Island sanctuary doesn't feel right.

[Padudu]

One can certainly make the Island your own personal nightmare by trying to obtain everything in the shortest period of time.

Or, one can take time, play around with the easy content. Having spent the first six months after starting the game in hotels with 'iffy' Internet, crafting and gathering was a quiet way of spending the evening during the week, with actual 'dungeon instance' gameplay relegated to the weekends. The Island is pretty reminiscent of those days.

One does not have to become a billionaire for the Island to hold interest. I've seen a number of comments about the lack of "content". Content that was rushed through based on Fear of Missing Out, it looks to me.

While you will get kicked out if you go AFK, you can log out on the island and find yourself back there when you log back in. You also get kicked out of dungeons after a certain period of time. An instance is an instance is an instance ...

Plus, it's a pretty nice place to go and watch a sunset on an otherwise off day in-game.

I did take my time and got everything at my own pace (or everything that I wanted, anyways). Doesn't change the fact that it's a right click simulator on par with Cookie Clicker. It definitely felt more like a chore to me than anything else after a while, and overall, it's just super... lacking.

Before you/anyone says I rushed, I really didn't lol. It took me weeks to even get to rank 10, and I picked it up whenever I felt like it. I'm not really grinding it out other than every couple of weeks.

And as for it being my "personal island", there's really nothing personal about it at all. You can't customize it, can't play your own music (unless it's bugged, whenever I tried to set a song it would reset to the default island music whenever I would come back in next time). Once you max out everything, actually going *into* the island is more or less not needed. There's nothing really.. personal or relaxing about it, IMO.

[Tulzscha]

Island Sanctuaries should be renamed to Tataru's Sweatshop Simulator. At this rate I could see her becoming the next big bad lol.

They are absolutely not ours, they have both less customization and less content than WoW's Garrisons. Somehow. Well it was fun for a couple weeks or so and I don't feel obligated to keep going there despite it no longer being fun so that's something.

[ameliaw]

It is very much a chore. I disliked it so much that I only finished the content last week, only because I really wanted the baggy pants and the shirt from the last level, otherwise I'd skip it.
Gathering is also much worse than gathering outside of it - stuff respawning every 10 clicks and getting one item at a time SUCKED REALLY BAD. Mounting and dismounting nonstop, clicking the sprint button so many times or just enduring how slow it is to walk to the next node wasn't fun. Also, I don't like the mammets and most of the buildings you can place in it, having animals on the farm isn't satisfying, and there is almost no customization.

This has nothing to do with how fast someone finished their island.

[AwesomeJr44]

The island isn't a fun activity to do, it's a glorified menial chore simulator. Go here and click on 100 trees to get this thing. Click on these rocks over in this area. Once you have it automated it does get slightly better in some aspects, but getting to that point is just horrible. The speed at which you try and finish the content has no impact on how boring it is. There have been days where I've traveled to the island, gathered for 5 minutes, then just left because it's that boring.

[Johners]

I've not touched the Island Sanctuary much myself but after reading about it, my honest takeaway is that it's just an inferior version of the Garrison mission table from World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor almost a decade after Blizzard tried it. That launched with more customisaton options than Island Sanctuary launched with and ended up hated by the players. I don't see Square Enix abandoning the concept, not just yet, but I also don't see them actually being as ambitious as they should be and turning it into a proper instanced housing area amongst over things.

[Bsrking5]

It's 3 and a half minutes content every 2 weeks. At max rank at least. It's very engaging content.

[george357]

got my rank up to 10 got all my buildings done all mats and stocks done including rares so far up to 51k in cowies and still having fun doing the work.

[ICountFrom0]

I didn't see the live letter so, I kind of expected it to be a sanctuary for me to just get there and relax. Instead I get "you, fleshling minion! Go get us stuff so we can work!" Like, nah... no my thing. I rather Administrate those things than having them to administrate what I do.

I know, it's not YOUR fault the hero of NODDING went and nodded and let the cat take over...

[RukoBoshi]

I know, it's not YOUR fault the hero of NODDING went and nodded and let the cat take over...

Our character just can't do anything without someone telling him what to do.
I swear that if a garlean talked to us before a scion, we would have invaded the world and the first for them.

Now we're getting bossed around by robots. On our own island.

[Jojoya]

Our character just can't do anything without someone telling him what to do.
I swear that if a garlean talked to us before a scion, we would have invaded the world and the first for them.

Now we're getting bossed around by robots. On our own island.

Except as others have pointed out, it's not our island. It's Tataru's Island with Tataru's mammets that she purchased in exchange for sharing data.

Tataru is letting us use the island as long as we keep an eye on the mammets for her.

If it was truly our island, we could customize it to our liking and kick the mammets out.

****

That said, I'm still enjoying it. I didn't hard grind massive quantities of materials in advance so even with two Granaries, I usually need to farm some small quantities of materials for the workshops (rock salt always rock salt, sometimes vines, sometimes copper ore, sometimes something else). I'm not relying on any worksheet with all the formulas so I need to visit daily to figure what I want to make the next day (or if I want to turn it into a rest day).

And I'm getting a decent amount of materia to supplement what I'm already getting from my endgame crafting/gathering. That's going to either save or make me millions when the new crafted DoH/DoL gear comes out in 6.3.

Could the theme have been handled better in the quests so it would truly feel like our island? Absolutely. But in the end the content is still mostly what YoshiP had been describing to us when asked. I feel like the only thing missing was we were told there would be a chance to explore to obtain rare materials and it seems like they ended up turning that over to the mammet slaves.