People who are new to the game are often told that making alts is pointless because of the way jobs work.
However, alts can be useful for playing as different races, re-playing certain high-end content, or splitting your storage space between two accounts (among other reasons).
In Final Fantasy XIV, alts are extra characters you can play along with your “main” character.
And the job system in Final Fantasy XIV is great on its own.
Your character doesn’t have to stick to one combat role for the whole journey. Instead, they can level up pretty much anything they want and switch between them whenever they want.
Even if you’ve spent a lot of time levelling up one job, you can always switch to a different one and level it up whenever you want.
So, making alternative characters (called “alts”) might not seem like a very good idea.
Why bother making another character if one can do everything? The story in XIV is good, but it’s very long.
Even if you skip all the cutscenes, your alt will still have a lot of work to do to catch up.
What Are The Best Reasons To Make An Alt?
So, no, you don’t have to make an alt to play every single combat, crafting, or gathering job in the game. But there are a lot of things that will only work for one character.
If you do a lot of raiding, for example, you might not be able to get rewards for high-level content you’ve already cleared that week. You can do it again if you level up an alt.
By making another character, you will also double the amount of storage space you have.
You can get two more free retainers, more Chocobo saddlebags, and, of course, more personal inventory space.
The in-game Moogle Mail system lets you send money and items between the two, and you can keep doing this as long as you have more character creation slots.
It’s also a good way to try out playing a different race before using a Vial of Fantasia.
At the end of A Realm Reborn, you do get one of those potions that can change your look for free.
But most of the time, you won’t know if you like playing a race until you’ve seen it in action for a while, seen how it moves, how good it looks in your favourite glamours, and so on.
You might just want to play two different races. It’s your account, so do what you want with it.
I made an alt because I wanted to go through the story at a slower pace than I did the first time.
Even though most of the more experienced players around us told us not to, when my group first started playing, we were kind of racing to the end.
We wanted to see everything and get our characters to the highest level possible. There was probably also a competitive side to it.
The group part of the game is no longer important to me. And it let me walk back through the world I had flown through.
I made a new character with a class I hadn’t tried before and decided I wouldn’t miss any cutscenes. Well, except for those scenes that show how to get into a dungeon. I’m not a monster.
Using Alts To Replay The Story vs. New Game Plus
With New Game Plus, you can play the MSQ again. This lets you go through the story again without having to create a new character.
But I kind of feel like this is a waste of time.
You can do these quests again and again, but it won’t give you any experience or gold. It’s just for the story.
Even though the story is very good, if you could do something for free or for money, you would probably choose to get paid, right?
You might be able to get a good amount of gil to give to your main character if you retell the story on a different character.
You might see things in the world that you’ve never seen before or find fun side quests that you’ve always walked right by.
You could get better at a job you never thought you’d play before.
In the end, playing as a new character will give you a lot more benefits than just New Game Plus.
With what you already know about the world, you’ll have a whole new way of levelling up, talking to other players, and doing a lot of other things in XIV.
What Are The Drawbacks Of Creating An Alt?
So, this is all going to be pretty personal. But what might be the best thing about the game for some will be the worst thing about it for others.
You’ll have to play through all of that story content again unless you pay for a story skip.
This means that you won’t be able to use a lot of the features you’re used to until you reach a point in the story where you can unlock them again.
It means you’ll have to go through a lot of the same dungeons again just to get to the same level you’ve already reached.
Though, this isn’t always a problem.
After all, some of the earlier dungeons are so easy to clear that it’s silly. But you might die of boredom while waiting in line for things like Castrum and The Crystal Tower raid series.
Aside from that, it looks like you’re looking at a pretty simple equation.
Story skips and level boosts aren’t that expensive in the grand scheme of things, and they can save you a lot of time if you want to have another alt to raid with.
But there are also a lot of good things about being able to play through the story at your own pace.
It’s important to remember that not a lot of your characters’ experiences are the same.
So if you spent a lot of money on MogStation outfits, you won’t be able to use them on a new character. Watch your step!
The last thing to remember is that there are two levels of subscription for XIV.
You have your basic plan, which lets you make all of the characters that can be made on a given server. Then there is the entry-level plan, which is cheaper but only lets you have one character in each world.
You can make an alt with this plan, but they won’t be on the same server, which may take away some of the benefits of having an alt in the first place.
