I've been gaming like a mad lad lately. After writing about Stormblood the other day I've put in some massive sessions and managed to finish up the entirety of the Stormblood expansion as well as some raids from Heavensward. I'm gonna be talking about those raids later because they're super cool, but today I'll be showing off my first steps in the Shadowbringers expansion.
Stormblood ended in a bang. The twists and turns they throw into the story at the end of that expansions is just mind boggling. I'm not gonna go into details here for the sake of not spoiling it for the people here in the community who play the game. I might do some spoiler heavy posts layer because I have a lot to talk about when it comes to the story of this game.
No matter. The start to Shadowbringers has just left me completely in awe. The first quest is so huge and awesome that you know right there and then that this is gonna be a one of a kind expansions where we uncover some huge lore and will be going through some epic story. There's just no doubt. Now that I've started I feel like the entirety of Stormblood was mostly a build up to the events we'll be going through here.
This isn't it though. The first 30 minutes of Shadowbringers has given me some of the best views I've seen in the game so far. This one zone trumps every other zone I've seen in my 3-400 hours long journey so far. You'll know what I mean when looking at the screenshots I'll be decorating this post with.
Another thing that amazed me going into the expansion is how Square Enix has planned for this all along. The story picks up on a lot of the story and lore from the base game A Realm Reborn. It's really awesome that they loop back on this seeing as other MMOs (World of Warcraft) often tend to just scrap older content.
Final Fantasy XIV doesn't do that. All through both Heavensward and Stormblood we've been going back to visit older parts of the world in relation to the story. In World of Warcraft we barely left Northrend once we got there in Wrath of the Lich King and the only thing that kept us coming back to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdom was the fact that they didn't put auction houses in Dalaran. This is also true for later expansions.
One thing I also like is the darkness that's growing in the game. I feel like towards the end of Stormblood the game kept getting darker and darker and I feel like we're gonna see a lot of that in Shadowbringers. There's gonna be some dark and grim story happening here, I'm sure of it.
I'm not gonna ramble on much more. The first few hours of then expansion just gave me a whole other feeling that any other MMO has done before so I just needed to get this off my chest. The fact that this game just keeps on getting better and better after all these years is just a testament to Yoshi P's genious. May he work on this project for a long time still.
This man loves his game so much that he chose to delay the launch of the next expansions just to quality check for things that "only he would notice". The man literally broke down crying on stream while announcing the delay because he felt like he was betraying the fans. If this doesn't speak volumes of the mans dedication to this project than I don't know. I know of other companies who would happily delay their game and just give their fans a "deal with it".
I'm gonna end this ramble with my new favorite screenshot which I've also set as the wallpaper on my desktop. No more default Windows 10 wallpaper for me. Not it's my cat girl for life.
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.