Natuxatu~ Back in college my roommates and their boyfriends and I all played WoW together, and even though we all lived together, rather than sharing an account we all ended up having separate accounts so we could play together rather than on the same account. I did temporarily use my roommate's account when I got bored of WoW aside from wanting to abuse the action house, but I also never really played the actual game. So I can understand if you had someone you never wanted to play with and didn't want to share a character with wanting to have additional characters for no additional fees (cause honestly it doesn't cost Squenix nearly anything to have an extra slot open), but in most cases people in those situations will have separate accounts so they can slaughter things together in game.
Reserving is fun Amazon has release date delivery, so woo. Support Seattle companies!
Seattle love aside, you can click here to check out the FFXIV current controls for keyboard. They're fairly similar to FFXI with the addition of camera control at IJKL instead of the arrow keys (sort of counter to WASD), and you can still move on the number pad.
In fact! I only made this account because I wanted to say thanks for such a great read! You gave me everything I needed to know, and broke so much things down giving me a great deal of things to expect!!! At the same time I hate you~!
Because you made me want to play the game even more! >:O !!! lol, I'm really impressed with what you've said, and I'm glad to see someone break so many things down with positive comments and feed instead of skeptical beta testers who have apparently been beta testing since birth and know everything there is to know about MMO's and expect FFXIV to fail miserably. I loved everything you had to say, especially the occasional humorous ramble that reminded me of life on FFXI lol. (holding a whm hostage for a tele lololololol)
I'm just going to say from a non beta tester to a beta tester, thanks for the awesome post. This has by far been the most enjoyable read I've had since the producers were talking about making the game.
Very informative post and I'm sure it's exactly what a lot of people not in the beta are looking for, I certainly was. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
-When you die, unlike FFXI, you don't lose experience.
YESSSSSSS!
I read the whole thing, but this one point made me semi-hard.
Not loosing exp is one of the very few things i will not like in 14 :: besides that i really enjoyed reading your post thx a ton for the info's.
Agreed, but can't win them all. Still greatly looking forward to this.
Speak for yourselves.
Every time I hear the DeLvl chime a part of my inner child dies. Maybe you think it was a good thing to have that hardcore element, but to me, it was a painful and completely unnecessary setback that had me strangle a housepet more than once. You think that every time a hardcore element is removed from the genre that God kills a kitten? Well every time they add one for the sake of it, GT throttles one.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4 Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
I do have a question though. Have you gotten a chance to try out the grouping system enough to learn how it works? I've heard there's some sort of search function where a party leader can specify certain requirements and people who flag themselves as LFG will auto-join if they meet those requirements? Is that the case? Can you explain that system a bit lol? Thanks!
Yes, it really is changing quite a bit right now. I think they're checking out the extremes to find a nice balance with the game. Since they increased the experience from the guildleves like crazy for this phase, I wouldn't be surprised if the limit was increased and experience gained lowered a bit to balance it a bit more.
I can't say too much about partying, since I usually only do it when my linkshell just invites me when I'm standing right next to them to do leves. Also not many people look for parties at the moment since the system doesn't really encourage partyingas much as I wish it would, but Squenix is working on that. Currently you can't invite people from other zones (which is sort of a weird concept to me since when moving from one zone to another by walking, the transition is completely seemless with no load times). There also isn't currently a /sea all Pretty Purple Monkey function like there was in FFXI, but a lot of people have been asking for search functions like that to be included.
Right now (though I may be wrong, since I usually get invited to join by a linkshell mate rather than start it up on my own), you can open the main menu, select "Party" and then a box will pop up with info about people in the world and nearby. You can search by class, location, purpose (regional guildleves, localleves or quests), and name. I think the search currently only looks for people in your physical level range, but Squenix said they were going to be adjusting this.
The other option is "recruit", which is the auto-join set-up for people who meet the certain requirements. It has the same purpose location and class information, but you can also recruit people within a certain rank range, and how many of them you want (so you want 5 rank 10-20 pugilist and 2 conjurers rank 15-20 to go do regional leves in Camp Skull Valley) and then you can add a custom recruitment message, like join Vatuwatu on her epic suicidal journey. Currently the recruiting goes on automatically for 60 minutes. If you decide to stop, you can close it.
Thank you very much - you've sated my curiosity for now . Thanks for clarifying on the guildleve thing too - a friend of mine who is beta testing currently also told me it was daily so don't feel too bad lol.
In fact! I only made this account because I wanted to say thanks for such a great read! You gave me everything I needed to know, and broke so much things down giving me a great deal of things to expect!!! At the same time I hate you~!
Because you made me want to play the game even more! >:O !!! lol, I'm really impressed with what you've said, and I'm glad to see someone break so many things down with positive comments and feed instead of skeptical beta testers who have apparently been beta testing since birth and know everything there is to know about MMO's and expect FFXIV to fail miserably. I loved everything you had to say, especially the occasional humorous ramble that reminded me of life on FFXI lol. (holding a whm hostage for a tele lololololol)
DUDE! I made you make an account! Actually, I only made an account to post this cause I stealth invade MMORPG, but lack of FFXIV info has been making me sad.
