100% Unbiased View of this game

[Jeire]

Hi there,

I recently bought FFXIV and since its so hard to see any review at all, never mind an unbiased one that gives simple info- here we go.

So to start off with.

I bought the disc as all the equivilant price downloads were all sold out. Disc came with two codes, seemed simple enough premise.
Cue 5hours later when the website finally decided that these codes were valid, I finally got into the game. This happened to both me and my gf. 2 codes entered correctly coming up with invalid codes entered message.

Carried on to character selection process. Awesome choices I have to say. Really nice selection of options for some races( granted a little lacking for others)

Next thing is class selection- Simple enough except that you have to watch for where your starting area will be if you plan to play with someone else. Not a huge thing, just something to think about.

Ok so chars picked- classes chosen lets play! or maybe not....

This so far is the most annoying thing about the game for me, If you want to play on any (I repeat ANY) EU realm past 4pm you cannot. The only way to do this is to make a char on that realm early in the morning and then you can continue after a long queue to get into the realm. If you fancy a new alt or even starting off in this game! watch for this.

One other annoying thing you will notice is a lot of lag, I have played on each EU realm now and any time past 8pm gmt you will experience crippling lag often (again not a huge thing as it is a new game after all)

MOVING ON ...

Visuals - I have game on ultra with 80fps and it looks very very good, Well what did I expect with FF series But yes its a+ for visuals. And its quite nice that even on lower end pcs like my gf's, it still runs at 40+fps on low-medium settings. I really like that

Gameplay - I am torn with this currently, It can be quite nice and yet frustratingly slow and clunky. Target tabbing is just so damn annoying. You can try clicking on target - 15clicks later you get it targeted. Ok so try tabbing to target - It chooses things wayyy away in the far field. OK lets try clicking the icon just above their heads - only takes 3-4 clicks so to me seems to be the best option so far. C- for gameplay, could be made soo much better

Clarity of play - By this I mean well, how easy is it to get from quest to quest etc. Well quite nicely to be fair. The targets are shown quite clearly in the distance and also the Fates are constantly shown in a different colour so you know where to go!
Only downside is map is quite horrible and doesn't show roads, or hardly anything tbh.

Random Events - Nicely done, I like random events that everyone can take part in and enjoy. It feels a little stagnant, a little too sterotyped but its early days and this for sure is a nice way to go, so no negativity from me really on this.

Crafting - Crafting is quite different in this game. You level up your crafting as you would leveling your character, It is slow- time consuming and very grindy. But it can be good fun and a nice Gil (gold) maker.

There will be updates to come, but I thought it would be nice to have a simple- concise opinion / viewpoint on the game from an unbiased person for a change. Let people know what to expect!

[Venaliter]

Hi there,

I recently bought FFXIV and since its so hard to see any review at all, never mind an unbiased one that gives simple info- here we go.
So to start off with.

No question there are some serious issues with FFXIV. Kind of to be expected with a brand new game. Quests all but disappear about level 46, meaning you basically fate grind to 50. Most annoyingly, you have to manually dismount your chocobo to attack/interact/teleport or do. basically anything. Every Single Time. The things I'd do for auto-dismount. Some cross class skills are utterly ridiculous, (Come on, a Conjurer gets Pysick????!) and some class balance is way out of whack in a few cases. FATES themselves are tedious, boring and random. Guildhests cannot be done in a party. The list goes on.

FFXIV doesn't break new ground. It's main advantage is it took what worked from other MMOs, slapped FF iconic things on it, and shipped. They didn't have time to reinvent FFXIV from it's first failure. They simply took what worked and used it all. But it came a LONG way.

The success of the game will hinge on them quickly working out the hiccups, most notably the issues I outlined, and adding new content, such as jobs, in a timely manner.

The game is better then SWTOR. SWTOR's developers were terrible. Are Square's developers better? We hope so! It's fun to dig into a brand new game and figure out everything for the first time, and that's FFXIV's major strength at the moment. Newness.

[Nyanmaru]

The game is better then SWTOR. SWTOR's developers were terrible. Are Square's developers better? We hope so! It's fun to dig into a brand new game and figure out everything for the first time, and that's FFXIV's major strength at the moment. Newness.

*puts on moderator hat* Let's not start bashing on SWTOR now...

Back on topic, first and foremost: There's no such thing as unbiased reviews.

I've been playing on Lich-EU from Germany for the last 2 weeks on a daily basis. Weekdays logging in at ~4pm GMT, I haven't had queues longer than 5 minutes (max 20 people in queue) and rarely lag worse than ~300ms. It's a bit annoying if you try to stop casting by movement or almost gamebreaking if you try to hit a moving target as melee. And the occasional rubberbanding of other player characters. But like I said, that's rare.

