The interface is still hideously bad by PS3 standards.
It is god-awful. When I play PS3 games I don't deal with shitty UI lag and horrible menu design riddled with superfluous confirmation screens. A UI is supposed to smoothly translate your inputs into actual game results. Like, I don' t know, selling your inventory or targeting nearest ally to heal. Both of which are ridiculously poorly implemented. Anyone defending has worst taste than a Windows98 fanboy.
I came to this thread hoping a professional review had been found that had a different viewpoint about the interface (DF had people who understood and at least accepted it) but instead I found more just more opinions.
I personally think this game suffers from the same issues as EVE does, and it doesn't appeal to the average gamer, but is fun for the target niche. Still going to hold off giving it a try though until they get some more patches under their belt.
Sorry but i disagree. I consider myself to be the target niche; I have even played EVE for 5 years religiously, but problems with FFXIV are beyond just interface. There is nothing difficult or complex about FFXIV. if that is how you are going to enter FFXIV you will be sorely disappointed. Game is very easy and everything has been done before and in lot better ways. Time consuming and tedious activities doesn't make a game challenging..it just makes it tedious.
Honestly, who cares that you played Eve for 5 years? I highly doubt that has anything to do with the topic. Eve is no more harder than any other game out there either. And when you get to the point, Eve is just as simple and easy. Oh yeah, i better give you why it is... Let's see.. do I mine all day, shoot rats, or try my luck in 0.0 space? Even getting the right setup for your ship has become damn easy. There are just as many options in Eve as there are in other games. And some of those options have been done better then they are in Eve.
I came to this thread hoping a professional review had been found that had a different viewpoint about the interface (DF had people who understood and at least accepted it) but instead I found more just more opinions.
I personally think this game suffers from the same issues as EVE does, and it doesn't appeal to the average gamer, but is fun for the target niche. Still going to hold off giving it a try though until they get some more patches under their belt.
Sorry but i disagree. I consider myself to be the target niche; I have even played EVE for 5 years religiously, but problems with FFXIV are beyond just interface. There is nothing difficult or complex about FFXIV. if that is how you are going to enter FFXIV you will be sorely disappointed. Game is very easy and everything has been done before and in lot better ways. Time consuming and tedious activities doesn't make a game challenging..it just makes it tedious.
Honestly, who cares that you played Eve for 5 years? I highly doubt that has anything to do with the topic. Eve is no more harder than any other game out there either. And when you get to the point, Eve is just as simple and easy. Oh yeah, i better give you why it is... Let's see.. do I mine all day, shoot rats, or try my luck in 0.0 space? Even getting the right setup for your ship has become damn easy. There are just as many options in Eve as there are in other games. And some of those options have been done better then they are in Eve.
I would like you to list such options. I am sorry but EVE is still a very complex game. It has been dumbed down ever since Exodus in 2005 and thats no secret...but it's still more complex then most of whats available right now. For someone such as you and I EVE is easy as hell now, but for the average new player EVE is a very complex, deep, and hard game to get into. You sir have lost all credibility.
Actually, think of FFXI. SE should have experience here. They made FFXI for PS2 and PC. After a few years with that they should know how to do the PC and PS3 versions without screwing them up because of compatability. Besides PS3 release isn't for awhile. Why release a console version for the PC? Since they released on the PC they should at least have a system setup for the PC. Face it SE screwed up and half-assed this game just to push it out on the market and make more profits. The very idea that they asked reviewers to wait 30days is offensive. I love Final Fantasy and had very high hopes for this game. I play it and am level 21 at the moment but after only a month I might log in for an hour every other day because it is so unbearably boring. Ypu have to do the same repetative leves just to level up and you have to do them because if you don't you have to spend hours and hours just running around these huge areas attempting to find enemies to kill. Even then you better hope that when you finally find a monster that it is your level so you can either get exp or not get killed. This game has a lot of issues, ALOT. It has a great deal of potential if SE would actually fix their mistakes instead of acting like nothing is wrong or treating their customers like idiotic children when we try to give feedback or call customer service.
We as players deserve better, especially from such a well established company as SE. They have experience in MMORPGs as well as doing them on different systems simultaneously. They should know better. They have the resources and knowledge to have made this an amazing game. Basically it seems more and more like SE doesn't care and expects it's name to carry it through this and keep the players hanging on waiting for the next 6 months or more for the game to be patched. They have stated that patches will be coming in December, after even the extended free trial period runs out. Even still they will have not addressed many issues in the game such as storage or a mailing system. It just seems ridiculous that they would expect us to pay for something so incomplete. I don't intend to shell out nearly $15 a month after the original $50 just for half a game that isn't even set up to be run on the system it was released for.
Ok, so I heard that FFXIV came out about a week ago, and I spent the next few days reading up reviews on the game and forum posts on mmorpg.com and the majority of them said, "stay away from this game."
