FF XIV Reviews

HQ graphics, solo ability, variety of jobs types, ability to change jobs, no pvp, no 13 years kids. It's like when you started FFXI basically, except you actually get exp this time.

Yeah the graphics definitely look hot. Definitely a plus.

What do you mean exactly by solo ability? Like it's easier to solo exp all the way up?

FFXI has a vast variety of job types, so how is it better, or different than FFXI?

Ability to change jobs on the fly seems hot. So that's definitely a plus.

Why is no PvP a good thing?

No punk *** 13 years, w00t! Definitely a plus. Why is that btw?

Enix did put out some good games in their hayday, but it was hit or miss. That could probably be attributed to having a wide range of developers they published from, observe for yourself:

Enix List

Squaresoft List

SquareEnix List

Take note of the developer column for each one. In my opinion FFXIV problems stems from management, FFXI was Square's first stab at an mmo and they made a splash. We and the media forgave flaws that exists being that it was there first. (Yes I know the US got a year old product) However, SE just does not listen to the community or try to understand the market outside the one they've traditionally had.

Traditionally FF games have been on consoles and SE can't seem to pull away from that even for MMOs when I think that they should if they really want to compete. The UI in FFXIV and FFXI (to a lesser extent) is a compromise between mouse/keyboard users and traditional gamepad ones... and it doesn't work. If you watch the Gametrailers review the guys asks "Why not just use a hotbar? Who knows!" when describing how to assign skills to your character. It's because it's catered to a gamepad. I don't think a single instance of dragging and dropping was ever used in XI or XIV. It's just harder to expand to new markets this way, and the UI suffers from this constant compromise. Oh and the "are you sure? really? positive?" on an already slow interface where it's actually easier to make mis-clicks with a mouse anyway doesn't make any sense.

@PimpChan: It was more of a joke at how ridiculously grinding has become in XI but thanks for the analytical break down.

Like I said I think XIV has great potential it's just tl;dr mad at rushed buggy game and paying for beta. People who are reviewing it this early are likely to hurt sales, thus affecting subscription rates, thus affecting quality of future content developed which hurts all of us playing in the end and which might have not been a problem if the game would of had a proper beta development cycle and wasn't released in the rushed and sloppy state it was.

I think MMO developers need to stop thinking they can compete with WoW. WoW will have it's fall some day but it won't happen anytime soon. This early release was either fear of cataclysm or a CEO saying cut and ship/need to start making money back or a combination of said reasons and or possibly other reasons. Regardless I personally feel it was an unwise business choice that they made. We'll have to see what happens but at the current time especially with the stricter hardware requirements required the run XIV as it's meant to be displayed at decent speeds I think that the game may struggle to compete with even many of the other lower populated MMOs at this time.

The biggest PROs I see for XIV at the moment are that it's visually stunning, has a great variety of wonderful sounding songs in it's sound track, it's at it's beginning if you want to jump on board near the beginning, and it has a lot of potential.

Unfortunately in playing now you have to deal with a much longer list of CONs.

Actually if you search the name of the GT review character and Gamespot review neither got past 14, crafts not barely level 10.

It just seems in general to be much easier as say compared to XI for every class to be able to solo this time around. I'm not sure how effective this will be all the way to cap but it definitely seems like they're at least giving every class the option this time to be able to solo when not grouping.

I wouldn't say the job system is as diverse as XI but it'll be interesting to see what people do to with all of the functionality that there is with being able to mix and match job abilities, traits, weapon skills, and magic between every class especially when the rest of the classes come out. I just hope SE can keep it balanced or at least interesting so as to keep 1 or 2 super "builds" from emerging come end game.

While there is no PVP content at the moment SE has been quoted once or twice about wanting to add it to the game eventually. I wouldn't be surprised if it acted on a similar type system as Ballista/Brenner in XI. The main thing will be how interesting and fun they can keep it and if they can improve the lag so it isn't a total *** fest.

I'm not exactly sure how changing jobs on the fly is going to work. You can't change your equipment in active mode and I'm not sure if it allows you to if you're within the range of an engaged mob. If it does, we'll just have to see how that strategies pan out with the content that they decide to give us to work with.

