General Gaming Final Fantasy XVI – Information Thread, update: PC version in "final stages of optimization', pre-release demo planned

[TwinIon]

At what point did the side quests become more worthwhile? I started out doing them all, but quickly came to ignore them. I just now got my third set of powers at the "Cid the Outlaw" main quest.

[Bacon]

7 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

At what point did the side quests become more worthwhile? I started out doing them all, but quickly came to ignore them. I just now got my third set of powers at the "Cid the Outlaw" main quest.

Never for the most part. There are just specific quests that give you upgrades or expand on the characters near the end. Most aren't worth it. Hunts are worth it if you wanna do more combat.

[Mercury33]

The last batch feels pretty worthwhile as they kinda start to wrap up the arcs of all the people living in the hideaway. But yeah they’re mostly for character depth and some ability points. 
 

Finishing the Hunts gets a nice upgrade plus those fights are just fun. 

[best3444]

7 minutes ago, Mercury33 said:

The last batch feels pretty worthwhile as they kinda start to wrap up the arcs of all the people living in the hideaway. But yeah they’re mostly for character depth and some ability points. 
 

Finishing the Hunts gets a nice upgrade plus those fights are just fun. 

 

Did you beat it yet?

[Mercury33]

5 hours ago, best3444 said:

 

Did you beat it yet?

Just finished the Hunts last night and the Side Quests tonight. So hoping to finish the final two main story quests tomorrow night. I’m right at 60 hours according to my dashboard. 

[best3444]

6 hours ago, Mercury33 said:

Just finished the Hunts last night and the Side Quests tonight. So hoping to finish the final two main story quests tomorrow night. I’m right at 60 hours according to my dashboard. 

 

The two chapters take about 2 hours. 

[Spork3245]

The last couple runs of side quests is down right brutal. I pretty much skip all the dialogue for them and do the SQs just for the reputation points or whatever they’re called to get the rewards from the whispers thing by the moogle. You need to complete the final run of SQs + hunts to have the/enough crafting materials for the best weapon + armors in the game afaik. It’s just the same boring fetch quests or “go here to kill 3-waves of enemies” over and over. I finally finished the game on Tuesday, the ending kinda blew.

[best3444]

3 hours ago, Spork3245 said:

the ending kinda blew.

 

Absolutely it sucked and they were kinda building it up as something special. That entire second half of this game was so disappointing. 

[Bacon]

I'm hoping for DLC to come out to fix the ending. I'll even pay for it (I got the game as a gift so it's OK!)

[Spork3245]

1 minute ago, Bacon said:

I'm hoping for DLC to come out to fix the ending. I'll even pay for it (I got the game as a gift so it's OK!)

Bring on Leviathan DLC 

[Bacon]

Just now, Spork3245 said:

Bring on Leviathan DLC 

"Leviathan the Lost"

God that was such a letdown. I felt defeated after wondering for so long who it would be and it ended up being no one.

[Biggie]

1 hour ago, best3444 said:

 

Absolutely it sucked and they were kinda building it up as something special. That entire second half of this game was so disappointing. 

The game was ass. I tried to warn everyone but no one would listen. As usual I was spot on. Just like Ball Sacks Gate. 

[best3444]

5 minutes ago, Biggie said:

The game was ass. I tried to warn everyone but no one would listen. As usual I was spot on. Just like Ball Sacks Gate. 

 

Well even you were enjoying the first half. BG3 must be phenomenal so not sure what you mean. 

[Mercury33]

Finished. 62 hours. 
 

The game certainly dragged in the 60-80% completed range. But overall I loved it. The epic story beats and Eikon battles certainly outweighed the monotony of a large number of the side quests. I also don’t get the hate for the ending. Would I have preferred an ending more along the lines of Black Flag? Absolutely. But I thought the ending we got worked just fine. 
 

Jedi Survivor definitely still my game of the year so far but this was a fantastic experience. 
 

