I believe you can double-click or right-click the quest rewards and it’ll pop into the spot, if I remember correctly (for ergonomic reasons I’m playing FF14 on the couch with a gamepad now, so I haven’t used M/KB in a while).
There should be a way to do an item compare on quest rewards. On an Xbox gamepad, I’d “hover over” the reward and hit X which brings up a context menu, one of which is Item Comparison. There must be an equivalent on mouse… maybe try right-clicking and see if it brings up a menu?
I do agree the UI isn’t as smooth as some of its peers. I think a large chunk of that is due to having full gamepad support and playable on the PS4, while still having a full plethora of MMO abilities (rather than a Limited Action Set type of idea you’d see in Elder Scrolls Online). Honestly, the fact that they got a traditional MMO to play great on a gamepad is pretty remarkable. They’ve done some pretty cool tricks to handle the “three hotbars of abilities” with just a gamepad.
Just to confirm - it is indeed a right click to pull up your valid delivery options (or X/Square on controller). I don’t think this is explained anywhere in-game and it took me longer than I’d care to admit to find out. User interactions could definitely be better in places. One thing that I will offer as a positive; if you don’t like the look of your HUD it’s extremely customizable.
Welp, I’ve decided this isn’t the game for me. I feel like I’m playing WoW or GW2 or Rift with a different skin, and I’ve already done that time. Got as far as level 23 following story quests, but then they ended unless I wanted to sit around and wait for the group finder for dungeonsduties. I was kinda bored already, honestly. The story wasn’t advancing fast enough to keep me entertained on that front, and the game is nothing new on the gameplay front. Having to wait for PUGs to form in order to proceed the story was the last straw. FF XIV was fun to try out at first, but there’s too many other games out there to play one that feels like it’s a retread of a bunch of others I’ve already played.
What class you queue as makes a huge difference in wait times. My friend and I decided to run a dungeon roulette on Monday and both queued as DPS. The projected wait time was 23 minutes so we left the queue, I switched to WAR, requeued and got an instantaneous dungeon.
As Kevin says, the game is sadly slow to get going and really doesn’t differentiate itself early on so maybe you’re totally done. If you do decide to give it another try, however, you might do so as a healer or tank for better queue times.
I have to agree with this. I’ve been playing this recently and had the same experience. I ended up waiting quite a while to get that first dungeon done. In general, the idea of having to PUG to advance a critical leveling path, with no way to do it solo, is a horrible idea. I tend to play MMOs at weird off times, so grouping is often a problem, not to mention I usually hate PUGs.
I’m really struggling with this game. I love the FF universe, and once in a while, can glimpse what the game could be in the right situation. One of the pugs I ended up in was quite good, and at that point, the game was actually pretty fun.
I do agree that they need to look at the early game. There is so much running around, and needlessly trekking from one end of the map to the other…but I’m not sure how they avoid that while they are trying to teach you about getting around the world…tough one to “fix” I think.
This is one of those games I’ll probably stick with for a little while longer. I’m a sucker for class/job systems, and I’m semi interested in the story so far, but yah, the tedium is real.
It doesn’t help your play experience, but things are probably exacerbated by where we are in the patch cycle. The final Eureka zone just dropped and many people are likely doing that instead of roulettes. For that matter, concurrent players is probably trending down until Shadowbringers releases.
Shadowbringers will at least have a new tank class, so hopefully that’ll help queue times.
Edit: it also doesn’t help you now, but the queue times get more manageable at higher levels, if only because there are enough other things to do to keep busy while you wait. Even now, you could change jobs and level something else until the duty pops. You just need to change back to the class you queued as to enter it.
This describes me pretty well, but the FF14 community is just… different. I have something like 300 hours in the game and haven’t had a single bad experience with a toxic player. That’s even when I’m new to a dungeon and flub things up a couple times. Everyone’s just been super patient and happy to coach me through difficult fights which is… unexpected, to say the least.
My default approach in nearly every game is to avoid PUGs like the plague, but I use them all the time here and have yet to have a single bad experience.