I'm right with you! Pre-natal beta testers have some good points if they can figure out how to articulate it without sounding like a pretentious douchebags, but there are two kinds of feedback that are completely and utterly useless. 1) THIS GAME IS LIKE SEX EXCEPT I'M HAVING IT (aka fanboyism). 2) KOREA HAS CRAPPED THINGS THAT WILL BE MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN THIS MMO BECAUSE IT SUCKS FOR REASONS UNKNOWN (aka the pseudo-racist, angry, non-explanitory rageaholic who doesn't know why they feel things - possibly a robot programmed to spam anger).
The game definitely needs some tweaking, but the greatest beauty of it is it doesn't try to make a WoW-clone like so many have been trying to do recently. The battle system is something different yet still familiar enough that people can jump into it, and the detail put into the class system is great. Also it targets PvE players, and I enjoy being a targeted demographic~
Here's hoping to see you in game! According to the twitter, they'll be having an "open" beta soon with a different app than the closed beta, so linky linky!
Every time I hear the DeLvl chime a part of my inner child dies. Maybe you think it was a good thing to have that hardcore element, but to me, it was a painful and completely unnecessary setback that had me strangle a housepet more than once. You think that every time a hardcore element is removed from the genre that God kills a kitten? Well every time they add one for the sake of it, GT throttles one.
I'm with GT on this one. I for one do not want to downlevel and wander around as a half-naked dominatrix cat girl or a half-naked pretty boy who just got ass-raped by a giant pink bird who forced me into my partially nude state by stealing what is most precious to me - my subligar - all because Squenix sadists thought it'd be fun to make me downlevel when I decide suicide is the answer.
It's like the walk of shame, but worse because I'm involved.
Every time I hear the DeLvl chime a part of my inner child dies. Maybe you think it was a good thing to have that hardcore element, but to me, it was a painful and completely unnecessary setback that had me strangle a housepet more than once. You think that every time a hardcore element is removed from the genre that God kills a kitten? Well every time they add one for the sake of it, GT throttles one.
I'm with GT on this one. I for one do not want to downlevel and wander around as a half-naked dominatrix cat girl or a half-naked pretty boy who just got ass-raped by a giant pink bird who forced me into my partially nude state by stealing what is most precious to me - my subligar - all because Squenix sadists thought it'd be fun to make me downlevel when I decide suicide is the answer.
It's like the walk of shame, but worse because I'm involved.
Well i never had problems with that(not much at least) i always made sure i had enough EXP buffer for a couple deaths (without a Raise) but i think it was an important feature to keep u playing your lvl 75s jobs since if u wanted to do Endgame u did need a buffer (better a big one for some activities lol) so this way SE made u play your job even tho u had highest lvl and not forget about it and only get it out for events.
Also since it did hurt and had consequences if u die ppls played more attention to what they did just imagine long walks in Endgame areas (SKY for example) with a group of ppls who dont care if they die since it doesn't hurt....
Besides there was nothing better than getting your lvl bk getting a few buddy's and pay bk the mob which killed u...most satisfying kills ever lol
It also causes headsplosions when the DD dies from taking way too much aggro, or having to heal him up fast enough to where healer dies from taking it all. As you can tell, my main jobs were RDM and WHM.
Tell me, do you want to save him or not?
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4 Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
It also causes headsplosions when the DD dies from taking way too much aggro, or having to heal him up fast enough to where healer dies from taking it all. As you can tell, my main jobs were RDM and WHM.
Tell me, do you want to save him or not?
Sounds like either way a bad tank problem or a DD who didn't understand how to play in a pt in a good setup that wasn't a prob at all and that's an excellent point right here no one wanted to die so they took your advice and played smart since no one wanted to loose exp...now it doesn't matter if u die or not Tanks can slack off DD go nuts and ignore all Hate tactics,,,doesn't sound fun to me.
I'm not one to be giving presumptions, but I assume there will be main story ones w/ cutscenes like the last one, just maybe not so many tertiary ones - if any.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4 Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
@ Doomedfox - So there are currently 3 main different types of quests I've seen so far. There may be more at release since Squenix said beta is for testing the system rather than the content. I'll go from least exciting to rock awesome.
1) Localleves. These are quests you get from the adventurer's guild, then you run around and find the person you're supposed to craft for, get the items, sit in front of them and craft the items. Still gives experience, gil, and skill, but it's just less sexy.
2) Guildleves. These are quests you get from the adventurer's guild, then you run off to the correspoonding aetheryte and select to begin the quest. For DoW and DoM these are mainly running to a certain location indicated on your mini-map and slashing the place up. For DoH it's "go here and fish for 20 minutes trying to catch this fish". Once you succeed, a crystal thing pops up, you talk to it to get your reward, then it offers to take you back to camp. As fun as slashing things up are, I'm more about the fishing for 20 minutes.
