why i quit before reaching endgame (feedback from a new player)

[Melorie]

Mad at Final Fantasy for Final Fantasying.

I don't get that argument. I played FF9 recently. Interestingly enough, I did not felt that 90% of my time playing was just reading blocks of text and teleporting to one npc to the next. Maybe because even though the history is a trait of the Final Fantasy franchise, telling that history in a way that is tiring is not.

[MsQi]

I don't get that argument. I played FF9 recently. Interestingly enough, I did not felt that 90% of my time playing was just reading blocks of text and teleporting to one npc to the next. Maybe because even though the history is a trait of the Final Fantasy franchise, telling that history in a way that is tiring is not.

In FF9 you don't get to teleport. But seriously 90% is and exaggeration for either game. Though both have points where you may have to spend half an hour or more of reading mostly it's is broken up with dungeons and stuff. In either game you can take a break from the main story and go grind something or play a mini game if you like.

[Crushnight]

I don't get that argument. I played FF9 recently. Interestingly enough, I did not felt that 90% of my time playing was just reading blocks of text and teleporting to one npc to the next. Maybe because even though the history is a trait of the Final Fantasy franchise, telling that history in a way that is tiring is not.

Actually the thing you will probably spend the most of your time in FF9 is cutscenes most specifically the going into and out of combat cutscenes and yes they are cutscenes they wrest control away from the player to be all swoosh whoa do i look cool for a normal battle yet? XD

[Penthea]

I don't get that argument. I played FF9 recently. Interestingly enough, I did not felt that 90% of my time playing was just reading blocks of text and teleporting to one npc to the next. Maybe because even though the history is a trait of the Final Fantasy franchise, telling that history in a way that is tiring is not.

FFIX doesn't have many cutscenes or camera angle changes during dialogue due to the limitations of the ps1. FFX which came on the ps2 had far more cutscenes and skipping through dialogue took longer due the things like camera angle changes during scenes. Sounds familiar?

As technology became more robust the FF games got more and more cutscenes and more chunks of dialogue with fancy camera work. Comparing a ps1 game to FFXIV is very misleading. Those games are at least ten years apart, and when you consider how rapidly technology advances this is a super long time.

Cutscenes and long chunks of dialogue holding you in place are part of the FF experience. It's just how the stories are told. At least in FFXIV you usually would experience each of these only once, because solo duties aren't usually so challenging you need to attempt them more than once. In the solo games sometimes you could experience the same piece of dialogue several times if it was something you had to go through in order to access a difficult boss. I can't comment on FFXV (not played it yet) but at least from FFX and up to then you could skip previously viewed cutscenes, but normal dialogue had to be spam clicked through. Sound familiar again?

People also need to consider that FFXIV is a mmo and often the cutscenes also serve to remove other players from disrupting the immersion of a scene. I'm sure we can all agree that serious scenes such as a character's death would have a very different tone if another player on a fat cat mount was seen running around, or that it might be difficult to see what is going on if a lot of players are crowded around you.

Another thing to consider is in the older FF solo titles combat was randomly thrust upon you by an invisible force and you could rarely avoid it. Therefore it meant that there was a lot more time between story-telling sections due to spending time in these random battles the game threw at you. In more modern games, and certainly in mmos, you can see hostile mobs before engaging with them, so you can choose not to do so thus cutting your downtime between storytelling.

No one has to like how the story is told in FFXIV or any other game. We are all entitled to our tastes, and different types of games exist because tastes can greatly differ. However to say that frequent cutscenes and large chunks of dialogue isn't a typical trait of the FF series is simply untrue. Such a claim is only the case for the older games of the series, and a lot of the time they were like that due to the limitations of technology at the time.