Endgame Viable

The worm turns quickly for New World.

In short, I haven’t experienced much of the queue problems everyone else is having. It’s been a fairly normal MMO launch for me.

But then, I’m mostly a solo MMO player and have no need to coordinate and socialize with a bunch of people across the world. It seems Amazon didn’t put much thought or effort into those systems.

As a side note: That’s what Discord is for, isn’t it? Honestly I don’t even understand why they build social systems into games anymore, it just seems like a big waste of development resources. Just put a Discord hook in there. RIFT was one of the only MMORPGs I can remember to innovate with social media but nobody’s picked up the ball since then.

Not enough forest fires in real life I guess.

My experience was much the same as everyone else. Absurd queues, because for some reason they set the idle timeout to 30 minutes instead of 2 or 3 minutes. In any case, people quickly figured out that old trick of running up against a wall to stay online indefinitely.

But once logged in, the game ran perfectly for me, except for that very first session at 8 AM.

Bhagpuss mentioned the Charity Douglas NPC … I got that starting NPC too (somehow you get different starting NPCs depending on some formula I don’t understand; I’ve seen three different ones so far).

I’m almost 99.9% sure that voice actor is Kim Richards from High Rollers, which makes me wonder if they got all their voice actors from Twitch D&D shows as some sort of Amazon corporate synergy (or for a cheap source of “good enough” voice actors). There’s no information on the voice acting cast that I’ve seen. [UPDATE: Found it, though Kim Richards is not listed.]

I uploaded all the videos I recorded from my first day, where I wandered around practicing my Runar voice (an NPC in Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers) and wondering where to find the fun game everyone keeps talking about. I played one session in the morning, one session at noon, and a handful of sessions at night.

Weirdly the beach was littered with corpses, like a WWII documentary.

It took me close to an hour to get through a 40-person queue to log into my tiny backwater speck of a server Hanan Pacha (the Incan “heavenly underworld,” obviously the coolest-sounding server name in US East).

As for the game itself, I was fairly unimpressed. I didn’t get any further than I did in any of the betas, where I was similarly unimpressed. Little did I know, they didn’t put anything impressive in the beginning of the game, for reasons that I’m sure I wouldn’t understand. I got to level 9.

I logged in to play before work and had no queue at all.

I logged in to play after work and it took about 20 minutes to get through a 150-person queue (where I expected it to take hours… I had to idle for a long time until I was finished with work).

I heard some folks in the evening talking about a queue of thousands on Belghast’s Mira Minda server, so I tried logging in with a character I made there, and the queue for me was about 50. I didn’t wait around to see how long it took. The whole queue thing seems pretty random. :shrug:

On my second day, I was still wondering where to find the awesome game everyone seems to like. I see little more than a minimum viable product full of half-finished features, where the main activity is chopping down trees and picking up rocks in a very generic-looking forest, followed by standing around a very overpopulated Hamlet full of players with terrible pun names that you can’t turn off. There’s no story to speak of, no lore to speak of, no characters to speak of, no quests to speak of. Just an empty wasteland of nothingness.

ARK was much better at this kind of thing.

But at some point I joined the Covenent (one of the three factions, the one that forces their religion on people … with an axe), and suddenly I was given a quest to go somewhere and do something.

I mean, it was to kill 10 rats, and it was a lot of non-interactive empty terrain I had to cross to get there, but still, I got to leave the Hamlet and travel to a distant location and kill generic zombies to save their immortal souls.

Upon returning, I reached level 10 and suddenly I seemed to have even more options to go places and do things and talk to NPCs.

So in short, inexplicably, the first 9 levels of New World is utterly wasted time and in no way represents a game worth playing. The game doesn’t really start until level 10. Only then did I begin to see the edges of that game everyone was talking about. Maybe.

Then I got to go out to a quarry and kill more zombies (I think zombies are the only enemy in the game, besides boars and wolves), find a brooch, gather some honey, and destroy some Corruption nodes. Very exciting stuff that I would have thought I’d get to do in the first hour of the game, not the third or fourth hour.

Somewhere around this time I also learned that LALT + H is the mysteriously fixed hotkey to hide the UI.

Anyway I reached level 11 on the second day. Then I stood idle too long and was kicked. I decided to play Final Fantasy XIV instead of trying to log in again. FFXIV is a vastly superior MMORPG to New World, but I don’t really need to do anything there until Endwalker launches in November.

Walking into the sunset. Which means all screenshots and video will inevitably look bad during the coming night cycle. Sigh.

I logged in to play on Hanan Pacha before work, and as before, had no queue. I discovered that the Town Board quests are utterly pointless.