Oh and the scene after the credits?? 🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻

[TwinIon]

I feel like Final Fantasy needs to lean even more into being the cinematic journey that it so clearly has wanted to be for so long and reduce the menu screens. When I'm doing a fetch quest and I'm serving some bloke his supper, why does a menu need to pop up with exactly one option to hand it over? Just show it. I walked over to the guy with the quest marker over his head and interacted with him. He has no other possible interactions. I can't keep the food for myself and stiff him. Just streamline the whole thing and let the scene play out. That's a tiny example, but it's consistent through the whole game. It can't help but show you a menu or a status screen or take you out to the map so you can select from the only possible choice. Yes, I walked right up to that castle, it was directly in my view and the only topic of conversation. Now that I'm at the gates I get pushed out to the map with that castle being the only location I'm allowed to interact with. Why not just play the into cut scene?

 

Final Fantasy has always wanted to be cinematic, and it very often is, but it feels uncommitted. Like it needs to remind you that you're playing a game in the clunkiest ways possible. No, those single select menus don't give me a sense of agency or even a welcome break in the action, they're just putting the brakes on a show I'm enjoying. Especially now that loading times are essentially optional and you can pause or even sleep the console at any time, putting in weird menu brakes serves no purpose except as a throwback to old games.

 

Overall I think the menus themselves in FF16 are good. They're clean, easy to navigate, and don't over complicate things. I don't mind the menus themselves, and I don't think they need to go full on diegetic and make every menu some in game magical screen or something. I just think too often the game hinders its own goals for no reason.

 

Also, I just finished a fight in Drakes Fang that was pretty wild.
 

Spoiler

I thought the opening fight went pretty hard, but this one was some proper, over the top anime nonsense, and it was great. Reminded me of Gurren Lagann when things just kept getting bigger. The falling sequence towards the end made me think of the endless runway from Fast and Furious. I was curious how far we must have fallen, so I found a youtube video of the fight, and that part lasted ~5min. A person would have fallen something like 12 kilometers in that time, but if I completely make up some numbers I end up with a much lower terminal velocity for these giants, so they probably still would have fallen something like 7 km. After falling all that time you just pop right back up to the surface.

 

[best3444]

Game sucks.

[best3444]

@skillzdadirecta The game starts out fantastically then slowly falls apart. I don't recall that ever happening with a AAA title for me. It's a 7/10 game with an awful ending to boot. 

[skillzdadirecta]

1 minute ago, best3444 said:

@skillzdadirecta The game starts out fantastically then slowly falls apart. I don't recall that ever happening with a AAA title for me. It's a 7/10 game with an awful ending to boot. 

Damn bro... it's next up in my rotation. They way you guys have changed your tune on it makes me wonder if I should even bother 

[best3444]

11 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Damn bro... it's next up in my rotation. They way you guys have changed your tune on it makes me wonder if I should even bother 

 

@Xbob42 @legend Do you guys recommend skillz plays this? 

 

@skillzdadirecta did you already buy it?

[Spork3245]

11 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Damn bro... it's next up in my rotation. They way you guys have changed your tune on it makes me wonder if I should even bother 

The game’s a lot of fun, it just slows down tremendously towards the end with all of the side quests which are boring AF (“go here, kill enemies, bring back item to NPC” 90% of the time)

[Mr.Vic20]

11 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Damn bro... it's next up in my rotation. They way you guys have changed your tune on it makes me wonder if I should even bother 

Its a fine enough Lite ARPG, with excellent production values. But like many of the FF installments since the 360/PS3 era, its just not a classic. Probably worth playing when you can nab it for $30. 

[best3444]

I truly thought the entire second half was absolutely garbage. I'll never touch this game again. I deleted it off my hd.

[Biggie]

14 hours ago, best3444 said:

Game sucks.

 

11 hours ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Damn bro... it's next up in my rotation. They way you guys have changed your tune on it makes me wonder if I should even bother 

Please Read Above

[skillzdadirecta]

48 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

@Xbob42 @legend Do you guys recommend skillz plays this? 

 

@skillzdadirecta did you already buy it?

Yeah I bought it shortly after it came out. Played the first couple of hours but then focused on Jedi and Remnant. About to beat Dead Island 2 and then was gonna go to work on this one and Armored Core. I enjoyed what I played so far even though the game seemed a bit on the easy side and the gameplay seems a little shallow. I don't think I died once. I know @Mercury33 was enjoying it.

