11 years? Damn, time flies. I waited in line for the 1.0 release and took a week off of work to play it. I really need to give XIV another shot once I’m done with XI.
Graphics updated for entire game, or just the newest expansion?
Edit: upon getting my lazy ass to read, it says the whole game! Nice.
They’ve done new lighting and stuff like DLSS that applies to the entire game, and they’ve also done a bunch of new textures and art assets for some of the game.
Do they still slow you to a snail’s pace as soon as you progress to a new area? It felt so scummy losing my flying and mount speed as soon as I hit an expansion in a subscription based MMO. “Let’s slow that roll there gamer, can’t have you beating that content too fast. Why not buy a few more months play time?”
The progression is absolutely time gated, and they definitely calculate the travel time to make each zone take some given amount of time to complete. When they need to pad out the zone a bit longer they add one of the trailing quests (autoscroller). It’s the business model and the same reasoning for why they don’t increase the weekly tome cap and also why there’s a weekly loot lockout during the raid tier, if players could grind out all the gear they need for a patch in 1 week, they would. That said if all you want to do is the msq and normal content, you can probably beat that in 30-40 hours watching cutscenes if you can dedicate a weekend to it and unsub until the next patch. I finished the msq + all aether currents in about 16 hours after launch with a couple friends, skipping all cutscenes, and the leading edge progression groups were probably done in closer to 10-12 hours so they could hit the EX trials.
But my poor mods though ;__;
