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Beta Impressions
AIMonster
Member UncommonPosts: 2,059
I managed to snag a beta key from Fileplanet a few days ago. Since then I've been I managed to snag a beta key from Fileplanet a few days ago. Since then I've been playing almost non-stop. I've managed to get most combat classes to level 10-20, land (harvesting) classes to ~7, and some crafting classes to 5. I've been trying to do a large variety of things in game to get a feel for the overall package. I'm going to go into detail about each individual thing from mechanics, features, and general gameplay. I'm trying to maintain an overall unbiased view here.
Character Creation
There are many videos of this on youtube. Overall the character creation is adequate. It's not extremely comprehensive like City of Heroes, Champions Online, Aion, All Points Bulletin, or even AoC and Perfect World, but it should be decent enough to make a unique looking character.
You start by choosing your character's race and sex. There are 2 clans you can choose from, each have distinct features. For instance the Seeker of the Sun Miq'ote do not have fangs, have thicker but shorter tails, cat eyes, and paler skin tones while the Seekers of the Moon Miq'ote have darker skin tones and fangs.
You can then choose a character's height, voice (one of three choices), skin tone, hair (which gives several options), face, and additional characteristics (like scars). It should be noted that none of these features use sliders or can be individually placed on your character, so you are stuck using preset choices. One other thing to note is that the face feature (at least for Hyur females) inexplicably changed her breast size and shape even though there was no option for this in character creation.
Next you choose a character's discipline which effects their starting weapon and armor, their birthday, their guardian (what deity they worship), starting city (in beta only a single starting city is available, but there should be 3 at launch), a server (shows all servers and how heavily populated they are), a name, and a surname. Note that the surname is not optional and players can have the same first or surname as you (but not both) so you could create families and such.
The Tutorial?
After character creation you go through a few cutscenes depending on your starting city. If you ran the benchmark test you should have a good idea of how these cutscenes play out for Limsa Lominsa (the only city available at beta). About midway through you'll have the opportunity to fight with NPCs assisting you in case you do poorly. You aren't really told how to do things, yes text pops up in your chat window, but the window is small and hard to read while trying to figure out the controls (and it doesn't explicitly tell you the controls). Afterward the battle you have a few more cutscenes, then you are off to the port of the city where you have to speak to an NPC to progress. Overall the tutorial explains little (almost nothing), doesn't even go over various aspects of the game like crafting and guildleves (you can find information about these by talking to an NPC you get the first storyline quest from as well as other NPCs related to specific things like retainers or guildleves, but even these texts will offer you little insight on how these game mechanics work). The game can really use additional tutorials and reworking of the intro to familiarize players better with the gameplay before they jump into it. As of right now, the initial experience may be offputting to new players especially those who are new to MMOs.
UI and Controls
They are absolutely horrendeous. The UI suffers from a multitude of problems. The controls, while better than FFXI's overall, are laggy and uninitutive.
To even reconfigure the controls you have to open a seperate "FFXIV Configuration" program with FFXIV closed out. The only controls you can currently reconfigure via normal means is the gamepad controls. Keyboard/mouse users are pretty much out of luck and will be forced to use the default controls if they don't want to use a gamepad. You can also set graphic's settings up in the configuration program here.
While the game plays better on a gamepad, you can still make due with a mouse and keyboard. The mouse lags like molasses and most of the time you'll want to stick to the keyboard. Selecting things with the mouse is sometimes completely unresponsive - in particular targeting NPCs and enemies, so get use to tab targetting slowly through things in an attempt to properly target whatever is in front of you.
One of the biggest problems is commands lag. It will often take precious seconds to process an action such as talking to an NPC or selecting a command from the menu. This makes an already slow paced game feel even slower. The UI also has syncing issues with just about everything. Let me explain with an example: you select an action trait and "add" it. After a few seconds (due to commands lagging) you'll get a chat message that the trait has been added, but the icon will not show up. After several more seconds the icon will show up; however the action points you have left for traits will still not be updated to reflect the change. After a few seconds that will finally show up. Overall you had to wait almost a full minute just to see the result of you giving a class an ability. Now imagine doing this for every single action. There are even better examples of the UI sync problem, but I'll go into them when we get to combat.
The game was obviously designed with a console in mind with little thought towards keyboard/mouse users. Almost every single action in the game takes at least 3 steps longer than what a keyboard user could do in a single step, and sometimes even as many as 8 steps longer. You have to go through menu after menu, "confirm" various actions, etc. It's a mess. Even if we take into consideration the game was designed to be played on consoles with a keyboard, the menus and confirmations seem like overkill. Top this off with the UI lag and you have actions taking a seriously long time to perform.
