I was dragging most of the day Tuesday so when I got home I stuck to simple, low energy tasks on Stormblood’s official launch day. Being launch day, I first had to enter a code on my account page to activate the game again. Square Enix somehow continues to have one of the worst systems for activating your game account in the history of the universe. You have to enter a code to get into the early access (two of them, in fact), then you have to enter another code to get in on launch day.

Still bumping around doing miscellaneous tasks of little import in Stormblood. But lately I’ve been thinking about Heavensward, the previous FFXIV expansion. I pre-ordered it early and was in there on early access launch day, but looking back on it two years later, I didn’t play it very much at all. (Yet for some weird reason, I remained subscribed the whole time.) In FFXIV ARR (2.x), I leveled all of the following jobs to 50: Bard, White Mage, Dragoon, Black Mage, Miner, Botanist, Carpenter, Weaver, Alchemist, and Leatherworker.

It was a big weekend for me in FFXIV, as I managed to finish up the Heavensward Main Scenario Quest, so I stand ready to begin Stormblood this week (just in time for everyone else to be finishing it :). However, since there is usually a two or three day lag between my gaming events and posts about them, let’s continue with last week’s adventures… Normally I try to stay semi-focused on meaningful progress when I’m in an MMORPG, but I had a bit of time to kill Thursday so I started wondering if I could pick up two more points of item level so I could check out Dun Scaith, the final alliance raid in Heavensward.

I spent a little bit of time Friday evening checking out the head start for Secret World Legends. I was actually surprised how many people on Twitter were downloading it. I don’t remember seeing more than a couple people express much interest in The Secret World on my timelines before. Let me be blunt, like a politician: It’s the same game. It has slightly more action-y combat, in that you no longer have to hit the tab key to select targets.

I’m going to squish my entire FFXIV weekend into one post. The short version is that I finished all of the Heavensward Main Scenario Quests so I can begin the Stormblood expansion. This required completing all of these instances: Final Steps of Faith. A mostly-FC group got me through this trial pretty easily, except for one flashy lightning thing that zapped me dead in the second half. I’m not sure but I think Aymeric was hitting on the Warrior of Light.

I officially started the Stormblood Expansion on Monday night, by which I mean that I’ve finally started into the Stormblood Main Scenario Quest. I’m trying something I’ve never done before: I’m recording my MSQ adventures. I very rarely record MMORPGs, because frankly I find MMORPGs are among the least interesting kinds of games to watch. I constantly wonder why people stream them. (Most of what you see on the screen is just the UI.

With the release of Stormblood, Final Fantasy XIV returns to become my most-played game of June. The hours below are padded a bit because I frequently left the game running while I was AFK. Final Fantasy XIV - 70 hours Dark Souls III (The Ringed City DLC) - 9 hours Secret World Legends - 3 hours

Too busy playing to write anything. As of now I’m about 3/4 of the way to level 65, plugging away at the Main Scenario Quest in Yanxia. (See YouTube for excruciating detail.) Here are some screenshots. This anonymous lalafel photobombed my shot of the Kugane market. Arriving in the underwater village of the Kojin (I call them ninja turtles). The underwater palace Shisui of the Violet Tide. A little haunted forest in The Fringes called Dimworld.

Still too busy playing to write anything. I’ve reached the Azim Steppes and level 65. Here’s some more screenshots. :) The picturesque part of The Fringes. Not sure if floating or crucified. There is a very tall stack of rocks in The Ruby Sea. UFO sighting in Yanxia. You can’t go to that zone yet. :) Gasp! Foreshadowing! The Azim Steppes, exactly where I am in the story as of Tuesday night, and yet another lalafel photobomb.

I won’t try to summarize the entire Main Scenario-I’ll just say that I’m completely hooked and invested in the story as of level 66 in the Azim Steppe. The hokiness and stiltedness of the FFXIV-style cut scenes that most people complain about are completely unseen by me. If canned emotes and stoic nods-essentially the 3D equivalent of a puppet show-is what they have to do to deliver quality storytelling at a consistent pace, I’m fine with it.

I see a lot of people on Twitter and at least one person on a certain MassivelyOP podcast mention that they keep trying to play FFXIV but they just can’t get into it. I consider myself a pretty jaded MMORPG player, and I can certainly understand the reasons people don’t like FFXIV. But I thought I would try to document here how I personally overcame the biggest criticisms people have with the game.

Slight diversion to see the Binding Coil raids: I’ve always wondered who the twins’ parents are. They never talk about them. Wonder twin powers, activate! (I’m sure I’m not the first to make that joke.) See you back in the future. Meanwhile, back in Stormblood: I wonder if you can get outfits like these. Probably best to stay out of her way. Calm before the storm. U MAD BRO? … Tolkien’s eagles were here the whole time!