I've already run into plenty of derps and herps that I would categorize in the "babys first mmo, 13 years old" category. They're the ones you see at Aethyryte crystals in full alliances talking in /s because they don't understand that there are different channels of chat. It's all going to be situational, just like it is in any MMO: who you meet, what friends you make, what enemies you make, the experience YOU have with the game will be unique. As always, how much fun you have might be based on how many friends you have that you enjoy playing with.

I hope they don't waste their time adding PvP. FFXI shows they really had no grasp on the concept and FFXIV shows they don't listen to the community in order to improve on mistakes.

Cool, finally some details into the positive aspects of this game. Thanks.

It sounds to me the best option for now is to wait until Summer 2011 to upgrade my computer and start playing then. By that time the PS3 community will have been on board for a few months as well as there being more content, fixes, etc.

Yeah when I think of PvP, I picture an arena where you have 1 on 1 up to 6 vs 6. None of the garbage that's in there now, just plain versus and an open area.

@Belmonth:
Haha oh wow.

Also @PC:
I've done most if not all level 20 leves in each town, and as I am not of high enough level yet to do them my self for the rank 30 node leves, I have however joined many people already doing these at 4 different aethryte nodes now and most of these feel exactly the same as the ones at the beginning. I'm still discerning what enemies are actually imps in hiding, killing x amount of mob, or farming x amount of item. The only notable different one I saw was one where we had to kill 3 sets of wolves to farm ancient paper runes or something that apparently is what summons 2 Griffon type mobs. But as that may sound slightly different, it still really wasn't. It was kill *** > run to the other *** > kill > run > kill > finish objective, A guildleve target appears! > kill > annoying looping fanfare music.

I imagine there will probably me more variety at some point, but for the moment, or at least of what I have experienced, most battle leves just follow like 5 basic patterns. "Kill ***." "Kill ***to spawn ***to kill ***" "Farm items" "Kill ***to run after ***to spawn ***to kill ***" and who can't forget "Kill ***to detect sets of ***in hiding/Attack ***until you find x mob in hiding and kill the hiding ***."

Folks saying "no MMO is complete on launch" are correct, but they're failing to realize the immensity of XIV's weakness in this regard.

12 years ago, the first MMORPG, Everquest launched with 1000 quests and 3000 items. This has been considered bare minimum ever since. WoW launched with 2600 quests and even more items. Both ended up with something like 7600 over time. This is pretty standard for MMO launches these days.

XIV appears to have launched with what, eight main quests and a handful of leves? (The leves arguably don't even count, as they're the same thing cut-pasted over and over.)

And items? Dear god folks, have you looked at the dats? If I'm a gladiator, these are all the weapons for me in the entire game. In actuality, there's about five unique weapons there.

I mean, not even FFXI launched with zones made out of snapped-together, recycled features. But walk right outside of say, Ul'dah, and you'll see the exact same valley rotated and stamped out four times next to each other.

This isn't just an oversight, this is a jaw-dropping lack of content. It makes you ask, what the hell were they working on for the past 4+ years?

Thank you. <3

Yeah... It's really disappointing.

I don't mind the grind after you do the leves personally, and I can see reviewers looking for other things to do besides that for the sake of reviewing all it's initial out of the box content. I do mind, however, an unintuitive and slow interface. If FFXIV had a quick and intuitive UI AND Auction House on launch... I think the review would of been in the 7-8 ranges. Not the 4s.

All I'm waiting for is SE to stop being dipshits, also would like watching everyone that quit 11 to go to 14 to come back and *** some more. Would be lovely, heh

LOL! I still don't understand why people would quit 11 for 14, without even playing 14 yet. Or even if they were in the beta, with all the problems that came up then, did they honestly believe everything was going to be fixed by launch?

All I heard was 11 is dead, you're stupid if you keep playing it. 14 is the wave of the future. Some wave, lol!

Look back at the forum here, and you'll see people talking with absolute certainty about a mythical "5GB patch" that was coming with all the remaining content in the game. First it was coming at open beta. Then it was coming at CE launch. Then it was coming at normal launch.

Face it, guys. It's not coming.

Really, only 8 main quests? That's it?!

So like all these people who say wait until you're level such and such, and you're not grinding levels any more, there's not much more to do after that?

You can't talk sense into someone that just spent money on ***. Think of it as Halo, Great when you first get it months down you think, "Wow, I'm a complete jackass for making myself believe I liked that ***."

