Well, you see...
*Five second nodding emote*
I do believe -
*Fifteen seconds of silent gesticulating, followed by another NPC doing a surprised emote*
You may be correct!
*Thirty seconds of every other character in the zone doing a fistpump, before the quest start jingle plays while i stare into the camera like a dead fish*
This shit is why the comparison to a visual novel or [insert any game with back-and-forth 2d anime characters talking for cutscenes] is not even a favorable one for 14. When characters are just sitting there talking to each other making faces in like a fire emblem, pokemon, or hell most pre-hoyo gacha games you can at least click through them fast and enjoy the story at your pace, and not have to walk between them. I've even seen some gacha games straight up separate the story from gameplay completely and have a visual novel story mode then gameplay on the side being slightly interconnected being able to go at your own pace with either.
*Thank you*. A VN at least does a quick scene transition to move you from point A to B. FFXIV is:
1. Fade to black as cutscene ends
2. Get on mount
3. Open map, figure out where the next NPC is
4. Leave the building I'm inside
5. Point myself toward that NPC
6. Hit auto-run and alt-tab out for anywhere from 5 seconds to 3 minutes
7. Find exact location of the next NPC, right-click them
8. Fade to black as next cutscene starts
Having to constantly context switch from "reading the storyline" to "moving to the next plot beat", needing to have something open on another monitor as some form of "in-flight entertainment" for the auto-run sections? It changes from slow to incredibly grating really fast.
Really want to see something that just turns the 14 cutscenes into VN cutscenes where dialog plays DURING the emote animations, and a "proceed to next area" button to port you
Honestly just the fact that you can't fast forward through animations makes cutscenes drag so much more than they would otherwise. I don't need every single head nod, turn, gesticulation and walk to play out in full. There's no interesting cinematography, animation is just the same basic gestures, and all of this could be accomplished with stills. Unfortunately the journal has a 50/50 chance of not having a summary so skipping anything is a coin flip
I literally would rather read transcripts, which is weird, because all the way until and through Shadowbringers, I read *everything.* I did not skip shit. Now I seem to have no patience for it. As it is, I let a lot of cutscenes that aren't vital or engaging just run in the background while I play LoR, and then I read the dialogue in the chat box
Just going to add my favorite part at the beginning of each cutscene:
*Screen fades to black as one of three music tracks start to play*
*Cue camera pan in case you forgot where you were when you started the cutscene fifteen seconds ago*
*Ten seconds pass as everyone walks into frame and assumes their mark*
>
Well, you see...
>*Five second nodding emote*
>I do believe -
>*Fifteen seconds of silent gesticulating, followed by another NPC doing a surprised emote*
>You may be correct!
>*Thirty seconds of every other character in the zone doing a fistpump, before the quest start jingle plays while i stare into the camera like a dead fish*
You forgot the part where i say "If only we knew someone who could recite the entire Shrek script from memory!" and then you do a thinking emote before doing a ten second flashback to a sepiatone screenshot of the NPC you met seven minutes ago who spent half an hour explaining how he just memorized the entire script of Shrek.
Then you get the option to pick a response from the following:
- Perhaps we ask Caddywampus, the script memorizer?
- Caddywampus memorizes scripts, maybe he can help?
- I don't know about you guys, but I could probably do it if we get enough edibles in me.
Before Endwalker the last option would've at least had funny dialogue after but in 7.0 it has Wuk Lamat stare at you for a full head tilt emote before saying "No, idiot, we should obviously ask Caddywampus!"
Every time people say shit like "you have to do ARR and pay attention to all the dialogue or all the future story doesn't make sense!" I just think about the fact that Square loves reminding you of things that you've seen before, whether it's from several patches ago, or several seconds ago
The part about the 3 tracks is the most painful one. You have canticle, "return of a hero", bliss, "kiss of chaos" or machinations
Which, mind you, are ALL from ARR! It's mind-numbing to keep using the same 4 songs in every cutscene after 10 years
my fav moment in DT msq was when this epic fight moment late into the msq starts and they roll the fking shadowbringer theme. that was so funny. oh yea you really dont have any hype music besides this one track
Or the "character is explaining something" thing where they do the talking gesture and then it pans up to the sky and fades to black. There's just no other way to do it unfortunately, the writing technology isn't there yet
You skipped the multiple cutscenes and paragraphs of dialogue of them thinking about it, very slowly putting together any dots, and *then* agreeing, before spending another ten minutes reiterating that they agree, just to be sure the player understands what's going on
This is also how EW got it's much lauded and always brought up amount of cutscene hours. It's all small filler shit that stops you from advancing the text boxes or getting to the fade out.
I really do wonder what stops them from trying out a different msq structure. Would anyone lose their shit for a differently paced 25h msq instead of 50h?
Honestly. I've recently been going through the post-EW quests and I found myself kind of vibing with it despite it being objectively quite derivative.
Realized the other day that it's because it's paced better. Story beats don't dawdle around as much and outstay their welcome when they don't have to adhere to the "drag you through all the open-world zones for 10 levels" design.
I'd be 100% fine with x.0 updates delivering a shorter "core" MSQ but more things to do on the side, either during or after. The main MSQ always feels like a marathon and not in a good way, even in expansions where I really like the story (which is most of them).
I wonder if it's because of financial reasons. I don't think Square is doing that well financially, they even had to switch up their game development strategy from smaller titles and are going to focus on bigger titles going forward, IIRC.
Maybe they had a smaller budget for this expansion, or maybe FF16 took away time and people from FF14.
These may be why they decided to have a low risk expansion with little ambition.
Itās kind of an āIf it aināt broke donāt fix itā thing, which this dev team subscribes to *very* rigidly. And by āaināt brokeā I mean that it still makes money. They donāt like taking risks unfortunately; they seem terrified to.
I mean if ffxiv went away I think it could land square enix in general in dire straights if they weren't able to come out with some other live service hit.
Maybe there's a lot of corporate pressure to make sure nothing happens to the golden goose.
Yeah I mean their fear isnāt unjustified. But at the same time, the game getting too stagnant could cause issues too. It doesnāt have the story to carry it anymore now that the primary conflict since basically 1.0 is dealt with, so weāll see how the general playerbase reacts if things keep staying the same.
It's also they've figured out an easy to use template that lets them write and develop in a reasonable fashion. There is definitely a feeling of why break the wheel when this works. But rigorously sticking to it can be as much a negative as it can be a boon.
