👑 Black King ⚔️

Ok yeah Monster Hunter Outlanders is DEFINITELY a Gacha 😆😆😆

My previous FFXIV post is still blowing up my notifs, so I'm just gonna do a large response here. A lot of people seemed to think me calling the story a bottleneck was about me personally not liking the game. I assure you, I would not put over 1700hrs into something I disliked (and yes that includes the story, I do like experiencing it). It wasn't even mainly about me as a whole, but moreso an advocation for newer players. It all stemmed from the MHWilds collab where I thought it was silly to ask people, who never would have played Final Fantasy, that to experience the thing you're advertising to them about you need to get through hundreds of hours of content first (beat Dawntrail). That doesn't really work well as an way to get people in, they should be able to try the thing you're selling them on way earlier than that. I saw lot of what boiled down to people treating FFXIV as a single player RPG first, which it is not. It is an MMO first, a live service product that must appeal to as wide an audience as it can, as any service needs to. My criticism was also mainly a business/financial one. I have a lot of criticisms in that regard ($20 mounts and costly outfits that only apply to a single character for example), and this is one of them. "You can just buy a skip" misses the point, that's bad practice. You're telling people they need to fork over even more money to even see if they want to be invested, or still end up wasting a lot of time hitting the ESC key. I am the most non skip type person out there. I'm playing through an old game, Monster Hunter Stories 1, because I wanted the experience of what came before, instead of jumping into the new shiny Stories 3, and I'm having fun. I'm playing through Nioh 1, to the dismay of some friends who wanted me to jump straight to 3, for the same reason (and I'm having less fun, but I'm stubborn). My wife wants to play Nightreign with me, and I told them they should play the Souls series first to appreciate it more. That's just who I am, but that's also just me. To the people who don't have that mentality, they're not hurting me lol. To those that agreed with my take and shared experiences of their friends getting filtered by the story, I salute you. To those that disagreed with me but brought up their own points, more power to you. To those that simply wanted to throw vitriol my way, you're dumb lol. You're a bad representation of the community, and actively do more harm to the game than I could ever be perceived to do. See ya'll when 9.0 is announced where I'll triple down. Happy Patch day, I'm going to play 7.5 now and enjoy the new story content ✌️🏿

It’s 2026, we are gonna be 6 expansions deep into FFXIV soon. Can we stop with the weird gatekeepy behavior if someone doesn’t want to play through 250 hours of story to be able to play some of the best MMO raid encounters ever made? Heaven forbid someone asks you a small lore question if they start getting interested in the story after starting the game 10 years late. Are we really gonna keep driving people away with this weird NIMBY ritual? Just use your social skills (lol) and answer the small question, suggest they start a story alt on their downtime, or direct them to a synopsis video on YouTube. Crying about “story skippers” this deep into a game’s development cycle is peak cringe. If they set up a skip to Dawntrail for new characters to jump into the new story arc I and many others feel like it would be beneficial for the game’s long term health. While the Hydaelyn/Zodiark arc is great storytelling it’s also not a sacred cow for people to clutch pearls over. At the end of the day, it’s a game to be played. We’re all better than this and should start acting like it.