I got a quest to kill a bear, but it didn’t tell me where to find a bear.

I got a quest to make some linen, and wandered all over creation trying to find linen fibers, and found exactly two plants in a half hour, far short of the required number. (Meanwhile you can’t walk two steps without tripping over a million kinds of “bushes.")

So there’s a horrible return on investment from those Town quests. A half hour of play and literally nothing gained. I will never return to the Town Board. Why is it even there? Maybe there’s a reason, but the game definitely doesn’t make it clear how it benefits me in any way. It probably unlocks something later. Maybe.

The Town Board aka. Busy Work. But only if you have tons of time to play.

Who knows what exciting gameplay awaits in the evening of Day Three? Not me, because that’s in the future.

And besides…

The big community news on the third morning is that apparently the grace period for this MMO launch is now over, because everyone on Twitter is warning people to stay away and announcing that they won’t play anymore until the server queues are resolved.

Everyone is worried that the sky is falling and the game is already dead and the very future of MMORPGs is in jeopardy again (a slight comedic exaggeration of actual worries). But yeah, people are pretty annoyed about the queues now.

Maybe there's a story here but it's not in the game.

I mean, Hanan Pacha works fairly well, all things considered. I almost posted yesterday that the meme of “MMO launches are always train wrecks” isn’t a thing anymore, but apparently it’s still a thing. It just takes a few days to gestate.

I suspect the issues vary widely depending on which server you’re on, and where you’re located geographically in relation to that server’s data center. I happen to live in the same state with Amazon’s N. Virginia data center, so that’s probably why I’m not seeing as many problems on US East.

It’s funny how queues are a bit of a dual-edged sword. On the first day of an MMO launch, queues probably create more of positive PR buzz, as everyone hears the news that there’s some hot new club everyone’s waiting in line to get into. So it probably helps a game a lot on the first day.

But on the second day and beyond, queues turn into a big PR problem because everyone seizes on the “oh no not another launch day disaster” meme. But it only really matters if a top-tier streamer has problems. Us peons complaining to our handful of followers don’t matter that much.

The Very Important War Map, Day 2. The Rationalists lead both the Zealots and Nihilists on Hanan Pacha.

Anyway most of my curiosity about the game is already satisfied. If the game suddenly disappeared tomorrow I’d just shrug and move on to something else. There’s nothing to get invested in; no characters, no story, no stakes. Whatever story develops from this game will be based around real life guild or streamer drama.

I have zero interest in any of the territory control from either a PvE or PvP perspective, the game has done nothing to explain to me why controlling territory is beneficial to my character in any way, or why it should matter to me in the slightest what color the map regions are.

Still, it’s not terrible. MMOs have to start somewhere. It’s worth $40, I think.

New World launched and I was there recording for the historical archives.

I wrote my first post about New World in 2016. Today, this morning, the game launched.

So if you’re keeping track at home, that means it takes a minimum of five years from announcement of MMORPG to published game.

Anyway, it turns out I completely lied in my last New World post, when I said I wasn’t going to pre-order and wasn’t going to play on launch day.

I did, in fact, “pre-order” the game on Monday, a day early. And I did, in fact, log in and “play” at zero hour on launch day.

I say “play” in quotes because the game was, of course, unplayable for all the lag and crowds and everything, so I soon logged back out. Also, I had work and stuff.

So the window of opportunity to actually play New World is already over just fyi :) pic.twitter.com/sY8LOHohnL

I recorded a video of the experience for posterity. The zero hour launch day experience is the part that seems to stick in everyone’s memory and goes on to become legend for some weird reason. “I was there when…” etc. etc.

There’s probably more bragging rights in saying you were there when Ultima Online launched, or when Asheron’s Call launched. Or whatever the ones before those were. Nobody’s going to care about New World’s launch day in twenty years. But still… just in case, I recorded it.

I was there when Ultima Online and Asheron’s Call launched, incidentally. Though I don’t really remember it. Back then, due to shipping delays and such, it was more of the “launch week” or even “launch month,” not necessarily the “launch exact second.”

I wasn’t there for EverQuest, but I played it a bit later, and then stopped playing almost immediately because it looked awful compared to UO and AC.

Anyway, those days are dead and gone and hardly even worth remembering. Today we’re talking about New World, until it, too, fades from public consciousness and the next new thing appears. In a week or so, probably.

In terms of the video, the entertaining part where I begin fighting the 10 seconds of lag in the Dark Souls of stupid easy tutorials begins around 13:07.