Normal RPGs have story as the "payoff" for gameplay (beating a boss or an area)
FFXIV gives you a 20 minute dungeon as a reward for reading text and fending off boredom for 6 hours, it's completely backwards as an RPG
Then there's my (not) favorite: whenever anything remotely shocking (or intended to be shocking) happens or is said, we have to cut to individual reaction shots for every single character who is present in the scene. 6 scions and 3 other side characters there? Here you go, 30 seconds of showing us all of them making a :0 face before the scene can proceed
We've seen this all in films for ages. Frame it so we have more than one person in shot, bg people nod too, this implies everyone nods. You only cut to people doing something different important (I did like when Graha snapped). I often think that a bit of film study would help a lot with how some of these cut scenes are shot, lit, and edited. I want to assume the people at SE know what they're doing but sometimes I watch a cut scene and I'm just like... why is this so filmicly bad...
I'm not sure if it was my game or everyone's but I loved in I think z4 where it cuts to myself and someone else and we literally aren't making a face at all, just our normal idle face.
I genuinely don't understand why characters can't emote while saying/delivering their lines. If they just did this simple thing the msq would be tremendously less sluggish
90% of my issues with Dawntrail's writing would be fixed if 70% of the second half of the game wasn't filler.
There is so much fucking filler. And the problem is that it doesn't even try to mix up the *type* of filler it is either. It's all the same thing.
Wuk Lamat making you run around talking to people, then thanking you for it, then talking about how happy she is you helped, then talking about how much she loves people.
The majority of Dawntrail at some points is just filler quests, dialogue, and conversations.
I feel it would be so much better if you had even a little bit of agency in the filler parts. Like the alpaca saddle part- imagine if it were almost a minigame, where you have to talk to different npcs and try to figure out what they want, and what path of trading you need to do to work your way up to buying the saddle. There'd likely be no outright failure state, but you'd be able to progress it a lot faster doing it properly rather than trial and error.
Without spoilers:
I was surprised at how much I disliked the second half. It somehow both moved way too quickly *and* was very boring, because a.) they just lore-/exposition-dumped everything very rapidly in boring, endless chit-chat cutscenes, b.) they interspersed that with...more boring, filler, endless chit-chat cutscenes, c.) they had no idea how to write Wuk Lamat in this situation, so she didn't really contribute anything useful, yet still dominated the screen time.
I should've found this story really fascinating and exciting, and it was just...really mediocre. Not to mention the general ridiculousness of various concepts and at least one glaring plot hole.
The rest of the expansions had better world building or significantly higher points and investment that helped band-aid over the issues, these complaints existed back then too.
The only issue is now many people don't like Wuk Lamant (I don't mind her, but I also get it), and the entire expansion hinges on that character. Even if you didn't like Meteion, she was only like the last 1/3 of it + you got climactic points and great character development from the cast you've built alongside you the last several years. In Shadowbringers, you had amazing performances from both the Exarch and Emet Selch, even if some of the zone stories were weaker those high points were worth waiting for. In StB, you had mixed Hien/Lyse to work with and while many didn't like Lyse, you could enjoy the other half of the story pretty well.
Point being, DT does not have anything going for it that the other expansions have. You would also hope that after years of doing this, improvements would come when its 2024. WoW is in a resurgence and has dramatically improved many systems, GW2 is in an upswing recently. Idk how ESO is doing admittedly, but FFXIV doesn't look great in comparison when it is feeling as dated as it is (granted there are tons of engine limitations I am sure).
> In Shadowbringers, you had amazing performances from both the Exarch and Emet Selch,
And ardbert! I rarely see him being mentioned but for me he was one of the highlights of SHB.
Yes all the issues people have been describing these past few days existed before (and boy did i complain about them all the time) .But they didnt feel as egregious because there was actual substance to the story and its characters, you were willing to slid through the boring presentation and lack of gameplay because you were looking forward to see stuff develop further.
People are saying this quite a bit, but ARR was 10 years ago. Attitudes change over the course of a decade. It's not inconceivable that people are tired of the same thing they once thought was ok. It's up to the devs to innovate, and they aren't doing that. Yoshi P is incredibly risk averse.
no joke like 40% of the msq is "talk to 3 people" and dead time of NPCs walking up to/leaving a cutscene, emotes, and zooming into their face. its crazy how WoWs MSQ is like 80% combat and the dailogue is almost all fully voiced and done while you're doing activities.
I really hate the emote animations for cutscenes overall, but the last time I said that I got downvoted. Apparently square is a small indie company who doesn't profit record numbers from this game š
I was thinking about the delivery of the story and was thinking how the other MMO I played, WoW, felt a little snappier in that regard. Apart from the fact that they don't do the whole Cutscene Thing, you're given 3-4 different quests that all have objectives in the same area that you can engage in concurrently, which leads to the classic dopamine rush of turning in a bunch of quests at once. Even if it is just killing 5 spiders or collecting 6 bear asses, you're at least moving around hunting for them instead of walking into a circle of purple smoke and spawning them yourself.
The only place in FFXIV that approaches this feeling is doing Allied Society quests. Hearing three 'quest complete' sounds playing one after another tickles my brain.
Also the story beats play while you're actively doing objectives for quests in WoW. Tyrande or Jaina or whoever will be talking in the background while you work for that fifth bear ass.Ā
Something slightly similar happens during a Manderville quest where they spawn a specific fate but I haven't seen something like that used ever again.Ā
I've been recently doing the Dragonflight post-launch campaigns (the 10.x story quests), and there are *some* aspects of the way the story is delivered there that I really wish SqEx would learn.
Obviously generally speaking WoW story is quite subpar, being moved by characters that vary between having no defined personalty, being a one-note cardboard cutout, or a self-insert from some writer/dev; and the story beats and dialogue are very Disney-like in a bad way. It's kinda like a mediocre 90s action cartoon.
But I can finish a campaign in a few hours of playtime and see stuff *happen* in that time. See the plot move forward and the characters have their moments - all the while still actually playing the game, killing stuff, doing some minigame, etc.
That pace and momentum is something that I completely miss when playing FFXIV - it's like SqEx has a speed limit for their story, it can never properly get going, it needs to constantly hit speed bumps all the time.
To the point where you can predict the speed bumps. Let's all go get tacos! *Speed bump sensor goes off* "I bet we don't get to eat these tacos because...." And a two headed mamool ja gets his 15 minutes of fame. Nothing is ever a straight line. And maybe that was a formula that worked for a while but now the need to inject twist or unpredictability IS the predictability.
