leviathonlx

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Should have made Witcher 4 instead of a bad FPS that brags about its customization that is pretty much irrelevant given almost all the gameplay is 1st person.

I just can't recommend this game right now. Combat feels terrible, the graphics are honestly a downgrade to Odyssey and especially Origins and are incredibly glitchy, and overall it doesn't even feel like an Assassin's Creed game and feels clucky as can be. I was always wary of Valhalla since it felt like this was Ubisoft wanting to cash in on the Vikings craze all while having the Viking you play as act nothing at all like a Viking.

When it comes to Shadowbringers if story is all you're looking for then this game is great and far better than the disjointed story of Stormblood and if that's all you're looking for then sure this game is pretty high up there compared to other MMO's which cannot compare as you sure as hell won't be playing WoW for the story. Almost every so called 'critics' review I read focuses on how the story was great. And the story is good but FF14 is an MMO and not a single player RPG and so the game should also be scored on things besides just the one time story. Though if you do that you realize that ShB is literally just HW 3.0. If Blizzard were to have released 3 expansions in a row that all did the same thing (only 3 max level dungeons, no new side content, no dailies/wq, and just a 4 boss raid) they'd be absolutely destroyed by said critic but WoW is apparently just held to higher standards than mediocrity. There is no new type of end-game content or systems similar to what you'll get with a WoW expansion (regardless of your feelings on artifacts or Azerite at least Blizzard tries new things). Dailies are, as per usual, going to be relegated to patch content and overall all you'll be doing at max level is grinding tomestones like we have been for the past 6 years. You can grind FATE's for a bit to get things like pets which at least may somewhat help keep the outside world from becoming the barren desert it tends to become due to a lack of things like WoW's world quests and world bosses. Class change wise it'll depend entirely on what you play. If you're a healer you most likely will be pissed with this expansion as Square has decided to give up on balancing healers by just making them all exactly the same. I personally play a DRG and I found the job enjoyable with it's changes and the removal of skills that existed just for the sake of having a button like Heavy Thrust and the excessive role action skills. The 2 new races are something that my opinion on will develop as the expansion progresses. Currently viera and hrothgar only have 1 gender which in itself doesn't necessarily bother me but most the helmets in the game do not work on these 2 new races (I could just imagine the pitchforks the WoW playerbase would have if Blizzard were to release even allied races like that). Allegedly more helmets will become usable in later patches so we'll have to wait and see but then again the 'more customization' the viera and hrothgar were supposed to have to make up for the lack of helmets is not there and even helmets that are NEW with this expansion don't even work on the new races which is just unacceptable. A big negative is that hrothgar hair is attached to their faces and the only way to change that is to pay Square 10 dollars for a fantasia which is pretty scummy. World design I feel the game has at least improved a bit when compared to Stormblood but besides the more 'realistic' textures of FF14 the zone detailing is still leagues behind what Blizzards world design team is capable of but given the typical problems of having little reason to go out in the game world I guess that's less an issue. I like a lot of the music for the zones and dungeons/trials though places like Rak'tika are a perfect example of my issues with FF14 music due to how zones have just 1 day and 1 night track that runs about ~4 minutes that plays over and over which causes the music to get repetitive very quickly compared to WoW's far more varied (and sometimes better in my view such as Zuldazar's 8.1.5 pieces) music. Overall the expansion is actually exactly what I expected from Square given their track record and that's just yet more of the same but in a different locale. Patch content will add the beast tribe dailies and the side content but given Squares track record I'm sure those things will just be Eureka 2.0 and Palace of the Dead 3.0. Maybe Eureka 2.0 will be less boring to complete this time but we'll have to wait and see and I can't score a game on something we have no information on.. There's no denying it's still one of the best MMO's on the market along with WoW but I feel they need to start innovating and trying new things and the lack of anything truly new to do that I wasn't already doing in Stormblood a month ago and Heavensward 3 years ago and A Realm Reborn before that is why I feel this expansion is worth the score I gave it. I'm sure I'll get 'reviews not helpful' from this but thankfully you can't hide opinions you don't like here like you can on reddit.

The story was good even if a bit cliche and tropey though the quests (gameplay wise) still were pretty inferior to what WoW does. Zone design was improved compared to HW but copying of assets is still pretty noticeable in areas like terrain doodads. I understand buildings having only 1 or 2 varieties but I shouldn’t see things like the same rock and tree over and over so easily which can usually be dealt with but just rotating an object. Ruby Sea feels like a huge empty zone given the water doesn’t add much actual gameplay either besides swimming. If you’re going to add a mostly water zone you should at the very least add some type of gimmick rather than having it be nothing more than a barren land of emptiness and copy pasted rocks and kelp that you swim through. In general some zones just didn’t feel like they reached their full potential such as the Lochs and Yanxia while others like Azim Steppe were really well done. The zones still feel dead in general when compared to WoW’s where you’ll see NPC’s actually doing things such as bears hunting fish or predators hunting prey and in general FF14 zone design seems to be nothing more than ‘this is the bear area and over there’s the wolf area and this final area is the bird area and the mobs are just all walking back and forth in their little zone’ and doodads just seem thrown into the game world and rarely are blended in. The main issue with SB right now is that once you hit 70 the game is the same exact game as HW. You do the same 3 dungeons over and over (with high DPS queues) to grind out tomes and in general are doing nothing at all actually new unlike how Legion added Mythic+, artifact weapons, and the world quest system (an improvement of the old dailies system). And of course with Omega they are continuing the convoluted gearing system from Alexander. Square is once again relegating any new systems to patches and we have to hope these new systems are well developed unlike Lord of Verminion and Diadem and even things like the eventual beast tribes may just be the same ol’ 3 daily quests. I’m iffy on this thing Square does where they release a ‘skeleton’ expansion and how they instead put new systems into patches I’m holding out hope that they surprise me with the upcoming patches though given Square has been nothing but predictable with FF14 so I’m not getting my hopes too high. It doesn't help that the one new system, Eureka, has already been delayed making the first patch pretty barren for a patch coming 4 months after release with some of the content not even being patched in till a month after that. So 5 months for everything while in that time Legion released 2 patches following a 77 day release schedule that added far more content than 4.1 is adding. Stormblood is a mediocre expansion and the playerbase should honestly expect so much better from a company like Square.

A mediocre expansions that is more of the same. The expansion added nothing new systems wise to the game and at max level you are doing the same exact things you were at max level in Heavensward with grinding tomes in a whole 3 max level dungeons and trying to save up for an item from the 4 boss raid with the most convoluted item system ever (well if you're rich you at least can do crafting). The reality is that if Blizzard were to have released an expansion like this it'd have been destroyed by the gaming media and playerbase.

Someone has to make up for the haters who downrate the game just for being WoW. MoP overall is a great expansion that corrects the many mistakes made in Cataclysm and is delivering content at a much faster pace this time. Dailies can get annoying but overall they take almost no time at all and most complaints center around people who have no self control. There are faults still yes but you'll be hard pressed to find a better MMO out there unless you're someone that refuses to play the game just because it's WoW.