3) Storyline quests. Awesome. These go from anything shown in the benchmark where part way through you go smack up some mobs (or throw rocks), to cutscenes where they boss you around, to instances where you emote at someone or escort them to a certain location. These aren't quite like FFXI quests where you talk to random NPCs to start one and are like "what the hell's going on?" and end up going to wiki to look up what to do or bugging linkshell to tell you why the little girl wants you to wear a subligar. They're more like FFXI missions where it's more involved than just getting something for someone to get X item in return.
As an example, Treasures of the Main is pretty much a quest to introduce you to the pirate citystate. Has you run from Hob, talk to the guy in the adventurer's guild, head to the first camp you can do guildleves at, try to infiltrate a group of pirates, help a fisher make sure sahagins didn't off all her buddies, and uh...I'm sort of tired so I don't remember the rest. Since this is just the first quest, I'd imagine ones further down the line would get even more involved, as this quest was mostly just talking to different people with a little bit of escorting involved.
All of these are recorded in your journal in the game which gets updated as you progress (not a big deal for the first 2, but it is for the third), so if you're a slacker like me and ignore a quest for a long time, it's easy enough to open it up to see where you were and continue from there.
Thx for the answers i should have been more specific i suppose i was aware of the Leves and just assumed that there will be mainstory Missions what i didnt see mentioned anywhere yet r the small (and at least in 11 to 90%) useless quest u got from NPCs in the towns i never liked them since the rewards were crap and the missions not that challenging (for the most part) but they still gave u something to do when u were bored.
Now i did read that SE wanted to make it easier to find quest now in 14 since there were quiet a few complains about not being able to find quest npcs what i dont know is if they just got rid of them for good or if the Leves r supposed to be for the once not willing to look around but if u take the time and speak with the NPCs u still can find different (kinda useless) quests.
Ohhh okay, sorry for the confusion! To date I haven't bumped into any NPC quests like the useless ones in FFXI, and I've talked to a lot of NPCs. They might exist in retail, but as far as I know they don't exist in beta. I read in an interview the regional leves (guildleves) are used for gaining fame like the mostly pointless quests in FFXI were used.
Ohhh okay, sorry for the confusion! To date I haven't bumped into any NPC quests like the useless ones in FFXI, and I've talked to a lot of NPCs. They might exist in retail, but as far as I know they don't exist in beta. I read in an interview the regional leves (guildleves) are used for gaining fame like the mostly pointless quests in FFXI were used.
Oki thx for the info.
Guess no need to get a few hundret Flutes(Cornettes or what they were called) this time for gaining fame than lol
was really hoping they change the controls to a pc-friendly, guess i have to get a gamepad then. Also it should be titled "Preview" since the game is still in beta.
About the one character slot. I love being able to have one character that can have all the classes... as I for one.. don't like having alts but do just to try out different classes ect. HOWEVER I would say that having 3 slots at least would be ideal... for example if there is a group of guys living together that each want to play.. or a brother and sister... why not? Then again new slots can be purchased so I dunno...
The controls also sounds like a concern BUT FFXI was my first MMO so I had no problem with using mostly the number pad. In fact that was all I knew... never even knew wsda keys were used for movement so I will adjust....
Regardless though I am highly looking forward to this game and have been since I heard of it's exsistance. I will be getting this on launch day for sure.. in fact I should probably reserve it just in case...
While I secretly agree with you, most ToS or EULAs or whatever sort of frown on that sort of behavior. You usually (are supposed to) only pay for one person to play, and there's almost always some clause saying that you can get banned blah blah blah for letting other people use your account.
Now, while the economy sucks and sharing is caring and all, it kinda makes sense that they'd only give you one slot.. If you're character can do anything and everything...then needing a second character is probably because you have some extra dude playing on your account without paying for his own. So, ya know, 3 bucks is still a deal for him and the fat cats can get a lil summin' summin' for their troubles. Not too bad.
Anyway, point being it'd be hard to bring that subject up at the meeting without letting everyone know you were being naughty
Thank you and nice information. You almost lost me though at the long winded stop complaining about 1 slot characters opinion piece though. The rest was interesting.
parrotpholk-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.
What a great write up, and I too am geeked out by the approaching XIV launch. Sadly perhaps, XIV isn't this websites editorial staffs cup of tea...really they just don't get it at all, so you see far more SWTOR articles, even though it isn't due to release until well into next year.
I'm enjoying the videos people are uploading to Youtube a lot, my jaw dropped when I first saw the speed of the combat in Beta 3 videos and while it may seem slow to WoW players it's a hell of a lot faster than I remember XI being. I'll admit I'm starting to get pretty hyped about this game despite swearing never to get excited about another MMO after being burnt by the last few I've tried.