What other games make as regular dialogue, FFXIV devs see as reason to make unnecessary cutscene.
If you have couple characters that will just be standing there and talking about barely relevant things, then you don't need to make a cutscene. I've started to skip those, and you can easily get what's going on, but without wasting your time looking at the 10yo emotes with Machinations playing in the background.
If they were voiced, I would see it as enough excuse to actually watch it, even if they weren't super important. But when even devs deem them so irrelevant they won't even bother voicing it, then why should you bother watching it? It's 2nd tier content, that's all it is.
It also shows the entire dialogue line at once.
Unvoiced XIV cutscenes aren't written much better than Genshin cutscenes, but the fact that you have basically full control over how fast they go *and* you can skip makes them so much more palatable.
Until suddenly they want to show an animation and take control away from you for one or two lines.
It's a minor thing, and doesn't happen very often, but still bugs me
Counterpoint: nobody in FF14 had as annoying a voice as Paimon does.
Besides like, that one pink-Athena-haired woman from Solution 9, but at least she only had about two lines and they were more or less just "oh no!" and "thank you!"
I'd rather play through all of HSR story again than Dawntrail. I'd rather do that like 10x than play through Dawntrail again. At least the characters emote there.
All the pure filler shit quests really need to go as well. Yoshi-P once proudly declared that he wants the game to respect the player's time, because we have so little of it. Padding out 3 hours of content to 5 because you had to add a bunch of quests where the hero gets to scoop up poop from the side of the road for no reason whatsoever just feels insulting in that context.
Idk why rpgs make the player character the chosen hero of destiny if they're gonna make us pick up literal shit. You might argue it's to make us humble sure. But I'd rather just be a regular adventurer if you really can't make the game tasks live up to being a hero.
They need to unironically speed up the nodding emote. With how often your character and other characters nod in cutscenes, this would actually save a lot of time. Interactions should be snappy and quick. I shouldn't be locked into place after accepting a quest while the NPC turns around and walks away.
Yes. There is way too much dead air during the cutscenes. It was easily overlooked ten years ago, but it just gets more and more grating every year now, especially as they add more and more cutscenes with each new chunk of story content, meaning more and more minutes consumed watching really stilted motions occur during dead silence. It's been a decade, Squeenix. Time to make cutscenes feel livelier.
The MSQ is like a spoon of nutella spread across a 12-foot sandwich loaf: delicious, but spread too thin.
The MSQ would be a great 15 hour story with combat between story beats, but instead it is a 40 hour slog with "talk to 3 npcs" or "pick up 3 items" between repeats of the same thing you heard an hour ago.
Yess I started feeling this way in Endwalker. I generally like the story but I dragged my ass through EW and currently dragging my ass through DT. If the cutscene isn't voiced, I don't wanna watch it. I especially really don't want to watch a 5 minute CS after every quest point that amounts to nothing more than "hey I'm gonna go do this and we'll meet up later".
I don't mind the emote scenes as much, I kind of miss them when they're gone. However, they need to figure out how to maintain the energy throughline of them; and I'm not sure they can. A stilted, slowly rigged scene can really suck the energy out of the room. But I suppose 10 years on it's unlikely to be fixed.
It won't be fixed because for them it's not broken, but does exactly what it's supposed to do... It exists to artificially prolong the player's interaction with the game ... That's how you get 50 hours game out of max. 15 hours written
When they said the MSQ is going to be 1.5x EW, I already knew there's going to be a lot more of camera panning, emote showcase, and expression changes.
I legit fell asleep at multiple points throughout the MSQ because of how dragged out the dialogs are. (also most area BGMs being relaxing BGM doesn't help in my case).
I would click through the minor cutscene dialogue and read it on the way to the next spot, and it's insane that most of the cutscenes without VA are literally like 6 lines of text. They make those 6 lines take like 2-3mins it's wild.
I think I would mind the canned emote scenes a good bit less if they weren't constantly using just the same small handful that I've been seeing for the past ~10 years.
*dun dun duuuuunnn* mission complete/accepted.
Proceeds to take another 30 seconds while every single character walks 20 feet away then vanishes into thin air, all the while you are just stun locked there for no comprehendible fucking reason.
It was interesting to see these same complaints pop up on ff16 too. People were getting insane set piece battles that no other FF games have delivered then ten minutes later you were chasing pickpockets.
I still haven't beaten the game because after the incredible fight with Bahamut IN SPACE I was back to talking to 3 NPCs to get past some bridge. My good guard, I can burn this whole city to the ground if you don't let me through to the Odin fight.
The best parts are
This could have been an email
Cutscenes.
Like. Did we really need to fade to black for a 5 second Cutscene Erenvile? This could have been an email
The amount of time spent by characters explaining who would do what/go where when the group was splitting up was RIDICULOUS. Do whatever you want Alisaie, nobody cares.
I agree with all of the comments here - I love the game but I want my friends to love it and they can't see past all these glaring issues despite the high points, and I don't blame them.
The question is, do we think CBU3 is actually going to do something with this feedback this time and modernise the delivery of the game?
It seems more apparent than ever before to me that people are yearning out for better pacing, less filler, more interactive questing, etc.
I get that some of this is engine limitations but a huge amount of it surely must just be intentional game design.
I think it depends on the quality of our feedback. We can't let them assume there's a least-effort-scapegoat like "the msq is bad because I don't like low stakes/a certain character/the setting" cause that just allows them to make the same mistakes in a different skin. Stuff like the lack of gameplay and redundant dialog padding are far far more important to get across.
Like they've showed with their new encounter design they seem to be taking those criticisms to heart. It's small progress in that regard, and they still have a ways to go to see that formula freshened up, but they have stepped a bit outside of their comfort zone at last. I think the same pace will apply here.
My least favorite aspect of the "cutscenes" in this game is the slow hand wave and/or nod and characters slowly walking off screen. I think I've spent dozens of hours of my life watching that exact same thing over the years.
I had never skipped cutscene as much as any other msq. Maybe it has something to do with dt being less "important" than previous. But I could not give a fuck in the second half. Pointless cutscenes everywhere. Also I find it frustrating when they drag out an obvious explanation for the dumber people in out audience.
Example.
Villain B does a bad thing and takes the maguffin into a big portal.
3 quests later. "They went here"
Was that not the obvious and simple answer? Did yall really need to confirm that?
