FF XIV Reviews

You are talking about quests, but I don't think it's what FFXIV needs ; look at FFXI, most quests are time sink and reward 200 gil. 90% are not even fun or interesting story wise. I'd rather have them develop bcnm style event or even a NM system. Although I know I would hate it if they do so, releasing a bunch of NMs is going to shut all the complaints because for some reason people like to camp dumb NMs but not grind EXP. It sounds a lot like SE to release NMs later ; look at wotg or ToAU, the expansion at start had nothing to do either beside exp (campaign/merit). Right now anyway everyone is busy getting level ups so not having quests is not hurting. What's hurting is menu lag and fail economy system. Honestly I did not see many people complain at ToAU release ; there were only a few quests (all useless beside the turban one btw) but there was EXP and assault. All we have now is leves and EXP. When Wotg was released there was Campaign and Camp OPs. Same ***. Honestly a decent economy and no menu lag is all we need. Anyone can be kept busy between jobs leveling, gathering and crafting. It will be another thing when people start reaching the level cap.

You're forgetting things like nation missions. This is what we mean by quests. Or ToAU mission, you know 1-48(I think). There's more to quests besides the silly ones that only get you 200 gil or w/e. In this context missions and quests are synonymous. I don't about you but I had fun doing all the Sandy rank missions. ToAU missions were fun too. There's also quests that run into each and make up their own little side story.

There needs to be more that just leveling up. Quests/Mission are a nice thing to have when you get sick of grinding. Never mind the fact there is nothing for people to do once they hit the level cap.

As far as NMs are concerned, camping an NM and grinding levels are by no means even comparable. Do I really have to explain why?

Fixing the economy and menu lag alone are not going to solve the big problem everyone is talking about. There are way more things to MMO's then leveling up.

Hell it took me almost 6 months to reach my first 75 job in FFXI. Why? Cause I could only take leveling up just so much before I got sick of it and wanted to do something else. Sure leveling up is fun for a bit, but after a few hours, you got to have something else to do.

--actively engaging battles, where I can evade special moves by reacting and running around the mob (even when solo), react and counter with ws-s, and all the tp based abilities (not just ws-s but bloodbath, featherfoot etc.) makes even melee jobs very fun compared to XI. Its not all about mashing buttons, because whether you're smart in battle does have a consequence (being able to fight tougher mobs, more mobs, etc.). Of course you'll still find it boring if all you did was fight easy mobs just to be safe (because they can still give skill and exp, which maybe a bad thing)

--you don't need to rest for mp like in FFXI (as a lover of mage jobs this is incredibly refreshing), spells cost small enough mp compared to your pool that you can last for a long while, and mp can easily be recovered at aetheryte gates

--teleport system is pretty balanced (at least for me as I save my teleports for between city or long *** treks and just run to the closer areas), there are many aetheryte gates placed all over the map for easy access (and mp regeneration), but not too common that no walking is necessary (which would be boring and without substance)

--the bit of reused terrain does not bother me at all, in fact that is what the real world looks like (similar for long expanses), I'd say the fact that each zone is so humongous and wide-spanning goes a long way to making it feel immersive and more realistic. Right now I'm on a mission to collect all the aetheryte gates and am always amazed to just walk through the atmosphere and environment

--crafting, mining, harvesting, fishing etc. are all actual well developed disciplines, instead of some side activity, with a significant mini-game factor to each. While crafting, you have to decide which tool to use (hammer or file for smiths, etc.), what kind of synthesis (standard, rapid, bold, wait) to use at what time, and even use specific abilities learned by crafting jobs (that does various effects such as increasing probability of successful standard synthesis)

--crafting is a full time activity, even if you never level a melee/mage, you can still help out your friends by repairing their equipment or participating in battle as support healer or such. Crafting and gathering each have their own separate levequest systems, that don't involve killing mobs and such like the melee/mage levequests. To succeed in crafting you have to cooperate with friends in taking up crafts because they're all deeply interwined through ingredients and materials and skills

--graphics is a given

--weather effects are really well done, with sand storms, rain, wind etc. all completely realistic

--music is a given

--hilarious set of emotes

--character creation and lore behind them is intriguing, (and I'm already attached to my character)

--the main storylines are the type that want to suck you back in because I want to know what happens next damnit!