Gameplay is basic run of the mill hotkey MMORPG combat and questing, nothing new. The quests are basically a mix of FedEx, kill and click shiny quests with some WAR/GW2 public quests (Fate) and smaller scale Rift massacres (Hunting Log).
2.5s basic GCD makes for an interesting change compared to the otherwise common 1-1.5s GCDs of other games. Feels clunky at first but once you adapt to it it's a nice change. (Hint, doesn't affect most caster classes as much outside of instants and CDs)

Basic usability is definitely tailored with a controller in mind. The mouse targeting implementation seems half assed, I agree. Tab targeting works great though, unless you keep the standard configuration. Check http://imgur.com/a/DQm7v for a start.

Honorable mention should be the typical asian style of textboxes instead of walls of quest-text, some hate them, others love them.

All in all, gameplay-wise nothing really new and exciting or especially well done.

Visual and aesthetically it has a great amount of polish and lot's of detail to be admired (I love the quest names that are often times breaking the 4th wall). Though, the non-japanese voice acting is outright dreadful. The class/job quests are nicely done, even though it feels a bit weird that an established Dragoon, Black/White Mage and Bard gets the unknown lowbie treatment when picking up the Gladiator class. But there's limits to what can be expected in MMORPGs. Hell even most Single Player RPGs can't get that right, if I just think of Skyrim's guard telling me to check out the wizard's college when I just used the highest level of spells to incinerate a giant ancient dragon. So I think I can let that slide. But overall the quests tell interesting stories if you take your time to actually read through them instead of skipping them. The current endgame doesn't offer a lot for hardcore gamers that are used to rush through content and prefer things like extensively speed-running instances to get rewards in the fastest way possible.

The most innovative thing I spotted in FFXIV was the class/job system that allows "on the fly" changes to your class and roll without having the need to respec. Just equip the matching weapon and soul and tada you just switched to a different class. Levelling up classes after finishing the main class and quests can be a bit tedious if you prefer to quest over Zerg-Fests... err Fates. Sure, there's levemetes, but doing the same 3-4 quests 20 times can be just as challenging for your stamina as hunting for Fates.

[Deleted]

Likewise, I haven't really had any server issues outside of shorter queues since the server upgrades, even during prime time.

And am I the only one that actually enjoys levelling in dungeons, regardless of role and queue timers? Because it seems that people equate "optimal way of gaining EXP" to "only way of gaining EXP".

I will admit that Final Fantasy XIV doesn't particularly tread new ground, though. Still, it's a polished and playable experience that's fun, save for a variety of minor issues that are nagging at me. I want a proper inventory/armory sort button! Why is stuff like dyeing hidden behind some random quest?! And it's still hard to break the habit of being able to do things on your mount from WoW. I actually dismount as I go inside a building or cavern (even though you can ride in them) out of sheer habit. ><

[Nyanmaru]

And am I the only one that actually enjoys levelling in dungeons, regardless of role and queue timers? Because it seems that people equate "optimal way of gaining EXP" to "only way of gaining EXP".

Nope, I also enjoy dungeoneering for EXP. Kill mobs until 12-13 do hunting log to get to ~14, some quick Summerford Farms Fate and bam level 15 jump onto the dungeon train and go gathering/crafting/nintendo3DS during the wait time.

[Nyanmaru]

FFXI was the same way, if I remember right. Heck, I don't even think the game told you about subclasses, you just had to stumble on the quest if no one told you.

Why do games need to lead you by the hand for every little thing? I still got fond memories of Lineage 2 where one of the few 'real' quests was the fixer grid quest. Where you had to go and talk in /say to an NPC that was standing in the normal grid. Aaahh, back in the day *get's nostalgic*

But seriously, "commonly known" stuff like the dye/convert/materia ability can easily be helped by doing all the quests or asking in chat.

I feel like this is more of a community issue than a game issue.

[Kelimbror]

I do feel like it's easy to miss a lot of things. I just found the dye quest myself last night. I thought it was odd, but also not completely out of line. The reality of the situation is that for an MMO to take off, you really need to get these things in people's faces. There's too much hand holding in certain things and not enough in others.

More complex system design like dyes, we'll just give an obscure quest with no guarantee you'll ever pick it up. Making sure you know where all the vendors are in Gridania? We'll give you a detailed and non skippable series of quests that intently carries you through vendor stalls. I feel like their idea of what needs to be communicated to players is skewed.

While it's nothing to me personally, they aren't going to do any new players any favors. Take it or leave it as your personal opinion, but it's not good for the game. Same reason why the 5 hours (embellishment) of reading spam text blocks is going to instantly put off many people who try the game. I was delighted, but it still felt like way too long before I even used an ability and killed a mob.

To put it best, this is an RPG first MMO second in terms of leveling and beginning the game. After that, it seems everything has a nice balance.