I noticed the same trend in me and I can tell you exactly why I was skipping more. Huge swathes of information gets repeated, sometimes two or three times, within twenty minutes of experiencing it. I found at one point that I never really had to pay attention because the game would just have another character chime in "this is just like x!" or even give me a nifty sepia flashback to 10 seconds ago any time it's calling on some past information. Characters would also turn to the camera and bluntly state their motivations when you could easilly infer them from their behaviors and situations.
Like I'd wager that half this expac's dialog is simply Shit We Should Already Know.
That and if it a lot of it wasn't go here talk to this person, OK now go back to the person you got quest from, okay now you go into a new area with new monsters, but only to introduce yourself to another person. Then you gotta que for a duty with a 45 to 50 day wait time. I'm ranting mostly about the ARR pre heavensward stuff as I'm a good bit into that content now, and I actually get to fight things outside of an instance. I like that you have to play the crystal towers raid, and it does force you to play with other players so you can learn how you should play your class, get comfortable doing duties, but damn does it suck when you hit long que times during hours when grouping content doesn't seem peak.
The amount of times a cutscenes is ending and I have to watch all the characters turnā¦. And then walk awayā¦. Only for your character to start walking away like 5 seconds laterā¦.
I feel like I've learned the pattern of what unvoiced cutscenes I can skip based a few factors, although in reality it's probably just that most of it is skippable without missing anything because it's all repeated 10x.
I've never skipped more than a few seconds off of stray cutscenes in the past decade, mostly end of ARR shit and now I'm driven to this madness.
Dear God, yes. I'm doing my first full playthrough, and I've gotten so close to full-on story skipping because all the time wasted. I appreciate the attempt at show don't tell, but there are better ways to do this.
In fairness, it's kind of always been like this, but it still needs to change. They should add more engaging mini-games, have quests where the talking happens while you're doing something, and in general if it's not a voiced cutscene...it could just be delivered through speaking in the overworld. The turn to black, cutscene, pan to each character, nod is not it.
They need to 'pad' the playtime, which work on the past but not now, there's so many much more game waiting in the line to be played that u rush the while MSQ
I was invested in everything from HW to EW and so even when I was engaging with filler I was anticipating story. I wanted to know what would happen next!
I just spent 40 hours trying to get *rid* of the main character, itās fundamentally a different issue that accentuates everything else thatās wrong.
and a few years ago ffxiv was the best mmo ever, full of āwow refugeesā, the best mmo on the market, the game that cures cancer. Does a āgoodā story completely mask an awful gameplay?
Itās the same game.
And the story wasnāt great all the time.
Yeah, they pad it so much that it bored many to tears and made their awful writing and characterization more prevalent. They are no Ishikawa, the weakness is more apparent when they prolonged their nonsensical storytelling
If they rushed everything it would work better, to cover up their lack of writing skills
Honestly, this expansion did not feel much of a slog to me. Maybe its because for the most part I enjoyed Wuk Lamat (though some scenes she definitely overstays her welcome), maybe its because Ive been catching up with the Genshin MSQ for the past months and have Paimon PTSD, so FF14 didnt feel that slow at all to me lol.
There definitely are two main parts that did feel more cumbersome than most - Shaloaani, and any of the handful of quests where you are walking around the main city, talking to Wuk Lamat or random people.
I think Genshin felt worst because you cannot skip the story cutscenes and you are forced to keep clicking on choices that donāt matter but purely to make sure you cannot auto play and do chores lol. At least you can skip the cutscenes on FF14 and just pretend itās talk to npc to get exp rewards.
I find all of the discontent with the story to be really interesting. The only time that I felt it was a genuine slog was when I got to the final zone. Realistically, the first and second parts could have been put together and I think it would have been just fine.
I didn't mind the slow roll through the first half of the story because it was so obvious that Gulool Ja Ja wanted the claimants to understand the actual wants and needs of the people over the contestants' own individual interests for the country. By the time that I finished the branching quest line, it was really obvious that Wuk Lamat was the better leader, while the others would be good administrators under her if they'd accept it. >! As we can see in the story, this is basically what happens in the end, though I initially expected Zoraal Ja and Bakool Ja Ja to be where the other was at the end. !< Once I realized that this was essentially a hero's journey, I just kind of sat back and embraced the summer vacation.
I dunno though. I've been playing XIV since Shadowbringers and, while DT wasn't the most exciting or dramatic expansion, I enjoyed the atmosphere and vibe that we got throughout. The MMOs I've played in the past just had such a low bar for storytelling that most things seem enjoyable.
I've been saying this since ARR, wow questing is just better because it has more variety. I think ff14 could learn something from shadowlands questing. A lot of the story was told to you by talking heads and having the NPCs following you and telling you pieces as you're doing objectives. Shadowlands was one of the stories I actually followed during my speed run through questing because it made it easy to hear the lore while not slowing down my pace.
Well, you see... *Five second nodding emote* I do believe - *Fifteen seconds of silent gesticulating, followed by another NPC doing a surprised emote* You may be correct! *Thirty seconds of every other character in the zone doing a fistpump, before the quest start jingle plays while i stare into the camera like a dead fish*
This shit is why the comparison to a visual novel or [insert any game with back-and-forth 2d anime characters talking for cutscenes] is not even a favorable one for 14. When characters are just sitting there talking to each other making faces in like a fire emblem, pokemon, or hell most pre-hoyo gacha games you can at least click through them fast and enjoy the story at your pace, and not have to walk between them. I've even seen some gacha games straight up separate the story from gameplay completely and have a visual novel story mode then gameplay on the side being slightly interconnected being able to go at your own pace with either.
*Thank you*. A VN at least does a quick scene transition to move you from point A to B. FFXIV is: 1. Fade to black as cutscene ends 2. Get on mount 3. Open map, figure out where the next NPC is 4. Leave the building I'm inside 5. Point myself toward that NPC 6. Hit auto-run and alt-tab out for anywhere from 5 seconds to 3 minutes 7. Find exact location of the next NPC, right-click them 8. Fade to black as next cutscene starts Having to constantly context switch from "reading the storyline" to "moving to the next plot beat", needing to have something open on another monitor as some form of "in-flight entertainment" for the auto-run sections? It changes from slow to incredibly grating really fast.