Come to think of it, Ultima Online was just as laggy around the banks back in 1997 as New World was in the tutorial combat just today. How far we’ve come in MMORPG technology, eh?

UPDATE: When I logged back in at noon, the lag had disappeared and the starting beach was inexplicably covered with corpses, like a World War II documentary. So, once you get past the queue (which, for me, is roughly an hour wait for a 40-person queue), the game is perfectly stable.

Amazon’s New World is about to launch. For real this time. Maybe. Probably.

Belghast’s recent post reminded me that I hadn’t posted anything about New World either.

There seems to be some momentum in the blogosphere building around the topic of New World launch plans and/or launch thoughts. After all, this is widely recognized as the biggest “real” MMORPG launch in a while.

New World is definitely the biggest AAA MMORPG launch from a Western studio since 2014. Although calling New World an “MMORPG” seems extremely generous to me. Calling it “AAA” also seems generous.

I, for one, am utterly baffled what anyone sees in this game.

I still don’t think we’re allowed to talk about our NDA experiences, but I played two of those alphas. I think the second one was advertised as a closed beta, but they insisted on calling it an alpha afterward.

I also played the recent open beta briefly. The only significant change I noted was that the first quest NPC changed from a dude with no voice acting to a lady with voice acting. Neither one had anything interesting to say to begin the game’s story, and I very quickly hit skip, skip, DEAR GOD, SKIIIIIP as fast as possible through both their boring long-winded monologues.

So immersive.

I think the longest I played any of the New World events was maybe three hours. Probably closer to two hours.

The thing is, the first two hours of New World isn’t fun at all. It’s a railroaded, scripted exercise of following breadcrumb quests and doing rote tasks with little or no story hook. It’s like going back to school and taking tests.

Combat in the first two hours is entirely button-mashy with zero chance of dying. In the last open beta I stood still and pressed one key over and over again and won every fight without losing more than 10% of my health.

There’s no need to engage with any of the leveling or skill development mechanics at all. I think it’s intended to be vaguely Souls-like and “player skill-based” but in reality you just flail around (or stand still, like I did), kind of like Elder Scrolls Online.

In 2021, it remains impossible to make a combat system that is fun for both PvE and PvP combat at the same time.

I have a lengthy list of criticisms about the player animations that constantly scream, “This game isn’t polished!” the entire time you’re looking at the screen, but I’ll spare you the details in case you’re lucky enough not to notice them.

It’s possible New World might turn into some kind of fun game later on. I have to believe that must be the case, because people have, in fact, played more than two hours. But there’s no sign of where or what that game is in the beginning.

Block! Or don't! Because it doesn't hurt at all!

So of course I’ll be buying New World and playing anyway. :) I think it’s one of those buy once, play forever deals, like Guild Wars 2, so there’s no compelling reason not to get it. I think it’s only $40, a bargain, really.

But I certainly haven’t and won’t pre-order it. And there’s almost zero chance it’ll become my main game. And I will probably wait until some days after launch to find a quiet server, to avoid the streamer mob servers.

Random side question: Who are streamer mobs going to fight if they’re the only streamer on a server?

Fortunately for them, New World timed its launch to occur just as I’ve finished up the Shadowbringers expansion and have a couple months to kill before Endwalker.

So I might force myself to log in for a week or so and … I guess kill zombies and chop down trees and pick up rocks for the good of some random town or faction? That sure sounds like a fun RPG concept.

But it’s the best we’ve got, so I guess we have no choice but to support it. I bought Astellia Online too, for all the good that did.

Notes on the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers Patch 5.1 Content, Vows of Virtue, Deeds of Cruelty.

Super duper big-time spoilers ahead.

There are ten quests to get through. At first it seems like The Crystal Exarch is going to send the Scions back home–the very least he can do after kidnapping them and endangering their lives. (That’s a crime in most civilized societies.)

We enlist the help of one Beq Lugg to figure out how to transport souls and memories inside of crystals, and along the way, Alisaie manifests a magical flying porxie to help poor Halric. (The flying porxie quickly becomes a visual symbol of “the thing that fixes things we’ve never been able to fix before.")

But that storyline is put on the back burner to deal instead with a missing Chai-Nuzz and his civic duties in Eulmore.

Freeeeeedooooooom ... and a lot of civic governance work.

I remember wondering what would happen to Eulmore’s societal structure after Lord Vauthry was gone, so I was glad to see them at least touch on the fact that somebody still had to run the city.

In real life, everything of value inside Eulmore would have been looted by the poor people to buy food, then there would have been a period of civil wars and famine and pestilence until the next strong ruler took over.