Chat commands don't make much sense either. To talk to members of your linkshell, without busting through a bunch of menus, the command is /chatmode linkshell. Then you have to send that command to switch your chat to linkshell. It would have made a lot of sense to just have /ls (Message), /link, or /linkshell send a message to linkshell and you could still maintain whatever channel you were on as your default chat. You cannot do that right now, you have to switch channels. Emotes also pretty much have to be done with the menu, there are no easy commands like /bow or /wave.
Graphics and Sound
Graphics are very good, on par with newer MMOs like AoC and Aion. Sound is also excellent, incorporating classic FF themes and sounds with additional modern touches too. One small complaint is that like just about everything in the game there is so issues with animations syncing up during combat. You'll see results of you attack before the animation and animations will often be cancelled out from other attacks or the game will try to play catch up and play animations oddly quick. It should be noted that unlike many modern games, besides the introductory cutscenes there is no voice acting for NPC dialogue. Be prepared to do a lot of reading.
Disciplines and it's Mechanics
You change your job simply by changing your equipped weapon. The whole discipline system and ability to change jobs and mix and match as you please is one of Final Fantasy XIV's best features. When you are playing that particular job you get an amount of action points you can use to set up your abilities of that job. You can use whatever abilities you want in that particular job or ANY of the abilities you've unlocked by leveling other jobs as long as you have enough action points. For instance you could make a Lancer, drop some Lancer abilities you don't find yourself using as often (for instance I chose not to use my points on Trammel despite it being an ability for that particular job), and add abilities like Second Wind from a Pugilist, Cure from a Conjurer, Poison from a Thamaturge, etc. This makes for an insane variety in gameplay and encourages you to not focus on leveling a job, as well as nearly eliminating the need to roll an alt. You can pretty much customize as you please.
You have a physical level (anything you do that would normally get you skill experience will also grant you normal experience that goes towards your physical level) and a skill level (raised by doing anything that involves using your current class, in a crafter's case this would be crafting, in a Pugilist's case killing MOBs, in a Miner's case harvesting, etc.). Your skill level effects your current Discipline level (8 in Polearms basically means you are a level 8 Lancer), which will let you unlock traits in that discipline as you level as well as overall become more powerful (higher HP, more damage, more MP, better hit rates, better evasion rates, better defense, ability to wear better gear at optimal level, etc.). Increasing physical level on the other hand let's you boost base stats like dexterity as you please as well as elemental resistances. As you gain more and more physical levels it will cost more points to raise a single base stat higher (at low levels it cost one point per, but once you reach 40 in a stat it cost 2 per, I'm sure it gets worse as you get even higher stats) encouraging you to evenly distribute stats and resistance points rather than focusing only on something specific like just strength. Stats boosted by physical level seem minor in comparison to your discipline level which greatly effects your overall performance.
Guildleves
Guildleves are quests which are quite similar to ones you'd see in traditional MMOs. So far the only guildleves I've seen for "Battlecraft" are the typical kill X variety, while the "Fieldcraft" leves require you to harvest. There are also "Local" leves which require you to successfully craft something with the materials given. There is a limited period of time (so far all guildleves have been 30 minutes), although you'll probably complete most of the early leves in 5 minutes or less. MOBs or group of MOBs will spawn and you'll be pointed in the right direction with an arrow on your minimap as well as a flashing circle marking where the enemies spawned. Only you and your group can initiate fights with these MOBs, so nobody else will be able to interefere in your leve. While in a leve EXP is significantly increased (about 4-5X) so they are fantastic ways to level up.
To activate a leve you have to go to the leve location indicated by the leve and initate it via an aetheryte crystal there. Aetheryte crystals also restore your mana and are used to remember teleportation locations.
At the end of the leve you and your party are rewarded gil, and you are sometimes rewarded additional loot such as a piece of armor (which is quite rare, I'll get into this in the crafting section). The rewards you get appear to be somewhat random (although they are stated before you accept the leve), as I've found that after rolling on a different character I got different or no rewards than my other character doing the same leves.
There is a limitation on leves. You can only complete 8 regional (Battlecraft, Fieldcraft, and Faction leves) and 8 local leves (Crafting), every 2 days. Apparently it resets at a specific server time. Otherwise you'd be doing leves over and over again because of the huge EXP boost they provide and additional rewards.
Travel
The world is gigantic. Traveling takes a very long time. While there appear to be methods of faster travel such as Chocobos and Ferries, they aren't available at low level in the beta. You also have the option to teleport to Aetheryte Crystals and Gates throughout the world, but this consumes Anima (4 each time) and while you start with 100, it appears to recharge very slowly, about 2 per day if I had to guess, so it be wise to use this only when it's absolutely necessary. In just the beginner areas outside of Limsa it can take as long as 30 minutes to travel from location to the next. I can only assume travel will be a nightmare at later levels.