I'm not a blinkered fanboi and I understand there are issues in Beta yet to be worked out and that perhaps they won't be all resolved in time for release, call me an optimist but I'm confident SE will get the UI and the associated lag sorted. I mean they've run FFXI for around 8 years now and I'm sure they know how to write efficient code, it would be nice if they just came out and said so but that doesn't appear to be their style.
I'm sure the experience rate will be sorted as well because I'd guess they must know more or less exactly to within a few hours how long they want it to take an average player to progress through the launch content. Surely this would be one of the key things to have been decided, too slow and people get disheartened and leave but too fast and people hit the cap with nothing to do.
The lack of tutorials really don't bother me at all if they provide a decent manual and even then a week after release sites will have all the information you want available, not ideal but certainly not something I'd ditch the game for.
The game being slower paced that most current MMOs is a plus for me, back when I played FFXI I never even thought about endgame as levelling was such an epic journey in itself . Compare that to last few MMos I've played, WoW, WAR and Aion however are all about a mad rush to the level cap and the actual levelling process? well that's something to get out of the way as quickly and painlessly as possible. The majority of the game locations are only properly experienced by the few willing to explore as the average WoW player will just head straight to quest hubs and follow the map to location then head back. The time it took to get to 75 in XI never bothered me, the LFG did many times I'll admit but I mostly found that was due to a lack of RDM or BRD for regen and dispel abilities but I'm hoping that with the new class system any spells like that will be picked up by more than just mage classes.
Call me a sucker but I'm willing to sub for a few months even if things aren't perfect as the I love the ideas behind the game, the Armoury system, the crafting system, the combat and the world have me really excited and I think giving them time to tweak it will pay off. I never subbed to WAR or Aion after the trial month as WAR is just plainly broken at a fundamental level. I mean an MMO based on large scale PvP built with an engine that can't support large scale PvP battles without grinding to a halt, brilliant idea Mythic. Aion just bored me to tears and I just didn't 'feel' the game or the world plus I'm starting to believe that any sort of balance in MMO PvP is wishful thinking at best so I'm sticking to PvE from now on.
I'm confident SE will get it more or less fixed for launch because this isn't a company that's struggling to finance the last few months of development and need to release to get money flowing, this is one of the biggest development houses and publishers in the world and surely they would hold release if they think the games needs it after witnessing how things like AOC crashed and burned so fast.
I'm also confident that even if the games ships in a bug free state a lot, if not the majority, of people that try it simply won't like FFXIV due to it's nature and mechanics but that was the same with Final Fantasy XI. Yet SE created a pretty sizeable niche for the game and made tons of cash in the process. A lot of people don't seem to understand that you don't need to have WoW numbers to be a profitable MMO and it's pretty clear FF XIV isn't being pitched at the WoW player base anyway which is refreshing to say the least. There'll be nothing else really like FFXIV on the market will there?
Sorry for the long post, I was just putting down some of my feelings about the game and got a little carried away.
Persimmons, thank you endlessly for taking your time and throwing this much information at us. I enjoyed every bit of it. This must be the best review posted on these forums so far
I do have one little question, though. I didn't quite understand how it works so far because from what I saw in the videos on youtube it's not quite what you described. You said that while changing classes you can equip other classes skills but you have to give it a lot of thought since your skill slots are limited (by action bars). From what I've seen on youtube and different streaming sites you can use additional action bars with other skills on them and not only the default one with 1 to 0 actions. Moreover, you can even use macros on those additional action bars. Now, I'm guessing that macros can activate a couple of skills simultaneously.
Could you please give us a close up on these skill choosing mechanics for different classes?
Thanks in advance!
"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted. Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world." Hans Margolius
@Sudo - sorry, I think part of my explination was lost in the rample. So currently (at least as far as I can tell) there is the standard action bar 1 through 0, then you can also click down the arrow key so there are essentially 3 different stocks of skills 1 - 0, and there are also ctrl + insertnumberhere macros and alt + insertnumberhere macros - however this isn't really what limits the number of skills.
I'm sure they have a better name for this, but I'm going to call them "action points" (AP) since it's what they were called in whatever the last game I played. So the limitations on the skills you can equip from other classes and your current class are based on AP. Each skill has a certain number of AP it takes up when set.
Example: Let's say a rank 6 pugilist has 15 AP available, so can equip skills up to 15 AP total. You have conjurer leveled to rank 8 already, so you can equip those skills as long as you don't exceed the limit of 15 AP.
From conjurer you'll have all the basic elemental spells that cost 3 AP each, cure, stoneskin, and shockspikes at 2 AP.
From pugilist you'll have Heavy Strike & Light Strike at 0 AP (these are what I explained as "basic attacks", use no TP or MP), concussive blow, haymaker, and second wind all at 3 AP. So when equipping skills you'd have something that looks like this:
Heavy Strike - 0 AP
Light Strike - 0 AP
Stoneskin - 2 AP
Cure - 2 AP
Shockspikes - 2 AP
Consussive Blow - 3 AP
Haymaker - 3 AP
Second Wind - 3 AP
Total AP used: 15 - so can't equip any additional skills without removing something. You could replace the pugilist skills second wind etc...with fire, aero, and stone if you wanted or so on like that.