But in the world of Final Fantasy, they simply selected a good person to bring the noble principles of freedom and equity to Eulmore, everybody agreed on everything, everyone retained all their riches, and everyone lived happily ever after. Kind of unrealistic, but at least they tied up the loose ends.

The alliance raids have always been one of my favorite things in Final Fantasy XIV. There’s a low barrier to entry (after the Nutsy hunting, that is), they take a fairly predictable amount of time to do, so you can plan around them, they’re reasonably challenging in the early days, and you get cool loot that helps get to the next content tier. But best of all, as a player, you’re largely anonymous and invisible inside 24-man raids.

Nier: Automata cross-media synergy.

The Copied Factory, it turns out, is one of the easiest alliance raids I’ve seen in the game (admittedly I’m late to it, so everyone is now overleveled). Compared to The Labyrinth of the Ancients back in the day, it’s a breeze.

I must mention the music in these YoRHa raids, which is, by far, the best music in the game. It’s mainly from Nier: Automata, which, it turns out, has an amazing soundtrack. It’s the only time in FFXIV history that I’ve ever wanted to get an Orchestration Roll. And I bought the Final Fantasy XIV Death Unto Dawn soundtrack largely for these tracks. (And I bought the Nier: Automata soundtrack.)

As for the crossover, it’s fine. By coincidence, I got Nier: Automata earlier this year and played about an hour before giving up (who wants to play Galaga again?). But these raids inspired me to go back and play a little more, so I guess the promotion did its job. Nier: Automata, the game, though, is not that great. But the music is amazing.

I stumbled onto this touching side quest because Tataru, standing next to Krile (who has the first quest of 5.1), asks you to go check in on F’lhaminn, who typically sits by herself way off the beaten path.

It’s a really good quest, and shouldn’t be missed. I wonder how many other quests like this I’ve missed along the way? I’ll probably never know, because they’re not always so easy to find.

I don’t seek out side quests in FFXIV because there’s usually no reason to, unless the game tells me to do so with a blue “unlock” mark. There’s no way to distinguish “related to the main story” side quests like this one from “random errand for nowhere near enough experience points” side quests.

Technically, I did these after the 5.2 Main Scenario Quests, because I didn’t realize the raids were released in 5.01, and I should have done them first.

I wasn’t that interested in the raids, but I was curious what Thancred and Ryne were doing out in the desert, since they mentioned it at the end of Shadowbringers.

I thought this was a big indicator that Thancred and Urianger, at least, wouldn’t ever be returning to The Source. Because now those two NPCs have to be there forever in The First to deliver those quests. But alas, no, they just left a dangling MMORPG time paradox there.

I got through the raids in PUGs without much difficulty, I just watched a video beforehand and that was good enough to remember the surprise mechanics and stay mostly alive (the main role of a DPS in FFXIV, when it comes down to it, is to avoid getting killed). Except for the last one, where everyone died except the tank, who soloed the boss for probably a third of its health.

Somehow tanks are able to heal themselves, which is probably why everyone is pushing healers to do more DPS, because apparently they’re entirely obsolete. It was weird. I’ve never seen a tank self-heal so much for so long before.

As for the story, it was okay, but nothing special. I’m not that invested in the future of The First. :)

P.S. Yes, I already gave up on the audio thing. It introduces a lot of speed bumps into the blog posting workflow, so I’m going to save that for special occasions.

Similar to what I did with Stormblood, I wanted to write a brief high-level overview of the events of the Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers expansion story, so I’ll remember it later.

Also, I can’t post my thoughts about the post-expansion content until this one’s published.

Also, super duper spoilers ahead.

After watching all of the Scions collapse one by one, the Warrior of Light seeks answers at The Crystal Tower. There, we’re “called”–transported to a strange land, known as Norvrandt, or The First. We meet the Crystal Exarch, who summoned us, and, it turns out, all of the missing Scions (by mistake), to save Norvrandt from Sin Eaters.

Arriving in Norvrandt.

Because time flows differently in The First, the Scions have been there for some years before we arrived. The Crystal Exarch called us to The First to defeat the Lightwardens, which have saturated the world with Light. We must “become The Warrior of Darkness” to defeat the Light. Cue the rock music.

The Crystal Exarch, acting all ominous and creepy.

We travel to Amh Arang to find Alisaie at the Inn At Journey’s Head, helping victims of Sin-Eater attacks. (At least I did; you may have visited Alphinaud first.)

Poor Tesleen.

Next we travel to Kholusia to find Alphinaud outside the opulent city of Eulmore, where the evil Lord Vauthry controls the Sin-Eaters and oppresses the poor and employs jongleurs and plays circus music.