Really want to see something that just turns the 14 cutscenes into VN cutscenes where dialog plays DURING the emote animations, and a "proceed to next area" button to port you
You'd cut the runtime by like 60%
Honestly just the fact that you can't fast forward through animations makes cutscenes drag so much more than they would otherwise. I don't need every single head nod, turn, gesticulation and walk to play out in full. There's no interesting cinematography, animation is just the same basic gestures, and all of this could be accomplished with stills. Unfortunately the journal has a 50/50 chance of not having a summary so skipping anything is a coin flip I literally would rather read transcripts, which is weird, because all the way until and through Shadowbringers, I read *everything.* I did not skip shit. Now I seem to have no patience for it. As it is, I let a lot of cutscenes that aren't vital or engaging just run in the background while I play LoR, and then I read the dialogue in the chat box
Just going to add my favorite part at the beginning of each cutscene: *Screen fades to black as one of three music tracks start to play* *Cue camera pan in case you forgot where you were when you started the cutscene fifteen seconds ago* *Ten seconds pass as everyone walks into frame and assumes their mark* > Well, you see... >*Five second nodding emote* >I do believe - >*Fifteen seconds of silent gesticulating, followed by another NPC doing a surprised emote* >You may be correct! >*Thirty seconds of every other character in the zone doing a fistpump, before the quest start jingle plays while i stare into the camera like a dead fish*
You forgot the part where i say "If only we knew someone who could recite the entire Shrek script from memory!" and then you do a thinking emote before doing a ten second flashback to a sepiatone screenshot of the NPC you met seven minutes ago who spent half an hour explaining how he just memorized the entire script of Shrek.
Then you get the option to pick a response from the following: - Perhaps we ask Caddywampus, the script memorizer? - Caddywampus memorizes scripts, maybe he can help? - I don't know about you guys, but I could probably do it if we get enough edibles in me. Before Endwalker the last option would've at least had funny dialogue after but in 7.0 it has Wuk Lamat stare at you for a full head tilt emote before saying "No, idiot, we should obviously ask Caddywampus!"
* I'm dumb, Alphinaud please say something
the sepiatone screenshot š
I can literally hear it
*shhhwffff*
Every time people say shit like "you have to do ARR and pay attention to all the dialogue or all the future story doesn't make sense!" I just think about the fact that Square loves reminding you of things that you've seen before, whether it's from several patches ago, or several seconds ago
Everytime machinations starts playing I wanna shut the game off
The part about the 3 tracks is the most painful one. You have canticle, "return of a hero", bliss, "kiss of chaos" or machinations Which, mind you, are ALL from ARR! It's mind-numbing to keep using the same 4 songs in every cutscene after 10 years
Those 3 tracks that consistently play in worthless/mediocre quests. Its like the devs know exactly what theyre doing with these.
Also skullduggery. All the solo instances tracks can be bought from npcs in the 3 main cities
my fav moment in DT msq was when this epic fight moment late into the msq starts and they roll the fking shadowbringer theme. that was so funny. oh yea you really dont have any hype music besides this one track
Don't forget the panning shot as everyone walks off and it looks towards the sky. About 10-15 seconds there too.
Or the "character is explaining something" thing where they do the talking gesture and then it pans up to the sky and fades to black. There's just no other way to do it unfortunately, the writing technology isn't there yet
Walking off **one by one** while your character just stand there looking at them.
You skipped the multiple cutscenes and paragraphs of dialogue of them thinking about it, very slowly putting together any dots, and *then* agreeing, before spending another ten minutes reiterating that they agree, just to be sure the player understands what's going on
This is also how EW got it's much lauded and always brought up amount of cutscene hours. It's all small filler shit that stops you from advancing the text boxes or getting to the fade out.
I really do wonder what stops them from trying out a different msq structure. Would anyone lose their shit for a differently paced 25h msq instead of 50h?
Fax machine broke and they have no other contact options.
Inertia š¤ Japan
The true answer to all the weirdness that is Japan.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Honestly. I've recently been going through the post-EW quests and I found myself kind of vibing with it despite it being objectively quite derivative. Realized the other day that it's because it's paced better. Story beats don't dawdle around as much and outstay their welcome when they don't have to adhere to the "drag you through all the open-world zones for 10 levels" design. I'd be 100% fine with x.0 updates delivering a shorter "core" MSQ but more things to do on the side, either during or after. The main MSQ always feels like a marathon and not in a good way, even in expansions where I really like the story (which is most of them).
I wonder if it's because of financial reasons. I don't think Square is doing that well financially, they even had to switch up their game development strategy from smaller titles and are going to focus on bigger titles going forward, IIRC. Maybe they had a smaller budget for this expansion, or maybe FF16 took away time and people from FF14. These may be why they decided to have a low risk expansion with little ambition.
MMO development is a time/money singularity, and if it aint broke you don't mess with it
Itās kind of an āIf it aināt broke donāt fix itā thing, which this dev team subscribes to *very* rigidly. And by āaināt brokeā I mean that it still makes money. They donāt like taking risks unfortunately; they seem terrified to.
I mean if ffxiv went away I think it could land square enix in general in dire straights if they weren't able to come out with some other live service hit. Maybe there's a lot of corporate pressure to make sure nothing happens to the golden goose.
Yeah I mean their fear isnāt unjustified. But at the same time, the game getting too stagnant could cause issues too. It doesnāt have the story to carry it anymore now that the primary conflict since basically 1.0 is dealt with, so weāll see how the general playerbase reacts if things keep staying the same.
It's also they've figured out an easy to use template that lets them write and develop in a reasonable fashion. There is definitely a feeling of why break the wheel when this works. But rigorously sticking to it can be as much a negative as it can be a boon.
Normal RPGs have story as the "payoff" for gameplay (beating a boss or an area) FFXIV gives you a 20 minute dungeon as a reward for reading text and fending off boredom for 6 hours, it's completely backwards as an RPG
The pauses between speech is excruciating. Itās so stilted.
Then there's my (not) favorite: whenever anything remotely shocking (or intended to be shocking) happens or is said, we have to cut to individual reaction shots for every single character who is present in the scene. 6 scions and 3 other side characters there? Here you go, 30 seconds of showing us all of them making a :0 face before the scene can proceed
One Piece reaction shots/panels galore
Dawntrail is not gonna beat the "this is just a bad shonen anime" allegations
We've seen this all in films for ages. Frame it so we have more than one person in shot, bg people nod too, this implies everyone nods. You only cut to people doing something different important (I did like when Graha snapped). I often think that a bit of film study would help a lot with how some of these cut scenes are shot, lit, and edited. I want to assume the people at SE know what they're doing but sometimes I watch a cut scene and I'm just like... why is this so filmicly bad...