[legend]

I still liked it and am glad I played it, but it has flaws.  FF7R was substantially better at striking the right balance of action and RPG IMO and I expected FF7R part 2 releasing soon will also be better. This year is also one of the most packed gaming years in some time, so it gets easily overshadowed and you could easily wait for a lull.

[best3444]

36 minutes ago, skillzdadirecta said:

Yeah I bought it shortly after it came out. Played the first couple of hours but then focused on Jedi and Remnant. About to beat Dead Island 2 and then was gonna go to work on this one and Armored Core. I enjoyed what I played so far even though the game seemed a bit on the easy side and the gameplay seems a little shallow. I don't think I died once. I know @Mercury33 was enjoying it.

 

It's EXTREMELY easy with very shallow combat. The story goes nowhere after a big build up in the beginning. Since you bought it play it but it's a 7/10 game. 

[Mercury33]

36 minutes ago, best3444 said:

 

It's EXTREMELY easy with very shallow combat. The story goes nowhere after a big build up in the beginning. Since you bought it play it but it's a 7/10 game. 

False

[best3444]

1 hour ago, Mercury33 said:

False

 

Just my opinion. I know you enjoyed it more than I did. Jumping from this to Uncharted Lost Legacy was such a breath of fresh air. I really dislike FF16 a lot. 

[Biggie]

2 hours ago, Mercury33 said:

False

Bruh. Stop lying. The game is barely mid. 

[TwinIon]

I'm deep into the second half lull, and it's really not great. I've been skipping the side quests for a while now, but the sad repetition of boring quests infects the main story line as well. I can't believe I've now come to a third boarder town where the guards won't let me past until I do a multi-part fetch quest for a local friend of a friend who gives me a sign to wear so I can solve their problem before I can move on.

[skillzdadirecta]

I'll be finishing Dead Island 2 today. I'll put a couple of hours more into this to see if its worth continuing. There's a lot of heavy hitters coming this fall that will be competing for my game time.

[TwinIon]

Finally finished and I was not as let down by the ending as it seems some were. Without getting too much into specifics, I'll just say the story basically went where I expected. My only real complaint is that the final battle is overshadowed by earlier fights.

 

Overall I think the game is solid, but definitely suffers in the back half. It loses a lot of it's narrative and gameplay momentum, even as combat options really open up. I switched up what powers I used a few times, and I think the combat system has some real depth to it, but it's wasted. There are cool combos to be had and most of the abilities seem pretty viable, but you didn't need to find those combos to steamroll through the game. I feel like there is a missing mechanic that would have tied the whole thing together, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe something to do with shortening cooldowns.

 

I'm also of two mind when it comes to the doge. I usually struggle to time things like that correctly, but here was almost never a problem because you can just spam R1 and usually be safe. So it seems like maybe it was too effective. On the other hand I'm glad that you can just dodge repeatedly, because often there would just be too many effects on screen or I wouldn't be able to see most of the battlefield, so having a super effective dodge with no cooldown and that interrupts many attacks felt necessary.

 

Some more narrative focus in the back half and a bit of tweaking to the combat would really have helped this game, but I still found it worthwhile. It's a solid FF game, just not a classic.

[Greatoneshere]

55 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

Finally finished and I was not as let down by the ending as it seems some were. Without getting too much into specifics, I'll just say the story basically went where I expected. My only real complaint is that the final battle is overshadowed by earlier fights.

 

Overall I think the game is solid, but definitely suffers in the back half. It loses a lot of it's narrative and gameplay momentum, even as combat options really open up. I switched up what powers I used a few times, and I think the combat system has some real depth to it, but it's wasted. There are cool combos to be had and most of the abilities seem pretty viable, but you didn't need to find those combos to steamroll through the game. I feel like there is a missing mechanic that would have tied the whole thing together, but I can't put my finger on it. Maybe something to do with shortening cooldowns.

 

I'm also of two mind when it comes to the doge. I usually struggle to time things like that correctly, but here was almost never a problem because you can just spam R1 and usually be safe. So it seems like maybe it was too effective. On the other hand I'm glad that you can just dodge repeatedly, because often there would just be too many effects on screen or I wouldn't be able to see most of the battlefield, so having a super effective dodge with no cooldown and that interrupts many attacks felt necessary.

