Highlights
- Final Fantasy 14’s Trust System enhances the single-player experience by allowing players to embark on story-based content with NPC companions.
- The Trust System relieves anxiety for players who struggle to perform at a high level in group missions, allowing them to play at their own pace.
- The lack of flexibility in the Trust System currently limits players to either solo play with NPCs or group play with strangers, which can break immersion for players with small groups of friends.
One of the things that makes Final Fantasy 14 unique within the MMORPG landscape is its emphasis on storytelling. With a monthly subscription fee, you get access to almost ten years of updates, which can be quite overwhelming. There’s literally hundreds of hours of cutscenes and gameplay to get through. The goal was to create something akin to a single player experience within a greater MMORPG model.
As part of making this experience more immersive for the players who want to opt into a more traditional RPG single player experience, the developers of FF14 implemented a Trust System. And while it has done a good job of expanding on the single player experience, it doesn’t allow for much-needed flexibility with two or more players.
What Is The Trust System?
The Trust System is a system designed for you to enjoy playing through story-based content with NPCs at your side. Take, for instance, my experience with the recent game’s story, Endwalker. During my initial playthrough of the content, I opted for a more single-player immersive experience when it came to going through story-based dungeons. After a few detailed cutscenes and events, the game’s NPCs and I would be at the entrance of the next dungeon. You can talk to each of the characters there with you and implement the Trust System.
Just like the regular game system, you’re limited to one tank, two damage dealers, and one healer. Your choice of who you take will be affected by your character’s role. For me, I was a white mage, so that meant that I couldn’t take one of my favorite NPCs, Alphinaud, since he was also a healer.
The benefit of this system is that it helps to relieve the anxiety of doing missions with other people. I love Final Fantasy 14, but there are times when I take breaks from it to play other games. Being away always means that my inevitable return will come with a readjustment period. My response times aren’t on par with end game content, and that’ll cost me and possibly the entire team a smooth run. This is especially nerve wracking as a healer, a role so important that it can wipe out the entire team if not pulled off with precision.
I Want A Final Fantasy 7 Timeline Where Aerith And Zack Live
They deserve a happier ending.
There’s also a swift cadence that experienced players like to have in dungeons. It’s traditional for tanks to grab a ton of enemies up to a certain point, and for the party to burn down the enemies. It makes dungeon runs faster, but you have to be on your A-game as a healer. The anxiety to perform at such a high level keeps me from enjoying the game, but when it’s NPCs, that sense of urgency is gone. I can play at my own pace.
And while this is a great system, it currently only gives you two options: either go alone with NPCs, or go with other players without any NPCs. This puts those of us with small groups of friends in a weird position.
Two’s A Crowd
I tend to play more regular content on my own, but I have a friend who will join me sometimes. If we want to play together, we have no choice but to play with two other people, so in many cases, it’s two strangers. Many times, the experience is fine, but there are times when it totally breaks the immersion.
The two of us take our role playing quite seriously. Whenever there’s a new story content update, we find ourselves in our best glamorized armor and get ready to experience the story. We experience our own cutscenes and then jump into the next story-based dungeon.
And with our luck, our chosen comrades have purple chicken heads on and some foul (or shall I say “fowl”) name that somehow got through the in-game censorship system. It is indeed part of the weirdness of playing online, but we’d prefer not to have it in our cutscenes while in story mode.
The only current alternative is for us to experience the dungeons separately while in chat with one another. It would be so much cooler if we could jump in together and fill those two remaining spaces with our favorite NPCs.
Every Mainline Final Fantasy Game, Ranked
Final Fantasy is one of the most long-standing and renowned franchises in gaming. Which one is truly the best?
If World Of Warcraft Can Do It, So Can Final Fantasy 14
There was a recent update within World of Warcraft. The game is implementing its own version of the Trust System. The difference between the two is that more than one player can join the group, and the remaining positions can be filled with NPCs. In this scenario, if my friend and I were to play, we would have the chance to fill those two remaining slots with our favorite NPCs. Oh, the happy day that would be!
Given that the developer of Final Fantasy 14, lovingly called Yoshi P by the community, has not shied away from admitting that he was not only a big WoW player, but that the game helped inspire many of the changes he made in A Realm Reborn, I can totally see FF14’s team looking at this implementation and figuring out how they can create a similar experience within the game. It would help make their already great Trust System even better.
Final Fantasy 14
- Released
- August 27, 2013
- Developer(s)
- Square Enix
[ad_2]