--that you can see current status effects on enemies and allies

--the fact you can assign battle labels to enemies so there is no confusion on what to attack and what to sleep, it lends to the tactics of battle (can also assign labels on allies and yourself)

--naturally job changing on the fly is very nice, and doesn't really affect battle mechanics because you can't change during battle (regardless of passive/active mode, and even if you're miles away, if you're in a party with someone engaged in battle you can't switch)

I hope that helps.

On an unrelated note, I agree with Jaerik that there does seem to be a lack of quests (I was shocked to realize that there were no normal NPC quests, but apparently each guild has their own set of story quests too, just not accessible early on), but I disagree that it equates to lack of stuff to do in game.

Its easy to feel like there is lack of content if you're dead set on leveling only one job, but the whole of FFXIV is geared around multiple jobs (with mixing of abilities, crafting, gathering, etc.), so for someone like me planning to level multiple jobs, I haven't really come to that lack of content feel (not for lacking of playing, since I'm at r15 now and have done most of the r20 levees). (I also distinctly remember that 80-90% of my initial FFXI activity was leveling up and main nation quests, despite its plenty of engrossing quests, so the argument about grind vs. quests is lost on me as I enjoy both!)

This is not really an attempt to say FFXIV is perfect or such since I've already posted my frustrations on here and fully agree it needs to step its game up in some areas, but this is in response to the "what are the positives" question which I can find many as you already read.

I agree with you on most of your points I just wanted to add something. Useless quests are a point of perspective PC, and maybe that's what SE is looking at. The numbers of people who never did side quests that didn't have gear at the end of them or their rewards were little more than story are the same people who spammed enter/(x) on the cut scene for Promathia or Alexander "man guys hury up in cs lol i have stuf 2 do" But the fact is in XI there were many cut scene based quests reward or no reward that had in my opinion interesting stories. This is what brought me deeper into the world, allowed me to meet the people of the game and really sink that feeling of immersion. That is the one thing I'm having trouble with establishing in XIV.

If the problem is the quest reward, then the quest was developed improperly and they need to re-think quest design. With how much gil they hand out every 36 hours alone I don't think them making some non-repeatable quests with decent story and reward will hurt anything more than there never ending inflation system, guildleves already has.

Let me make an example here.

Most RPGs, or Japanese role playing games for that matter have you playing someone, traveling from place to place, through cities, dungeons, plains, caves etc. During this lets say you have random encounters, boss battles, and cut scenes. Random encounters are kind of annoying because this is usually a repetitive chore of using a strategy you've developed for x mob set or if you're high level it's just spam X to win. Essentially I feel most of the best content in these games is both the quality of the story and lore, and overcoming exciting and difficult boss battles.

In these set of games, if a particular area or boss is too powerful for you to beat, you can do what is referred to as grinding, killing mobs over and over, to increase your level to more easily win. A lot of times this revolves around sinking time into a repetitive and many times mindless task until you are powerful enough to continue. It could be argued, but usually grinding by many is not found to be fun, but rather a chore to overcome, work if you may, to get to the next area, get to the next boss, the next cutscene, etc.

Now at least in my opinion, I have rarely enjoyed grinding in any MMO/JRPG. Developing strategies for boss fights or doing new and interesting things was what interested me or drove me to do the chore to get to the reward. The problem is XIV has a very very low amount of this "reward" material, and it's divided up by many grind sessions, it's probably the least amount of story content in any launch MMO in sometime.

In any sense, most MMOs have a central story with hundreds sometimes thousands of other quests that may be there own stories or tie in with the central story. XIV has launched with a very tiny amount of content in almost all areas and many bugs with both the game and UI to boot. I'm not sure what this means about the future of the game.

I wouldn't know about Mistwalker since I never played a Blue Dragon game or that other RPG they made for the 360 since I flat out refuse to purchase a console from Microsoft. However I am willing to give The Last Story a chance.