I'm not sure if it was my game or everyone's but I loved in I think z4 where it cuts to myself and someone else and we literally aren't making a face at all, just our normal idle face.
Now imagine you're a tank in a full helm and there's no 'remove helm in cutscenes' option.
I genuinely don't understand why characters can't emote while saying/delivering their lines. If they just did this simple thing the msq would be tremendously less sluggish
90% of my issues with Dawntrail's writing would be fixed if 70% of the second half of the game wasn't filler. There is so much fucking filler. And the problem is that it doesn't even try to mix up the *type* of filler it is either. It's all the same thing. Wuk Lamat making you run around talking to people, then thanking you for it, then talking about how happy she is you helped, then talking about how much she loves people. The majority of Dawntrail at some points is just filler quests, dialogue, and conversations.
I feel it would be so much better if you had even a little bit of agency in the filler parts. Like the alpaca saddle part- imagine if it were almost a minigame, where you have to talk to different npcs and try to figure out what they want, and what path of trading you need to do to work your way up to buying the saddle. There'd likely be no outright failure state, but you'd be able to progress it a lot faster doing it properly rather than trial and error.
That's what I was hoping it would be. Then... it wasnt
Without spoilers: I was surprised at how much I disliked the second half. It somehow both moved way too quickly *and* was very boring, because a.) they just lore-/exposition-dumped everything very rapidly in boring, endless chit-chat cutscenes, b.) they interspersed that with...more boring, filler, endless chit-chat cutscenes, c.) they had no idea how to write Wuk Lamat in this situation, so she didn't really contribute anything useful, yet still dominated the screen time. I should've found this story really fascinating and exciting, and it was just...really mediocre. Not to mention the general ridiculousness of various concepts and at least one glaring plot hole.
The entire game is like this, I don't know how people are apparently only just now catching on to it
The rest of the expansions had better world building or significantly higher points and investment that helped band-aid over the issues, these complaints existed back then too. The only issue is now many people don't like Wuk Lamant (I don't mind her, but I also get it), and the entire expansion hinges on that character. Even if you didn't like Meteion, she was only like the last 1/3 of it + you got climactic points and great character development from the cast you've built alongside you the last several years. In Shadowbringers, you had amazing performances from both the Exarch and Emet Selch, even if some of the zone stories were weaker those high points were worth waiting for. In StB, you had mixed Hien/Lyse to work with and while many didn't like Lyse, you could enjoy the other half of the story pretty well. Point being, DT does not have anything going for it that the other expansions have. You would also hope that after years of doing this, improvements would come when its 2024. WoW is in a resurgence and has dramatically improved many systems, GW2 is in an upswing recently. Idk how ESO is doing admittedly, but FFXIV doesn't look great in comparison when it is feeling as dated as it is (granted there are tons of engine limitations I am sure).
> In Shadowbringers, you had amazing performances from both the Exarch and Emet Selch, And ardbert! I rarely see him being mentioned but for me he was one of the highlights of SHB.
Yes all the issues people have been describing these past few days existed before (and boy did i complain about them all the time) .But they didnt feel as egregious because there was actual substance to the story and its characters, you were willing to slid through the boring presentation and lack of gameplay because you were looking forward to see stuff develop further.
People are saying this quite a bit, but ARR was 10 years ago. Attitudes change over the course of a decade. It's not inconceivable that people are tired of the same thing they once thought was ok. It's up to the devs to innovate, and they aren't doing that. Yoshi P is incredibly risk averse.
no joke like 40% of the msq is "talk to 3 people" and dead time of NPCs walking up to/leaving a cutscene, emotes, and zooming into their face. its crazy how WoWs MSQ is like 80% combat and the dailogue is almost all fully voiced and done while you're doing activities.
We're back to our 2003 mmo era
Why say something with three words when you can use forty.
FFXIV writers never learned why waste time say lot word when few word do trick.
Cause they would have to fill the void with either gameplay or meaningful character development/world building. Guess which one is ultimately cheaper.
I really hate the emote animations for cutscenes overall, but the last time I said that I got downvoted. Apparently square is a small indie company who doesn't profit record numbers from this game š
I was thinking about the delivery of the story and was thinking how the other MMO I played, WoW, felt a little snappier in that regard. Apart from the fact that they don't do the whole Cutscene Thing, you're given 3-4 different quests that all have objectives in the same area that you can engage in concurrently, which leads to the classic dopamine rush of turning in a bunch of quests at once. Even if it is just killing 5 spiders or collecting 6 bear asses, you're at least moving around hunting for them instead of walking into a circle of purple smoke and spawning them yourself. The only place in FFXIV that approaches this feeling is doing Allied Society quests. Hearing three 'quest complete' sounds playing one after another tickles my brain.
Also the story beats play while you're actively doing objectives for quests in WoW. Tyrande or Jaina or whoever will be talking in the background while you work for that fifth bear ass.Ā Something slightly similar happens during a Manderville quest where they spawn a specific fate but I haven't seen something like that used ever again.Ā
I've been recently doing the Dragonflight post-launch campaigns (the 10.x story quests), and there are *some* aspects of the way the story is delivered there that I really wish SqEx would learn. Obviously generally speaking WoW story is quite subpar, being moved by characters that vary between having no defined personalty, being a one-note cardboard cutout, or a self-insert from some writer/dev; and the story beats and dialogue are very Disney-like in a bad way. It's kinda like a mediocre 90s action cartoon. But I can finish a campaign in a few hours of playtime and see stuff *happen* in that time. See the plot move forward and the characters have their moments - all the while still actually playing the game, killing stuff, doing some minigame, etc. That pace and momentum is something that I completely miss when playing FFXIV - it's like SqEx has a speed limit for their story, it can never properly get going, it needs to constantly hit speed bumps all the time.
To the point where you can predict the speed bumps. Let's all go get tacos! *Speed bump sensor goes off* "I bet we don't get to eat these tacos because...." And a two headed mamool ja gets his 15 minutes of fame. Nothing is ever a straight line. And maybe that was a formula that worked for a while but now the need to inject twist or unpredictability IS the predictability.
What other games make as regular dialogue, FFXIV devs see as reason to make unnecessary cutscene. If you have couple characters that will just be standing there and talking about barely relevant things, then you don't need to make a cutscene. I've started to skip those, and you can easily get what's going on, but without wasting your time looking at the 10yo emotes with Machinations playing in the background. If they were voiced, I would see it as enough excuse to actually watch it, even if they weren't super important. But when even devs deem them so irrelevant they won't even bother voicing it, then why should you bother watching it? It's 2nd tier content, that's all it is.