The jongleurs weren't creepy at all.

Returning to The Crystarium, we defeat the Lightwarden of Lakeland, and restore night to the skies for the first time in a hundred years. The Crystal Exarch is pleased, because his plan is working.

Good job.

Between adventures, we’re visited by the ghost of Ardbert, the former Warrior of Darkness, who has been wandering this land for a hundred years. It’s a long story. He’s been trying to save his home, The First, for a long, long time, but he was deceived by the Ascians into nearly destroying his home. Now he’s wondering why he’s still alive and what his purpose is.

I probably won't have a pivotal, redemptive role in this story, right?

We learn that the young girl Minfilia (it’s a long story), is held captive in Eulmore, and we mount a desperate assault to rescue her. Thancred arrives at the last minute to help.

The Scions escape to Il Mheg, the zone of the pixies, where we meet up with Urianger, who has a house there. With the help of the Mole People, we find and defeat another Lightwarden there.

Returning to the Crystarium, we find Emet-Selch, an Ascian (don’t misspell that!), waiting for us. Ascians are basically immortal troublemakers. He wants to know why we’re interfering with his plans, and starts tagging along to find out.

Hey, I'm supposed to be the hero of this story.

The Scions travel to the Rak’tika Greatwood to find Y’shtola, who is working with Runar and the people of the Night’s Blessed. With the help of the Bunny People, we find and defeat another Lightwarden.

Also Y’shtola dies, but then she’s fine.

Tripped.

Lord Vauthry isn’t happy about the Scions destroying all of his precious Lightwardens, so Eulmore attacks The Crystarium with a horde of Sin-Eaters! Many die. It’s the All-Is-Lost Moment.

We are not pleased by Lord Vauthry's taunts.

The Scions don’t know where to go next. They need to find the rest of the Lightwardens but they are hidden.

They return to the desert so that Minfilia, the young girl, can seek the assistance of Minfilia, The Word of the Mother and The Oracle of Light (it’s a long story). She does, and absorbs the soul/spirit/something of Minfilia, and becomes Ryne. Minfilia is gone, once and for all (again).

Also Thancred dies, but then he’s fine.

Ryne, now with the power of The Oracle of Light, can find the remaining Lightwardens.

Ryne leads us to a Lightwarden in Amh Arang, and we defeat it. Alas, it turns out that we, in destroying each Lightwarden, are absorbing their Light instead of dispersing it, which is bad. It’s becoming too much to handle.

Big headache from absorbing Lightwarden energy.

In a plot twist surprising no one, we return to Kholusia to find that Lord Vauthry himself is the final Lightwarden. He flies away and hides in a floating mountaintop, leaving the citizens of Eulmore quite confused.

I knew it was a little early to be ending the story.

The people of Kholusia band together to build a gigantic Talos golem to help the Scions reach the floating mountaintop. We defeat Lord Vauthry and free Kholusia from his evil grip, finishing off the final Lightwarden.

This is a giant golem grabbing a floating mountain. Really.

But the Light we’re absorbing from the defeated Lightwardens is too much for us and we collapse. The Crystal Exarch intended to absorb the Light and sacrifice himself to save us and The First, but Emet-Selch intervenes and shoots him in the back. Emet-Selch is disappointed in us and leaves, taking the wounded Crystal Exarch with him for his nefarious plans.

Only Ryne’s magic powers save us from certain doom. We’re weak and helpless and might turn into a Sin-Eater any moment if we overexert ourselves (except we’re at full power, in gaming terms).

We make our way underwater on a flying whale (it’s a long story) to The Tempest, where Emet-Selch has recreated the ancient Ascian city of Amourot.

It's a flying whale. That dives underwater. And then destroys the underwater ecosystem, but apparently nobody minds.

We do some paperwork at various bureaucratic institutions in Amourot (it’s a long story), and learn about The Final Days and the long-dead Ascian race.

Waiting at the DMV.

A final climactic battle with Emet-Selch ensues. We’re almost defeated, but we merge souls with the ghost of Ardbert, the True Warrior of Darkness, and with the help of the Scions, we defeat Emet-Selch and save The Crystal Exarch and The First.

Ardbert saves the day.

Celebrations are held and the credits roll.

I’m experimenting with an idea I’ve had for a while, and that idea is to attach audio files to blog posts.

You might know this concept as “a podcast.” But in my case, it’s just “my standard RSS feed with enclosures added.”

