Quote Originally Posted by Royze View Post
Again, I must reference XI. Look at the amount of depth in the lore there. And yes, a lot of it was available at launch.
While I don't mean to defend the storyline for FFXIV (it's a bit wretched), FFXI had FAR less at launch than FFXIV did. The main scenario ended with the defeat of the Shadowlord (and it took a couple updates before that content was even released), the entirety of the world consisted of four cities, about a dozen overworld zones, several dungeons, and a bunch of quests, only a few of which provided any lore and were mostly fetch quests or talk-to-the-npc.

To be sure, the zones and dungeons were in general larger than the areas we have in FFXIV, but they were also more boring, both in appearance and in the fact that traversing them took so long.

Don't take this to mean that I don't like FFXI - I loved it, and still play it fairly regularly alongside FFXIV - but FFXI had more content at launch than FFXIV? Absolutely not. It had less, but folks were far less likely to complete everything because it took so much longer to DO anything.

I just wish FFXIV's storyline was as interesting as the Shadowlord storyline was. The cliches in FFXIV run fast and furious, and I don't think there was a Garlean NPC who I coudln't tell exactly what they were going to do long before they did it. ;_; The primals are kind of cool, though; I enjoy how each seems to have different motivations while still resorting to brainwashing and enslaving their patron races to do it: Ifrit wants conquest and to be worshiped, Ramuh and Titan both want to protect their people, and Garuda's just flat-out insane. Yeah, the Beastmen are far more interesting than the evil empire.