I skimmed over a bunch of it today. I didn't specifically recall a 5GB patch, but I see references to more quests and content patches that are supposedly ready at a moment's notice.

Kind of paints a picture of they have all these batches of quests and content, but don't want to release too much too soon as to not overwhelm anyone.

From the looks of it, pretty much. I was off -- there seems to be 8 quests per city. So 24 total in the dats. Woo.

There appear to be no standard MMO style NPC-given quests. In the entire game.

There appear to be about six leves per camp, and we can assume these are at 1, 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50. There's three cities, so that's about 100 leves, all of which are pretty much cut-paste jobs of one another.

My numbers may be slightly off by a small degree, but not to the extent it changes the point about a crippling lack of content.

Honestly, with a decent toolset and a spreadsheet, the MMO's I've worked on could have crapped out 100 of these levequests in a couple weeks. Same with the zone design, with a set of these building blocks. The main plot quests and cutscenes are extraordinarily high quality, but you farm that stuff out to China and have it back in a few months. I just don't see what they've been working on for ~4 years.

They don't. If they had it, there's no reason not to release it. Players don't get "overwhelmed" or else every other MMO that's ever been released would have flopped by comparison.

Especially when they fell for all the pre-order gimmicks. Or talk down FFXI cause FFXIV was the wave of the future.

What are leves, some kind of FoV type of thing?

Go to town.
Select from a list of missions. (Ex: Kill 3 imps.)
Hike out to a camp.
Start the leve.
Select difficulty level.
Arrows appear on your map saying "go over here and kill these imps," which have spawned just for you and aren't attackable by others.
Walk over and kill the imps.
Teleporter appears back to camp.
Get gil.
Repeat.

The whole process usually takes about 3-10 minutes. But wait! You can only do 8 of them per starting town every 36 hours, so after you're done with that hour or two of recycled content, you need to wait two days or so to do more.

XI has it's fair share of problems and limitations but it at the moment even in my opinion is miles better than XIV. Only time well tell what they do with both the games.

I wouldn't be surprised if XIV didn't pickup until it's first expansion comes out, I would expect that sometime late 2011/early 2012 if it follows the same cycle as XI did. At that time, XIV should have much more content and hopefully all it's bugs fixed. XI probably has more mini-scenarios add-ons/mini-battlefield add-ons on the way.

lol
Sounds like FoV was the "beta" for this feature.

Yeah my friends and myself have been saying this since alpha.

If it's following the cycle of XI, then this is like how XI was pre-zilart, JP ONRY, stage of the game.

Except it's world wide already.

Bold part = lol. While I'm sure some bugs will be fixed by then, tossing around the word "all" is very optimistic of you :P

You know, the suckiest thing about this is that I don't want to be negative. We didn't make ffxiah.com, investing hundreds if not thousands of hours, because we hated the game. We made it because we loved it. Even though we've all moved on and no longer play, every step of the way, we made choices in site features and content with a goal to enrich, rather than cheapen, the game itself. We've always wanted to be SE's ally in this, if a rather unconventional one.

I can't speak for Scragg or Cliff or the other mods/admins, but I want to do the same for XIV. I have every vested interest in wanting this game to be a smash hit.

Square games are the experience that, as a kid, started me on the professional path towards game development. Uematsu's music, Amano's character designs, etc, are what got me into game music composition and artistic design. I've worked in the MMO industry for a long time, and I know how hard and unforgiving it is. I have friends who work at SE. I know how unreasonably negative most MMO players can be. I have every reason to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I just can't pull punches, here. It really is that bad. To spin it otherwise would cheapen my professional opinion. It wouldn't be fair to players, and it wouldn't be fair to SE. Fanboyism from a handful of dedicated users is the last thing this game needs to succeed right now, because it's truly awful, and SE needs to acknowledge that fact before it's too late.

I'm pretty sure they will realize, MMO's can't be based on company opinions anymore. They're going to have to listen to the players on this one and the FANBOYS, I've played every FF game I can think of as a kid, and honestly I feel the same way. FF got me into Rpgs and I saw FFXI online I was like "O Hell Yea!!!" Now, I see 14 and My thinking is Money, Just money. They'll find out soon enough what that thought gets them. :/