My roommate gave me his buddy pass, so We've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for the past couple of days...and already, I can see my review (which will be concluded after the free 30 days) is not going to be in favor of the game. My roommate assures me that most Japanese MMO's are like this, and the problems I have with the game are how the average Japan MMO game player are more than used to and accustomed too, but really, I think there's a line here. Just because your used to a certain game mechanic, doesn't make it a good mechanic.
I've gotten to level 7. And that's where the game, yes the game, is having me stay for 3 days. You literally have x amount of quests (8) that you can do every 36 hours. If you try to grind out gaps in levels, your xp declines exponentially till you hit 0xp for everything you do. People assure me this is to stop power leveling, but really, when all you want to do is listen to the story, and they have a story quest at level 1 and then the next one isn't until level 10, at least you could get me to level 10, or have something to actually do in the game until then.
(side note: obvious sign of Japanese game: no jump, and your player is constantly defeated by knee high invisible walls)
I didn't intend for this to be my full review, but it's going to be a good chunk of it right here, 2 days of plugging around in the game (and I do mean plugging). The game from the get-go is anti-intuition and anti-player. easiest thing to explain is the anti-player. There are no in-game options for graphics cards, audio, or anything. That is a separate .exe that you have to open before you open the game .exe and change all the items around. After I changed the options to fit my pc, I realized that there's no U.I. scale...so I have to play the game in tiny eyestrain-o-vision.
Sadly I am kind of spoiled, I have come to hold that developers should know that not every consumer's pc is exactly the same as the ones that they are developing on. That not everyone has the same resolution setting across the globe. A simple U.I. scale that increase and decreases the general user interface's size on a fixed percentile ratio shouldn't and isn't that hard to implement into a general options menu.
Another reason this game is anti-player is the fact that you have to pay them extra money ($3) per character. that's right, per character. The game may say it's $9.99, but that's only access to their world. To actually walk around and do stuff in it, let alone get pass the log in screen, you got to give them $3 per avatar, and that adds up real quick if you want alts.
Here we get to game play. This is just simply not a game for me. I'll play it until the 30 days are up, then cancel. Which is sad because the environment in the game is beautiful to look at, truly. One thing that I really don't like in the game, is the fact that everybody is every class. The game feels more like Secondlife than it is an MMO. I feel like every class should carry something "special" to the table, each person having strengths and weaknesses that separates them and compliments everyone else's strengths and weaknesses. But FFXIV goes the opposite rout. Nobody is special because everyone has exactly the same everything. Only difference between characters I've seen, is your starting cloths, that's it...which is really unfortunate, in my opinion.
changes and transitions: Alot of MMO's, like Wow, Everquest 1 and 2, City of Heros(villians), Champions Online, Tabula Rasa (remains my favorite MMO of all time, OF ALL TIME), Guild wars, Conan, Baked Potato Online, and others I've played, have a steady transition that marches along with your character. Transition of gear, transition of fighting style, transition of movement, and most of all, transition of location. So far in FFXIV...no transition. level's 1-7 and I'm still at the same city gates, I'm still in the same cloths, I've still got the same weapon, Only difference is what little money I did make from the 8 quests I've expended (7 complete 1 abandoned cause it didn't tell me I needed a crafting tool, and then "oops, can't do that cause ya don't have the tool" and nothing to do but to give up) and waste the money on useless crafting tools that are HELLA expensive. So all in all, I'm bored. This game....hasn't changed yet...and I'm stuck waiting for it to do something. Me? I'm ready to do something, I've been ready, I'm just waiting for the game to catch up to me, and it's taking it's sweet ass time.
Crafting: what a bunch of BULLSHIT. Usual crafting games have a cuve. you start at level 1, easy, simple things to craft, then to what ever high level where things increase in more complexity. You have to venture further out in the world ass appropriate to your level and get more and better materials and make more and better items. In FFXIV, I have no idea how any uses this fucked up crafting system. you can not just go out, harvest some stuff, and come up with some item. (on rare cases, you can, but those cases are rare and far and few between.) I got frustrated with the inability to take the 79 different stacks of harvested Items I have and trying to randomly combine them to make things, so I looked up online recipes.....and you know what?
reason 1 I can't make something: out of the recipe that is meant for level 1's to make, there's a level 16-30 item that needs to be made and used IN THE LEVEL 1 RECIPE
reason 2 I can't make something: A lot of level 1 recipes rely on materials either gotten through quests or are rare or are obtained somewhere else as well as where I'm getting them through, all in all, to make a something I have to travel to other starting zones..how....I have no idea!
reason 3 I can't make something: It requires a purchased material, and I spent all my money buying the items required to make it in the first place.
reason 4 I can't make something: When it says "recipe level 1" it isn't, it's usually much much much much higher level due to the items it needs from reason 1
reason 5 I can't make something: level 1 recipes have about a 70% fail rate (probably worse then 70, feels more like 90). When you fail a recipe, it's considered a botch, and you loose all materials. which sucks because at level 1 you don't have many materials to begin with, so it's more of the same bullshit of the anti-playerness.
Something I really like about the game, the player character designs. Like most FF games, the player characters do look pretty good.
