Final Fantasy XIV's "maximum" graphics preset disables occlusion culling, which is maybe the funniest graphics toggle ever created

PC Gamers buying top-end GPUs to render thousands of offscreen objects. Sure, you can't see them, but just knowing they were rendered anyway is well worth the cost

I got through the whole account setup and graphics config and server selection and then it played the five-minute-long intro video and then it just says "go type your product code into a website" and closes the game

square's pc ports remain absolutely undefeated lmao

anyway uhh it's a long weekend so this is my once-every-five-years attempt to see if Final Fantasy XIV is good yet

the last two times I tried this I quit around the 8th straight hour of random NPCs telling me to kill 10 giant bugs for no discernable reason

apparently they've overhauled some of the early-game stuff since then. Maybe this time I can make it to the parts people actually like?

wait why can't i make a rabbitgirl

are they like restricted to an expansion or something

I wanted to pick a race with a different starting area since I went with catgirl the last two times I tried this

but it turns out rabbitgirls are paywalled so I guess it's catgirls again and the LotR Shire music on loop :/

man for how much people obsess over the fashion aspects of this game, the facial editor is like... really disappointingly limited

I mean I guess you could light the opening of the game like this if you... want

that's right

FFXIV stans: FFXIV is actually the best-written final fantasy

FFXIV:

God of War (2018)

Current Opinion:
At some point in the past 5 years FFXIV's early-game experience was upgraded from "Excruciating, unplayable" to "Boring but otherwise Fine"

I wouldn't say I'm ENJOYING it exactly, but nothing has like actively made me want to quit, unlike previous attempts lol

Picking a class that doesn't start in the Infinite Shire Theme Swamp Zone seems to have made a huge difference. Limsa is at least pretty and interesting to explore

XP being buffed enough that I can just ignore the vast majority of side quests is also a massive improvement, ofc

it's incredibly funny that humans are even an option in this game

imagining the sort of dweeb who would look at the character creation screen like "hmm, I can be a catgirl, or a rabbitgirl, or a dragongirl, or a weird cartoon, or extremely tall... I think I will be... a Guy"

so there's this low-res but otherwise normal looking pirate map on the wall

BUT THEN!

𝑷𝒂𝒓𝒓𝒂𝒍𝒂𝒙 𝑶𝒄𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒊𝒐𝒏 𝑴𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒈

there's like a thin sheen of POM applied to basically every surface. It works well for like bricks and cobblestones but it most cases it just kinda turns every surface into weird noisy lumps

kinda wonder if POM was added post-launch as some sort of graphical upgrade. A lot of assets don't really seem designed for it, and I think wherever there isn't an authored heightmap it falls back to using albedo as height (like the pirate map), which pretty much always looks odd

Progress coming to a screeching halt because the main quest makes you do three raids in a row, but this game is like ten years old so finding a group for early dungeons takes 15+ minutes lol

ah I love to play apolitical videogames

For reasons unclear, it seems you resemble some sort of Videogame Protagonist!

yes but im cute

it's very weird that process of salvaging this game from its disastrous launch involved completely removing the original Nobuo Uematsu soundtrack

soken's soundtrack is generally very good (at least when he moves away from the generic LotR/star wars stuff), but uematsu's ridiculous nerd-prog is... important

genius tactician ptsd catgirl is the only character I care about

the fact that level skips cost twenty five US dollars is absolutely incredible

yes I think I will purchase a $20 videogame and then spend an additional $25 to not play it

so I spent the entire weekend+Troop Day playing Final Fantasy XIV. Got to level 30 and unlocked Jobs

I think at this point my opinion of Final Fantasy XIV is that it is Basically Fine

It's very... rote.... like even by MMO standards

but they fixed the stuff that made me actively hate it a few years ago

a side effect of massively streamlining progression is that I have like, less than zero attachment to anything going on. Characters, gear, cities, stories, all just kind of smoothed into dioramas as I slide past

like driving through midwestern cornfields in gameplay form

like sure you might drive past something cool, and you might enjoy looking at it, but it'll be gone in ten seconds and it's all just ephemera on your way to some other destination

THIS isn't really the game's fault; it's just a thing that inevitably happens to long-running mmos

Anyway I'll probably stick with it for a while and see if I eventually cruise my way into the newer parts that people say are much better

(and which presumably feel much more Alive due to still having players who aren't just blasting through it to get somewhere else)

"please do not attempt to have sex while we turn the universe off"

opening tiktok like

ffxiv really leaning into my least-favorite rpg trope, where a bunch of NPCs send you on meaningless shitty fetch quests, and the developers REALIZED this sucked, but instead of making it NOT suck they wrote a bunch of dialog where the characters complain about the shitty quests

a dungeon gave me some shoes that can only be described as Renaissance Adidas so I had to dig through the market to find clothes that would go with them

I guess this means I'm playing the real final fantasy xiv now

the lore justification for the faction-based PvP zone is extremely funny

i would probably wear the renaissance adidas irl

for real though why is the lighting in this game so consistently terrible

I'm not cherry-picking bad examples here; this is like a major voice-acted cutscene

it's not a tech thing; their actual rendering looks fine. The character models are generally great

but somehow basically every scene is this unreadable brown backlit mess

it's very weird

actually the fact that I had to delete and recreate that tweet like three times is thematically appropriate for final fantasy xiv

this cutscene is wild because every character in the entire game has been generic MMO face-generator faces and then out of nowhere it's like SUDDENLY: AN AKIHIKO YOSHIDA BOY