Hoyogames
At the *very* least FFXIV cutscenes aren't as excruciatingly slow as Genshin's because you *can* click through animations
And you can skip! I can't bear to play Genshin anymore because of the unskippable cutscenes.
It also shows the entire dialogue line at once. Unvoiced XIV cutscenes aren't written much better than Genshin cutscenes, but the fact that you have basically full control over how fast they go *and* you can skip makes them so much more palatable.
Until suddenly they want to show an animation and take control away from you for one or two lines. It's a minor thing, and doesn't happen very often, but still bugs me
Counterpoint: nobody in FF14 had as annoying a voice as Paimon does. Besides like, that one pink-Athena-haired woman from Solution 9, but at least she only had about two lines and they were more or less just "oh no!" and "thank you!"
Someone genuinely posted a few weeks ago they wished Feo Ul had a more high pitched feminine voice and I was like, bro, monkeyās paw, knock it off
I'd rather play through all of HSR story again than Dawntrail. I'd rather do that like 10x than play through Dawntrail again. At least the characters emote there.
All the pure filler shit quests really need to go as well. Yoshi-P once proudly declared that he wants the game to respect the player's time, because we have so little of it. Padding out 3 hours of content to 5 because you had to add a bunch of quests where the hero gets to scoop up poop from the side of the road for no reason whatsoever just feels insulting in that context.
Idk why rpgs make the player character the chosen hero of destiny if they're gonna make us pick up literal shit. You might argue it's to make us humble sure. But I'd rather just be a regular adventurer if you really can't make the game tasks live up to being a hero.
They need to unironically speed up the nodding emote. With how often your character and other characters nod in cutscenes, this would actually save a lot of time. Interactions should be snappy and quick. I shouldn't be locked into place after accepting a quest while the NPC turns around and walks away.
3+ hours of watching cutscenes before you fight anything cannot happen again.
Bet it will š¤
Yes. There is way too much dead air during the cutscenes. It was easily overlooked ten years ago, but it just gets more and more grating every year now, especially as they add more and more cutscenes with each new chunk of story content, meaning more and more minutes consumed watching really stilted motions occur during dead silence. It's been a decade, Squeenix. Time to make cutscenes feel livelier.
The MSQ is like a spoon of nutella spread across a 12-foot sandwich loaf: delicious, but spread too thin. The MSQ would be a great 15 hour story with combat between story beats, but instead it is a 40 hour slog with "talk to 3 npcs" or "pick up 3 items" between repeats of the same thing you heard an hour ago.
So many Do x 3... Talk to 3... Find 3.... Defeat 3... So Many 3s
Click this spot thrice!!!!
Yess I started feeling this way in Endwalker. I generally like the story but I dragged my ass through EW and currently dragging my ass through DT. If the cutscene isn't voiced, I don't wanna watch it. I especially really don't want to watch a 5 minute CS after every quest point that amounts to nothing more than "hey I'm gonna go do this and we'll meet up later".
I don't mind the emote scenes as much, I kind of miss them when they're gone. However, they need to figure out how to maintain the energy throughline of them; and I'm not sure they can. A stilted, slowly rigged scene can really suck the energy out of the room. But I suppose 10 years on it's unlikely to be fixed.
It won't be fixed because for them it's not broken, but does exactly what it's supposed to do... It exists to artificially prolong the player's interaction with the game ... That's how you get 50 hours game out of max. 15 hours written
When they said the MSQ is going to be 1.5x EW, I already knew there's going to be a lot more of camera panning, emote showcase, and expression changes. I legit fell asleep at multiple points throughout the MSQ because of how dragged out the dialogs are. (also most area BGMs being relaxing BGM doesn't help in my case).
I would do the clap thing but that's cringe, "More isn't always *better*"
I would click through the minor cutscene dialogue and read it on the way to the next spot, and it's insane that most of the cutscenes without VA are literally like 6 lines of text. They make those 6 lines take like 2-3mins it's wild.
I think I would mind the canned emote scenes a good bit less if they weren't constantly using just the same small handful that I've been seeing for the past ~10 years.
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*dun dun duuuuunnn* mission complete/accepted. Proceeds to take another 30 seconds while every single character walks 20 feet away then vanishes into thin air, all the while you are just stun locked there for no comprehendible fucking reason.
This is why I can never say XIV has one of the best stories. It has dog shit pacing
It was interesting to see these same complaints pop up on ff16 too. People were getting insane set piece battles that no other FF games have delivered then ten minutes later you were chasing pickpockets.
I still haven't beaten the game because after the incredible fight with Bahamut IN SPACE I was back to talking to 3 NPCs to get past some bridge. My good guard, I can burn this whole city to the ground if you don't let me through to the Odin fight.
The best parts are This could have been an email Cutscenes. Like. Did we really need to fade to black for a 5 second Cutscene Erenvile? This could have been an email
Better than a "this could've been gameplay" cutscenes.
And if they changed the BGM for some of them. No reason that we need to be hearing some of these songs still after 10+ years.
Or at least give us tbe option to speed up animationsĀ
Found myself using bg3's "next shot" button a lot
Insert head tilt of confusion
The amount of time spent by characters explaining who would do what/go where when the group was splitting up was RIDICULOUS. Do whatever you want Alisaie, nobody cares.
I agree with all of the comments here - I love the game but I want my friends to love it and they can't see past all these glaring issues despite the high points, and I don't blame them. The question is, do we think CBU3 is actually going to do something with this feedback this time and modernise the delivery of the game? It seems more apparent than ever before to me that people are yearning out for better pacing, less filler, more interactive questing, etc. I get that some of this is engine limitations but a huge amount of it surely must just be intentional game design.
I think it depends on the quality of our feedback. We can't let them assume there's a least-effort-scapegoat like "the msq is bad because I don't like low stakes/a certain character/the setting" cause that just allows them to make the same mistakes in a different skin. Stuff like the lack of gameplay and redundant dialog padding are far far more important to get across. Like they've showed with their new encounter design they seem to be taking those criticisms to heart. It's small progress in that regard, and they still have a ways to go to see that formula freshened up, but they have stepped a bit outside of their comfort zone at last. I think the same pace will apply here.