I took these reviews and forum posts with some skepticism for a few reasons:
1. The players who hate the game are going to complain on forums about how bad it is. But the players who like the game, are going to be busy playing it, and may not take the time to post their opinions. So the forum post quantity will be skewed in favor of the haters, not the lovers.
2. No interface could ever be as bad as Darkfalls. And I had a blast during the 6 months or so I played Darkfall. Its a Square Enix game, I can't imagine their interface would be so bad from a company with such a successful franchise.
3. I got FFXI for christmas from my parents when it came out. I installed it, played it for 5 minutes, hated it, and put it on the shelf. Years later I came to find from my guildmates in several different MMORPGs that they looked back on FFXI with fondness and thought it was a great game with good pve and grouping etc. I never gave FFXI a chance and I feel like I missed out because of that.
4. There is NO way this game is worse than the game I'm currently playing. A week ago I was finishing up my 7th week or so of playing a game called T4C (The fourth coming). I had played this game in the past about 7-8 years ago, and I went back to playing it for nostalgia reasons mainly. It was fun for a while, but I kept thinking about FFXIV at work and I thought, there is no way FFXIV can suck as much as this 8 year old T4C game im playing.
So those were my reasons for givnig FFXIV a chance. I went out and bought it yesterday after work. And I must say, the game is not as bad as people are making it out to be.
Heres the big thing people need to know before they buy this and review it. THE GAME WAS MADE, FOR PS3. This is a solid fact. The interface is clearly made for a controller with 2 joysticks, a directional pad etc etc. Hell, the default keyboard layout has ASWD for movement, and IJKL for camera movement, its to simulate the 2 joysticks. You can easily play this game without your mouse and just your keyboard. This game was not a PC game that is being adapted to fit to PS3. It is a PS3 game that was adapted to fit onto PC.
Most of what you need to know is in the instructions manual, and the starting tutorial guide thing. Yes there is a starting tutorial, but you have to actually go past the beginning cut scene areas to get to it. People talked about "there are red circles I cannot cross beyond, and I keep hitting them and im so confused, I played EQ1 so Im not dumb." I was expecting it to be very difficult when I started because of these posts. It was not that difficult. It actually reminded me alot of FFIX / FFX type gameplay. Your in an area, you need to talk to an npc, theres 5-10 npcs or so, you find the one you need to talk to and you talk to him. Thats how most FF games were/are and thats how these starting areas are.
ZOMG I HAD TO TALK TO 5 NPC'S TO FIGURE OUT WHERE TO GO. Hello welcome to single player RPGs, where there are npcs that talk for no reason.... its called Lore, it enriches the game. Honestly, I was inconvenienced for about 60 seconds before figuring what to do to get past the starting cutscene areas.
The character creation section is a bit confusing I will admit, regardless of which beginning character "look" you choose, you can edit them to end up creating the same looking character. They are really just starting default looks as a template to begin from. This portion of the step by step menu could be eliminated. I am pretty anal when it comes to how my character looks and will spend a good 30-120 minutes perfecting the look. I think this character creation system is adequate enough to give u decently different looks, but its nothing like Aion or any games like that, you pretty much just adjust all facial features, height, skin color, and voice. There is no editing of body parts / proportions etc. One thing that I missed out on in the beginning but later found was, in character creation you can use J and L to rotate the camera around your face to see how nose/hair/jaw looks from the sides.
And lastly, the graphics. I read someone say the graphics engine sucks and is not optimized. This is another thing Im anal about. I spent a good 4-6 hours tweaking my graphics settings and overclocking my new GPU to optimize it for the game. The game has extremely high res textures, for every single object. There is no candle or boulder or anything you will walk up to where a low res texture was stretched out over a rock or something and it ended up looking blurry if you check it out point blank. The game's graphics IMO are like all the best features of Age of Conan, and all the best features of LOTR wrapped into one. The grass, bushes, and trees are all very high polygon count models and have very good textures, even if you get up point blank to the bushes they will not look bad. I just bought a GTX460 768 mb yesterday to replace my 9800 GT 1GB and I can easily put all texture graphic options on max without an FPS loss. The sky and greenery all look very good. In order to adjust the graphic settings you need to go to the FFXIV config file in the games directory.
Ok so, to wrap this post up, I want to give one of my final reasons for why I am not unhappy I bought the game. Because it is a final fantasy game, and there are many asian players who will stick with it for years, and because the servers are international, this game will never lose enough players to where it will be shut down or lose development team size. This is a good thing for the future of an MMO. Many MMO's coming out now have so much competition that if it fails hard enough, there is a risk of it getting shut down completely (ex. Tabula Rasa). I do not have this fear with FFXIV, which is a very good thing.
P.S. for people who may question my experience or whatever, here is a list of my MMORPG's ive played (for last 13 years):
Nexus:TK, UO, EQ1, T4C, DAoC, EVE, SWG, EQ2, WOW, Guild Wars, Slayers (Taewool), ROSE online,Vanguard, Scions of Fate, LOTROnline, CABAL online, Age of Conan, Requiem: Bloodmare, Warhammer Online, Nostale, City of Heroes/Villians, Champions Onine, Fallen Earth, Aion, Global Agenda, Darkfall, Earth&Beyond, Entropia Universe
There are some other free games I've downloaded and tried but I played them too little time to count them.
