Originally Posted by
Azerate
So to fill the downtime created by completing most of the activities in 8.2, as well as to clear the bad taste playing wow classic has left in my mouth, I decided to jump in and try out FF14. I've always been a great fan of FF games, so the thought of playing those old school jobs in an mmo setting and riding chocobos seemed kind of cool to me. One of my mates also plays it which gave me an additional incentive to try it.
I'm a person who gets a kick out of leveling things up, collecting stuff and all that, so every game that allows you to do that will provide me with some sort of entertainment. And I had a fair share of fun playing FF14 btw, about 3 weeks of fun to be precise. There's a lot of good things in the game, and overall it is an mmo, and everyone who enjoys that kind of gameplay will enjoy it to an extent. In this thread I will be focusing on the negatives, but that does not mean I hate the game. I wanted to make this very clear because fanboys are often unable to understand that.
At some point however, all the gameplay problems started to mar my experience to the point where I no longer feel the need to log in to play anymore. I stopped playing the game 5 levels away from the cap (at 75) because it's just unpleasant to play it now. It also made me realize how much I value some aspects of a game, ones that I normally don't think about. With that said, let me enumerate the biggest problems I encountered.
1. The combat
...is awful. Much like Rift, Swtor and all the other usual suspects in the past, it just feels clunky. It's one of those things that are hard to put into words. It's just not as smooth and fluid as you'd like. It feels like there are unnecessary delays between you using a skill on your keyboard and the character actually executing the command.
The other thing is that the rotations are extremely bloated as you advance your level. FF14 is a good example of what happens when you don't do the so called "ability pruning" that all the elitist players criticise so much in wow. At max level, or even slightly below the max level, your rotations include about 20-25 skills. And that is not including AOE skills, utility skills etc. It's just the single target rotation. I'm sure someone will argue that using 25 skills in a rotation is fun, but to me it's really not. It makes it hard to pick up a class because unless you're a gaming professor you will have a hard time learning it. It also makes it ridiculously hard to optimize your gameplay, let alone min-max, which is downright impossible. Using your actual rotation on anything outside of a dungeon boss? You wish. You'll just have to settle for using a couple random skills, using a fraction of your potential on those non-boss things. As far as the number of skills, combat below level 50 at best feels okay, afterwards it's just too much filler stuff in your rotation.
The funny thing is I didn't even think combat would matter so much, because I am mostly interested in other areas of an mmo, but it turns out that a bad enough combat system can turn you away from a game even if you aren't combat oriented.
2. Leveling and alts
MSQ Leveling is a bit weird, but it's fast and varied, which is good. Myself I am not a plot-person so I don't care at all what the game's story is about and thus I skipped every cutscene ever. Somewhat enjoyed all the leveling of my main job still, because at least it took me around the world, through all the zones, and it was close to the questing/leveling experience I know from other games. No problems here.
However, the real problem is the leveling of your alt jobs. Now some people will probably scratch their heads and start telling me how fast it is and all that...okay, I don't disagree, it may be fast, but fast does not equal entertaining or interesting. Quite the contrary, leveling alt jobs is pure pain in FF14. You use your main character for all of the jobs, and you can only do quests once per character, which means that you are pretty much left with the following methods for leveling up your alt jobs/classes:
-levequests (incredibly boring repetable quests, which are also capped hourly to make it even worse and stop you from doing them all the time)
-doing dungeons over and over (only really viable for tank and healer jobs)
-a dungeon crawler mini game that you can do over and over for levels
While those methods may be quick, they are an absolute and complete pain. I managed to level an alt tank job to a level of about 40 or so through dungeons which is where I felt I am done with it and can take no more of the same dungeons over and over. The whole system seems to be designed with blocking grinds in mind. You are supposed to just do a daily roulette once per day and level your alt job that way, over the course of like 100 days.
3. Queues are ridiculous, even during the peak hours.
It's no surprise that playing DPS results in long queue times, but even trying to queue up for a trial from the current expansion, that is required for a MSQ quest can take up to an HOUR. The game is only playable if you have a friend who can tank/heal for you, otherwise you have to wait for like an hour, and your best bet is to just do something else (but that something else can't be playing an alt job, because the best way to level that up is doing dungeons, and you can't queue for another thing at the same time).
It's pretty funny, because while I never believed all the talk about FF14 killing WoW, all the voices make you think and consider the possibility that the game is pretty active. Again, reality turns out to be different than the forum rhetoric. If you have to wait up to 1 hour in queue as a dps for current obligatory MSQ content, that means barely anyone is playing it.
4. Professions are done horribly
So with this one I don't have much hands-on experience, because after researching how those things work in FF14 I decided not to even try. Profession skills such as mining, cooking etc. work as a separate class, so they lower your level to 1. It is an interesting concept, but also means you have to switch jobs whenever you want to partake in those activities (because you will get one shot by any mob otherwise). To pile up onto that, you have mining rotations, which you have to use correctly, or you risk failing the mining activity (I mean really?).
There were some other minor things that got on my nerves, many of those probably more subjective so I won't be talking about them too much. Dungeon encounter design, un-obvious boss mechanics, UI bugs, the horrid TRUST system (doing dungeons with NPCs which takes like 1 hour longer than a normal party), retainers instead of a regular deposit place, market interface, confusing housing system.
In the end...it's just one of those games. It's fun for a while to take a break and play it. It will just make you appreciate and enjoy the proper MMORPG more once you go back to it full time.