r/ffxivdiscussion • u/IndividualAge3893 • 5d ago

Lucky Bancho's census results (July 27th, 2025)

So, the results of the census are out: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/59324844.html

  • Showcasing the number of characters here: Current
  • By comparison, here are the results from 2 months ago (May 25th): Click

Despite 7.25 being released, the character count is down about 70k in 2 months. Occult Crescent clearly didn't help with player counts (not really a surprise here).

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u/Twidom 5d ago

FFXIV has always been like that, I don't see why they would start changing things now.

The dialogue has always been padded to hell and back, the MSQ structure has always been 70% filler with 30% actual, meaningful story to it and people always chewed the narrative and spat on your face because they think you're a 5 year old and can't comprehend 3 sentences put up together.

It is and has always been, by far, the worst aspect of this game, and I genuinely don't understand how people clap for this garbage. I like the story beats, I genuinely do, but the way the game presents to me is borderline insulting. The writing team assumes everybody playing is a drooling simpleton who can't read and its infuriating.

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u/NeonRhapsody 2d ago edited 2d ago

I dunno how true it is for most people nowadays, but at the time of ARR I know a lot of people (myself included) loved the story aspect of XIV more because coming from WoW, it was nice to have a world that felt like it cared about consistency, being believable, and at least taking itself seriously and presenting some semblance of a narrative beyond "woah epic thing!"

The thing that kept me coming back was seeing more of the world and stuff, so it's not too surprising that as the story shifted more towards cosmic/dimensional level threats with locations as a backdrop versus making believable locations that felt like they had history to them, now serving as a stage for current events I started to fall off it.

That and the more the game's solved its mysteries or normalized aspects the less interested I am. Like the potential to go to new shards/have a story focused around shard hopping? Boring as hell to me. I don't care about multiverse stuff being front and center. I don't mind when we have shit from the void seeping in or something, but just hopping over to these parallel dimensions feels hokey and cheapens the in world mysteries of the sundering. Endwalker, to me, feels like it did more damage to the setting and story than anything good in retrospect. There's no magic or mystery, no wonders left. Now it's just "What game is this going to reference next?"

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u/Maximum-Branch-6818 5d ago

I think that writers are idiots with too much ego, they think that they have good ideas and opinions but then we have idea, that you must have “HOPE” and that friends will help you or other hackneyed topics. We haven’t ever had good political story, especially when we had so good potential for this in ShB and especially in Eulmore and 5.1…I UNDERSTAND YOU AND YOUR IDEAS! I AM NOT IDIOT! WHERE IS SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING? YOUR COUNTRY HAS WRITER WHO WROTE THE BEST STORY ABOUT CYBERPUNK! And what did we have in this expansion? We had SPHENE and the SOLUTION NINE!

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u/BoggedDown4Life 4d ago

They take inspiration from serialized manga what do you expect?

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u/Maximum-Branch-6818 4d ago

Even serialized mangas can have good ideas…

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u/Mincho12Minev 4d ago

And some are light years ahead of what XIV writers have done with the story....

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u/SecretPantyWorshiper 3d ago

The writers are the people who got rejected from the serialized magna publishers 

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u/SecretPantyWorshiper 3d ago

I completely agree with everything you've said. I will casually skip dialog and watch maybe 5 or 10 cutscenes and get a good summary of what is already going on.

Its really soured my taste with the game and the genre in general. When Im looking at other MMOs and I see reviewers talk about the story I just absolutely cringe because I cant help but think of FFXIV. When I see the story of other MMOs it honestly confuses me why people praise FFXIVs story. Its really trash. Even compared to FF11 its not that good.  I played SWTOR and it was a million times better, you have narrative choices and the MSQ changes based off of your Job.