Fortunately, I haven't encounter any agressive MOBs in the 1-20 area around Limsa, so travel is relatively safe at least over there.
Combat
Overall combat has a good pace to it. It doesn't feel too slow (it is slower than most newer MMOs) nor too fast. The variety of disciplines can keep things interesting enough.
Melee classes right now are far more powerful than casters, mostly due to having a higher HP and defense (the casters at low levels don't really get many options to keep the MOBs in check either), and lacking a limitation of a mana pool (which doesn't refill over time, you need to use abilities on very long cooldowns or visit an aetheryte crystal). Casters are still very important to level for most builds, as they provide important solo abilities like heals, buffs, and debuffs.
UI sync issues are very apparent here. The only reliable information you have available to you is your health bar and the MOB's health bar. Animations will often trigger much later, long after you or the MOB is dead and hotkey recast timers are currently way out of sync and don't report the correct times your abilities are available. You'll see you have enough TP (which generates as you do normal attacks and can be used for more powerful attacks) to do an ability, but the lag will often cost you a second or two of being able to use the ability. It can be very difficult to adjust to the combat due to this when first playing, but eventually you'll grow used to it, and it can be a lot of fun once you do.
One thing that bogs combat down is the "active" and "passive" modes of combat. If you played AoC you'll be familiar with this, similar to how you unsteath/steath your weapon in that game. The problem in FFXIV is it's not implemented well, so much so I'm going to give it it's own category.
Active and Passive Mode
In order to start combat you'll generally want to target something (using tab if you use the keyboard/mouse, since mouse controls are wonky and don't always work) and then hit your hotkey/button (default F, but you can also click on an icon in the UI) to enter "Active" mode. Your character will stop in place (after some lag between the command) and draw out their weapon rather slowly (unlike in AoC where the draw is quick and you can do it while moving), and then enter "active" mode. They'll be in a stance with their weapon drawn, and move slower. While in active mode your TP will degenerate more slowly too. Once you are in "Active" mode you can start using your abilities on the enemy or buffs/heals/etc. on yourself and party members. So what's the problem with this? Well, once combat is done you still remain in active mode and do no regenerate HP. You still move slowly. You have to press the F key (or gamepad button/UI button) again to enter into passive mode to start regenerating again. The problem here is that it slows down the speed of combat and moving around significantly. Engaging an enemy and leaving combat is now a 15 second ritual. It would have also been nice if the UI automatically put you in passive mode when you weren't engaging anything so you don't have to go through the tediousness of doing it after every fight. The odd thing here is that it already doesn't this with crafting and harvesting disciplines.
Grouping
Suprise, at low levels unlike FFXI there is little incentive to group. The only real benefit of a group is the ability to do more guildleves for bonus gil rewards, as you aren't limited to a set of amount of party member's leves you can do. Everything else so far (keep in mind this is only 1-20) can be done solo and it's the preferable method. Why? For a few reasons. One, there isn't enough spawns to support a party. In beta, even if you find a spot to solo, you'll find that spot easily cleared and have to wait a fairly long time on respawns. This was addressed slightly in the last patch, but the dial still needs to be turned up a couple notches on the spawn rate. At the moment you can't support group leveling anywhere. Also, there really wasn't anything that required a group. Everything at 1-20 could be solo. I only hope there is a decent amount of group content at later levels. You can set the difficult of leves, but I've managed to solo leves at Party (3 star) difficulty, though I have yet to try Troop and Legion (4 and 5 star, small raid and 15 man raid respectively). This is a really bummer, since I know most people were hoping for a party heavy game. Hopefully we see a big change before release with more incentives for partying.
Harvesting (Disciplines of the Land)
Unlike most MMOs, harvesting is less tedious and much more active and fun. Harvesting is done via a minigame where you have to guess where the node is and land in the correct position with timing. You are then told if you are hot or cold, if you are on the spot but have to hit it again (a sign you are getting a better material). You only have a few chances, based on your skill level and the grade of the node being mined. Additionally you get abilities which let you hunt down nodes faster, so you don't have to run around aimlessly looking for them or memorize points they spawn on the map. I actually found harvesting to be a welcome break from combat, while I usually find it to be a tedious task in most other MMOs. Since harvesting gives you EXP towards your physical level, you could technically just play the harvesting minigame and level only harvesting Disciplines if you are inclined to. Same with crafting...
