The second major addition is the World Visit System. For the rest of us, it’s neat and fleshes out the characters a bit more. This caters to them, and perhaps is intended as a tool to keep them around longer. That seems strange considering this is a MMO game, but the truth is there are plenty of Final Fantasy fans that just want to experience the story and bounce. Overall the Trust System allows players to mainline Shadowbringers playing almost entirely solo. They will still speak however, often adding some supplemental dialogue fleshing out a Duty’s narrative context.
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You almost won’t notice you aren’t playing with other people, except they won’t help you figure out how to win fights or spam emotes. Story-adjacent NPC characters will join you, and their AI is programmed to meet the needs of their given role.
This allows players to jump into certain Duty instances without a single other human player. The most important-feeling is the Trust System. But another part of that is a set of new features meant to trick you into not realizing you’re playing a MMO. Part of that is the large-scale story that takes enough time to be considered its own game. When I was at the preview event for Shadowbringers earlier this year, it was stressed during the presentation that this expansion was meant to feel like a new, standalone Final Fantasy game. While there are plenty of things for seasoned pros to sink their teeth into, including a new raid based on NieR: Automata, many of the new features are oriented towards players who want a more smooth gameplay experience. With Shadowbringers, Naoki Yoshida’s team is taking that sense of casual play and streamlining to the next level. Despite being on the third expansion, I’m still able to access and enjoy everything from the original Realm Reborn content, including finding friendly players who are still running dungeons through the Roulette feature. To me, this is Final Fantasy XIV’s core appeal. This is truly a Final Fantasy game, by which I mean it wants you to experience a story above all else, and mess around with its many systems at your leisure. And even for a major dungeon, or “Duty” in this game’s world, playing with others is as simple as sitting in a matchmaking queue. What that means is that in order to play through the “Main Scenario,” you’ll mostly be running through everything on your own, unless you want to bring others along with you.
Instead, while community and socialization is certainly omnipresent, actually playing with others is more adjacent to the gameplay experience than a core part of it. While Final Fantasy XI was a hardcore MMO in that grouping with other players was paramount to getting anywhere, Final Fantasy XIV leans hard in the opposite direction. Final Fantasy XIV is the most player-friendly MMO-style game I have ever played. I’ll be brief with the beginner stuff, but I do want to say that if you’ve been on the fence about Final Fantasy XIV, or curious but haven’t made the jump yet, you totally should. So this review might feel a bit chunky, but I sort of had two different perspectives on the game happening at once. I’ve been playing as both an entirely new character from the ground up, as well as a boosted “toon” that allowed me to immediately jump into Shadowbringers. My experience with Final Fantasy XIV as a player and critic has had two layers.