I hope that helps clarify it a bit! When you're selecting which skills to equip, you select the class from the drop down you want to get skills from, so they're listed by class. I'm hoping they'll add drag and drop, since that's one thing I would definitely rock my touchpad to complete, but currently you click through the menus to add each skill.
I'm also confident that even if the games ships in a bug free state a lot, if not the majority, of people that try it simply won't like FFXIV due to it's nature and mechanics but that was the same with Final Fantasy XI. Yet SE created a pretty sizeable niche for the game and made tons of cash in the process. A lot of people don't seem to understand that you don't need to have WoW numbers to be a profitable MMO and it's pretty clear FF XIV isn't being pitched at the WoW player base anyway which is refreshing to say the least. There'll be nothing else really like FFXIV on the market will there?
Aha, your post was a lot shorter than mine! And better organized
One thing you said that really hit home was FFXIV not going after the WoW market. I see a lot of posts in forums asking if FFXIV will be a WoW killer or if it'll be successful, and the answer is simply no. At this point, more people go to WoW just because of the massive number of people who play WoW. Hell, I know 80-year-old grandpas who play WoW. Trying to attack their market seems to be pretty synonymous with fail since you can't go up to someone with a pet tiger and say "hey, I got a little kitty over here. That's a cool pet, right? It's much like your tiger, but it's young and undeveloped and the chance of it getting as big as your tiger is statistically insignificant. Want to buy it?"
Squenix has mentioned a few key demographics they're targeting with FFXIV, and I don't really think any of them encrouch on the WoW group. 1) FFXI players (that's sort of obvious though), 2) Casual gamers who can only play a couple hours a day (though I'm sort of hoping they up the party system for those of us who want to waste more time I think they will though based on other comments in interviews they've made) 3) RPG players who have never played an MMO before. Honestly, playing FFXIV beta I feel like they're really rocking #3 pretty hard. If I were #3, I'd be all over FFXIV (though most in #3 refuse to pay subscription fees, so win some lose some).
That said, Squenix has had issues getting FFXIV promoted by NA media. Sort of sad, but I hope word of mouth works fairly well, and some of the hardcore elements that existed in FFXI being reduced will make it easier to convince my friends to play. Sorry for the tl;dr!
@Persi, thanks again for that last post. It gave me some extra insight into the game I hadn't known before. I'm finding myself getting more and more interested in this game as it gets closer to launch / I find out more about it.
Comments
Natuxatu~ Back in college my roommates and their boyfriends and I all played WoW together, and even though we all lived together, rather than sharing an account we all ended up having separate accounts so we could play together rather than on the same account. I did temporarily use my roommate's account when I got bored of WoW aside from wanting to abuse the action house, but I also never really played the actual game. So I can understand if you had someone you never wanted to play with and didn't want to share a character with wanting to have additional characters for no additional fees (cause honestly it doesn't cost Squenix nearly anything to have an extra slot open), but in most cases people in those situations will have separate accounts so they can slaughter things together in game.
Reserving is fun
Amazon has release date delivery, so woo. Support Seattle companies!
Seattle love aside, you can click here to check out the FFXIV current controls for keyboard. They're fairly similar to FFXI with the addition of camera control at IJKL instead of the arrow keys (sort of counter to WASD), and you can still move on the number pad.
DUDE!
Thank you for this post! I read it top to bottom!
In fact! I only made this account because I wanted to say thanks for such a great read! You gave me everything I needed to know, and broke so much things down giving me a great deal of things to expect!!! At the same time I hate you~!
Because you made me want to play the game even more! >:O !!! lol, I'm really impressed with what you've said, and I'm glad to see someone break so many things down with positive comments and feed instead of skeptical beta testers who have apparently been beta testing since birth and know everything there is to know about MMO's and expect FFXIV to fail miserably. I loved everything you had to say, especially the occasional humorous ramble that reminded me of life on FFXI lol. (holding a whm hostage for a tele lololololol)
I'm just going to say from a non beta tester to a beta tester, thanks for the awesome post. This has by far been the most enjoyable read I've had since the producers were talking about making the game.
Very informative post and I'm sure it's exactly what a lot of people not in the beta are looking for, I certainly was. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
Speak for yourselves.
Every time I hear the DeLvl chime a part of my inner child dies. Maybe you think it was a good thing to have that hardcore element, but to me, it was a painful and completely unnecessary setback that had me strangle a housepet more than once. You think that every time a hardcore element is removed from the genre that God kills a kitten? Well every time they add one for the sake of it, GT throttles one.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Thank you very much - you've sated my curiosity for now
. Thanks for clarifying on the guildleve thing too - a friend of mine who is beta testing currently also told me it was daily so don't feel too bad lol.