Crafting (Disciplines of the Hand)
If you are familiar with EQ II's crafting system it's very similar. You select what materials you want to use and then if there is a receipe available with those materials you can select an option and start crafting. It's worth noting that recipes are not given to you, so you'll either have to look them up or discover them via experimentation and guessing. Once you decide on a recipe you have to pay additional "shards" (these are found on MOBs and through harvesting, but mostly harvesting) to craft it. After you confirm that, you'll be presented with a few options. You'll have a progress meter and a measure of durability and quality. If durability drops to zero you'll fail. Quality effects how good the item will turn out (it also boosts your rewards during a local leve). You have 4 options. You can choose to a standard, rapid, or bold synthesis or wait. Standard will give you somewhere in between rapid and bold level of quality and progress, while rapid focuses on progress and bold focuses on quality. You can also "wait", but I've never seen wait work properly, so I tend to avoid it. As you use your synthesis your durability will go down, and different effects will cause extra losses of durability and sometimes even quality. Reaching 100% progress will allow you to finish to item and the combination will be finished and fashioned into a new item. You can also dye items later on to further customize the look of the armor.
The economy is player driven, meaning you'll be able to trade most (if not every) item in the game. Crafting will likely be your main source of equipment. You can get gear via leves and (persumably) named monsters/bosses, but crafting is a fairly reliable source and should drive the economy. Each craft relies on other crafts for materials, in fact sometimes a single recipe can pull materials from as many as 3-4 different crafts!
There are however a lot of issues with crafting right now. For one it takes a lot longer to level than a combat profession. This is mostly due to a need for materials which can sometimes be scarce or hard to find and an overeliance on crafts outside your current craft to get proper materials. The problem is also compounded in beta with what I can only assume is a bug where you sometimes don't receive skill experience (but still gain regular EXP) for unknown reasons despite doing a combine earlier and receiving it at the same level, same combine, same quality, etc. Leveling crafting right now is a bit of a chore, is time consuming, and requires heavy leveling of a gathering profession. Some material requirements seem a bit too steep, making the combine essentially a waste of materials.
Retainers
These are basically a replacement to an auction house system. Retainers are NPCs you hire to setup a shop for you (and act as a bank/mule). Players can visit the retainers and purchase items you gave to the retainers and setup a price for. You can select your retainer's race, gender, and a nickname (you cannot have a space in the name, so no surnames). Once you setup your retainer you head to one of the market wards and summon them there, outfit them with your junk, and set prices if you'd like on the items.
Unfortunately, while the whole system sounds great, it's pretty much universal concensus that the system as a whole is an utter failure. There are a lot of problems with it.
The first major problem is where the retainers are located. You have to go to an instance (one of about 20 in beta) and teleport to that instance. The game gives you almost no indication of where the "market wards" are (they aren't where the NPC shops are), so you pretty much have to find it by dumb luck or asking someone (it's located in the southern islands in Upper Limsa Lominsa, you'll get a little icon popup similar to how you use aetherytes and you have to "teleport" using that). The market wards themselves are small confined, and once again you have no logical means of getting out. In order to get out you have to go to the middle of the ward where there are 2 walls (no doors) and teleport out. Retainers can be placed anywhere even though there are 8 stalls per ward you can place them behind (you can also customize the look of the stall, but you have to pay additional gold to rent a stall if you choose to use that). This is immersive breaking, even in beta the first ward was congested with retainers who were standing around all over the place lifeless with no logical position.
Next is the problem of actually shopping for the goods. There are 20 instances. In beta you only had about 30 or so retainers in the main (first ward on the menu selection) ward. It took me about an hour to look for goods through them all. Imagine trying to find the item you want. Now imagine when there are 10,000 players on a single server, each with there very own retainer available to sell goods 24/7. Not only is switching between wards cumbersome (load times), but actually going to each retainer to check there goods is time consuming. There is no central auction house or even a search option to find a retainer with goods you want. If the system is kept the way it is now, it will take all day to look through all the retainers, you probably will not be able to look through them all, and you may not even find the item you were looking for. In a player driven economy this is going to be bad news, and players are going to find it easier to just shout in popular trade locations (think East Commonlands in EQ, heck the whole system is very reminescent of EQ's bazaar without all the useful features for finding the item you want). The UI lag and having to sort through a bunch of menus makes matters worse.
It's Beta
Yes, it is beta. A lot of the problems mentioned will likely be fixed. SE is receiving a lot of feedback on important issues like the UI, crafting, and retainers.
I'm going to go into a little mini-rant here for those who are in the beta, or plan to be in the beta key soon whether through the contests or the recently announced open beta.
