It’s been several months since I logged into FFXIV every day to take care of my “dailies.” Open access opened on Friday and I played a little over the weekend, but today was my first full “day” of my typical FFXIV gameplay.
EXHAUSTING
Before I get into that: I can’t say enough about the story yet except that it’s fun and, as promised, pretty low stakes right now. Royal intrigue, succession drama, legends, etc. Love that! As long as the universe isn’t on the brink of collapse, I’m going to have a great time. I found something interesting, though, that a friend was able to articulate better then I could: basically, that in FFXIV, the story is the game. Sounds obvious and with other games like BG3 (especially), of course the story is the game. Except it isn’t.
FFXIV is without a doubt my most-played game because it’s really a world and class of its own; when people ask whether they should play it, I honestly don’t know what to say because it’s not just a game. When playing BG3, I got really bothered that the quests weren’t more delineated, or that there wasn’t one specific order to the quest line. That sounds restrictive, for sure, but I really like that I’m exploring the story first and the “video game” parts (like dungeons, trials, other fights, etc.) come out of the story. Meanwhile in BG3 especially I had to hunt around for the story. Different for sure, and one isn’t better than the other, but I do really like that element of FFXIV’s storytelling. You play FFXIV through the story; the story is the game. And that’s been a very different style of game than I’ve been playing this year so far. I missed it!
But my first day back was exhausting. I sat down after work and did a few MSQ quests that brought me to the next pause in the quest line. Then I decided to do a couple of daily duty roulettes because my jobs are all at 90 and they need to get to 100. (All of them.) I did two roulettes, checked on my retainers, crafted, remembered the Wondrous Tails leveling journal existed, solo’d a couple of early game trials to knock out some entries, went back to my retainers, crafted and sold some more, switched to the new Pictomancer job, did a duty support dungeon to explore the job and level up, and… now I’m here writing a summary of all that. It took my whole evening (with a break for dinner in the middle somewhere) and I’m not sure how I feel about that! I do feel accomplished for chipping away at level 90 into 91 for a couple of jobs, but also pre-tired that there’s so much more leveling to go.
Yeah, at some point video games get too heavy for any number of reasons. Maybe I’ll think of something tomorrow or the day after to lighten and switch it up a little.