Now, you might be thinking, "Great! Finally, I'll no longer be stuck with my low-level kit in the MSQ dungeons."
But imagine if your entire experience in FFXIV had been like that—that you didn't start playing FFXIV until Level-Syncing had been stripped out. You're playing for the first time alongside old veteran friends, who've been helping you out, supplying you with the best gear available for your level, who actually covered the costs of preordering the expansions, helped you to use Recruit-a-Friend, so that you're just overloaded with top-tier and experience-increasing gear. Out of curiosity, just to see more of the world, you're doing all the side quests you can get your hands on alongside the MSQ—killing a monster here, clearing a city of its pests there, crushing mobs elsewhere.
Uh-oh! You're overleveling. And really quickly, too. You've tried other jobs, but most of them don't really appeal to you, not your style—it's the melee combat that has your attention, that up-close encounter. Sometimes you even switch to the rare first-person camera so you feel like you're in the thick of it, surrounded by enemies on all sides, blades and fangs and claws all lashing at you.
But even that is starting to lose its appeal, because you've overleveled beyond any local enemies. No one's presenting any challenge anymore. Even the "bosses" are... laughable, now. You've leveled too far beyond, outgeared anything that could've possibly presented a challenge to you. You begin to grasp how, in the story, an empire like Allag could've just crushed the world underfoot, because they were simply so far beyond everything, outclassing with education, with skill, with magic, with technology. "Did the Allagan Empire really die out because of a Calamity, or was it out of boredom?" you think to yourself.
Every encounter that the devs hype up just feels like Cape Westwind all over again. There's no threat. No danger. No challenge. You can't even complete a single full rotation because everything dies after just a few moves. One AOE and everyone around you just friggin' dies, and you're not even getting any XP from it anymore. Your only source of XP is from MSQ now, but it's become so boring. It's just like the side quests, only with more flair: kill some more savage beasts, exterminate some more rats, crush some more mobs. It's not fun doing what you're told anymore—oh, sure, the devs try to make the story sound interesting, but it just feels like you're treading the same ground over and over, like what MSQ has you do never changes, it's all just the same rote experience, repeating in new lands.
So you start mixing it up. You send your GC Squadron out to do the tedious parts of your job for you—send your Highlander Gladiators over here to keep the peace, send a Midlander Rogue to another to deal with the beast tribes, maybe send a Roegadyn to help her. And you? Well, you're going to start experimenting with Extremes and Savages. See if you can't make things interesting again.
You start marching into battle completely unarmed, and dare the "threats" to just come at you. And they do, of course—that's the nature of beasts, to charge in all at once. But you're too damn high level. You're not even trying to evade them, really; but your level and gear is so far beyond them, they can't help but miss. Even their strongest blows just glance off your armor, and their every other swing just misses wide of the mark. It's laughable.
And so you just beat them, one by one, with your bare hands. It takes a little longer than it would if you used your weapon, but at this point you don't even really need one.
Still, despite all their inadequacy, it does convince you to try a different melee job. But that doesn't last long—you're still leveling too fast for the encounters to keep up.
And then, then—the devs release a new Trial. Different from the others, they claim, even as they apologize for the loss of challenge presented by the removal of Level-Syncing. This one, they say, will change all that, different from anything you've experienced before.
So you start it, this new trial. And the boss actually survives a few of your base combo rotations. Its HP is actually lasting. But its damage... oh, God, it still does barely any damage. Sure, over the course of half an hour, it might eventually whittle your HP down, if you didn't bother popping a potion or a Second Wind or a Bloodbath ... but it's still not a challenge.
So you sigh, figure it's like every other failed challenge, simply too far below your level to be a threat, and you pull out your big-cooldown move. Its HP drops like a rock and—it doesn't go to 0. The battle actually ends before it "dies," and the boss escapes.
"Oh."
This was an intended fight on the dev's part—they wanted you to think it was easy to win. This is a multi-stage Trial, and this was just the teaser. And though you dare not hope, you can't deny you're getting a little bit excited about the potential.
Time passes, and the devs release the second part of the Trial, deeper into the MSQ, in fact deeply tied to the MSQ, unlike previous Trials. The boss monster, and its new mate, survives even more of your attacks. It's clearly gotten stronger, fed on the experiences and foes of the path it's been blazing across the lands added in the expansion. It's still easy, but not as easy as it was the first time. It's doing more damage, becoming a little bit more of a threat, even getting assistance from other beasts that swoop in at the last moment just as it's about to die. It escapes again. But your intrigue is piqued—it's actually starting to come closer to your level, even after all the massive overleveling you've done throughout the course of the game.