I'm a really thorough tester, and yes when I join a beta I do look for, write down, and try to replicate bugs. I have a background as a tester (QA briefly), so I know how to file a proper bug report. I enjoy sending feedback/reporting bugs and I try to do so as much as possible in order to hopefully make the game better at launch (more fun). I simply cannot do so because SE won't allow me to. My beta key did not come with instructions on how to get to the beta forum nor did a Google search. A member of my linkshell group had to give me the link to the beta forums. Why couldn't Fileplanet or SE direct me there in the first place. Once I found the proper site I found I couldn't send a bug report or post on the forums. So I have no means of sending SE feedback and bug reports. The forums themselves were convulted, since testers cannot post new topics broad topics like "Feedback - Synthesis" with 100s of pages of posts are there instead. How are you suppose to get proper feedback? What if there are issues with crashing related to synthesis, but the issue is buried somewhere in page 84 and only mentioned briefly, so people cannot test and try to replicate it. People are even posting in this topic even when it's something completely unrelated, it's an utter mess.
Additionally, the beta is pretty limited. Why don't we have access to the other 2 starting cities? Don't these areas need to be tested too?
Overall Impressions
Despite all it's problems the game is fun and I'm looking forward to release. It could use a push back in it's release another 6 months-year, but that's highly unlikely now (and the wait is already UNBEARABLE). Major fixes need to be made in only a little over a month's time. The biggest thing holding the game back right now is the sluggish UI which is related to a numerous problems in other features. If Square Enix can manage to fix a few of the problems mentioned above in that short of a timeframe (here's to hoping they are holding onto an updated version of the game that is way of ahead of where we are at currently or the debugger has been the source of the UI problem) then they'll bring in a lot more of the subscribers. If you are still unsure about whether or not to preorder the game I'd recommend waiting at least 6 months till most of the bugs have been ironed out.
TL;DR version: Pros and Cons
+ High quality graphics and sound
+ Great atmosphere
+ Active crafting and harvesting.
+ Since crafting and harvesting increases physical level, you don't have to participate in combat to enjoy the game.
+ Discipline system - Job switching and customization
+ Player driven economy
+ Tries a lot of new things, pretty unique and innovative.
+ No regional block.
+ Allows for solo play.
- Sluggish UI and controls
- Very time consuming
- Not enough focus on group play.
- Crafting and retainer systems have lots of issues to work out.
- "Battlemodes" (Active and Passive) slow down combat.
- Travel takes a long time.
- Physical jobs seems stronger than casters, despite casters being a necessity to level for most builds.
Comments
I pretty much agree with 99% of this post to be honest. My main concerns are the UI and the combat sync (getting killed, but it takes like 3 seconds for the animation to happen, lol)
Yea Im with you its a great write up... I think they cuold use identifiers for the regular Quest givers also not the leve the other quest you can get...... And yes I have posted that in the beta tester area of FFXIV
Thanks for the write up. Since i didn't get chance to play beta. this information helps a lot.
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That was one of the better, and more believable Beta Impressions I has ever read. I'm not in Bata, and despite my bashing of what I had researched on the UI, and drop down boxes. I was really really counting on this game to be an upgrade to FF11.
I had not given FF11 much of a chance I was always curious of the group play that 11 had to offer. My guess is that since it's made more for consoles, and add to the fact that the game is more geared to an Asian player base, that the devs are concentrating more to their own.
After reading this review I find my self still curious of the players that overcome FF11's obstacles to create a very close community.....I'll have no choice but to Waite for release or take the advice of waiting six months, because I would really like to be a part of a strong community. I'll not rule out a game pad if the game works well for it.
Quote" This is a really bummer, since I know most people were hoping for a party heavy game. Hopefully we see a big change before release with more incentives for partying."End quote
Hopefully not the reason I am interested is because it is NOT party heavy.
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Regards Gramps www.theoldergamers.com
Good read, thanks OP :]
As others have already said, great read and very informative. Nice work
My thoughts on his negatives.
Full Sail University - Game Design
All in all a nice post by the OP, but I can already see them reducing XP etc in order to slow down the level gain and extend the game play, former FFXI player will probably want to avoid another Valkurm Dunes
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png
the only thing that makes me say no right now to this game is the lag (UI and animations).
Keep us posted if the "lag" bug has been fixed plz.
thnx
great info from OP
The only lag in the Beta is that caused by the limited resources SE has put into the Beta server and the fact said server is running debugging software. Like the guy above me said you can't really blame SE for that, what we can do is blame people for running the game at higher settings than they should be. My experience with the game has been doing so leads to a slow down in both UI and controller responsiveness.
Full Sail University - Game Design
I'm glad they don't have quest indicators and am sincerely hoping they don't add them.
I'm thrilled to see that there's a MMO out - these days especially - where the player isn't led around by the nose being shown exactly who to talk to and exactly where to go for everything. I feel like I'm actually an active participant in uncovering questlines and tasks to be completed, rather than just playing "connect the dots", following quest indicators everywhere.
They want us to explore and to find and learn things for ourselves, and I think that's great.