Oh and I rolled my char on the Besaid (unofficial RP) server on FFXIV, and I haven't run into the "crippling lag" every spoke of.
hope this helps anyone who might of been on the fence about buying it or not
Dear FFXIV fan, SE has requested that the game not be reviewed for another month. Please hold off reviewing the game until this time.
Oh wait... were they just asking those negative reviews to hold off for another month?
In any case SE seems to disagree with you. They apparently think the game is not ready to be reviewed yet and they also think it's bad enough that no one will resub after their free month is up... hence the EXTRA 30 days free lol.
5 weeks playing the game logging prob 60 hours a week. I quit. 1 of the reasons was the bad UI. "Being made for console", no excuse. We are playing on computer if game not intended for computer to that extent never should have released it.
'An unreal, misinformed review about the interface/game engine' more like it. I wish mmorpg.com would be a bit stricter with what kind of 'reviews' are allowed around here. I don't care if it criticizes or praises the game, but FFS, have some quality and depth to it.
Comments
The interface is still hideously bad by PS3 standards.
It is god-awful. When I play PS3 games I don't deal with shitty UI lag and horrible menu design riddled with superfluous confirmation screens. A UI is supposed to smoothly translate your inputs into actual game results. Like, I don' t know, selling your inventory or targeting nearest ally to heal. Both of which are ridiculously poorly implemented. Anyone defending has worst taste than a Windows98 fanboy.
Honestly, who cares that you played Eve for 5 years? I highly doubt that has anything to do with the topic. Eve is no more harder than any other game out there either. And when you get to the point, Eve is just as simple and easy. Oh yeah, i better give you why it is... Let's see.. do I mine all day, shoot rats, or try my luck in 0.0 space? Even getting the right setup for your ship has become damn easy. There are just as many options in Eve as there are in other games. And some of those options have been done better then they are in Eve.
I would like you to list such options. I am sorry but EVE is still a very complex game. It has been dumbed down ever since Exodus in 2005 and thats no secret...but it's still more complex then most of whats available right now. For someone such as you and I EVE is easy as hell now, but for the average new player EVE is a very complex, deep, and hard game to get into. You sir have lost all credibility.
what does eve have to do with ff14? lol how do these other games get brought up XD?
Actually, think of FFXI. SE should have experience here. They made FFXI for PS2 and PC. After a few years with that they should know how to do the PC and PS3 versions without screwing them up because of compatability. Besides PS3 release isn't for awhile. Why release a console version for the PC? Since they released on the PC they should at least have a system setup for the PC. Face it SE screwed up and half-assed this game just to push it out on the market and make more profits. The very idea that they asked reviewers to wait 30days is offensive. I love Final Fantasy and had very high hopes for this game. I play it and am level 21 at the moment but after only a month I might log in for an hour every other day because it is so unbearably boring. Ypu have to do the same repetative leves just to level up and you have to do them because if you don't you have to spend hours and hours just running around these huge areas attempting to find enemies to kill. Even then you better hope that when you finally find a monster that it is your level so you can either get exp or not get killed. This game has a lot of issues, ALOT. It has a great deal of potential if SE would actually fix their mistakes instead of acting like nothing is wrong or treating their customers like idiotic children when we try to give feedback or call customer service.
We as players deserve better, especially from such a well established company as SE. They have experience in MMORPGs as well as doing them on different systems simultaneously. They should know better. They have the resources and knowledge to have made this an amazing game. Basically it seems more and more like SE doesn't care and expects it's name to carry it through this and keep the players hanging on waiting for the next 6 months or more for the game to be patched. They have stated that patches will be coming in December, after even the extended free trial period runs out. Even still they will have not addressed many issues in the game such as storage or a mailing system. It just seems ridiculous that they would expect us to pay for something so incomplete. I don't intend to shell out nearly $15 a month after the original $50 just for half a game that isn't even set up to be run on the system it was released for.
Dear FFXIV fan, SE has requested that the game not be reviewed for another month. Please hold off reviewing the game until this time.
Oh wait... were they just asking those negative reviews to hold off for another month?
In any case SE seems to disagree with you. They apparently think the game is not ready to be reviewed yet and they also think it's bad enough that no one will resub after their free month is up... hence the EXTRA 30 days free lol.
5 weeks playing the game logging prob 60 hours a week. I quit. 1 of the reasons was the bad UI. "Being made for console", no excuse. We are playing on computer if game not intended for computer to that extent never should have released it.
'An unreal, misinformed review about the interface/game engine' more like it. I wish mmorpg.com would be a bit stricter with what kind of 'reviews' are allowed around here. I don't care if it criticizes or praises the game, but FFS, have some quality and depth to it.