I’m actually more or less enjoying the dungeons when I get into them, but I do have a very big problem with this game. Whoever designed the main quest needs to be banned from ever doing anything in a video game again. For me, this is the worst questing in any MMO I’ve ever played. I’m level 27 at this point, and the quest string since I got my mount has been nothing short of infuriating. Ride through a couple of zones to find this guy, when I finally get to this guy, literally the only thing that happens, is that he tells me I need to ride a few more zones to find another guy. This string of idiocy goes on for about a half hour, until the last guy in the chain tells me to go back to base. If this would have happened once, eh…ok, but it happens constantly. Literally 85%+ of my gameplay to level 27 has been riding or running somewhere.
I have a lot of good will for Final Fantasy, and I really like the job system and the way they have the classes set up but boy, If I wasn’t such a FF fanboy, I would have quit this at level 10 and never looked back.
100% agreed on the MSQ. It does get better, but there is an insane amount of what feels like oldschool “stretch out their monthly subscriptions” bullshit you have to wade through. The game is just frontloaded with so much of that crap, it’s a testament to how good of a game it is that it has a dedicated playerbase. If they didn’t turn away so many people with the awful start, I have to imagine the game would be far more successful.
If any of my friends were to play the game, I would do everything I could to convince them to buy the skip potion so they could bypass the MSQ and just kick off with the far stronger Heavensward once they hit L50.
Some of the frontloading is due to the history of 1.0 to 2.0. It doesn’t excuse it, but they were trying to make it slow to give themselves time to get a new endgame in place. Now it’s a pretty big deterrent to new players, unfortunately.
Do you think skip potions would help? I agree with getting through the 2.0 drag, but I wonder if the MSQ would have the same resonance if you’re effectively meeting everyone for the first time in Heavensward? I guess the counter to my argument is that without the skip portion, people won’t get to Heavensward in the first place. (Also, 2.4 into 2.5 are still my favorite emotional beats in the MSQ and I hate to see them lost.)
Yeah, this is what I was going to say. No, I don’t think Heavensward (and Stormblood to an extent) would have the same resonance. But if they’re going to get turned off of the game and never even see it, I think it’s worth it. They could brush up on “the story so far” on Youtube or another site.
What they really need to do is heavily prune everything up to 3.0. Accelerate EXP gain for the first 50 levels (especially with the level cap going up to 80 now) to account for the reduced number of quests. There are a lot of long dry spells where all you’re doing is running from one part of the zone to the other or hopping across the continent just to “tag” an NPC and head back. There was a particularly “memorable” stretch around L30 when I was in Costa del Sol where I felt like that’s all I did for hours. That part almost broke my will to keep soldiering on, the only reason I did was everyone telling me how good the game was if I could stick it out (they were right!).
Get rid of a bunch of that filler crap but keep the core of the story intact. It’d be a significant amount of work, granted, but I think player retention would be significantly higher and would pay for itself.
Yea, I would say my issue with the skip potion is it’s a bit too much of a skip, and then doesn’t do anything to catch the player up on the story after the fact. I hope they can go back and streamline a lot of the bullshit out (no, I don’t need to sniff your chocobo), stuffing it into side quests for people who want it.
I hope that they are able to take the time and go back to retool the early MSQ, but it’s understandably a hard sell since there’s no immediate value generated (and a lot of the money generated by FFXIV is used to fund other projects, which is a whole other thing…). Maybe with Yoshi-P getting a seat on the board of directors recently the team will get some more liberty to work on improving old content.
The skip potion sounds like an excellent idea. I’ve played a ton of MMOs, I get it. I can catch up on the story easily enough. The skill sets, at least up to 27, have also been brutally shallow. Cast 2 dots, nuke, heal when the healer sucks, that’s about it. I know this game gets way more involved later on, and that’s really sort of what I want to get to. I’m close enough to 30 now, that I’ll probably just push through, at that point I can start fiddling with Summoner yah?
Jobs unlock at 30, yes. They’ll start getting complex around 50, although they’re still simple compared to 70.
There are a few things that can help with the MSQ. Any time you get sent back to the Waking Sands, it’s faster to warp to Limsa and take the ferry than warp to Horizon and run.
The run up to Garuda and Titan were probably the low point of the 2.0 story. After Titan it accelerates to the 2.0 finale, which is suitably epic. 2.1 through 2.3 are PAINFUL again (stupid Ramuh) before getting really, really good for 2.4 and 2.5. By the events of 2.5, seeing things happen to character that you’ve spent dozens of hours with has an emotional punch that is really hard to rival.