More time passes, and the devs promise this will be the biggest, most difficult fight you've ever faced, that any player has ever faced—in fact, every other player that's fought this boss has lost, and lost hard. It's not a Trial anymore, not even an Extreme—it's a Savage Raid.
So you pull out all the stops.
You're doing full rotations, every cooldown in your arsenal, bringing to bear every weapon you've got—even some shit you've never had the chance to use before, that you only just bothered to do the quests to unlock, because you never thought anything would deserve its use before. And it actually fought you to a standstill. Oh, the battle was close to be sure, and it was the hardest fight you've ever fought, but you recognize you can't actually win now. Its HP recovers too quickly, it knows how to dodge your AOEs, it braces against your biggest attacks—and yet it all feels... fair. It wasn't meant to win, it simply won on its own merits this time, facing you at equal level. And it feels good.
For the first time in a long time, you've seen your HP flag, felt the adrenaline from a tense encounter, felt defeat—death—closing in. The Savage beat you, and it earned it, every step of the way. But it doesn't kill you; the battle ends, and your left with a choice: to go out on their terms, or your own.
You choose. You know what you choose. What other choice could you possibly have made? But you're satisfied with the choice—you got to fight a real battle, at the level cap in an expansion that was otherwise woefully undertuned for you, and it made life in the game feel worthwhile again.
And then the devs release a new expansion, one that unlocks a new job for you—in fact, it's a job using the same power type as that Savage boss used. And they promise a brand-new encounter with that boss, apparently a recurring villain, but they ask for patience, while they prepare the content.
Meanwhile, the people that got you into the game, completely misunderstanding your view on what the game is for you, think it's victory that's the most important thing, not the challenge—they say they've found some third-party tools that allowed them to beat similar Trials and Raids without even taking any hits. It just instantly ended the encounter, and gave them all the rewards with none of the effort.
"Black Rose," they call it—and they plan to use it on that boss, to skip the fight. They offer it to you.
And so you stab your father in the stomach with a katana.
And this concludes "Why Zenos Is Actually a Good (and Relatable) Villain." Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
submitted by /u/TheBlackWindHowls
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...
But imagine if your entire experience in FFXIV had been like that—that you didn't start playing FFXIV until Level-Syncing had been stripped out. You're playing for the first time alongside old veteran friends, who've been helping you out, supplying you with the best gear available for your level, who actually covered the costs of preordering the expansions, helped you to use Recruit-a-Friend, so that you're just overloaded with top-tier and experience-increasing gear. Out of curiosity, just to see more of the world, you're doing all the side quests you can get your hands on alongside the MSQ—killing a monster here, clearing a city of its pests there, crushing mobs elsewhere.
Uh-oh! You're overleveling. And really quickly, too. You've tried other jobs, but most of them don't really appeal to you, not your style—it's the melee combat that has your attention, that up-close encounter. Sometimes you even switch to the rare first-person camera so you feel like you're in the thick of it, surrounded by enemies on all sides, blades and fangs and claws all lashing at you.
But even that is starting to lose its appeal, because you've overleveled beyond any local enemies. No one's presenting any challenge anymore. Even the "bosses" are... laughable, now. You've leveled too far beyond, outgeared anything that could've possibly presented a challenge to you. You begin to grasp how, in the story, an empire like Allag could've just crushed the world underfoot, because they were simply so far beyond everything, outclassing with education, with skill, with magic, with technology. "Did the Allagan Empire really die out because of a Calamity, or was it out of boredom?" you think to yourself.
Every encounter that the devs hype up just feels like Cape Westwind all over again. There's no threat. No danger. No challenge. You can't even complete a single full rotation because everything dies after just a few moves. One AOE and everyone around you just friggin' dies, and you're not even getting any XP from it anymore. Your only source of XP is from MSQ now, but it's become so boring. It's just like the side quests, only with more flair: kill some more savage beasts, exterminate some more rats, crush some more mobs. It's not fun doing what you're told anymore—oh, sure, the devs try to make the story sound interesting, but it just feels like you're treading the same ground over and over, like what MSQ has you do never changes, it's all just the same rote experience, repeating in new lands.
