansions still have lots of quests in-between dungeons and trials, but they obviously tried a bit harder to make the questing more interesting. More solo fights, more dialogue, more cutscenes, and a lot less fetching. Although, there is still fetching. Just not as much fetching as before.

Gameplay-wise, it's pretty much the same as ARR, except scaled upward like many other leveled MMOs. Many of the mechanics you find in later ARR dungeons return in the expansions, except they hit for higher numbers. Learn your new job abilities, do your job quests, keep up with the mechanics, use decent gear, and you'll be fine.

Well, the thing is, base ARR isn't really the same as it used to be. A lot of job/combat/side content changes throughout the expansions have somewhat shifted how the game plays through ARR. The core of the game is still the same of course, but leveling itself is quite different than it used to be (acquiring skills and what not), and the challenges themselves have been somewhat eased from their original difficulty.

That being said, if you are enjoying it thus far the expansions add a lot to the experience and I would definitely recommend getting them once you get there. I saw something recently about HW expansion being free? Might want to jump on that if it's still up.

Yup, first expac free for 10 more days https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...4d62177375d0f2

I would tend to agree that those starting the game now for example would not have the same exact experience as those of us who started from the beginning. Or experience Titan HM for the +1 Relic which was good times.
To me the best expansion thus far has been Heavansward, great story and areas. Stormblood had beautiful scenery as well but the story kind of felt rushed to me if that makes sense.
I will not get into too much detail as to not spoil it for you. Do hope you are enjoying yourself

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Originally Posted by whiskeybravo

Well, the thing is, base ARR isn't really the same as it used to be. A lot of job/combat/side content changes throughout the expansions have somewhat shifted how the game plays through ARR. The core of the game is still the same of course, but leveling itself is quite different than it used to be (acquiring skills and what not), and the challenges themselves have been somewhat eased from their original difficulty.

That being said, if you are enjoying it thus far the expansions add a lot to the experience and I would definitely recommend getting them once you get there. I saw something recently about HW expansion being free? Might want to jump on that if it's still up.

Yup, first expac free for 10 more days https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...4d62177375d0f2

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Oh I already own all the expansion including the peorder for shadowbringers. So i'm good to go but I was just curious how it all compared.

I consider it to be like this.

HW>ARR>SB

But by the end of SHB I expect it to be SHB>HW>ARR>SB

I am going off the story content alone. The battle changes and QoL that is to be expected in any major updates.

I loved Stormblood due to its great Eastern Culture involvement in it. I know I am in the minority but I though it was really a great concept to explore,

I can still remember how excited I was when I step foot on the new city in SB. Great times.

ARR is OK.
Post-ARR/Pre-HW is ... tedious. The story isn't bad, it just drags on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. I think it's around 150 quests in the Post-ARR segment. A LOT of dialogue across all that.
Heavensward is bae. Best content, story-wise, so far.
Stormblood isn't bad, it's just not really noteworthy. Hien is husbando material and Yshtola is waifu material.

In regards to Shadowbringers, I've seen some things that appear to hint that Uriange will die, so I'm already extremely excited for ShB. I really don't like him. NO ONE TALKS LIKE THAT

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Originally Posted by OhnoozeMyToes

As you can see I'm still a low lvl and I'm what a lot of people in this game call a WoW refugee.

I'm not rushing through trying to get to endgame stuff. Instead I'm just enjoying the game and cruising along. But I am curious how the game changes as it goes.

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To answer the title of the thread: ARR's tutorial doesn't really end until you actually hit level 50. Several classes and jobs change drastically until you get all of your skills; BLM is a perfect example of this. A lot of the latter stuff is better compared to what was made available in 2.0. Overall, ARR is very slow compared to Heavensward and Stormblood combat-wise.

Story wise, ARR is a lot of fetch questing and there was quite a bit of feedback from the community that it was tedious and boring. Also, Minfilia giving you that linkpearl to call you wherever, whenever; only to make you come back to the Scion's headquarters and becoming a meme. So, it got cut down massively in HW to almost non-existence.

I've been playing ARR since alpha, so I think I could give my opinion but a lot of what I experienced may be different since a lot of changes that occurred later on in the game's lifespan carried over to the previous sections of the game. ARR's story is lack luster compared to the expansions that follow it. However, the game was very popular on release and for good reason: The story was still better than most MMOs on the market and the job system was interesting. Probably its biggest selling point. The story of ARR is pretty much just trying to catch the player up on the world, lore and conflicts happening as most players wouldn't have played through 1.0 to know anything. Almost all of the NPCs are very generic, even the highly important ones, which can leave it feeling bland imo. I suspect this happened because they didn't know how popular the game would become and were making it under very unusual circumstances (I'd suggest looking into the history and revival of the game if you're interested but the long and short of it is that they were still updating 1.0 WHILE creating 2.0 almost from scratch) ((Although Im not sure what the excuse was for 1.0 because some of the npcs were still generic...probably time constraints as the game was honestly nowhere near done on release)).

As the expansions roll in, the main characters you encounter end up being more unique - something a player character can't look like a clone of (think Alphinaud and how you can't look like him). Heavensward had, in my opinion, the best story of all the expansions and I think it really let the game shine. As we progress through the game, I think there are a lot of changes in combat and gameplay that are ultimately quite good. Although I really enjoyed ARR at the time, I'm a bit baffled by how I did because the gameplay job-wise was atrociously boring. lol. Even playing back level 50 dungeons for roulettes, it's an absolute pain to play certain classes because they're just so boring. As you progress in levels (although really it was changes that happened over expansions), the gameplay got much more interesting. There was more off the global cooldown stuff going on and skill weaving. The actual way dungeons, trials, duties, etc are done is much more polished and interesting too imo. Especially as we move into Stormblood, I think the duties and dungeons/raids/trials were far more interesting with pretty unique and cool sequences. The actual story of Stormblood felt a bit rushed to me because it was so sweeping and so I didn't care for it as much but it was far from bad and still better than ARR if you ask me. (Although the latter parts of ARR were really interesting, I might add).

FFXIV started off as a game that had failed horribly. Because it was a main title FF game, the company couldn't let it go down as a failure and cautiously tried to rebuild the game from scratch. Because of the fact that it had already caused so much trouble and a lot of lost money and the issues needed to be fixed asap, the budget and time constraints placed on ARR's development severely hindered what the game was capable of. Couple that with the hesitation of "will anyone even bother with this game after we screwed up so badly?" left them not wanting to invest too much into the game. After the success of ARR, however, they saw they had a great game on their hands and began pouring more into it. I think it has been an upward trend and we can expect them to continue doing their best now. :)

I think ShadowBringers has potential to be the best expansion, possibly even beating out Heavensward (AGAIN, imo) which is a pretty hard feat. ANYWAYYYY, welcome to FFXIV! Hope you enjoy your time here. The beginning can be rough but I hope you enjoy the ride. And buckle up, cause it's gonna be a long one. (: