I miss HW

[Renathras]

Legitimately sorry for the length, but I really care about this topic:

Aight, you know what? ....I kinda have to agree with this. The game has somehow managed to lose that sense of "dread" or "entropy" it had in the days when Dalamud was a serious consideration. Ditto for Nael and OG Gaius being pretty underrated.

Perhaps it's because I was around to hear Answers - Reprise fill the zones as Dalamud burned in the sky? Whatever the case, I found ARR's whole "feel" was far better than what we have now, and a large part of that was knowing what kind of threat Bahamut actually posed to the world. The player-character(s) have gone on to face much greater threats than he, but somehow the "feeling" was lacking. Even the Final Days and lead-up to the Endsinger did not stir any kind of feelings within me at all.

Heavensward was two or three steps removed from that feeling, but there was still a sense of urgency with the threats posed by Alexander and the Warring Triad. Although the former turned out to be benevolent, his mere presence could've killed the planet. The latter were of course primals that very much lived up to their hype as gods, and any one of them would've been basically unstoppable by modern man if allowed to regain its former strength. Admittedly, my interest in the Warring Triad in this regard may have stemmed in part from FF6 having been one of my favorite Final Fantasies to date, but still.

Dalamud burning in the sky; the hymn of dalamud filling the zones only to be replaced by answers reprise later on created a sense of overwhelming dread that they have failed to capture again even with threats bigger than Bahamut, dalamud was present in every zone, the music filled every corner, you couldn’t escape it and you knew what was coming

The first visit to kholusia came close but the final days completely failed to replicate the feeling and I think it’s because dalamud made the world dangerous, superbosses spawned, hamlet defence became harder, beloved NPC’s that had necessary functions in the world died and never came back, nothing in ShB or EW made me feel like “I” was in danger

And still coils makes me feel that, even going in as a level 90 character coils fills you with a sense of dread and makes you feel like you are actually in danger

Dalamud was just so perfect in how it affected the world it’s sad that 1.15-1.23b are just lumped in with the rest of trashy legacy and forgotten

I get this...but I think the problem here is that you really can't have that (well) with games in general. Lukile from Speakers Network (the "Fall and rise of FFXIV" series - fantastic if you've never watched them - on YouTube) said of the end of 1.X that, for all 1.X's faults, it did something that very few games manage to do in terms of it's feel. And as I've said before myself, it's because games generally don't plan to destroy themselves, so they don't do crazy things like have creepy awesome music play in all zones at the same time (the only other game I ever saw do this was Eve Online with Caroline's start...which come to think of it I never DID hear how that resolved itself other than it was theorized by players it was the destruction of the entire Jovian Jumpgate network and I think it had something to do with Thera appearing in Wormhole/K-Space?), spawning a bunch of enemies and sieging normally safe player areas (the only other game I can recall doing this was WoW's Undead invasion before Wrath and Burning Legion invasion before the Legion expansion).

And while Lukile says, and I think most 1.X veterans agree, "It may sound hipster, but you just had to be there", I think I get a sense of the "feel"; one other game I've played nailed it. Crisis Core. When you enter Nibelheim and hear the Nibelheim music, it just slamed me with a sense of foresight-induced deja vu of "something really bad's going to happen, and this is the epicenter of it". Granted, I had played FF7, but it still hammered the feeling. It's super rare, both in gaming and out (in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale, All Good Things, when they find out the origin of the space anomaly that is ripping through the past and wiping out all life on ancient Earth, it's definitely a goosebump inducing moment).

So to a point, you can't really blame FFXIV (EW or otherwise) for lacking that since it's REALLY hard to cultivate. 1.X nailed it, but it also had totally free reign to do whatever it wanted because the game was shutting down. The kinda stuff they did like spawning hordes of monsters in Ul'Dah is what you only ever get in some Alpha/Beta tests of MMOs. For a similar reason - once the test is over, the server goes away, and it's expected the players are fine with dying over and over and random shenanigans at that point.

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ARR could kind of have it because the world was still new, and ShB when you first arrive in Norvant and fist go to the first couple zones also had it. It's that "new MMO feel" which definitely IS a thing people chase because of how rare it is. It's also a feeling I got first going into Eureka and (to a FAR lesser extent, Bozja)

The problem is, you eventually know more. You know more of the world's lore. You know more of the characters. You know more of the gameplay mechanics. And you also get the Dragonball Z problem of "power level creep". ("Power levels are b******t!")

It's hard to find things like Golbez foreboding when you've traveled to the edge of a universe and punched the literal embodiment of the concept of despair in the face. It's like Avengers: What do you do after Endgame? After you've saved literally all (or half of all) of the universe, in debateably two (or more than two) timelines?

Or to use another game example: Kingdom Hearts. KH1 was mystery. KH2 was mystery and history. But where do you go from there? Even Nomora had issues with that one. His solution was "everywhere (and everywhen) else, a decade prior with Birth By Sleep, hundreds(questionmark?) of years with Union Cross, a hundred or so (Dark Road), before finally settling on Dream Drop Distance (using prior game assets and settings and a post-Union Cross REALLY disturbing lore for the Dream Eaters once you finished UC and figured that one out) to explain Sora getting a power nerf for KH3 (where even Pete is openly mocking his weakness), just to end up saving the multiverse - again - in the end. And where do you go from THAT? Well, other than an alternate "better/true canon ending" DLC and a musical recap game with a tiny hint at the end - we don't know, since KH4 is still in progress...and Missing Link, in addition to being MIA, is ALSO going to be in the past! XD

I think that's why they want to do a soft-reboot of FFXIV with DT, to get back to more...non-universe levels of threats. More grounded. More exploration and mystery (maybe) with the New World. (And PROBABLY why they're holding off Meracydia for now...call that a prediction, but I bet it's a valid one...)

As much as I'm not a fan of "beach vacation: the expansion", I do kind of hope they succeed on that front.

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Though Coils specifically...

I think part of it is the Coils aesthetic.

Absolutely this.

The music, the art, the environment; it just has this kind of claustrophobic and dangerous feel to it. The closest thing to that I've experienced otherwise is actually Delubrium Savage. It gives the feeling of being in some ruined and unstable ancient ruins with dangers around every corner...somewhat helped by the perma-death (for the instance) if you get KO'd and not raised within 10 mins.

PotD solo runs KIND of have this feeling, but also don't because of how the floors/maps are generated and laid out and the stakes are more "you lose the run if you KO before getting to that bench at 200". Oddly, HoH doesn't have this feel at all to me, I think it's the setting/scenery. Though I DID like the really big open floors...

THAT is something they absolutely could work on more.

The problem is modern raid encounters are just the boss room...because players have increasingly complained when they aren't. People don't like Fausts or 3rd Coils. They want to zone in, start punching a boss after the preliminary light party/stack/spread marker business, and then leave.

It's why I find 24 mans far more enjoyable than Savage raid fights, and stuff like Delubrium and Dalriada (even the non-Savage DR) as much more enjoyable and foreboding. DR/Dal do feel like a proper dungeon crawl completely with getting kicked out if you all die/wipe, and 24 mans at least feel like you have a bit of travel between bosses, even the Pantheon ones that have largely been hallways with a miniboss or random trash pack. That's STILL more.

Something I remember form doing some raiding in WoW back in the Wrath/Cata days is you feel like you're assaulting an enemy stronghold. Savage just feels like you're teleporting to bosses for a boxing match.