First few hours impression

Valkyrie

 

As someone who has no console, plays MMOs since 10 years, especially stuff like UO, Horizons, EQ2, Vanguard and never played a FF game before this is my first impression after playing like 10 hours now:

1. User Interface/Controls

This was quite confusing for me first even though I had read about it. But experiencing it in reality took me some hours to adjust with my mouse/keyboard based gameplay and I still swear about some pieces. Basically the UI is neatly minimalized which I like but a several important things need clicking with a mouse at (main menu that leads to inventory, quest log, paperdoll etc) as well as the popups for things you can interact with like Aetheryte Shrines or ressources. So far I haven't found any keybinding for this and the mouse control is slow and sluggish. I'd give a leg and an arm for keybinding for those often needed things. The other stuff works after a while quite smoothly with WASD for movement, right mouse button drag for turning, ENTER, Arrows and ESC for menus that are already active and TAB to cycle targets.

2. Harvesting

That one is quite nice, you define the deepness of the fishing hook for example or the height of your cut on the tree. Than you watch a fluctuating arrow and try to stop it in time for a good result. Interesting idea and fun so far even though a bit annoying - at least I haven't figured out any way to influence what you might get by this. Trees for example can give anything from Earth Shards to fruits to logs, feathers, branches. Each tree can give many different kinds (maple, ash, whatever) of each of the thingies. With limited backpack space and a wiiiide variety of stuff one needs for a single item to craft that can become frustrating if you try to be more self sufficient and look for something specific. Which brings me to the next point ...

3. Trade

You set up your private Shop from your backpack with stuff you don't have equipped so a little bag item appears next to your name and people can ask for trading with you. That of course works only while you are online. Offline and stationary is the retainer system, some NPC you can hire who act as mobile bank (there are no static ones), combat helper or if placed into the Market Ward area as constant shop. Theoretically a nice idea, practically ... the Market Wards are cluttered with Retainers standing around and you need to click each individually, click on browse, click again Browse - before it loads what the person sells. There are several Wards so the lag is cut down as individual instances. Which mean you can spent a lot of time teleporting from ward to ward, squeezing yourself through the masses and clicking often to check the stuff. Which I found tremendously annoying and tiring. Suggestion: local auction house that shows who sells what or at least have as in Zenthia Market Stalls that have a display showing the TYPE of what is sold before you go through all this clicking.

4. Combat

You have action points which are linked to the rank of your class. The sum of the action points defines what abilities of the class you can combine on your hotkey-bars. So if happens quite often that you will have to choose some but can't put all your abilities on the bar. Which is similar to what some might know from SpellBorn. You target the mob, hitting enter will enter the combat mode and shows the hotkey bar with what you placed there. Hitting from behind or the side is causing more damage than from the front and there is something called Battle Regimen which seems similar to the Heroic Chance system of EQ2: timer for several people of a group to execute their abilities to inflict higher damage or such. You start this by clicking next to the button of your hotkey bar. There are two basic modes, passive mode with weapon sheated means higher run speed and faster recovery of HP and you can switch your class while active mode means slower speed and slower recovery. Of course during battle you are in active mode. Switching modes seems to be one more of the frequent things used one can only do by mouse click. Mobs in general seem to become aggressive when you target them - can someone confirm that? Seems mana you can't recover by waiting or sitting without spells (potions?), but you can recover HP and mana when going to an aetheryte shrine (for a limited number of times per playtime). So far I think the combat system is not bad, haven't seen anything more complex yet with my level/rank so I can't comment on this.

