I agree with almost everything in the OP. Many good points.
For me, the game is growing on me. I enjoy playing, it feels different than other MMOs. I feel more immersed in the game world, with less obssession on super efficient mob grinding.
However, I have some concerns, many of which I pray will be resolved in time for release.
Concerns:
Is the world big enough?
We don't have access to everything, but looking at the world map and guessing how much of the map the current zones take up, I'm worried about the world being too tiny. I could be wrong though, what we have access to might be a much smaller percentage of the world than it appears.
I just want to weigh in on this. A friend of mine and I did some exploring earlier. We started in Gridania and ran out to Coerthas. We spent well over an hour running through Coerthas alone and I'm not exaggerating when I say we saw maybe 20% of the overall region, if that.
We followed the road from The Black Shroud (region around Gridania... also enormous) which enters Coerthas in the SE corner, and followed it NW up until its end, which you can see on the map. That portion of the trek alone took about 15-20 minutes by my estimation - just to establish a sense of scale.
We then made our way South toward Ram Lake, and then a little farther South before our luck ran out and we were both one-shotted. It's a pretty narrow route we followed overall and we were out there a long time. The wildlife is pretty dangerous out there (at least at our level) and it was a very fun challenge avoiding it all.
The regions in XIV so far are not numerous. SE indicated that the landmass in FFXIV at launch would be slightly smaller than what XI had at launch. However, what's there is freaking huge. I think you can easily fit at least 2-3 full FFXI zones inside a single region in FFXIV. You can spend hours just exploring around one portion of a single region before you've seen everything. And I'm only talking what's above ground, not even getting into the many underground tunnels and dungeons you can find in your travels.
If it's vast expanses of land you're after... I don't think FFXIV is going to disappoint.
Is the world interesting enough?
The cities are great. The main quest line is interesting. (The stories are far from resolved, so I am hoping an expecting there are more quest lines not available in OB). However, the zones lack anything of real interest. They look pretty good, but there are no points of interest. If you've seen one Aether Crystal camp, you've seen them all. No villiages, no temples, no camps of creatures. No ruins or pretty natural landmarks. How can a game have such detailed cities, then completely lack any interesting details outside the cities?
Actually, there are various points of interest to be found.. They're just really difficult to get to for the most part, and spread pretty far apart. I'm imagining SE is going to be adding more such features in over time... There's way too much available land in FFXIV right now for them to leave so much of it unused.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
Thank you, I did finally get the files elsewhere. Which is odd to me. I suppose I kept hoping it would just start working like the other patches before.
"Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better." parrotpholk
I wish I knew how to get experience when out of guildleves and unable to find any quests. Killing enemies gives me between 100-250 experience and they're farmed so it's not even like I can go and 'grind'.
crafting rewards massive exp. Nest to the person you got guidleves from there is another person that will give you 'local guildleves'. They're crafting leves, basically. I got like 2k experieince from each item i crafted for them
Comments
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
Thank you, I did finally get the files elsewhere. Which is odd to me. I suppose I kept hoping it would just start working like the other patches before.
"Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better." parrotpholk
well, todays patch stops at 94.6 intead of yesterdays 94.8
got yesterdays from utorrent but the one from today won't even start to download even though "seems" to be plenty seeds/peers
read elsewhere that todays patch was to fix the patcher - yeah right
crafting rewards massive exp. Nest to the person you got guidleves from there is another person that will give you 'local guildleves'. They're crafting leves, basically. I got like 2k experieince from each item i crafted for them