A podcast is nothing but an RSS feed, if you weren’t aware. A blog is also an RSS feed, if you enable it. So it seems logical to smoosh the two things together.

Not surprisingly, I’m the first person to ever think of this on the entire Internet, because some Googling reveals that nobody has ever asked for this capability of taking two separate workstreams and turning them into one. So I had to consult the podcast specs and write all the code myself.

But it wasn’t hard. I just added an tag to my RSS feed which points to an mp3 file. Then I added some metadata to the post’s Markdown text, which refers to said mp3 file, and presto: The blog’s RSS feed is a podcast.

So, you should be able to add https://endgameviable.com/index.xml to any software that will play podcasts. You might be surprised what happens.

The hard part, of course, is creating and hosting the mp3 file. But that’s a problem for another day.

Incidentally, you can add any blog’s RSS feed to a podcatcher, depending on the software. It’s just that it might not play anything unless there are audio or video files attached.

You might also notice an experimental little doodad at the top of each blog post now with a “play” button on it, if you’re using an HTML5-aware browser.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Out of curiosity, I went looking to find some contemporary accounts of why Shadowbringers was The Greatest Final Fantasy Story Ever. Because it wasn’t clear to me.

Probably spoilers and all that. At what point is it safe to talk about an MMORPG story? Never, honestly. Perhaps we can learn something from the Critical Role community and all of their [C2E65]-style tags … add a tag every post with the point in the game that must be acheived before it’s safe to read the post.

You must have completed the Main Scenario Quest entitled “Shadowbringers” to read this post safely. It’s the last one in Shadowbringers, the one that has the credits. The first credits, that is. There. I’ve labeled this post appropriately.

Nobody ever really tells you why they thought Shadowbringers was so great. I suppose to avoid spoilers. Or perhaps people don’t know why. Perhaps they just liked it for unknown reasons, which is certainly a valid response to any piece of art. Sometimes we don’t know why we like something, we just do.

I thought it was fun, and entertaining enough to stick with it from beginning to end. I’d rate it as more memorable than Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft, but I wouldn’t have raved about it like others seem to have done. It sure wasn’t a Last Of Us Part II, I’ll tell ya that.

To me, it had more of the feel of familiar likable characters doing fairly straightforward things, which is “good enough” in most storytelling. The NCIS philosophy, if you will.

It's very handy that these familiar likable characters also can't die and have magic plot-fixing powers as needed.

I couldn’t find any one particular thing that stood out to me as “the thing” that would have had mass market appeal, so I went digging for contemporary reviews. Back in the summer of 2019, Kotaku’s Heather Alexandria suggested it resonated because of the epic scale of Araumot’s destruction in the final dungeon and that you felt sorry for Emet-Selch in the end.

True enough, but to me, that’s normal. The baseline expectation for a story is that you identify with and understand the villain. So they merely reached the bar of “average” on that point, to me.

Still, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Emet-Selch was the best character in the expansion. He certainly had more depth and backstory than any of the Scions, and he was far more interesting as a villain than Vauthry or Ran’jit. Better than Zenos in Stormblood (though, strangely, I find the post-Stormblood Zenos much more interesting, because now he has a backstory and a motivation). I don’t remember much of the Heavensward story so I can’t compare it to that one. Perhaps I blogged about it.

As for the final dungeon, it was a visual spectacle but also kind of a pain in the butt, as a Trust dungeon. It’s hard to view dungeons as story scenes in Final Fantasy XIV because your experience of narrative is so often overridden by your need to run, dodge, and shoot. It drives me insane how much dialog FFXIV throws into dungeons, trials, and raids that you can’t see in the middle of all the chaos. (Particularly those teeny tiny chat bubbles that only stay on the screen for a couple of nanoseconds and often don’t appear in the chat log.)

In any case, I’m pretty sure we’ve seen dungeons before that took place in the middle of a war zone with people running and screaming around us. I think there was one at the end of Stormblood. I don’t remember the name. I remember running it a lot for gear though. I wonder if that Kotaku author did a story skip to write that review.

Kyle Campbell of IGN suggested it was because of the reversal of the light and dark tropes: “A tale of how darkness should not blindly bend the knee to light, for there is just as much beauty in a sea of stars as there is in a sunrise."

I didn’t get that message at all. The message I got was: Heroes defeat villains, regardless of whether they have a point or not.

We might feel slightly bad about it for a second, but we're still going to exterminate the evil.

