An Hour in Queue is Not Playing The Game

 

I've been making some progress catching up on the Final Fantasy XIV story since resubscribing a couple of weeks ago. I've now made it through the portion of the post-Dawntrail content that concludes with Calyx and his rather bizarre primal.

And in the process, I've been reminded of some of the reasons I stopped playing FFXIV in the first place.

The biggest issue came when I reached the trial that concludes that portion of the story. It's a required part of the MSQ, so there's no getting around it if you want to continue.

I spent almost an hour waiting in the queue.

An hour.

I realize that queues have always been a part of playing MMOs, particularly when you're catching up on older content. But with the relatively limited amount of time I spend gaming these days, sitting around waiting for a group to form feels like a colossal waste of time.

And it brought another frustration into focus.

Am I Playing a Game or Watching a Movie?

FFXIV has always been a story-heavy game. That's certainly nothing new, and the MSQ has always been central to the experience.

But as I've been catching up, I've been struck by how little actual gameplay seems to be involved in much of it.

There are long stretches where I'm essentially watching a movie, except that I have to keep clicking to advance each line of dialogue.

Then, eventually, I reach a dungeon or trial where there's some actual gameplay involved. Except now I may have to sit in a queue for a substantial amount of time before I can continue.

It's a strange combination.

I spend a lot of time advancing dialogue, and then when I finally get to the parts where I actually play the game, I may spend almost as much time waiting to do so.

I'm not suggesting that FFXIV should abandon its focus on storytelling. That's obviously an enormous part of its identity. But I do find myself wishing there were more opportunities to actually play my character as part of the MSQ, rather than moving from one conversation to the next.

It also helps explain why Dawntrail was the expansion that finally caused me to step away, even though I couldn't entirely put my finger on the reason at the time.

I haven't finished all the content I want to catch up on yet, so I'm not ready to make a final judgment. But the experience so far hasn't exactly convinced me that my earlier frustrations were misplaced.

Meanwhile, Aion 2

I also downloaded Aion 2 this week and have spent about two hours playing it.

That's obviously nowhere near enough time to form a serious opinion about a new MMO, but I've enjoyed what I've played so far and expect I'll spend more time with it.

It's an interesting contrast to returning to FFXIV.

With Aion 2, I'm starting something new and seeing whether it manages to hold my interest. With FFXIV, I'm returning to a game I know extremely well, trying to work through a backlog of content while rediscovering some of the things that made me leave.

I'll be curious to see where the two games end up.

I'd still like to finish getting caught up on FFXIV and give the post-Dawntrail content a fair assessment. But I'm increasingly aware that the amount of time a game asks me to spend doing things I don't particularly enjoy matters a lot more than it used to.

Especially when I could be spending that hour actually playing something else.

Cheers,

Joar