I will echo what @Obsidian Fire said and add that, for myself, the most satisfying moments throughout most of the RPGs I've played are those periodic moments of returning to the open world after a long, confining linear segment -- I always think of the Oeilvert/Desert Palace portion of FFIX in particular with regard to this. Because God, I hated that part.
Just to chime in my own little two cents, for a game about a road trip, FFXV had an incredible lack of progression. Like, near the end, there's still quests to do that are a few min away from your starting point.
Just to chime in my own little two cents, for a game about a road trip, FFXV had an incredible lack of progression. Like, near the end, there's still quests to do that are a few min away from your starting point.
Oh, this! This has been one of my main gripes. The road trip and open world are absolutely at odds with each other. Open worlds are all about being a playground and going all over the place exploring, doing quests etc.
A road trip for me is a journey from a to b. Say, doing an epic trip through the US from New York to LA.
FFXV is the equivalent of wanting to do that, but after leaving NYC you spend three weeks driving in circles in New Jersey until you decide "fuck it" and load your car on a plane and fast forward straight to LA.
Also, I feel like my thread is getting incredibly derailed now. I am part of the problem.
I think it works just fine as a road trip. There's a slight disconnect, though, between that and the urgency of the plot developments -- e.g. ostensibly trying to get to Altissia/Luna as soon as possible while later describing this period as taking life at their own pace.
Still, it does what it does so well that I don't mind overlooking that.
I was comparing it to standard "story run" of the game. That's all I ultimately care about. If that part isn't good, I never care about the extra content.
The launch version of the game was somewhere between 25-30 hours long. So it's within reason to say it'll end up having doubled its original playtime. Obviously it's a bit exaggerating because Comrades is so threadbare. But it still does have a clear narrative you have to get through.
Also depends on if you include the crossover DLC. Assassin's festival, FFXIV, Terra Battle, etc.
The crossovers and collaborations are obviously not related and unconnected to XV story so I dont know why you include that in main story stats. As you said Comrades is threadbare (at most it has 30 minutes of story, the linked viseo has a few scenes missing but even with than Comrades has at best slightly 30+ minutes of story) and inflates your stats.
They're not much different than regular unrelated sidequests within the main game. Going and unlocking the Chocobo Post is unconnected from the story too. I'm including anything that has a kind of narrative element to it.
I still consider Comrades to be part of the main story simply because I enjoyed exploring the dark world locations and seeing how much things had changed. I know it doesn't have much in the way of cutscenes, but you do get plenty of new information while playing it.
Since you're using the collabs in your stats just because they have narrative element then it's fair for me to do the same and thus the base game still trumps all the DLCs combined. Even if we cut the 92hs lenght of content in half, by ignoring hunts and other non-narrative activities like fishing, we still have 46hs which is still near double of your DLC stats.
Well I dunno what the various different playtimes are associated with. All I know is my very first playthrough was about 30 hours, which was just the main story plus some of the extra stuff.
The way I play things like this on the first time, is to just follow the main story, along with doing the sidequests that are available immediately from the main story locations. And also anything that really grabs my attention.
Like I did the Rock of Ravatogh on my first playthrough because it really draws your attention. But I didn't do the Crestholm Channels (sewers dungeon) because you have no idea they exist unless you explore everything.
I guess it really all comes down to if Square wants to continue using Unreal 4 or whatever pre-made engine ends up being the best to work with, or if they'll slide back into theiir previous ambition of trying to one-up everyone with another proprietary engine. If the former, we could see Final Fantasy XVI a lot sooner than we're used to right now.
Their own engine is what seriously slowed XV back tbh. I mean what the fuck was even up with the weird "on rails" driving thing? I guess they wanted to avoid people yeeting offroad because the level design didn't support it? idk.
Besides that there's a few random hopscotch wotsit sections of gameplay; wtf is up with that fight vs
Leviathan? IIRC? That just felt disconnected from the rest of the game and gameplay, and jarring as fuck. Although it has some overlap with the rest of the combat gameplay, in that randomly bashing buttons and hoping for the best seems to work. The final battle had a similar system but that was pretty good I guess. Even if we're fighting an underdeveloped final boss dude. I don't actually care they're releasing DLC to finally give the big bad some backstory, that shit should have been in there.
And the main plot points of Kingsglaive for that matter. I mean they could've at least put the relevant parts of that movie into the game.