It’s true enough that they did flip the meanings of “light” and “dark” to “evil” and “good,” but they didn’t quite flip the meanings of “good” and “evil,” which is where I wanted them to go. They got tantalizingly close a few times, but in the end, they didn’t lean into it. We only felt bad for Emet-Selch but a few moments before we were showered with unending praise for doing The Hero’s work.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m too old to understand why this is a novel concept to people. I’ve pondered the concepts of “good isn’t necessarily good” and “evil isn’t necessarily evil” for decades. It’s a particularly fun thought experiment (in private, of course!) in today’s world where everyone is screaming at us every day about how evil the evil is, and how good the good is. Shadowbringers just barely scratched the surface of that debate.

Laurence Phillips of PCGamesN has a much more balanced viewpoint that closer matches my own.

Though it deals with relatable, human experiences of grief, tragedy, and behaviour in the face of mortality, its persistent melodrama undermines its most powerful moments time and again … by falling back on these tropes Shadowbringers’ story shies from true brilliance and becomes, well, commonplace. In the end, it is just another Good vs Evil story.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good summary of Shadowbringers. It was good, but it definitely fell short of great. I’m right on the razor’s edge of declaring that Stormblood’s overall story was better. :p

"Do you honestly believe that half your number would sacrifice themselves to save the other?" He makes a fair point, though.

The game is better in Shadowbringers, though. The mechanics, that is. A little. It’s mostly identical to Stormblood, but it’s better because of one key feature: The Trust system. It’s criminally underutilized. I wish we could do Trials with the Trust companions too, but alas, we cannot. Thankfully 8-man instances are far less stressful than 4-man dungeons. Nobody cares if one out of four DPS dies in a trial. (Trust companion support also needs to be added for every previous expansion, too. How frickin' cool would it be to run Sastasha with Isildaure and Alianne? They’re sitting outside the dungeon already!)

I see a lot of grumpy newcomers complaining about stuff in A Realm Reborn, and my general response would be that, yes, all those things you don’t like are completely fixed or a lot better by the time you get to Shadowbringers. One of them is the Trust system. The forced grouping no longer completely ruins your experience of the story. In Shadowbringers, the Main Scenario Quest is so, so much better when doing the dungeons with the actual characters in the story instead of that random half-naked guy with a fat chocobo on his head.

An automated YouTube upload script is now working. Hopefully.

I have so much free time in the mornings now! Now that I don’t have to scramble to write and/or post something every day hehe. I don’t really know what to do with myself anymore.

I recently reported some trouble with the YouTube Data API but I’m happy to report that that it’s now working. I’m running an automated script every day which pulls a video file from a directory and uploads it to YouTube.

The bad news is that: 1) You can’t populate the game name field through the API, 2) It’s hard as heck balls to put a video into a playlist through the API for inexplicable reasons, and 3) I haven’t yet worked out a way to easily tie individual video descriptions to video files on disk, so I just have to put a generic description on each video. So I still have to fill in those metadata fields manually, if I care to do so.

Windows does allow you to associate metadata with files on disk, and there’s a “Comments” tag that might work perfectly for holding a video description, but it seems to be limited to 256 characters. Also editing that metadata is a massive pain in the Windows Explorer UI.

The MP4 file format also has metadata tags I could use for holding titles and descriptions, and I have a handy tool called Mp3Tag which is actually quite good at editing said metadata in bulk (despite the old ugly Windows 95 interface), but … I don’t know how to read that metadata from a script yet. Maybe someday. (I vaguely remember finding command-line tools to extract MP3/MP4 metadata in the past. Maybe even ffmpeg can do it.)

Anyway it’s a work in progress. The point is, I don’t have to manually click-type-click-type-click-type-click through the YouTube web site to upload videos anymore. This year, I learned a new term for that kind of labor: “ClickOps.” I thought it was a pretty hilarious and accurate term. It’s soul-crushingly boring and time-consuming, for one thing, and it’s also prone to mistakes.

I also started doing some work with the Twitter API so I could write and/or find a tool to send tweets from the command-line. I thought I’d have to jump through a ton of hoops like I did with the YouTube API, but it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be. You just fill in some information about what you’re going to do, and it auto-approved me in seconds. I assume because I didn’t click any of the boxes that triggered red flags.

UPDATE: I forgot about this, but Mp3Tag is terrible for MP4 files. It takes forever to save changes, so we’re back to square one with the metadata.

Well kids, what did we learn this month?

But I kind of knew all that already. For my own quirky off-brand blog, I learned:

In terms of ongoing blog narratives over the month:

Congrats to all the Blaugusters! You’re all winners! I guess? Yes, probably. No, definitely! I’m not very good at cheerleading. The world is a dark and terrible place, you know.