DUDE! I made you make an account! Actually, I only made an account to post this cause I stealth invade MMORPG, but lack of FFXIV info has been making me sad.
I'm right with you! Pre-natal beta testers have some good points if they can figure out how to articulate it without sounding like a pretentious douchebags, but there are two kinds of feedback that are completely and utterly useless. 1) THIS GAME IS LIKE SEX EXCEPT I'M HAVING IT (aka fanboyism). 2) KOREA HAS CRAPPED THINGS THAT WILL BE MORE SUCCESSFUL THAN THIS MMO BECAUSE IT SUCKS FOR REASONS UNKNOWN (aka the pseudo-racist, angry, non-explanitory rageaholic who doesn't know why they feel things - possibly a robot programmed to spam anger).
The game definitely needs some tweaking, but the greatest beauty of it is it doesn't try to make a WoW-clone like so many have been trying to do recently. The battle system is something different yet still familiar enough that people can jump into it, and the detail put into the class system is great. Also it targets PvE players, and I enjoy being a targeted demographic~
Here's hoping to see you in game! According to the twitter, they'll be having an "open" beta soon with a different app than the closed beta, so linky linky!
I'm with GT on this one. I for one do not want to downlevel and wander around as a half-naked dominatrix cat girl or a half-naked pretty boy who just got ass-raped by a giant pink bird who forced me into my partially nude state by stealing what is most precious to me - my subligar - all because Squenix sadists thought it'd be fun to make me downlevel when I decide suicide is the answer.
It's like the walk of shame, but worse because I'm involved.
Well i never had problems with that(not much at least) i always made sure i had enough EXP buffer for a couple deaths (without a Raise) but i think it was an important feature to keep u playing your lvl 75s jobs since if u wanted to do Endgame u did need a buffer (better a big one for some activities lol) so this way SE made u play your job even tho u had highest lvl and not forget about it and only get it out for events.
Also since it did hurt and had consequences if u die ppls played more attention to what they did just imagine long walks in Endgame areas (SKY for example) with a group of ppls who dont care if they die since it doesn't hurt....
Besides there was nothing better than getting your lvl bk getting a few buddy's and pay bk the mob which killed u...most satisfying kills ever lol
It also causes headsplosions when the DD dies from taking way too much aggro, or having to heal him up fast enough to where healer dies from taking it all. As you can tell, my main jobs were RDM and WHM.
Tell me, do you want to save him or not?
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Sounds like either way a bad tank problem or a DD who didn't understand how to play in a pt in a good setup that wasn't a prob at all and that's an excellent point right here no one wanted to die so they took your advice and played smart since no one wanted to loose exp...now it doesn't matter if u die or not Tanks can slack off DD go nuts and ignore all Hate tactics,,,doesn't sound fun to me.
I do have a question regarding quests.
Are there any quests at all like they were in 11??
You know u just wander around town talk to all the npcs and some ask u for something or r Leves the only quests u get?
I'm not one to be giving presumptions, but I assume there will be main story ones w/ cutscenes like the last one, just maybe not so many tertiary ones - if any.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
@ Doomedfox - So there are currently 3 main different types of quests I've seen so far. There may be more at release since Squenix said beta is for testing the system rather than the content. I'll go from least exciting to rock awesome.
1) Localleves. These are quests you get from the adventurer's guild, then you run around and find the person you're supposed to craft for, get the items, sit in front of them and craft the items. Still gives experience, gil, and skill, but it's just less sexy.
2) Guildleves. These are quests you get from the adventurer's guild, then you run off to the correspoonding aetheryte and select to begin the quest. For DoW and DoM these are mainly running to a certain location indicated on your mini-map and slashing the place up. For DoH it's "go here and fish for 20 minutes trying to catch this fish". Once you succeed, a crystal thing pops up, you talk to it to get your reward, then it offers to take you back to camp. As fun as slashing things up are, I'm more about the fishing for 20 minutes.
3) Storyline quests. Awesome. These go from anything shown in the benchmark where part way through you go smack up some mobs (or throw rocks), to cutscenes where they boss you around, to instances where you emote at someone or escort them to a certain location. These aren't quite like FFXI quests where you talk to random NPCs to start one and are like "what the hell's going on?" and end up going to wiki to look up what to do or bugging linkshell to tell you why the little girl wants you to wear a subligar. They're more like FFXI missions where it's more involved than just getting something for someone to get X item in return.
As an example, Treasures of the Main is pretty much a quest to introduce you to the pirate citystate. Has you run from Hob, talk to the guy in the adventurer's guild, head to the first camp you can do guildleves at, try to infiltrate a group of pirates, help a fisher make sure sahagins didn't off all her buddies, and uh...I'm sort of tired so I don't remember the rest. Since this is just the first quest, I'd imagine ones further down the line would get even more involved, as this quest was mostly just talking to different people with a little bit of escorting involved.
