I jumped on the bandwagon when the game got popular and recently finished Heavensward. I'm not going to go into spoilers, but the game has some of the worst politics I've ever seen in a videogame. I didn't expect anything good, but jfc it was so much worse than I imagined, especially the first part, ARR.
Anyway, I don't want to spoil anything for people who might want to try it out, but I have to share my pain with someone or my head will explode. I didn't know if I should post it here or on the dunk tank, but it's a screenshot from a videogame, so I settled on this community.
I present to you: the worst take of all times. For context, that's basically the protagonist and the leader of the organization that tries to pretent world ending events. And if anyone thinks that just means killing monsters, they also overthrow corrupt kings and fight evil empires. In the most liberal way possible, it's insufferable.
Incredibly boring game. Very little opportunity or incentive to play with other people prior to max level. Dungeons are braindead, and too far apart and few between. There's little to no reason to interact with the wider world. Dungeons are only relevant during the brief moment of time when they have gear you need (save for cosmetic desires you might have. The cosmetic armor system is also archaic). Getting involved in the raids requires submitting to a whole wider system of time wasting to get incremental improvements to gear required prior to participating in a raid. After you have the prereq gear, then you have to learn the paint-by-numbers dance prepared for you by others that have had the pleasure of inventing it for you on youtube, depriving you of at least having the pleasure of doing the experimentation for yourself. The alternative to this is to find 7 other people who have a similar timeframe of playtime, a similar level of skill, tolerance for each other, and similar interest in learning and experimentation (a pipe dream if I've ever heard of one). The Main Story Quest is nearly totally divorced from the game. It may as well be a supplementary book or film, because the Main Story Quest does not actually have the player interact with the wider world of the game, it has the player travel from place to place (by teleportation if you value your time), and speak to NPC's to forward dialogue, and/or deliver fetch-quest stuff. Occasionally it has you gather a fetch-quest doodad by killing something, but not usually more than 1 or 2 things. Once in a blue moon you unlock a dungeon that, again, unlocks some dialogue at the end of the dungeon relevant to the story. Dungeons late in the series do a better job of giving cameo appearances to the major NPC's in the dungeon, but I wouldn't say that they really make the story feel at all tied together with the world. The character you play as is also a vacuous non-entity, which is very weird set alongside the rest of the cast, who are pretty well varied and characterized.
nah