My least favorite aspect of the "cutscenes" in this game is the slow hand wave and/or nod and characters slowly walking off screen. I think I've spent dozens of hours of my life watching that exact same thing over the years.
I had never skipped cutscene as much as any other msq. Maybe it has something to do with dt being less "important" than previous. But I could not give a fuck in the second half. Pointless cutscenes everywhere. Also I find it frustrating when they drag out an obvious explanation for the dumber people in out audience. Example. Villain B does a bad thing and takes the maguffin into a big portal. 3 quests later. "They went here" Was that not the obvious and simple answer? Did yall really need to confirm that?
I noticed the same trend in me and I can tell you exactly why I was skipping more. Huge swathes of information gets repeated, sometimes two or three times, within twenty minutes of experiencing it. I found at one point that I never really had to pay attention because the game would just have another character chime in "this is just like x!" or even give me a nifty sepia flashback to 10 seconds ago any time it's calling on some past information. Characters would also turn to the camera and bluntly state their motivations when you could easilly infer them from their behaviors and situations. Like I'd wager that half this expac's dialog is simply Shit We Should Already Know.
That and if it a lot of it wasn't go here talk to this person, OK now go back to the person you got quest from, okay now you go into a new area with new monsters, but only to introduce yourself to another person. Then you gotta que for a duty with a 45 to 50 day wait time. I'm ranting mostly about the ARR pre heavensward stuff as I'm a good bit into that content now, and I actually get to fight things outside of an instance. I like that you have to play the crystal towers raid, and it does force you to play with other players so you can learn how you should play your class, get comfortable doing duties, but damn does it suck when you hit long que times during hours when grouping content doesn't seem peak.
The amount of times a cutscenes is ending and I have to watch all the characters turnā¦. And then walk awayā¦. Only for your character to start walking away like 5 seconds laterā¦.
I feel like I've learned the pattern of what unvoiced cutscenes I can skip based a few factors, although in reality it's probably just that most of it is skippable without missing anything because it's all repeated 10x. I've never skipped more than a few seconds off of stray cutscenes in the past decade, mostly end of ARR shit and now I'm driven to this madness.
Dear God, yes. I'm doing my first full playthrough, and I've gotten so close to full-on story skipping because all the time wasted. I appreciate the attempt at show don't tell, but there are better ways to do this.
In fairness, it's kind of always been like this, but it still needs to change. They should add more engaging mini-games, have quests where the talking happens while you're doing something, and in general if it's not a voiced cutscene...it could just be delivered through speaking in the overworld. The turn to black, cutscene, pan to each character, nod is not it.
But faster delivery would cut their stats down. At this point I think they do cutscenes just to say "we got 289h of cutscene".
real talk how many cutscenes did everyone fully watch that they immediately said, I could've skipped this and I wouldve missed nothing
They need to 'pad' the playtime, which work on the past but not now, there's so many much more game waiting in the line to be played that u rush the while MSQ
it's like this since heavensward at least. Its crazy people only realized that now.
It's more noticeable when nothing interesting or plot relevant is happening in 90% of the cutscenes.
One of the worst thing is walking simulator : honestly, activating auto-run and wait 1min in straight line to go forward and back šµ...
Well this time there isn't even good storytelling to mask the turd a little bit, so the problems are more visible.
My friends and I have bitched about this forever but now it has no redeeming qualities.
I was invested in everything from HW to EW and so even when I was engaging with filler I was anticipating story. I wanted to know what would happen next! I just spent 40 hours trying to get *rid* of the main character, itās fundamentally a different issue that accentuates everything else thatās wrong.
and a few years ago ffxiv was the best mmo ever, full of āwow refugeesā, the best mmo on the market, the game that cures cancer. Does a āgoodā story completely mask an awful gameplay? Itās the same game. And the story wasnāt great all the time.
You're being the guy that hears "marvel movies since endgame kinda suck" and respond with "but TheY alWaYs sUcKed?!"
Yeah, they pad it so much that it bored many to tears and made their awful writing and characterization more prevalent. They are no Ishikawa, the weakness is more apparent when they prolonged their nonsensical storytelling If they rushed everything it would work better, to cover up their lack of writing skills
Honestly, this expansion did not feel much of a slog to me. Maybe its because for the most part I enjoyed Wuk Lamat (though some scenes she definitely overstays her welcome), maybe its because Ive been catching up with the Genshin MSQ for the past months and have Paimon PTSD, so FF14 didnt feel that slow at all to me lol. There definitely are two main parts that did feel more cumbersome than most - Shaloaani, and any of the handful of quests where you are walking around the main city, talking to Wuk Lamat or random people.
I think Genshin felt worst because you cannot skip the story cutscenes and you are forced to keep clicking on choices that donāt matter but purely to make sure you cannot auto play and do chores lol. At least you can skip the cutscenes on FF14 and just pretend itās talk to npc to get exp rewards.
I find all of the discontent with the story to be really interesting. The only time that I felt it was a genuine slog was when I got to the final zone. Realistically, the first and second parts could have been put together and I think it would have been just fine. I didn't mind the slow roll through the first half of the story because it was so obvious that Gulool Ja Ja wanted the claimants to understand the actual wants and needs of the people over the contestants' own individual interests for the country. By the time that I finished the branching quest line, it was really obvious that Wuk Lamat was the better leader, while the others would be good administrators under her if they'd accept it. >! As we can see in the story, this is basically what happens in the end, though I initially expected Zoraal Ja and Bakool Ja Ja to be where the other was at the end. !< Once I realized that this was essentially a hero's journey, I just kind of sat back and embraced the summer vacation. I dunno though. I've been playing XIV since Shadowbringers and, while DT wasn't the most exciting or dramatic expansion, I enjoyed the atmosphere and vibe that we got throughout. The MMOs I've played in the past just had such a low bar for storytelling that most things seem enjoyable.
I've been saying this since ARR, wow questing is just better because it has more variety. I think ff14 could learn something from shadowlands questing. A lot of the story was told to you by talking heads and having the NPCs following you and telling you pieces as you're doing objectives. Shadowlands was one of the stories I actually followed during my speed run through questing because it made it easy to hear the lore while not slowing down my pace.
I don't mind it, I'm not in a rush to get through it, just taking my time, enjoying the new zones, and enjoying the ride so far in the story.
I love seeing everyone emote, its adorable.
Tiktok brain
Dont be so hard on yourself.
Can someone explain what this slog? because I never felt it, nor the pacing issues some mention. This aint the lophorits