What is it that you LIKE from FFXIV

[Mature]

Just out of curiosity because we have a few threads on a daily basis about what the game needs to get better or improve if you wanna call it like that.

What is it that you like from FFXIV so far? What is it that is keeping hooked or keeping you going?

[MomomiMomi]

The story. The fanservice.

The Youkai grind. Oh wait, no. Sorry, that kool-aid is getting to me.

[Arrius]

The story.

Sums up what I like about it. And that you can't simply zone hop like in other mmo's and skip whole expansions with that, you have to follow the red thread all the way through.

[Derio]

Story. Believe it or not doing a fate for the first time or a legendary fate for the first time.

Primal fights. The list goes on

[cyborgmermaid]

As someone who does 3D modeling work, the animation and character rigging in this game is absolutely astounding. To illustrate my favorite example of it, if you have a female character, switch to dark knight for a second. Bring out your weapon, and go into your idle stance. Now click on nearby targets. Instead of just having your character's head turn, her entire body will move, all the way down to the sword in her hands. The animators in this game are the true unsung heroes in my opinion. I've had numerous people who straight up hate this game concede and say "Okay yeah, the character models and animation are gorgeous."

[Ronove]

Ear wiggles.

(and the story)

[Cinno]

For all the negativity i've been feeling towards this game lately, the things I like far outweigh the things I dislike.

1) The story. I've played several mmo's before and I always end up just skipping through the story after the first five or six bits of dialogue. They always start out way too slow and they try to get you started with fetch quests and combat. FFXIV jumps RIGHT into the world building. It starts with introducing you to the interesting characters and lets you know a bit about Eorzea before it sends you out to kill ladybugs or cactuars. It gets you interested in the world from the very start, and never once slows down (until the 100 quest slog at lv 50 but that's a different topic..)

2) The dungeons. While not every dungeon is a winner, almost all of them are interesting and fun, at least for the first few times. The expert dungeons get killed off rather quickly, but the first time going through a new dungeon is always a good experience. I like to go through them with my friends for the first time, all of us going in blind and figuring out the mechanics as we go along. It's a fun challenge trying to figure out exactly what we're supposed to do, or what killed us THAT time. But it's fun nonetheless. Sure this magical feeling is only there the first time you play through the dungeon, but that doesnt change the fact that they put a lot of time and creativity into most of these dungeons (despite them all being linear hallways), and it really shows.

3) The community. I know duty finder is always a roulette, filled with potentially bad or awfully rude players. But the majority of the time I get a good, talkative fun group out of duty finder. There's of course the occasional rude player, or the player that doesnt quite know how their job is supposed to work, but for the most part the encounters I get are positive. Theres been too many times to count where we've met a really really cool person through duty finder that we talked with and goofed off for the whole run with, and then got very dissapointed to find out they were from another server. Despite all the bad apples this game has, the good players manage to shine through even brighter.

4) The world. Eorzea is an amazing place. Terrifying in some aspects yeah, but it's still amazing. Beautiful scenery, interesting lore, a variety of towns and locations. It's all varied enough that exploring it takes awhile to get stale. I only wish there was a little more danger out in the wild to make exploring a little more exciting, but the world itself is beautiful and very well crafted.

5) Primals. As someone that's been a final fantasy fan since I was a child, I got to know the summons very well. I spent way too much time watching Shiva shatter everything with Diamond Dust in many final fantasies, watching Diablos both terrify and impress me in ff8, and seeing Ramuhs glorious beard in ff9. These things have always impressed me as they were the go-to when I needed a large amount of destruction, right now. They were the most powerful things at my disposal for most of the final fantasy games. So coming into ffxiv blind, not knowing what was going to happen, I was both delighted and terrified to realize that I had to fight these things. The first time I ever encountered Ifrit was one of the most exciting and anxiety inducing moments, and its a memory that will stick with me forever. Being surrounded by the wall of flame, having that towering beast hunched over me ready to burn me to a crisp brought back all the memories of the times i'd summoned him in past games, having him incinerate my enemies or crush them with a rocket-punch powered meteor. It was intimidating, but it made destroying him that much more satisfying.

The primals are probably the thing I enjoy most about this game. They're always a challenge, and they're always fun. Especially Titan. Titan has always been my favorite primal to fight. It took my group probably close to three weeks (using duty finder..) to find a group that could beat Titan Ex, and I had fun every single time we attempted. That was a very well designed fight, in my opinion. I know many hate it, but Its still my favorite to this day.

I didnt expect to type this much out, I really didnt. But for all the flack this game gets, its really great and its really well done. Honestly I could keep typing, theres many more things I like that I could list but I feel like if I kept the list going any longer my fingers would fall off.

[Lunavi]

That it feels like a living gameworld. Few MMORPGs have succeeded to create such a living world as FFXIV and I think that is in great part thanks to the story. To have to play through hours upon hours of story and getting to know many of the characters of the world really makes the player bound with the world and its inhabitans, other players included. FFXIV just feels more alive than its competitors on the market, and this is what i think makes it a winner in the long run.

[Mimilu]

-It is story-driven
-The story has gotten better since 2.0, especially in 3.0
-The game's aesthetics are nice
-Eorzea is pretty
-I can play the game on my non-gaming rig Home PC and the graphics don't look horrible

[Zojha]

1. Class Design
There are very few skills that you never actually use and very few skills that replace old ones. Compared to many other games, both single- and multiplayer, it's great that you don't just throw away half of the skills you get. The pacing was fairly good as well - it gets more complex as you go. Now that I've become accustomed to the complexity and pace of 60, it naturally feels rather boring to be synced to 17 and lose all my skills, but when I first started out, I actually found it rather good, because it gave me ample time to learn.

2. Visual Design
A few female-only attires aside, I'm quite happy with the way things look - not just for armors, but player and monster models and dungeons as well. Not everything suits my taste, naturally, but seeing as diversity is to blame for that, I can't find a fault in it. I'd just wish for more racial diversity, since everything is so human-ish >.>

3. The Lore
I have to say beforehand: I came from WoW. And the way they mishandled lore was...appalling. Frankly, if you want to offer Worgen Deathknights, don't write into your lore that Worgen are immune to undeath, choose between either. I wasn't fond of the Sargeras retcon that created spacegoats either, especially since the excuse was:"Sorry, I forgot and was too lazy to do research on my own works.". Don't even get me started on green jesus - you can't expect me to take your lore more serious than you are. So I am more than glad that thus far, the amount of retcons and horrible writing is kept well within my tolerance threshold.

4. The community
There are a few arseholes out there of course and the forums in particular often make me angry to the point of struggling for self-control, but ingame, the vast majority of people I met were really nice and helpful!

5. Relative Lack of RNG
Really, it's a selling point to me. I absolutely hate having to grind random drops.

6. Clarity
Almost all you need to know about your skills is spelled out in the tooltips. Nowadays, almost every mechanic has its own indicator and whenever that mechanic pops up, the same indicator is used, making for consistency. Moreover, many indicators like the stack marker make it very obvious what you are supposed to do. That eases the learning burden tremendously.