Medigo Verus

Imagine you had four candidates running to be leader of your country. #1 was intelligent but not very bold. #2 wanted to rule by force, gain power and lord over everyone. #3 constantly made selfish, naive choices and was completely devoid of the ability to think and reason, but claimed to love the people. #4 was strong and capable but didn't care about the environment, healthcare, etc. Now imagine you're being forced to support one of those with every action every day of your life (spoiler, it's not #1). OPINION: Heavensward and Shadowbringers are the best experiences I've ever had on any online game. That said... Dawnfail's story is like MoP was to WoW; completely pulled from the rear orifice...except less interesting or relevant at the end. Compared to any past FF14 other than 1.0, it's really basic, predictable, and boring. Much like FF16, it's all been done in previous FF games (including itself, in this case). Additionally, at least half of it feels like it should be done around L30-40 to fit more logically in the overall narrative. Perhaps the most stark difference is how unimportant your character feels this time. One of the huge attractors of FF14 was being the main hero of the story, unlike WoW where the faction leaders and such took center stage, same for basically any other MMO, comparatively. I miss the old lead writer. Questing felt like a bigger series of errands than ARR for the 5th time did (at least the ARR errands made sense narratively). Nothing interesting at all, honestly...and it's all made really unbearable by the candidate scenario I mentioned at the start. I will skip *all* the cutscenes on my alt characters. There's 1 new pursuit quest type that's mediocre, I guess. Visually, it's impressive in many ways - lighting, grass, foliage, faces, materials, everything looks WAY better fidelity-wise. They updated even some old areas' and equipments' textures, and they look great, at least for an MMO! Exploring areas, however, was barely interesting. The early areas have nothing new or unique and are about half-filled with vast empty spaces (sometimes not even foliage). Comparing the capital to something like Ishgard is night and day; Ishgard is filled with STUFF, makes it look lived in and populated, personality, whereas each of these new areas are more than half just open space. The empty half is filled with the most obvious tiled textures in the entire game [other than Coerthas's new snow] and more obvious copy-paste trees and foliage than vanilla WoW (maybe try rotating or scaling). I'm not sure who picked smooth jazz for the culture they emulate with the capital but...it's a HORRIBLE fit, sounds awful. Other than that, the music is great as usual. The vacation music doesn't translate too well into battle or tension music, though, kind of comical, unlike previous xpack main music. Good of soken to try, but not even he is perfect. The combat seems pretty decent across the board. Boss fights are intuitively telegraphed [except for a few] and pretty fun, even a few new things tossed in there. New abilities largely modify existing abilities, so sometimes meh but also easy to fit into rotation...the way they changed some classes is actually pretty interesting. Perhaps they just set the bar too high before. Play the free parts of the game, you get all the really good content there.