I have a weird relationship with this game. As you can see by my hours, I have played it quite a bit, I've finished ARR and Heavensward, and spent a lot of time leveling up different jobs, exploring, chatting. The game has a very nice charm and vibe, lots of jobs are fun to play, character customization and glam is great and the story has interesting moments and cool characters. I really want to get invested.
And it might have been different if I had started playing it back when everything was releasing over time, but starting after 13 years of content has already been released changes the experience a lot.
The main story consists of a loop: Go talk to an NPC, you get sent on an errand (delivering something, picking something up, or killing enemies.) watch a small, non-voiced cutscene, and repeat for an hour or two until you get an actual interesting story beat, dungeon, or major cutscene. Then the loop continues. It feels like for every few hours of MSQ content, you get a few minutes of genuinely engaging content, while the rest is repetitive fetch questing.
You arrive at an important location to speak to someone important? Access denied, go and help local villagers for an hour first.
Now a lot of MMORPGs don't have strong stories either. The difference here is that this is more of an RPG-first and MMO-second, Since almost all content is locked behind MSQ progression, you can't really ignore the story if you're not enjoying it.
People often say "it gets better" and the story definitely does, but the loop stays pretty much the same, at least up to where I made it in the game. Having all this content available at once, without the original release pacing means you experience that gameplay loop uninterrupted, over and over. I will say that maybe I just played too much of the game in a short period of time, but still, it becomes a slog at some points. It's a good game, and i really want to keep liking it, but i find it hard to stay consistently engaged. Maybe I just need to take a break for a while and come back later and push through another expansion or two.
Another thing. For an MMO it doesn't feel very social. People are friendly, for sure, but it's hard to actually make friends just by playing. You usually have to seek out Free Companies and Discords. Otherwise there are not many activities that encourage socializing with randoms, and most interaction happens outside the game.
I even tried getting friends into it, but playing through the MSQ together isn't really possible. A Realm Reborn, specifically, is the most boring part of the game by far, and you can't really do most of the MSQ content together in any meaningful way.
That goes hand in hand with the RPG-first, MMO-second philosophy. The game is much more focused on the story and your Warrior of Light's journey than on creating genuine social experiences. Instead of feeling like a small fish in a huge world full of players, it feels more like you're the main character passing through a world populated by other main characters.
At the end of the day, I obviously enjoy something about this game. Otherwise I wouldn't have spent 400+ hours and some money on it. I can see why the game works for some people, but it just didn't work for me, sadly. I just wish i enjoyed the game as much as i enjoy the idea of it.