All of these are recorded in your journal in the game which gets updated as you progress (not a big deal for the first 2, but it is for the third), so if you're a slacker like me and ignore a quest for a long time, it's easy enough to open it up to see where you were and continue from there.
Thx for the answers i should have been more specific i suppose i was aware of the Leves and just assumed that there will be mainstory Missions what i didnt see mentioned anywhere yet r the small (and at least in 11 to 90%) useless quest u got from NPCs in the towns i never liked them since the rewards were crap and the missions not that challenging (for the most part) but they still gave u something to do when u were bored.
Now i did read that SE wanted to make it easier to find quest now in 14 since there were quiet a few complains about not being able to find quest npcs what i dont know is if they just got rid of them for good or if the Leves r supposed to be for the once not willing to look around but if u take the time and speak with the NPCs u still can find different (kinda useless) quests.
Ohhh okay, sorry for the confusion! To date I haven't bumped into any NPC quests like the useless ones in FFXI, and I've talked to a lot of NPCs. They might exist in retail, but as far as I know they don't exist in beta. I read in an interview the regional leves (guildleves) are used for gaining fame like the mostly pointless quests in FFXI were used.
Oki thx for the info.
Guess no need to get a few hundret Flutes(Cornettes or what they were called) this time for gaining fame than lol
was really hoping they change the controls to a pc-friendly, guess i have to get a gamepad then. Also it should be titled "Preview" since the game is still in beta.
While I secretly agree with you, most ToS or EULAs or whatever sort of frown on that sort of behavior. You usually (are supposed to) only pay for one person to play, and there's almost always some clause saying that you can get banned blah blah blah for letting other people use your account.
Now, while the economy sucks and sharing is caring and all, it kinda makes sense that they'd only give you one slot.. If you're character can do anything and everything...then needing a second character is probably because you have some extra dude playing on your account without paying for his own. So, ya know, 3 bucks is still a deal for him and the fat cats can get a lil summin' summin' for their troubles. Not too bad.
Anyway, point being it'd be hard to bring that subject up at the meeting without letting everyone know you were being naughty
Thank you and nice information. You almost lost me though at the long winded stop complaining about 1 slot characters opinion piece though. The rest was interesting.
parrotpholk-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.
I'm enjoying the videos people are uploading to Youtube a lot, my jaw dropped when I first saw the speed of the combat in Beta 3 videos and while it may seem slow to WoW players it's a hell of a lot faster than I remember XI being. I'll admit I'm starting to get pretty hyped about this game despite swearing never to get excited about another MMO after being burnt by the last few I've tried.
I'm not a blinkered fanboi and I understand there are issues in Beta yet to be worked out and that perhaps they won't be all resolved in time for release, call me an optimist but I'm confident SE will get the UI and the associated lag sorted. I mean they've run FFXI for around 8 years now and I'm sure they know how to write efficient code, it would be nice if they just came out and said so but that doesn't appear to be their style.
I'm sure the experience rate will be sorted as well because I'd guess they must know more or less exactly to within a few hours how long they want it to take an average player to progress through the launch content. Surely this would be one of the key things to have been decided, too slow and people get disheartened and leave but too fast and people hit the cap with nothing to do.
The lack of tutorials really don't bother me at all if they provide a decent manual and even then a week after release sites will have all the information you want available, not ideal but certainly not something I'd ditch the game for.
The game being slower paced that most current MMOs is a plus for me, back when I played FFXI I never even thought about endgame as levelling was such an epic journey in itself . Compare that to last few MMos I've played, WoW, WAR and Aion however are all about a mad rush to the level cap and the actual levelling process? well that's something to get out of the way as quickly and painlessly as possible. The majority of the game locations are only properly experienced by the few willing to explore as the average WoW player will just head straight to quest hubs and follow the map to location then head back. The time it took to get to 75 in XI never bothered me, the LFG did many times I'll admit but I mostly found that was due to a lack of RDM or BRD for regen and dispel abilities but I'm hoping that with the new class system any spells like that will be picked up by more than just mage classes.
Call me a sucker but I'm willing to sub for a few months even if things aren't perfect as the I love the ideas behind the game, the Armoury system, the crafting system, the combat and the world have me really excited and I think giving them time to tweak it will pay off. I never subbed to WAR or Aion after the trial month as WAR is just plainly broken at a fundamental level. I mean an MMO based on large scale PvP built with an engine that can't support large scale PvP battles without grinding to a halt, brilliant idea Mythic. Aion just bored me to tears and I just didn't 'feel' the game or the world plus I'm starting to believe that any sort of balance in MMO PvP is wishful thinking at best so I'm sticking to PvE from now on.
I'm confident SE will get it more or less fixed for launch because this isn't a company that's struggling to finance the last few months of development and need to release to get money flowing, this is one of the biggest development houses and publishers in the world and surely they would hold release if they think the games needs it after witnessing how things like AOC crashed and burned so fast.