As it is, they've done a great job with providing more detailed explanations of what to do and where to go in the quest dialog (which I know many people don't like to read and will likely just look it up on a Wiki somewhere instead). Leves show you which direction to go and indicate the area your leve targets are going to spawn in. That's extremely helpful as well for the casual group, and makes sense, given how they're time limited and the targets can spawn anywhere over a pretty large area.
Anyway... back on topic.. Good read OP. One thing I will point out though... You no longer have to enter Active mode yourself. Targeting and interacting with a mob will automatically put you into Active mode now. They changed that for Beta 3.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
Nice review. Dont remember many player reviews as thorough as this one.
If the sluggish UI gets fixed, I might try this game.
I don't think you have to worry and, again... It does come down to what was said earlier in the thread.
For one, we are in Beta and there are things going on like Debug Code running in the background. That automatically is a hit on performance. I'm confident it'll be improved considerably in the retail client.
Second, what settings you're using definitely has an effect, particularly if you use a mouse. They're currently using a software mouse which means the responsiveness of the mouse cursor is tied to the performance of the game. Hence, low frame-rate, slow mouse response. Ideally, they'll be adding a hardware cursor at some point.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
... And this game died for me. I'm not even going to try and tolerate this. The thought itself is insane. MMORPGs will be held back, as long as this is allowed to go on. You would have thought that after Aion, and their earlier FFXI, they would have learned their lesson about this.
These ultra long winded games are not gonna win, and it's not good entertainment. These absolute hardcore players are going to charge through this, regardless if it takes a 100 hours or 5000 hours. The only difference between the two, is that everyone in between is going to be alinated and bored before getting very far, while the remaining few will stroke their e-peens at how good they are at losing themselves in a virtual world.
I'll respect those players once they have Ninja Gaiden / Crysis level of AI on the hardest difficulty. These brain dead zombies are a waste of time to kill, and extend it to long paces of time is stupid.
You can't keep the most hardcore from exhausting the content. It would have been better to go the other direction. Make a nicely paced game that is fun for everyone, all the time. What can I do with this if I only have 5-10 minutes? Nobody is going to be entertained by just watching some pixels transporte itself in that time!
I know all about the "bla bla It's okay because I don't watch TV so makes it better for me bla bla bla".
Vanguard and EQ2 too, both played on this long term time consuming gameplay. Some people need to get it into their heads that nothing becomes satisfactory just because you spent a lot of time doing something boring(grinding) and then assuming that it will feel fantastic at the end because the grind is stopped and the long effort made it worth it.
That's the equivelent of knocking your head against the wall, because when you stop you will be rewarded with the sensation of not hurting as much.
It's a combination of low standards here. Low standards and assuming that the road to the end does not have to be fun. It defintely has too! Your paying for entertainment. Lord of the Rings wouldnt be much fun if they had literally put in 50 more hours of footage and fighting... does that make your ticket worth more? or the ending more satisfactory? No it does not. Because when you see a movie, you expect the beginning, middle AND end to be great.
Now, time consuming could still mean that XIV has a great narrative all the way through but I find that hard to believe. Because it takes a damn long time to build nice quests with great stories and gameplay(particularly in a online persistent wolrd). I don't see it, but I will be happy to eat my hat, if XIV somehow is this insane ride gameplay quality ride and spice it up all the way through...
I still wouldn't play it. I'm not even going to try it, and I doubt anyone I know who enjoys MMOs will. I will cross my fingers for another MMO that takes the players time into consideration, and let me treat it as a game. Not a lifestyle or a burden to my life. Damn annoying. Pretty pissed off actually when I read this. You have such a great looking game, with so many things going for it, and they still wont listen.
Nobody asks for a WoW-Clone or a WoW-like game. That has nothing to do about being time consuming itself. I think many people play these games because they love fantasy, and they cant get that in online action games(because they are all military gun shooters or sci-fi shooters), so they reduce themselves to play time consuming games like this.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
+1 from me on that.
I don't care how fast other players want to level - that's their concern, not mine. As long as the game developers don't cater to that group by keeping most of the attention on End Game, while trivializing everything before it (like certain other popular MMO developers have done), people can power through the game, burn through the content get bored and leave all day long. It has zero effect on me. And if I find developers are leaning that way, I simply decide it's time to move on.
As long as I can take my time, immerse myself in the game world, enjoy the content and be entertained no matter what I'm doing... I don't care if it takes me a year or longer to reach cap. I don't define my playtime in absolute goals the way others do. To me, saying "My goal is to reach end game" is so limited. You're *going* reach the end-game eventually no matter what, as long as you're playing. My goal is to experience as much of the game as possible along the way.