Honestly like most people on KI said, SE needs to fire Takna since he obviously doesn't have a clue on what the hell he's doing.

Some people that hit 30 already are saying that plenty of quests from guilds and campaign quests opened up.

Rank 30 is quite the grind for a few quests... ;/

They've been too busy working on the graphics and have forgot all the content

One of the reasons why I am not bothering with 14 is the state of it. I have always said if it is still around in 12 months then maybe ill look. I dont want to be the one to be paying for a half finished product. So far all the reviews are saying pretty pictures but where is the content. To all those who are playing it, thanks, SE need your support to iron out all their faults and you obviously enjoy paying for a half product. When you have had them fixed then I'll consider if the game is worth getting.

Any ideas why SE felt the need to release it so early? Is it better to release a sub-par product earlier than a healthier version at a later date? I know money is always the answer, but it seems like getting hit with such negative reviews at the release will hurt the game in the long run, or is that generally not the case?

You answered your own question.
They wanted to be on the shelf for the fall quarter. It's pretty much the only MMO being released right now, and the only good one until GW2 so when you dissect the market it was a great time to release.

SE execs most likely wanted the game released before the holiday quarter. They wanted to sell as many units over the holidays as possible with the premise of fixing problems and adding content at a later date. They probably came up with the reasoning (for the content anyways) that most people would be content with just leveling/crafting/leves/etc for a while to get accustomed to their jobs and basic game play while SE did patches in the near future. Unfortunately it seems this is going to backfire horribly and a lot of people are jumping ship before it's even taking on much water. As a lot of people have said, the game does have potential. It's just a very bad start for what could be a great game. I really do believe it was a bad decision on the executives part and not the development team.

There's a few possibilities.

I don't think the actual XIV dev team decided it was just fine to release, unless they've been living a vacuum for half a decade. They're not that stupid, and they seem like smart guys. They had to know releasing it in this state would get terrible reviews.

More likely, they were under pressure from the top to release. If I remember right, this game's been rumored to be in production for well over four years now. That's long, and given how little content we have, I imagine it was probably a hell project. Maybe cancelled and rebooted internally several times before given the greenlight and the XIV name. The fact most of the world building seems to have cut corners with re-usable copypasta pieces, and there's so little gear in the dats, indicates to me that it wasn't methodically worked on for years but probably hammered together at the last minute.

It's possible that the project had run for so long and cost so much money, that upper management gave them an ultimatum: release whatever you have by X date or else. They certainly couldn't cancel it once it had the XIV name. And they likely desperately wanted to make third quarter earnings statements, so they imposed an arbitrary deadline.

The dev team probably over-promised on what they could do, both to management and to the players. If it's true that a lot of the game was made in China, perhaps their outsourcing companies dropped the ball and couldn't deliver assets in time.

Perhaps they so over-promised, their developers were spread out over a dozen systems we never got: airships, chocobos, some of those 20 other classes, etc. By the time they started cutting these features for release, it was too late: nobody had spent enough time on the core mechanics, and they couldn't be patched up to release quality in time.

Coding core systems takes time. It's like having a baby: just because it takes one women nine months, doesn't mean it takes three women three months. And by the time you're that behind, you can stick all the programmers on the project you want: you wont' make it, and you'll just make a mess of things.

SE management has seemed remarkably tone-deaf since the Enix merger. On the JP community side, this is exemplified by the infamous "ramen tweet," where they posted on Twitter that they were happily eating ramen when everyone was expecting SE to be crunching for XIV release. To many JP, it was analogous to Marie Antoinette's "let them eat cake" line, only featuring noodle products rather than baked goods. If this game was released early, it was probably these executives' fault.

Maybe it'll cause SE to worry more about the game itself than its graphics, but I guess that's what gamers want now. >.< When's FFXV coming out!?

Even longer actually. The first tech demo for this game (Then named "Project Rapture") was released in August of 2005. That's over 5 years ago, and I'm sure it had pre-planning before that, too.