Anyway, you can find my Blaugust 2021 posts here. You can find all my Blaugust posts throughout history here, assuming I remembered to tag the posts correctly.

I recently learned about New Game+ in Final Fantasy XIV, some time earlier in Blaugust, in the Blaugust Discord. I didn’t think it would work very well, but it actually does.

In 2017, I recorded my entire playthrough of Stormblood (except the bit at the end where I quit), and now in 2021 I recorded my entire playthrough of Shadowbringers (what I’ve played so far at least), and now that I’ve done that, I regret horribly that I didn’t record either A Realm Reborn or Heavensward. I could have recorded Heavensward back in 2015. I had the technology back then. But I didn’t, and I regret it to this day. So I’ve had a long-term life goal of going back and re-playing A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, so I can record them.

In most MMORPGs, it’s not a big deal to start a new character and replay the story. In Final Fantasy XIV, it’s a massive pain. You unlock so much stuff on your journey through that game, that losing it all is like losing two limbs, and then two more limbs.

I’ve started about five new characters with the intention of replaying A Realm Reborn. I’ve successfully recorded all three starting zones and those short little introductory stories therein, the ones where we first meet Thancred and Y’shtolla and Yda and Poppy-limo (a name I shan’t bother trying to spell correctly), and make our way to the airship to leave our homeland. (It’s “Part 1” in the parlance of New Game Plus.) But with each of those characters, I got to the Sastasha dungeon and just stopped. Because dungeons are always a very tall brick wall for me in Final Fantasy XIV, obstacles that need a lot of personal work to overcome. Especially with a new character.

Here's an actual screenshot of my Adventurer circa level 27.

But last night, I finally tried out the New Game+ thing that everyone told me about. At first I couldn’t get it to work, because the menu option was disabled for me. It turns out, in Final Fantasy XIV tradition, everything needs to be “unlocked,” so you have to find a pitiful old man near The Waking Sands, a surprisingly well-hidden tidbit of information in some of the Google pages describing how to unlock the thing.

Next I made a glamour of the dopiest low-level gear I could find, then I changed my character’s hair back to the way it looked when I started the game, started up New Game+ in “Part 2” of A Realm Reborn, and viola, a passable facsimile of my character’s experiences in the Main Scenario Quest some six years ago. (Fun fact: I’ve changed my character’s hair a bit with each expansion to make it look like she’s gotten older and wiser, a difficult thing to accomplish in a game that abhors the appearance of age.)

And here's a glamoured Warrior of Light/Darkness pretending to be low-level in New Game+, like an Undercover Boss.

Part 2 starts with “It’s Probably Pirates,” that old familiar quest that puts you into Sastasha. So I went through that dungeon last night. Wow that dungeon goes by fast now. I remember that being one of the longest, slowest dungeons ever, a horrible introduction to dungeons in FFXIV, where the tank can never hold threat because they’re so hobbled. But last night we blew through that thing like it was barely a speed bump, with the tank chain-pulling a million things at once. I guess it just depends on who you get in the roulette.

Isildaure and Alianne were right outside Sastasha! If you don't pay attention to what happens around Scion headquarters with the NPCs between main quests you might not recognize them. Little things like this are why I want to go back and record the older game.

After that I went through Tam-Tara Deepcroft (the very next quest), which went similarly fast, but not quite as fast. It was a more “normal” dungeon experience of the kind I might have expected from Sastasha. (That scene of the rival adventurers losing one of their own after Tam-Tara Deepcroft was dark holy crap.)

You can even get low-level gear drops from the low-level dungeons, so you can make even dopier low-level gear glamours! (I’m obsessed with making low-level gear glamours, to stick it to everyone who thinks that appearance is a reliable measure of player skill and worth. You know the players I mean. All the ones standing around the three main cities with their glowy weapons and sparkly mounts. Those people are the evil elites that must be thrown down by the MMO masses.)

I don’t know if I’ll carry through with the entire story in New Game+, because it doesn’t quite feel right to re-play old story stuff with the same character. As much as I’ve tried to make my Warrior of Light/Darkness look and feel the same as she did six years ago, when she was but a lowly Adventurer–little more than a speck dirt on the ground–it’s just not the same. My character is still actually a level 80 Bard so none of the low-level mobs bother me, for example. And I can teleport anywhere in the world. And I can ride a chocobo when I didn’t have one before. I can probably even fly in the old zones, a nifty feature they snuck into the game at some point without telling me.

Anyway working through story content is way more fun for me than endgame grinding, so I’ll probably work on the low-level stuff instead. Life is a lot less complicated at the lower levels in FFXIV anyway.