But... to each their own.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
3 People including the OP, says the game is very time consuming and defends it, that was my rant aimed at.
You misunderstand, in projecting that I want it easy. Nah, I like my games difficult, but screw time consuming. That just downright sucks. I don't see any positives in relation to MMORPGs to be a good thing, as this has always been the main problem for people.
If what you say is true, that its already very time consuming, and you dont have access to the whole beta, then it's just worse aint it?
Again, less is more. If the developers can't comprehend that, then I suspect that the game will not be a success, as people are catching on, and realising - Wow, it's simply not worth spending so much time in a game.
Nobody is asking for instant gratification! That's absurd. People just wants to be entertained, and time consuming is not respecting the audience time. You need to know when you need an editor to cut out the fluff, right? You would want that in a movie, a AAA game, a book or a TV Show, for sure!
You would rather make a short but sweet experience that is awesome all the way through, than having an experience where you spent a lot of time just walking somewhere. I can not see the fun in that. Not even in the name of exploration and discovering a game world. Look at GTA San Andreas, a single player game that made many people bored due to having to cross the entire worlds terrain over and over. Something the Devs admitted and realised later on.
You gotta respect the audience time.
Of course the reason in MMORPGs is simple. Many developers are short minded and think that if they stretch the experience out enough the players will keep being subsribed. they will ignore gameplay getting stale, and unbalanced combat systems and over use of the same areas, textures, creatures, music and loot to feed their carrot on a stick.
I was informed by other players that this game would be very casual player friendly, and it seems that it's not. Your reply reminds me of people in the Aion beta. "there is no grind... it goes faster than even WoW" and joe-what-do-you-kno, post release the game ends up being one of the worst hack fests around.
The Asian mentality and stereotype really do seem focused around grinding, and now it really looks like its in the cards, that this game will be another one of those carrot-on-a-stick-games.
It's just gonna end in tears years down the road "the devs messed it up", "it was better at launch" , "they didnt fix what needed fixing", "they nerfed the wrong things" as excuses that has more to do with their never ending gameplay, than anything else. And that of course is also directed at 20-30 other MMORPGs around(or the majority on the market right now).
Many people(from my understanding) are hoping that SWTOR and GW2, while forever-games too, will have stories concluded and new begun. that you can play them as game with a narrative that ends, and not like some lame soap opera, that when dragged out enough will fall in quality and not stop while the game is good. It always happens. It's the reason why so many people leave what games they are playing in detest.
It wouldnt have mattered if FFXIV was a short game that took 100-200 hours to max, if the gameplay was great. its an illusion that people need to see themselves with higher numbers all the time to have fun. if the gameplay really is fun, people will play just because. so why take a good thing and extent it from a logical point to a stretched out point where everything suffers, because the pacing is ruined.
Mass Effect 2 is a great game for the 10-20 hours it last. had they extended that to 50 hours, the game would have been much worse. They would have ruined the storytelling, the pace, the players interest in everything changing and being action packed. combat, puzzles, rpg lvling, and explorations would all have become monetone long before that.
So imagine if FFXIV was a shorter more condense experience and how much more awesome it would have been. Less is more. I'm beating a dead horse here, and this is really something aimed at the whole old mantra of MMORPGs, but I am bringing it up here, because this game along with GW2 and SWTOR, are the big hopes now. And FFXIV seems more stuck in the past than the others, and that really bothers me given the potential.
They say less time contraint gameplay, but I have heard that speech before, and somehow it always ends up in grinding(I am also suspicious at GW2 and SWTOR)! - Aion being the most recent examples. FFXI, was absolutely insane. Sure, you can stroke your hardcoreness if it makes you feel better about life, then all the more power to you, I just dont think its a hobby or entertainment at those levels - but a chore, a extra job.
This has nothing to do with difficulty. I love hard games. In fact I think MMROPGs in general are too easy, but time consuming has nothing to do with being difficult. It's not reflexes, testing memory, strategy or the abillity to press many buttons simultantiously - that stuff is skillbased. Of course there is teamwork, and that certainly is there in FFXI(and most likely also this game) and that's great, but what you give up for it...
I think you misunderstand somethin very important.This is a group pve MMO game, with all its pros and cons.All your complains are bout the genre in general , not ffxiv in particular.Im not gonna argue if you whant a small game to play it, enjoy it and be done with it, but this is not the genre.The games of this genre are supoused to have everythin your talking bout( never ending storyes , never ending gameplay,inmersive and huge worlds).
