Why you should be playing Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Over Destiny TTK

Ok, if you're on PS4 right now as of this writing and playing or thinking of playing Destiny: The Taken King I strongly advise you to step back for a moment. Allow me to fully explain myself and this situation in detail. This is probably gonna get lengthy, as a heads up.

Ok, I'm a person who's played the living SHIT out of Destiny. I've defended it through a lot of flakk that it honestly deserved. The Taken King launched last September and to my surprise after having quit for several months, found myself sucked back in again. Hell, it was a good expansion, fixing much of the bullshit that the first year brought to the game and adding a ton of new content.

Most of my real life friends jumped back headlong into the game and played the hell out of it. Everything was going great until a few months ago. The content is all dried up for us, and there's not even a HINT of an announcement for new content. The game is running on the fumes of timed events laden with microtransactions. We all know why they're timed. Two major reasons anyway, one is to keep them fresh, so that they don't grow stale, an artificial sense worth when they eventually come back...sort of like the McRib from McDonalds. The second is a little shadier, it's to make we as the consumers feel an urgency to play them and to spend money on those aforementioned microtransactions. And it works, well.

But I'm not gonna spend this entire blog entry shitting all over Bungie and Destiny, though I easily could with how lousy of a direction this game has dived after the launch of The Taken King.


See, instead I'll go to the other half of the title of this thing. Final Fantasy 14: ARR. I missed the original, reportedly awful launch of FF14, but came in fresh with the launch of ARR on PC. And was actually blown away that it was a pretty goddamn great MMO and even a pretty good Final Fantasy game on top of that. But I wasn't playing it with anyone and I ended up broke...so I quit playing. I came back briefly when the beta for it appeared on PS4, played through that and  enjoyed it, but didn't think to really do much more for whatever reason.

Recently, as in a month or two back some free FF14 avatars came to PSN that a few friends and I were going through and talking about. One of them says that he'd love to try the game but didn't like paying a subscription for a game. This friend was one of the main people I drug back into Destiny with me. And by this point we were both pretty much entirely fed up with that game.

Not much more came of it for a bit other than me telling him that I thought the game was actually great and knew it ran well on PS4 because I'd beta tested it. Fast forward to a bit over a week back and one night while bored I decided to piss with the wind and just go for it and bought the base game on PSN again, longing for some sort of massively multiplayer fix again.

Later that night after spending time with a good bud and my wife watching a movie I fired the game up after it'd finished downloading and patching. And I get bombarded with messages from the previously mentioned friend. He's interested in why I decided to pick the game up, rather I liked it, etc. I jump in a party with him and remind him that I've played it before, and even on the PS4 no less. He sigh and then says "Fuck it, I'll try it, the first month's free right?" It starts from there. We start playing the shit out of the game, rolling new characters to level together and all. Then another friend talks with us about it and decides to try it as well. This friend was also heavily into Destiny with us. We've been having a blast, and it constantly gets brought up amongst us about how we should have just been playing this rather than Destiny these past few months.

The game looks and runs great on PS4 and works surprisingly well with a game pad too. There's a lot to cram onto the pad so it will take some getting used to, but considering what all there is to be done here it's rather impressive. Worse comes to worst you can still plug up and use a keyboard and mouse.

So now this brings me to this week's Square-Enix sale. The base game of FF14:ARR is a measly $10. That's less than the 30 day it comes with costs alone. And even the collector's edition is only $20 right now. So I urge you, if you're like my group that has hounded Destiny for all it's worth and is looking for that next fix, or has just wondered how FF14 actually is, give it a go while this price is in effect. It's worth more, but this is a great deal. I PROMISE you if you like MMO style games that you'll end up having more fun overall with this game over Destiny, at the very least you'll have a lot more content to play through, that's for sure.