5. Quests

Class quests with a lot of cut scenes and voice over that expand the story line are long, deep and very good. I like them a lot. Guidlleves are quests you have to get from special NPCs that hand them out for any class or faction and play in certain regions. You go to the region and invoke the guildleve at the aetheryt shrine there paying with favour you have with your guardian/god that accumulates over time and limits the guildleves you can do per playtime. Guildleves are time limited (minimum 30 minutes) and while doing them you are under the impact of your guardian which gives you buffs for xp. Rewards are money (gil), equippment, faction whatever. And there is another thing I stumbled upon, no idea what the name, lets call them public quests, sometimes NPC pop up somewhere (have an eye on them ) and they give for a short time a quest which starts at a certain time you have to wait for and is handed out to a certain maximum number of players joining it while waiting for it to begin. The one I ended up in was to go somewhere and kill some mobs which spawned more mobs. Unfortunatelly nobody else realized, I was alone, people in general in FFXiV seem to pay very little attention to what goes on in chat or whatsoever ...

6. Social

Hm, that is a thing I have a gripe with too. Player guilds are called Linkshells and each one gets one for free in the beginning from an npc. You can have up to 8 linkshells so you can join several player guilds. I've seen thousands of people run around with each their own linkshell symbol but extremly few with the same - I hope this is a beta thing as say channel is dead silent too and rarely someone replies to any question or such in them. But there are aready power level spammers. And I mean SPAMMERS. Extreme chat flood, there seems to be no flooding block whatsoever. Unfortunately you can't click at the players name and have him on ignore, you need to open the main menu, social, blacklist, enter the whole name by typing, hit ok - to have one finally blocked. Meaning so far I'm playing surrounded by tons of other people while nobody says a word or interacts (even trading with a player who had a private bazaar didn't do anything to me, he never reacted) and the chat is only there to tell me of what I gain in battle or do be flooded by RMT people.

7. Class switching

That one is very nice, basically once you obtain a weapon or tool of a class you can equipp it and that will unlock the class for you. Unfortunately there is no such thing as paperdolls one can switch as in Vanguard. Instead you need to switch the equippment (and abilities on the hotbar) by hand each time or you start using the macro system early on. With this one you can define (but only by typing ...) what equippment to put where (why do I have to define that if it is obvious from the equippment type?) and what ability to put into what hotbar slot. Everytime you switch your primary weapon or tool you switch the class. Each rank of each class is stored so you don't forget anything. While leveling your class rank rises and your physical (general) level rises too. With rank up you get new abilities and more action points to put more abilities into your hotkey bar. With level up you get points to spend on stats and elements of your character.

8. Ambience/Look

For the most part that is outstanding in my opinion. The graphics are awesome, my machine is a Athlon 64 X2 4200 with 2GB Dual Channel and Geforce 7900GS 512MB and I can play with max textures and physics and all at 1024x768 very smoothly still. There is a tremendous amount of char characterization available, many emotes and the music is mostly very good. The water and hair is especially something to mention, looks very real. The bad part is the strong copy'n'pasting of terrain everywhere. It will happen often that you recognize a pond or a hill formation or such again and again and again if you pay a little bit of attention. That can make the whole experience feel - at least for me - painfully generic in some cases. If you just use the map to get around and don't pay attention to the scenery it might not be a big deal for you but if you do ... hm. I'm pretty unhappy with that part.

Conclusion

I like a lot of it and I dislike several things. At the moment I can't say if FFXIV will catch me for longer, the dislikes are more integral things after all (control with sluggish mouse because there are no keybindings for essential functions, very generic landscape feel in something that shows on the otherhand extreme love for detail). Furthermore there is a lot of server lag at the moment and I crashed several times with "game server error" messages in one case. The idea that this one is going live in 10 days is quite puzzling with its current status. And I'm wondering why they go live for PC first when the controls are obviously made for PS3 and more setting off than helping with PC controls. Furthermore I miss a more solid tutorial that explains the control with PC for example or game mechanics. A lot I had to figure out by digging through private web sites. And that stuff like recipes for crafting can't be found ingame but need to be looked up on websites (but alt-tab kills the game when not in windowed mode) is annoying as well.

 I can only recommend everyone to try it before it goes release, that is a very different beast from what I've played so far (and believe me, there is pretty much nothing on the market or closed I haven't played) even for a south-east-asian one. It takes long strides in several areas I find very attractive and intriguing even but fails harshly on others for me. So make your own judgement.