I didn’t intend to weigh in on @Sypster’s post about side quests, but apparently I did. :) In An Age and GamingSF also had some good responses. I think the basic argument Syp made is that side quests distract him from the main story, so he would prefer to eliminate them and boost the experience gained from the main story. I can understand that perspective. I’ve forgotten what’s going on in the main story of MMORPGs plenty of times.

I saw someone somewhere (FC chat maybe?) mention that they wished FFXIV would make their dungeons 5-man instead of 4-man so that DPS queues would go faster. (Belghast also recently lamented over the problems of leveling DPS.) It’s an interesting idea but I don’t think going to 5-man would significantly help the problem of slow DPS queues. I’m quite sure the ratio of DPS to tanks and healers in any given MMORPG is probably something like 25 to 1, if not 100 to 1.

I reached Bard level 70 Sunday afternoon. Yay! But that’s not all that much of an achievement in FFXIV. You can’t do much of anything with the endgame until you finish the Main Scenario Quest. And… I finished the Main Scenario Quest Monday night! After reaching level 70, you need to do the Ala Mhigo 4-man dungeon and the Menagerie 8-man trial. I finished Ala Mhigo with a relatively uneventful PUG Sunday night.

I’m going to make an attempt here to summarize the FFXIV Stormblood story for my own future reference. There are going to be spoilers ahead if you haven’t played, although I’ll try to keep it fairly high-level and leave out every detail of how everything turns out. (That means I’m not going to tell you who lives and who dies, muhahaha.) (You can consult any of a wide variety of Wikis if you really need all the details, and may I also suggest the 58 video series I uploaded to YouTube if you get really bored and need to see all the spoilers?

Standing Stone Games started taking orders for the Mordor expansion in LotRO, which is “expected” to release July 31. $40 for the no-frills version.* The moment is finally here. The moment I’ve been dreading for so long: The moment when everyone else will get to experience the MMORPG cultural event of the decade, while I sit on the sidelines, peering longingly through the cracks in the fence, trying to catch a glimpse of the prize at the end of the rainbow.

Thinking Play had a very interesting post recently about Play Personalities, something I had never heard of before. I recommend reading it. It’s a bit like a Meyers-Briggs test for how you spend your leisure time, or the Bartle Test. Here’s my self-assessment of how I fit the different play personalities: The Joker. Nope. Well, maybe a little. Sometimes I do like to poke fun at things that other people find deadly serious, much to my own detriment on Twitter.

I’m going to try to document here what I’ve figured out about gathering collectables in FFXIV, because there is almost a 100% chance that I will forget this someday and a future version of me will need to re-learn it. Collectables are similar to the Grand Company Provisioning missions you can do once per day, which look like this: Collectables are a bit better, though, because you can hand in a lot more every day.

“Remember when we used to talk about Three-Monthers? Ah, those were the days!” -Bhagpuss That quote from Inventory Full made me chuckle, because I had recently been thinking that it took me precisely three weeks to play through the Stormblood expansion story. And that was going slow, recording everything, talking to everyone around the quest givers, and reading all of the unvoiced text out loud for the video. I could not possibly have done it any slower.

I posted a comment on Aywren’s blog that made me think I should write a short post about what I’ve learned about the Stormblood Bard job. Then I wrote a way too long post about it, because that’s what happens when I’m bored for long periods of time. I’ve leveled a Samurai from 50 to 55, but other than that, I’ve been playing the Bard almost exclusively in Stormblood. I’ll admit the new abilities were a bit tough to grasp at first, but fortunately it wasn’t an impediment to playing through the content.

Final Fantasy XIV and the Stormblood expansion dominated the month of July. Final Fantasy XIV - 154 hours Secret World Legends - 3 hours Lord of the Rings Online - 2 hours

Since I’m home this week (see tomorrow’s post :) I had a rare opportunity to actually watch the Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire expansion announcement live today. (Those things are usually timed so that only the unemployed can watch them.) Not only that, but I could write a post about it and publish it with a screenshot all in the same day! Path of Fire is scheduled to release September 22, 2017, less than two months from now.

To make a long story short, I left my old job and will be home all this week before starting a new part-time job Tuesday. (Technically it’s in the same building.) Being home is weird. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I haven’t had a full week off of work since the last time I changed jobs, which was in July 2014. That means I’m writing this post on Tuesday morning on my gaming PC, which is a very strange situation for me.

I mentioned a Let’s Play series showing Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 in my last post: Out of intense curiosity, I’ve been watching this series for a while, trying to take some notes about what I like and dislike about 1.0. The YouTuber showers praise on the game while he plays, more than it deserves-to the point where I wonder if Square Enix actually paid the guy-but he’s at least enthusiastic. He is more of a talented radio-voice-guy than a talented gamer though.