They should have spent all that time giving XI new graphics. :3

http://www.ffxivblog.com/content.php/412-Precipitous-drop-in-SE-stock-price-XIV-to-be-blamed

this amuses me, greatly.

Well, I have two comments on this.

You say that FFXIV only has about 15 weapons per class. Definitely true, but consider this for a moment. There are 320 swords in FFXI altogether, which leads to a lot of variation. Now how many of those are actually worth using?

Gluttony Sword
Msk. Cmd. Falchion
Macuahuitl+1
Joyeuse
Excalibur
Burtgang
Tizona

About 7-10 weapons, I may be forgetting a few, going on a year-and-a-half-old memory.

Now how many of those were in the game on its initial release?

That's right. None of them. SE got the useful ones out of the way first in FFXIV so they could focus on other more important things, rather than designing stuff like whatever the heck this is.



Also, about the terrain being repeated. You obviously haven't looked very hard at FFXI, it was worse in that game than it is in FFXIV, but it's just more obvious because people expect FFXIV to use more detailed terrain because of its better graphics.

I disagree. There are a few fallacies in your logic. First, it's already breaching the limit of what PS2 is capable of, and dropping support would likely result in a lot of lawsuits.

Also, SE kind of painted themselves into a corner with the level cap increase. There's nothing worth doing anymore besides Abyssea. And a few Abyssea zones does not warrant a retooling of the graphics.

And of course, if people have played FFXI in the past and retired, a graphical update most likely won't bring them back, while they most likely WOULD want to try a completely new game.

Whatever the result, I'm glad they made a new one. If nothing else, there's a lot of potential for this game.

You're right, they have a lot more creative freedom with a new game. I just hope they get going on it before it's too late. :{

Intended release was March of next year, until then, I honestly think it's too soon to post any actual reviews of it.

they released it in Sept. which means someone in the higher ups thought it was ready for review. To release a product and not expect it to get reviewed is like saying you dont expect to get frostbite walking outside barefoot in a blizzard.


Square opened this Pandora's box, and quite frankly i'm glad their getting their financial *** handed to them, maybe now they'll realize they need to remember content matters more than graphics.

Honestly, i'd rather they pull the game, and offer those of us that have bought it another free month in march, when they reopen servers and go back to Alpha/Beta testing, which is where the game should be at in this point in time.

Just a note, it seems clear in FFXIV that it is a hell of a lot more work to get new items and armor introduced compared to FFXI, now that every ring, earring, necklace, undershirt, underwear, belt, crafting tool, and backpack needs its own 3D model (as opposed to a simple icon). Also, with all the expressive emotes, crafting motions, and movement and physics laws, all the armor and equipment must be tuned to these laws and deform/shape appropriately (especially the full cloth robe pieces and such).

It makes for a stunning experience, but definitely a lot more work (and less incentive to waste resources on useless items that majority of people won't use).

That is the worst decisions they could make XIV was SE's attempt to attract a new fan base and hopefully gain most of WoW players. All they did was prove (at least 8 of my WoW friends) that Final Fantasy is a dieing product. Not only that they killed most of their FFXI fan base with their bad changes for the future and geared it more towards moving FFXI players over to FFXIV.

One things for sure they might of hoped FFXI transfer over to the new game but they pretty much convinced their fan base to not play MMOs SE will eventually SCREW you with the next major release.

Lol Nae, I laughed at the link you posted. The Japanese seem very dramatic. :3

I agree with everything you said, I'm just saying from my personal opinion, I'm not considering the game "complete" until March.

I'm thinking of it like a skyscraper that's under construction. While the plans may say "60 stories", the first 10 or so will get done first. The main foundation will be done. There's just a lot more work for it to be completed.

If that makes any sense.

This is how I feel, I consider these next 4-5moths a nice time to build some bank and get all the bs leveling out of the way that would hold me back from enjoying the content.

oh i'm not saying a completed game should be had at this very moment. Like you, the game wont even be "release worthy" in my eyes until march. and like Urial, i'm using the 'paid beta' time to craft my little taru's arse off so i've got better footing than i did in XI.

I wish they'd let you jump. ; ;