And what even is up with the "romantic" subplot. Quoted because the two look like they don't know each other, but, Politics told them they need to go and fuck. Medieval shit y0.
Question, why are we ignoring the XIII sequels? They are mainline titles from the mainline XIII game. The last one of them (Lighting Returns) was announced on September 2012.
Question, why are we ignoring the XIII sequels? They are mainline titles from the mainline XIII game. The last one of them (Lighting Returns) was announced on September 2012.
If they were mainline games, they'd have new characters for us to get to know, a whole new world, and development understandably take longer because there are no assets to reuse, like they do in FFX-2, FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns. The direct sequels are more easily made games that play for time so we can get the real next FF.
Their own engine is what seriously slowed XV back tbh. I mean what the fuck was even up with the weird "on rails" driving thing? I guess they wanted to avoid people yeeting offroad because the level design didn't support it? idk.
Besides that there's a few random hopscotch wotsit sections of gameplay; wtf is up with that fight vs
Leviathan? IIRC? That just felt disconnected from the rest of the game and gameplay, and jarring as fuck. Although it has some overlap with the rest of the combat gameplay, in that randomly bashing buttons and hoping for the best seems to work. The final battle had a similar system but that was pretty good I guess. Even if we're fighting an underdeveloped final boss dude. I don't actually care they're releasing DLC to finally give the big bad some backstory, that shit should have been in there.
And the main plot points of Kingsglaive for that matter. I mean they could've at least put the relevant parts of that movie into the game.
And what even is up with the "romantic" subplot. Quoted because the two look like they don't know each other, but, Politics told them they need to go and fuck. Medieval shit y0.
It's an established (and painful) Japanese trope where a boy and girl know each other from childhood, and despite not possibly having anything in common as adults, the girl (and sometimes the boy) hold onto a promise to marry each other, and when reunited the girl imediately throws herself at the boy and the boy just is all "Oh, hey, instant girlfriend! Yay!" and rolls with it. Or runs screaming until eventually caving in.
I think it's a way of softening arranged marriages in concept, which is still very much a thing in Japan unfortunately.
Question, why are we ignoring the XIII sequels? They are mainline titles from the mainline XIII game. The last one of them (Lighting Returns) was announced on September 2012.
If you don't like the first game, you're screwed. Each new mainline FF gives you an opportunity to have a fresh start. I liked VII, disliked VIII, was okay on IX, fell in love with X, loved X-2 as much, couldn't even play XI, and hated XII, but got back to an enjoyable level with XIII. Although by the time LR came out, I was absolutely tired of the XIII trilogy, especially after hating XIII-2.
I thought that was much less true with XIII than it was with X.
XIII-2 was so different to XIII. I can easily imagine someone hating the first but liking the second. Although I liked both of them.
I actually gave XIII a try after enjoying playing some of XIII-2 so much. And I honestly wouldn't have given XIII a fair chance if XIII-2 wasn't so much fun, so yeah.
I think another part of the large gap between new numbered FF's is SE's obsession with turning every one of them now into its own entire series of games and other media, which slows the overall series progress down to a crawl. I kind of miss the days when you knew that the next game would just be the next number and not some side title or sequel and you knew were gonna get something new and completely different than what came before. FFX opened the floodgates to this whole turn-one-game-into-an-entire-series thing with FFX-2, and Final Fantasy hasn't been the same since.
When FFXVI does finally come around, though, I hope it goes back to the classic medieval setting from the early FF's for once. We haven't had a single-player numbered FF in that kind of setting since FFIX, all the way back in the PS1 era. The techno-magic setting is nice, but it seems that that's all SE ever does with the main FF's anymore, like it doesn't know how to do anything else or use any other kind of setting.
"Fantasy" bundled together with "medieval setting" has been overused in media for decades, I'd rather don't have medieval anytime soon, not until the current techno-magic overtakes the former in quantity.
"Fantasy" bundled together with "medieval setting" has been overused in media for decades, I'd rather don't have medieval anytime soon, not until the current techno-magic overtakes the former in quantity.
Well technically, everything has been done before. There are only so many kinds of stories that can be told, only so many kinds of settings that can be used. And it's been so long since one of the main numbered FF's has had a classic early FF medieval setting that it would be refreshing to return to it once again.
