Yes. ARR suffers a lot from assumed empathy, believing that just because we’re shown a character, we’ll instantly care about them.
The Battle of Carteneau flashback cutscene is a particularly big offender. It’s a ten-minute talking heads show between characters you haven’t even met yet, mentioning characters you don’t know at all (Louisoix), and its content can be summed up as “Dalamud is about to fall, our position is hopeless, retreat!” All while the visceral, cinematic event that would make the player actually care about this scene (namely, Dalamud falling) is happening entirely offscreen. WoW would instead have a flashy one- or two-minute cinematic that would achieve a greater emotional impact.
Playing Red Dead.
Just hunting rival gangs with Bill and my dog.
After sleeping at a camp, my dog died when I was tearing down the set up. It walked into the fire whilst Arthur was putting it out and went up in flames.
I was by no means bothered by ARR playing through it. It was all so new to me, and I was motivated to get through, and I knew it would get better later.
But looking back it’s easy to see why one would get deterred. Nothing in ARR really impressed me until the very end. It goes up a lot from there.
ARR was great looking back on it, really solid world building and vibes. My main gripe with it was that the story took a while to gain proper traction (ramped up when Minfilia and co get nabbed) and your rotation in battle is really slow until near level 50.
EDIT:
Everytime I hear this song, it takes me right back to those early days. Might be because Ul’dah was my starting zone though. Easily one of my favourite tracks in the game.
Same for me! I love both Ul’dah themes. That city really feels like my home in this game, as much as I also love some newer cities.
It’s kind of hard to describe my feeling on it. I never went ‘wow’ at anything until the end, but it never felt like a slog either. I never felt like I wanted to quit, or do something else instead.
Yeah pretty much the same feel. It’s not something I could ever recommend to someone, but it was a good time even if it didn’t blow my mind until the very last quest.
It kind of reminded me a bit of vanilla WoW in terms of how it established the world and the general atmosphere.
Yeah, I get what you mean. It’s definitely not good enough to be a draw, but it did its job at setting everything up. I think that contributed to why it never felt sluggish, everything I saw was fresh and unfamiliar.
A friend helping me install gshade when I started definitely helped though. I sometimes forget how ugly the base game is, it’s so weird.