So you start mixing it up. You send your GC Squadron out to do the tedious parts of your job for you—send your Highlander Gladiators over here to keep the peace, send a Midlander Rogue to another to deal with the beast tribes, maybe send a Roegadyn to help her. And you? Well, you're going to start experimenting with Extremes and Savages. See if you can't make things interesting again.
You start marching into battle completely unarmed, and dare the "threats" to just come at you. And they do, of course—that's the nature of beasts, to charge in all at once. But you're too damn high level. You're not even trying to evade them, really; but your level and gear is so far beyond them, they can't help but miss. Even their strongest blows just glance off your armor, and their every other swing just misses wide of the mark. It's laughable.
And so you just beat them, one by one, with your bare hands. It takes a little longer than it would if you used your weapon, but at this point you don't even really need one.
Still, despite all their inadequacy, it does convince you to try a different melee job. But that doesn't last long—you're still leveling too fast for the encounters to keep up.
And then, then—the devs release a new Trial. Different from the others, they claim, even as they apologize for the loss of challenge presented by the removal of Level-Syncing. This one, they say, will change all that, different from anything you've experienced before.
So you start it, this new trial. And the boss actually survives a few of your base combo rotations. Its HP is actually lasting. But its damage... oh, God, it still does barely any damage. Sure, over the course of half an hour, it might eventually whittle your HP down, if you didn't bother popping a potion or a Second Wind or a Bloodbath ... but it's still not a challenge.
So you sigh, figure it's like every other failed challenge, simply too far below your level to be a threat, and you pull out your big-cooldown move. Its HP drops like a rock and—it doesn't go to 0. The battle actually ends before it "dies," and the boss escapes.
"Oh."
This was an intended fight on the dev's part—they wanted you to think it was easy to win. This is a multi-stage Trial, and this was just the teaser. And though you dare not hope, you can't deny you're getting a little bit excited about the potential.
Time passes, and the devs release the second part of the Trial, deeper into the MSQ, in fact deeply tied to the MSQ, unlike previous Trials. The boss monster, and its new mate, survives even more of your attacks. It's clearly gotten stronger, fed on the experiences and foes of the path it's been blazing across the lands added in the expansion. It's still easy, but not as easy as it was the first time. It's doing more damage, becoming a little bit more of a threat, even getting assistance from other beasts that swoop in at the last moment just as it's about to die. It escapes again. But your intrigue is piqued—it's actually starting to come closer to your level, even after all the massive overleveling you've done throughout the course of the game.
More time passes, and the devs promise this will be the biggest, most difficult fight you've ever faced, that any player has ever faced—in fact, every other player that's fought this boss has lost, and lost hard. It's not a Trial anymore, not even an Extreme—it's a Savage Raid.
So you pull out all the stops.
You're doing full rotations, every cooldown in your arsenal, bringing to bear every weapon you've got—even some shit you've never had the chance to use before, that you only just bothered to do the quests to unlock, because you never thought anything would deserve its use before. And it actually fought you to a standstill. Oh, the battle was close to be sure, and it was the hardest fight you've ever fought, but you recognize you can't actually win now. Its HP recovers too quickly, it knows how to dodge your AOEs, it braces against your biggest attacks—and yet it all feels... fair. It wasn't meant to win, it simply won on its own merits this time, facing you at equal level. And it feels good.
For the first time in a long time, you've seen your HP flag, felt the adrenaline from a tense encounter, felt defeat—death—closing in. The Savage beat you, and it earned it, every step of the way. But it doesn't kill you; the battle ends, and your left with a choice: to go out on their terms, or your own.
You choose. You know what you choose. What other choice could you possibly have made? But you're satisfied with the choice—you got to fight a real battle, at the level cap in an expansion that was otherwise woefully undertuned for you, and it made life in the game feel worthwhile again.
And then the devs release a new expansion, one that unlocks a new job for you—in fact, it's a job using the same power type as that Savage boss used. And they promise a brand-new encounter with that boss, apparently a recurring villain, but they ask for patience, while they prepare the content.
Meanwhile, the people that got you into the game, completely misunderstanding your view on what the game is for you, think it's victory that's the most important thing, not the challenge—they say they've found some third-party tools that allowed them to beat similar Trials and Raids without even taking any hits. It just instantly ended the encounter, and gave them all the rewards with none of the effort.
"Black Rose," they call it—and they plan to use it on that boss, to skip the fight. They offer it to you.
And so you stab your father in the stomach with a katana.
And this concludes "Why Zenos Is Actually a Good (and Relatable) Villain." Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
submitted by /u/TheBlackWindHowls
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...