This Friday marked the early access release of Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward which has been highly anticipated for quite some time! Normally at the launch of a new expansion, I think we would be overjoyed, wanting to spend as much time soaking up the content as possible. In actuality however, our enthusiasm has been a bit subdued- now, I know that sounds like a slight toward the expansion, but it's actually a credit to the base game, so hear me out.

The way that FF XIV: A Realm Reborn works is that you are required to get through the story content in order for you to progress onward. While we have reached level cap and completed the 2.0 story, we've only scratched the surface of what pre-Heavensward has to offer. We've yet to face hard mode/extreme primal fights, hard mode dungeons, raids, a whole story from 2.1 to 2.55 in the lead up to Heavensward, and that's just to name just a bit of the game we've not tapped into yet.

The ARR team put together a whole host of content with a ton of lateral progression aimed at keeping the endgame experience as varied and interesting as possible. To that effect they did exquisitely because instead of being hyped for Heavensward, we are simply stoked to continue from where we are at instead. Instead of trying to trudge through old boring content to reach this nirvana of endgame that makes the whole thing finally worth it, the game celebrates the journey and does a damn fine job with it; the whole trek is engaging, enjoyable and worthwhile.

So even though we reached the actual ending for ARR 2.0 (complete with an awesome boss fight, ending sequence and credit roll), we couldn't be happier to be this unenthused about content that's the hot topic on everyone's mind which is not yet accessible to us. Oh sure, when we get there, we will be extremely excited, but no more than the feeling we have now, and that really is saying something special of what the XIV team has accomplished here.