I'm also confident that even if the games ships in a bug free state a lot, if not the majority, of people that try it simply won't like FFXIV due to it's nature and mechanics but that was the same with Final Fantasy XI. Yet SE created a pretty sizeable niche for the game and made tons of cash in the process. A lot of people don't seem to understand that you don't need to have WoW numbers to be a profitable MMO and it's pretty clear FF XIV isn't being pitched at the WoW player base anyway which is refreshing to say the least. There'll be nothing else really like FFXIV on the market will there?
Sorry for the long post, I was just putting down some of my feelings about the game and got a little carried away.
Persimmons, thank you endlessly for taking your time and throwing this much information at us. I enjoyed every bit of it. This must be the best review posted on these forums so far
I do have one little question, though. I didn't quite understand how it works so far because from what I saw in the videos on youtube it's not quite what you described. You said that while changing classes you can equip other classes skills but you have to give it a lot of thought since your skill slots are limited (by action bars). From what I've seen on youtube and different streaming sites you can use additional action bars with other skills on them and not only the default one with 1 to 0 actions. Moreover, you can even use macros on those additional action bars. Now, I'm guessing that macros can activate a couple of skills simultaneously.
Could you please give us a close up on these skill choosing mechanics for different classes?
Thanks in advance!
"Only in quiet waters do things mirror themselves undistorted.
Only in a quiet mind is adequate perception of the world."
Hans Margolius
@Sudo - sorry, I think part of my explination was lost in the rample. So currently (at least as far as I can tell) there is the standard action bar 1 through 0, then you can also click down the arrow key so there are essentially 3 different stocks of skills 1 - 0, and there are also ctrl + insertnumberhere macros and alt + insertnumberhere macros - however this isn't really what limits the number of skills.
I'm sure they have a better name for this, but I'm going to call them "action points" (AP) since it's what they were called in whatever the last game I played. So the limitations on the skills you can equip from other classes and your current class are based on AP. Each skill has a certain number of AP it takes up when set.
Example: Let's say a rank 6 pugilist has 15 AP available, so can equip skills up to 15 AP total. You have conjurer leveled to rank 8 already, so you can equip those skills as long as you don't exceed the limit of 15 AP.
From conjurer you'll have all the basic elemental spells that cost 3 AP each, cure, stoneskin, and shockspikes at 2 AP.
From pugilist you'll have Heavy Strike & Light Strike at 0 AP (these are what I explained as "basic attacks", use no TP or MP), concussive blow, haymaker, and second wind all at 3 AP. So when equipping skills you'd have something that looks like this:
Heavy Strike - 0 AP
Light Strike - 0 AP
Stoneskin - 2 AP
Cure - 2 AP
Shockspikes - 2 AP
Consussive Blow - 3 AP
Haymaker - 3 AP
Second Wind - 3 AP
Total AP used: 15 - so can't equip any additional skills without removing something. You could replace the pugilist skills second wind etc...with fire, aero, and stone if you wanted or so on like that.
I hope that helps clarify it a bit! When you're selecting which skills to equip, you select the class from the drop down you want to get skills from, so they're listed by class. I'm hoping they'll add drag and drop, since that's one thing I would definitely rock my touchpad to complete, but currently you click through the menus to add each skill.
Aha, your post was a lot shorter than mine! And better organized
One thing you said that really hit home was FFXIV not going after the WoW market. I see a lot of posts in forums asking if FFXIV will be a WoW killer or if it'll be successful, and the answer is simply no. At this point, more people go to WoW just because of the massive number of people who play WoW. Hell, I know 80-year-old grandpas who play WoW. Trying to attack their market seems to be pretty synonymous with fail since you can't go up to someone with a pet tiger and say "hey, I got a little kitty over here. That's a cool pet, right? It's much like your tiger, but it's young and undeveloped and the chance of it getting as big as your tiger is statistically insignificant. Want to buy it?"
Squenix has mentioned a few key demographics they're targeting with FFXIV, and I don't really think any of them encrouch on the WoW group. 1) FFXI players (that's sort of obvious though), 2) Casual gamers who can only play a couple hours a day (though I'm sort of hoping they up the party system for those of us who want to waste more time
I think they will though based on other comments in interviews they've made) 3) RPG players who have never played an MMO before. Honestly, playing FFXIV beta I feel like they're really rocking #3 pretty hard. If I were #3, I'd be all over FFXIV (though most in #3 refuse to pay subscription fees, so win some lose some).
That said, Squenix has had issues getting FFXIV promoted by NA media. Sort of sad, but I hope word of mouth works fairly well, and some of the hardcore elements that existed in FFXI being reduced will make it easier to convince my friends to play. Sorry for the tl;dr!
@Persi, thanks again for that last post. It gave me some extra insight into the game I hadn't known before. I'm finding myself getting more and more interested in this game as it gets closer to launch / I find out more about it.