 

Some more narrative focus in the back half and a bit of tweaking to the combat would really have helped this game, but I still found it worthwhile. It's a solid FF game, just not a classic.

 

I finished the game awhile back - I have not read what is past page 28 for me in this thread, so I'm not sure what the overall discourse is in this thread about the game but I mostly agree with this except I think it wasn't ultimately as good as you felt. This was a fine game. This was not a good JRPG. This was not a good RPG. This was not a good Final Fantasy game. This was a solidly made, super easy, Final Fantasy "themed" pure action game with little to no RPG mechanics to speak of. There was very little that was interesting about its world or technology or universe, weirdness is usually one of the highlights of JRPG's but this was just middle of the road, straightforward dark fantasy. Really nothing special about it, I'd take a weird-ass, more open world, bigger game like FF15 over one of these essentially corridor action games any day. The game is well made but I was disappointed ultimately. Nothing special, unique or hard about it.

 

The game also had so many characters that only a very few get any real characterization and everyone is so dry and direct that there's little room for genuine pathos and drama. And by not really having a full party always traveling with you over the course of the game means you don't grow close to a group of characters and it's very rare to see more than 2-3 characters even interacting in a scene together. Everyone has primarily a 1-on-1 relationship with Clive but they don't really have relationships between each other that exist independent of Clive - a party traveling with you allows for that. I'd take the boy band group of Ignis, Gladiolus, Prompto and Noctis, camping, cooking food, and talking around a bonfire building character relationships than the constant 1-on-1's between Clive and Jill, Clive and Gav, Clive and his brother, Clive and his uncle, and so forth. 

 

Ultimately I'd give this a 7/10, it's too well made on a technical level to get a worse score, but everything was done perfunctorily well as opposed to anything noteworthy. 

[best3444]

34 minutes ago, Greatoneshere said:

 

I finished the game awhile back - I have not read what is past page 28 for me in this thread, so I'm not sure what the overall discourse is in this thread about the game but I mostly agree with this except I think it wasn't ultimately as good as you felt. This was a fine game. This was not a good JRPG. This was not a good RPG. This was not a good Final Fantasy game. This was a solidly made, super easy, Final Fantasy "themed" pure action game with little to no RPG mechanics to speak of. There was very little that was interesting about its world or technology or universe, weirdness is usually one of the highlights of JRPG's but this was just middle of the road, straightforward dark fantasy. Really nothing special about it, I'd take a weird-ass, more open world, bigger game like FF15 over one of these essentially corridor action games any day. The game is well made but I was disappointed ultimately. Nothing special, unique or hard about it.

 

The game also had so many characters that only a very few get any real characterization and everyone is so dry and direct that there's little room for genuine pathos and drama. And by not really having a full party always traveling with you over the course of the game means you don't grow close to a group of characters and it's very rare to see more than 2-3 characters even interacting in a scene together. Everyone has primarily a 1-on-1 relationship with Clive but they don't really have relationships between each other that exist independent of Clive - a party traveling with you allows for that. I'd take the boy band group of Ignis, Gladiolus, Prompto and Noctis, camping, cooking food, and talking around a bonfire building character relationships than the constant 1-on-1's between Clive and Jill, Clive and Gav, Clive and his brother, Clive and his uncle, and so forth. 

 

Ultimately I'd give this a 7/10, it's too well made on a technical level to get a worse score, but everything was done perfunctorily well as opposed to anything noteworthy. 

 

Perfectly said. I agree with everything you said and you articulated it better than I ever could have. 

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

 

 

Final Fantasy XVI Announces 2 Paid DLC, PC Port Development Underway & New Update Available Today - Noisy Pixel

NOISYPIXEL.NET

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During the PAX West 2023 Final Fantasy XVI Voice Actor Panel, Square Enix announced that a plethora of new content will be making its way to Final Fantasy XVI...

 

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Moreover, two installments of paid DLCs have been started to be worked been confirmed, and the development of a PC port is underway. Fans can look forward to new information about this upcoming content later this year.