[Arlee]

I agree with you on that Kitty. They seem to have sort of oddish priorities when planning the quest pathing. It's sort of funn but in a way it feels like FFXIV got a lot of the big things right, while messing up a bunch of little things. Though my one big annoyance atm isn't that certain important things are skippable, it's that you can pick up some quests, complete them, and then be unable to turn them in because you are too low level. I currently have 5 quests in my questlog which are complete and I can't turn them in. And no I didn't pick them up while having a higher level class active. And I didn't complete them as a higher level class.

[jearle]

Target tabbing is just so damn annoying. You can try clicking on target - 15clicks later you get it targeted. Ok so try tabbing to target - It chooses things wayyy away in the far field. OK lets try clicking the icon just above their heads - only takes 3-4 clicks so to me seems to be the best option so far. C- for gameplay, could be made soo much better

Please for the love of all that is holy fix this. I have never seen tab targeting this terrible in a tab target MMO.

As a tank i find myself using an AoE and then manually clicking through the target list to tab target.

[RohanV]

I thought the dye quest was near the Waking Sands. There's no way you will ever miss that quest, unless you decided to ignore the main story completely.

[mstieler]

Regarding tab-targeting, from what I've heard, you can change what "Tab" targets to "closest enemy target" or something similar to help clear that issue up.

[Hobb]

Personally I'm enjoying the game overall, but the tab targeting is rather bad.

I could be doing a FATE with 3 mobs near me, hit tab-target and end up with a mob all the way on the other side of the event outside of my spell range.

[Arlee]

I thought the dye quest was near the Waking Sands. There's no way you will ever miss that quest, unless you decided to ignore the main story completely.

It is there. And you are right if you are there and picking up side quests while you are there you wouldn't miss it. However, if you aren't picking up every side quest as you go and mostly just doing the main storyline you absolutely can miss it. There is no reason you have to talk to that person at all.

[Kelimbror]

I thought the dye quest was near the Waking Sands. There's no way you will ever miss that quest, unless you decided to ignore the main story completely.

Actually, when I first saw the quest wasn't until I was in my 20's. I ran through that place multiple times on two characters in order to unlock the GC and get my chocobo. I tried to pick up the quests there first time through, but it was level 15 and I was already 20. I don't pick up under leveled quests, especially in a game where I will need them on my other classes for xp.

It's actually quite easy to miss.

[Kelimbror]

And for something like Dye, I don't see that as a problem. Hell, imagine stumbling onto it without even knowing the game had dyes, it'd be pretty awesome.

It was. I'm an MMO connoisseur, but this game makes me feel pretty noobish. I force myself to not look up 100 different things, read features, etc so I can truly learn the game. It's about the only way for me to get a 'vanilla' experience in an MMO anymore.

It was rather interesting to find out there are dyes. It made me wonder whether alchemy could make them or they are only available in game, where I can find more, and glad I could at least change my color when I get max level gear. Honestly I've never taken a game slower by intention or b/c of the design ever.

For me it's nice, but many of the things I find quaint will not appeal to the majority of people. It has a lot of offputting quirks/design flaws/differing ideology. It's actually having a snowball effect of drawing me in to the game more as more things unfold. If I was a true noob to the genre, I would have quit already.

[Venant]

The launch of this game has been completely catastrophic, there are likely many many people who would have purchased the game if it was available after the launch but will not now because their friends have already leveled. Word of mouth is so important nowadays, and that launch made it impossible for anyone that heard about the game in that manner to actually try it. Furthermore, how the class system works doesn't lend much interest to players making alts, which means that once everyone has leveled what happens to lower level content?

Most of my information is second hand, since I was one of the aforementioned people who wasn't able to play the game and had to listen to people talking about how great it was on vent for a few weeks.

[Venant]

So if you can't play an MMO in the first week or so, it's totally pointless to ever play for the next X years?

I'm sure that for many people trying out a new game is more of an impulse buy, and it would be crazy to plan on sticking with a game 'for years' before even playing it.

[Heedless One]

I would just like to point out that your "review" is in fact not a review, but merely an opinion on your personal experience with the game. In order to write a proper, unbiased review, you would need to do some research to find some truths about the game and compare and contrast them to other games in the genre, its predecessor, etc..

An opinion piece, while informative to some extent, isn't actually an unbiased review as you seem to think.

[Venaliter]

I would just like to point out that your "review" is in fact not a review, but merely an opinion on your personal experience with the game. In order to write a proper, unbiased review, you would need to do some research to find some truths about the game

Bull. Reviews are *always* opinion pieces. But the fact remains FFXIV has problems. It's a great game, but it's staying power will depend on fixing those problems and adding more content. Period. End of story.

[Xiorin]

And for something like Dye, I don't see that as a problem. Hell, imagine stumbling onto it without even knowing the game had dyes, it'd be pretty awesome.

I did this and was absolutely excited that I had found it, it was a very happy little moment. I had no idea you could dye your clothes though I had suspected it from the little color dots on gear icons but when I found that quest and confirmed it, I squealed like a little girl.