You compare gta to an rpg mmo, seriuosly, comon, by no means im saying your wrong or your right. but dude this is not the place to discuss if you like single players games over what an MMORPG is supoused to be, at least is all i can take out of your last post.Problems with ffxiv ? we all aware the controls and ui are not optimal and that the load time for menus and everythin is literally shit.But like people have said before is becouse everythin is done server side, and unlike the comercial betas or the release, the FFXIV beta is runing on such limited resourses that all of this should get fixed by release simply becouse thats when the big ass server machines will start working at.
I played FFXI with just a keyboard for 3 years, I'm 100% positive I will like the FFXIV controls if they are even remotely similar.
I have played nearly every game this development team has made. Early reviews mean very little to us fanatics ^^
You're doing an awful lot of generalizing in that post.
One statement stands out in particular:
"You gotta respect audience time".
Completely disagree in that context. The developers have to create a game experience that will suit the audience they are trying to reach. At that point, the audience members have to choose the game that suits the time they have to play. A developer can only be held to the experience they're trying to create. They can't be responsible for the individual play schedules, or time demands of every single person playing their game... and to do so would be an exercise in futility.
Let's put it this way... there are people who think WoW is too slow and demands too much time to play.
That would be like choosing to go see a 3 hour movie, and then complaining to the makers for "not respecting audience time" because they only have 2 hours available to watch it. If you only have 2 hours available, don't buy tickets for a 3 hour movie. That's called acting responsibly as an individual.
Not everyone deems a slower progressing game to be a "bad thing". Some even consider it a good thing. Others don't even notice how long it takes to do something because they're too busy enjoying whatever it is they're doing (I fall into that category).
And before anyone says it, yes I know "WoW is the most successful MMO ever and it's designed so things don't take as long to do..." etc etc.
Great... WoW is successful for those who want to play that style of game with that kind of pacing... and so they're playing it. If they're not playing WoW, they can be playing one of the myriad other MMOs that cater to that playstyle. People who want a game that requires less time investment to achieve any given goal have plenty to choose from these days.
Those of us who don't "need" that kind of pacing, or even prefer a slower paced game are running short on options these days. I think FFXIV, like FFXI before it can fill that niche. No, it won't have "WoW-like numbers"... But it doesn't have to, to be successful. It needs to be good, fun and solid enough to the players its developers are targeting to be profitable so they can continue supporting and developing it.
If FFXI should teach anyone anything, it's that a MMO modeled after the more "old-school" style of play can still do very well, for a very long time (7+ years at ~500,000 players and 32 servers is nothing to scoff at; they only recently had their first server merge) *if it's done well*. One thing SE did with XI that too few other developers fail to, is they identified the kind of game they wanted to make. They identified the kind of player they wanted to attract.. and then they focused like a laser on them. They didn't get distracted by WoW's millions of players. They didn't get pulled along with other developers who decided to ride Blizzard's coat-tails. And for that, they were rewarded with a healthy, loyal playerbase that I would bet money many newer MMO developers would love to be able to boast having.
Some people talk about how "developers should learn a lesson from WoW's success that players don't want slow-progressing games anymore". Well, I don't know how wise of advice that is anymore. When WoW first exploded, sure, it was easy to come to that conclusion. However, how many subscription-based MMOs since then who have tried to "learn from WoW" by largely modeling their game after it, have managed to reach even comparable levels of success? I'd say none. Well, maybe Aion in the Eastern market. But otherwise? -tumbleweed rolls by-. Meanwhile, here's SE chugging away with FFXI - a decidedly niche game that doesn't follow WoW's lead - maintaining more subscribers than most post-WoW MMOs have managed to keep only months after their launch, much less years.
My point? Let FFXIV be the game it's going to be. If people can give it the chance, learn its differences and quirks and enjoy the game they find beneath it all.. then perfect. SE has found its player base for XIV, as they did for XI. If not... well, again.. there are plenty of other choices out there currently, and more on the horizon.
Let players identify what they're looking for, do their research... and then choose wisely.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
And who would pay the subscription for the next month after "beating the game"? You want SE to commit financial suicide (or should I say seppuku ...)
I find keyboard SO EASY to use,
I use mouse to select my target (rather than Tabbing every NPC in view) and to move to Active mode or open actions menu (need to find shortcut for that..)
then i used Arrow pad to move through the menu, lot quicker and more intuitive than mousing over everything
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png
Thanks for this great review OP. Its clear that caters to an audience that is not spoon fed gaming nor instant gratification and some folks seems to understand it not. And I'm not the guy that you could think is in the boat as I play WAR since I left SWG pre-cu and post NGE and playing UO on and off.... But is notorious that must be games for all kinds of gamers and that SE has a accurate notion on which audience is aiming to.
I would remark that though I'm a PvP guy from the core the reality is that FFXIV appeals to me for its nature of long-term adventures, a vast world with exploration possibilities and - why not? - its beauty. I will give it a try.
It is a question of fangs.