There’s nothing to explore – you have one tunnel to follow to any location. In short, this is not an explorer’s game. You cannot pick your own path to a location, as you enter another zone or subzone only through certain gates. You’re only allowed to see the ocean in a couple of places in the whole continent (and only see, don’t touch, mind you). So if you wanted to walk along the coast, for example, it’s a no-no. You feel like a hamster in a wheel, in a cage: basically you move between quest hub “rooms” bound by corridors.įor example, if we take a Thanalan map, the dark grey places are out of bounds, which you cannot reach in any circumstances, and red lines mean loading screens as you traverse between the zones:
The game does not allow you to explore the continent in full. There are no ambience sounds, no NPC responses, and multiple cutscenes which take about 70% of normal gameplay time are not voiced by 98%. By the way, only two step sounds are present: the one like the sand steps applies to sand, ground, carpet, snow, and there’s also a sound for stones/metal slabs. All you hear is music, spells (if you happen to fight which is a ridiculously uncommon event here for an MMO) and an endless sound of steps as you run. I’ve mentioned this too – it’s a very silent game. A most common dungeon run is colored nameplates and spell animation, is all you see. God forbid you’re clad in darker gear – then you can’t tell your character from the environment too. It’s 50 shades of grey, and you often can’t really appreciate the monster design, cause in the dark environment it’s mostly unintelligible silhouettes and shades. It’s a bit better with NPC, character and monster models, but humanoids still look like wooden dolls – and move as such too. All in all, the environment looks like painted cardboards put together.
FFXIV is very crude, especially in the environment department, as if they put square polygons together and forgot to add textures to many items. It’s the very first thing that grabs your attention when you launch the game.
This post will be devoted to criticism, listing the drawbacks due to which I quit playing for now, so approach with care. During my recent two week experience I have developed a love-hate relationship to the game.
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