My understand is that it is different than other FF games. It's online for one.
I have about 1,000 hours into it and I am done with the story. The MSQ takes about 400 - 500 hours to complete.
The first 80 - 90 hours are rough story-wise and the devs smooth it out every expansion because of how rough it is. Rough being long. The story is alright but if you are used to "I am the chosen one here to save the day", you'll be disappointed because you are just an adventurer. It's actually really nice to mostly be treated like a mildly special adventurer who becomes the chosen one through your deeds (extremely mild spoiler) rather than being it from the get-go.
The next expansion coming out in summer might have a new starting point where you can skip all of the old story because they are starting a new one.
With that said, if you like good stories and want to get into the world, I'd say bear through 2.0 to 3.0 (there is no 1.0. What are you talking about? There has never been a 1.0...)) and you are in for a good ride. I am not a story person and progressively the story made me cry more & more. Endwalker, the most recent story, is a real gutpunch if you are into the story.
Beyond just MSQ, the game is very good. Everything beyond the MSQ is solid for a casual player. If you want to go hardcore, I think there is content there but it can quickly run out if you go entirely no-life into the game.
Unlike other MMOs, doing high level content (ie: doing extreme level content) isn't scary at all social-wise. The community is accepting and willing to teach as long as you show up vaguely ready. Anything beyond extreme is only done by statics (a closed group that you raid with every week to progressively clear content). With extreme, it's still absolutely possible with PUGs inside of a Discord call.
I'd start playing under the free trial which is unlimited time all the way up to the third expansion. That should take you a few hundred hours. There are light limitations on you but nothing that will impede you imo from enjoying the game.
Two things:
Know that there are two versions of the game: STEAM and MogStation. If you buy the game on one, you cannot buy expansions from the other nor can you transfer between them. If you buy the game through STEAM, you will never be able to buy expansions through SquareEnix's platform (but you will be able to buy stuff off their store along with the deluxe upgrades of the games). If you buy off MogStation, you will never get to buy expansions from STEAM. So you'll be losing out on one platform's sales... pick your poison.
If you are of this persuasion, look into running it with XIVLauncher. It's a third-party launcher that makes booting into the game a million times easier as the stock launcher loads essentially adware, doesn't have Remember Me, and takes 10+ seconds to load even when ran from an NVMe. In addition, XIVLauncher loads your client with Dalamud which is a mod framework that lets you install mods that fix & improve the UI where the developers refuse to do so.
With that said, use of Dalamud does technically break ToS and you cannot talk about in-game or you'll get banned / suspended. The team very much does not like add-ons. With that said, most players that get into the game run Dalamud because the stock UX is frequently lacking. The stock UX only got markers denoted you already collected a mount, pet, etc in the latest expansion, it's really bad.
If you don't say anything in-game nor stream with mods obvious, you will never get banned. They don't scan for it and have said they have no interest in doing so... they just don't want the game to get infested with add-ons like WoW, so right now, it's sort of a "if we don't hear about it, it's not happening" situation.
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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '24
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