free trial players can be friend-requested and party-invited from non-trial players :)
memo
joined 2 years ago
I haven't played Dawntrail yet, but I have to admit that I felt something was troubling the game even in earlier expansions: as I finished both ShB and EW I couldn't help but be left with a state of "oh, tome grinding... again... in the same exact way as all the other expansions". No one seemed to care, however, so I thought it was my problem. And it's a big shame, because I expected differently from Dawntrail: from what I heard, it feels more like the character going on a vacation than anything, with really just the same gameplay loop.
Another thing I was expecting from Dawntrail, apart from big gameplay changes, is to redefine the story more significantly: FFXIV up to Endwalker was a great story, but sometimes I couldn't help it but feel like I didn't want to be so central to everything: it's great when MMOs make you feel like "a hero from the sidelines" because there's less immersion breaking (and FFXI did this succesfully, if I recall). I think writers really dug themselves in too deep of a hole:
spoiler
how the hell do you write a threat that feels significant after you've talked about universes, ancestral gods from previous eras trying to destroy everything, etcetera? I understand that resetting everything to the point of no one having any recollection of the Hero of Light would have required a lot of writing, but maybe it would've been better - having EW's ending trigger a sort of memory-wipe similar to that of FFXIV 1.0's story.
From what I hear - reason I haven't played it yet - is that Dawntrail is fram from such expectations. I agree that once you try FFXIV's legacy controls you can't go back. Same thing goes for gamepad optimization.
aaah sorry my bad, I guess I misunderstood
I'm sorry but it is definitely nowhere as close as the kind of harassment women receive. They have to deal with insults based on their gender, sexual harassment, digital stalking outside of games, etc
Actually, nowadays it's very soloable: you can experience all of the story by yourself thanks to the Trust system. I only recently tried it, and control scheme wasn't as bad as I expected (but you do need some patience). From what I gather you don't really need to learn about macros and gear swapping mid fight in order to clear story content.