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Phase 4 - Newcomer's Thoughts to FFXIV:ARR
I played FFXIV:ARR in an uncharacteristically hardcore way over the past few days. When I stopped yesterday evening I had a level 20 arcanist, 13 conjurer, 20 weaver, and 18 goldsmith. The following review will be from the perspective of those four classes, as well as the supplementary systems that aren’t necessarily related to a particular class.
Historically, I’ve played games for a long time – we are talking all the way back to MUDs, so there really isn’t much I haven’t seen before. Having played FF series since their inception (didn’t play XI), it’s a franchise I have a lot of respect for. As a disclaimer, I did not play any previous ARR phases nor did I play the initial iteration of the game. This is a first time look not colored by past experiences.
Graphics:
I usually start here since it’s the first thing you get exposed to in any game. They are nice and that’s really all there is to it. However, beyond simply being nice to look at, they run efficiently. That is huge to me because I run a substandard computer. I’m immediately struck by a comparison to the graphical styling of Skyrim. I get similar performance in both games, and they both meet my expectations for the look of a newer game. For an MMO, this is not something I’m used to because a lot of games are shoehorned into a 3rd party engine that doesn’t get well optimized.
As is expected for FF, there are cut scenes and lots of them. Perhaps too many. I found myself clicking through a lot because the story was either not compelling or I just wanted to get onto fragging some pixels. However, I do enjoy the primary storyline and I’m someone who tends to skip most (if not all) cut scenes. One thing that I thought was a good design choice was to not use voice overs. You will have to read while character mouths just animate in oddly consistent ways. If you had to cut money, I would cut it here so I agree with SE’s move on this one. There’s nothing worse than bad voice overs, so if you can’t do it right – don’t do it all.
UI:
The UI seems cluttered, but it’s fully customizable. So if you are like me and want more hotkeys than you could ever realistically use, you’ll love it. You can rebind your keys as you see fit, which is really the standard for UI design. I do want to talk about the map system, which seems to get put down a lot. I’ll admit, I found the thing mind boggling at first. However, once you realize that map and city design is not linear it makes a ton more sense. You have to think more in 3D, where there are multiple levels in each city and multiple spots to switch levels. This does cause one problem, if you have a quest in an area that you can get to from multiple areas – the quest shows up in all spots. That’s confusing for a new player. However, it’s something I got used to in a few hours. Now I like the map system. It’s tough for a new player that starts in LL though.
Combat:
Combat starts off vanilla, in fact – it starts off as slightly putrid vanilla. It’s boring. It’s a basic tab target, hotkey mash (of which you might have 1-2 DPS spells). That also doesn’t last. It never gets like a full action game, but it does incorporate movement. In later boss battles you’ll be running around either avoiding spells or trying to line up certain events. The most fun I had was in Copperbell mines where you had to aggro a floating bomb, lower its HP, then kite a slimeball near it, all while avoiding the explosion radius. The GCD is a non-issue. As a DPS healer, you’ll have more than enough to do in those 2.5s and the GCD really makes you think about whether you spend 2.5s healing or 2.5s DPS’ing (yes, these choices matter – ppl go down FAST).
Skill wise, it seems thin – until you level up another class. By the end, my arcanist had most of two bars filled. I had all of my arcanist skills, plus 4 conjurer skills (of which I could pick 3). You’ll have plenty to put in your plate once you get into the game.
Balance isn’t there yet. My carbuncle out tanked an actual tank, while doing more damage than anyone else, while I took no damage. Yes, arcanists are OP up to level 20. I think this is an issue primarily with scaling, it’s too early in the game to tell.
Crafting:
I’m a bit split on this one. It’s a huge money and time sink and the benefit isn’t significant – yet. There is interdependency between crafts, both in terms of item creation and how good you are at crafting. For instance, goldsmith creates a needle for the weaver, which makes your weaving higher quality and easier. Some weaver items require goldsmith ingot, ect. The actual crafting is a minigame, where you can choose to do progress towards item completion or progress towards quality enhancement. You only have a fixed number of steps to do this, so you can choose to be risky with a higher upside or certain, with little to no upside. Overall, a fairly good system – but it gets tedious. Extremely tedious. Item payoffs were not better than dungeon payoffs, and they were a lot less fun to get. Hopefully, it scales up to a point where I’m willing to trade fun for more money/power.
Overall:
It’s a good, well-made game. There isn’t a ton of innovation, but it’s packaged neatly. Even as a hardcore PvP’er, I enjoyed the time I spent and I want to spend more time with it. You don’t need to be cutting edge, you just need to fun and FFXIV:ARR delivers on that account.
Comments
OP has 186 posts ... that's more then the usuall forum troll
anyway was fun to read and gives me hope ^^
Pretty fair review. I agree with a lot of it.
I'm going to agree with a lot of what the OP said, but I completely disagree about the voice overs. I found the lack of voiced dialogue to be a bad choice.
Before you chime in, I'm an 'old' man by gaming standards and I have no problem reading. In fact, even in fully voiced games (SWTOR) I tend to read anyway because I can get past it faster then waiting for the dialogue to be be spoken.
I don't necessarily think all cut scenes need voiced dialogue, however not having the NPCs say anything, lessened my enjoyment. WoW is not known as a 'voiced' game, but at least most NPCs will say 'something' to you when you interact with them, even if it is a canned response that they say every time.
It just felt very stale not hearing anything from most NPCs.
As others have said, the first 10 levels or so are also pretty boring by most MMO standards. As a conjuror I know I had only 2 DPS spells so ever fight was exactly the same and the starting quests from 1-5 are mostly all very boring. I hear it really opens up after level 15 and I hope to see that be the case. I only played sparingly this past weekend so I stopped at level 10.
I understand where you are coming from. I think voice overs would take the game to another level. However, if I put my financial hat on, I'd probably invest in other areas of the game that are more core functional. I also cannot stand bad voice overs. Thinking back about a decade when I watched anime, I always preferred subbed over dubbed. When voices don't match to the animation and the emotions come off as wooden or canned, I think it hurts immersion far more than reading. After all, before online games we had fantasy books and did any of you have a problem immersing yourself in that story due to it being fully text driven? I think it may depend on when you first got into FF - a lot of those earlier console games ignored voice overs as well.
I do agree that having some sort of voiced interaction when you run "over" an NPC or click interact is a simple way to add that polish without having to address cutscenes. Maybe something like 12 different responses, 4 male/female voices, 5 emotions (~500 combinations) shouldn't be outside of the realm of reality.
As others have said, the game will open up more post-15 and much of it is storyline driven. You need to experience the first dungeon at bare minimum to really understand what combat could eventually be like. This isn't meant to ignore the importance of immediate in-game experience, which is bad - but it's to give players like you a little more hope.
The world is really quite large, considering the hard cap on content for Phase 4. Part of the difficulty in the whole tutorial process is getting players used to the concept of 3 starting areas that are all necessary to visit no matter what class you pick.