The MMO blogosphere is not lacking for thoughts and opinions on Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker, especially as players devoured the Main Story Quest and were left wanting for more.
So we’ll kick this week’s blog roundup with Gnomecore’s review of the expansion (which includes a few spoilers): “The expansion is flawless story-wise and elevated the whole game to the heights of narrative which is nigh impossible to compete with. Gameplay remains a good old FFXIV we got used to, with some minor quality of life tweaks, and it works well.”
MMO Gypsy isn’t as instantly optimistic about Endwalker: “What struck me is how long this expansion takes to get going. There’s a great number of walking and talking quests before you ever get to see any action and there are pacing issues early on. There’s also an abundance of very long cutscenes that feel more self-indulgent than necessary.”
Princess Quill picked the top 10 best Lord of the Rings Online soundtrack tunes: “There’s no doubt in my mind that without the sincere excellence of the music, LOTRO would not be nearly as successful at communicating the true depth and atmosphere of Middle-Earth. It creates a texture to the world that only comes with a high-quality fabric, a tapestry that illustrates the culture or mood of a zone in ways that other game elements could never do.”
MMO Juggler took a good look at the new armory system in Elder Scrolls Online and said, “The armory is fantastic. Loading an empty build clears everything out, which let me more efficiently spend my skill points. And the save/load function makes it easy to add a second build to characters, so my main can now heal and tank (OK I bought a 3rd slot), my tank can have a DPS build and quest a bit faster, etc.”
Inventory Full warmed up to the idea of “faepunk” in the upcoming Nightingale: “The voiceover’s right out of City of Steam, too. It has that exact same elegaic, fin de siecle, everything just fell apart and we wish it was a week last Sunday feel to it. The whispersoft ASMR tone and the RADA elocution don’t damage the case it’s making, either.”
The Ancient Gaming Noob scouted out World of Warcraft’s new community council: “I realize I am being unfair to the members, many of whom are involved in other aspects of the game and who expressed a desire to talk about topics other than raiding or ranked PvP, but the impression it leaves is that World of Warcraft is about two things: raiding and ranked PvP. But maybe that is all there is left for WoW now.”
Contains Moderate Peril is dubious that LOTRO will be able to pull off a console conversion: “Although SSG have managed to keep the LOTRO alive and ticking over in the last few years, they have not exactly taken the game forward or in any way improved its standing. Bringing the game to a new player base such as console players presents a perfect opportunity to reset community relationships. However, all of this is a long way off, assuming that it ever comes to fruition.”
Every day there are tons of terrific, insightful, and unusual articles posted across the MMO gaming blogosphere — and every day, Justin reads as many as he can. Global Chat is a sampling of noteworthy essays, rants, and guides from the past few weeks of MMO discourse.