I like the pugilist class, but the game itself will not let you just play a class. You have to play ALL classes, making any single one class get caught up in the frustrating and very time consuming hat switching...thus making all classes not fun to play. I think I've spent just as much time playing the game, as I have navigating the menus trying to figure out if I'm supposed to equip the pick axe or some other arbitrarily pointless gear...WHEN ALL I WANT TO DO IS PUNCH THE SHIT OF OF THINGS WITH BRASS KNUCKLES!
Something that is pretty annoying: You can't tell a creature's level and compare it to your own. For one, you have 2 different types of levels. There's the class level, which changes with your many, many, avalanche of useless hats, and the body level, which only updates your numerical points and doesn't account for jack shit. With that said, there's no target box. When fighting a creature, all you get is it's health...which means they can stick level 20+ creatures in where ever they feel like in the level 1 zone. So when your be-bopping around, laying waste and slaughter to all the level 1 non-threatening squirrels of the start zone, suddenly you get one shotted by a level what ever mouse. The only way you find out it's a terror that far surpasses you, is when you select attack and you only do 5 damage, then it hits you and does 1280 damage, and you only have 612hp all in the matter of about 2 seconds. You can't even run, your just dead automatically, yay. Luckily, unlike City of Heros, there's no XP sink.
Another thing, levels and cut-scenes, all nice and balanced and pretty....Just wish the rest of the game was polished as much.
There are no in game tutorials for anything. The only starter equipment you get is your start cloths, and your start "weapon". Really starting out as fighter or magic person is a waste of time, and starting out as a crafter saves you about 2,000 money in the short run.
Switching to various crafting and gathering gear takes SO much fucking time to do, it's so very annoying. So far I'm teetering a rank of 4 because this game feels very unpolished and not very well thought out. (Like I get what they are trying to do with the power leveling stuff, but they should really implement those things later in the game, not at level 1...if anything is a put off of this game, it's the fact that I'm stuck at level 7 and all I wanted were some freaking gloves, some shoes, and a hat/mask! but now I can't get those things cause I'm out of levels, out of money, and trying to craft and can't, yay!)
I have more and other problems with the game, but I'll save those for the full review and further assessment later on.
Well, with all that said and done, things got a little wonky. I got to body level 11, punching level 9 and some other level 6-7 classes. I gave it the best try I possibly could. But in the end, I just ended up hating it more and more. Following forums and dev posts made it even worse so as they blatenly state that alot of the thing the game promots (even on the box cover and in the user manual) were not even implimented in game. Such as the punching class being able to use a steal skill, mage class summons, and other fun things like that.
What they have done, was successfully turned a game that could have been amazing, into a very pointless grind fest. You can't level a class except for x ammount per day (about 3-5 levels if that). You can only do 8 quests per day, and not all quests are for any 1 class, so it forces you even further to seperate your xp through the tons of pointless gather and crafting classes. The game echonmy is so upside down that even shoping for items is outragiously expinsive to begin with. There is no low level gear between levels 1-10. There may be some gloves, and a pair of boots, but really, unless your going to grind out untill level 15 with about 3 different crafting classes, you can't make, buy, or quest for a full set of new gear for any 1 particular class.
Something that makes it even harder to play: Your stats change with your class, and that changes with you main-hand weapon. You don't have different weapons for each class, it's all 1 main hand and 1 off hand. So if your a really heavy sack of hit points as a defense class, and you try mage, you suddenly get sickle cell anemia and hyperglycemia as all your hit points go down like some one give you a kick to the groin. It's really strange.
Time. Oh my god, time. They overlooked some incredibly major things when making this game that makes trying to do anything take a hell of a lot longer than it should. There is no quick change for your 10 or so different classes. You literally have to scroll through your unorganized inventory to find every little piece of equipment (2 hands, hat, gloves, shoes, backpack, apron, shoes) and equip them one by one. Each time your character model has to refresh (which takes about 30sec) and each selection refreshes your inventory and doesn't save your place. When your inventory is 80 objects long...it gets really cumbersome to scroll through to find equipment. This should have been in the back of the developer's minds. There should have been a solution like a quick button, or a several slotted macro item changer (like what is default in something like, i don't know, wow) that allows you to pre set what items go where, and then change over with a simple press of a button that adds all items to your character all at once. Equip, unequipped, 30 second character refresh, done. Not equip one item, 30 sec refresh, scroll, equip next item, 30sec refresh, scroll, that is pre alpha game mechanics that should have been dealt with. I say this because it's one of those "with the above said mandatory class changes, how could they not have known people need different equipment to be forced into various classes?" It really feels like a punishment to the player the huge amount of time equipment management takes in the game.
Something I did like about it was the fact that crafting had little simple minigames. It was the same minigame per crafting/gathering type, but still was an interesting quick time game mechanic. I had fun matching my marks and chopping trees. I had fun hammering a glowing sphere to do my bidding...even though EVERYTHING has a 90% fail rate, regardless of level it takes to make, making you loose soooooo many components to make 1 bolt of cloth, that it really defeats the purpose of training. Some of the attack animations and skills were great. The quest line, although impossibly short, and way to far in levels in between quests, was good and engaging where they were...just needed MORE, so so so much more. Every 2 levels needed a story quest. Not every 10 if they restrict your leveling so much. But yes, grindfest 2010.
Other then that, some technacle issues arrise: UI scale needs to be implimented, AI pathing needs abit better work. In game issues need work: Game needs to be more user friendly: Need minimap quest direcitonal beacons, needs quicker and better inventory management. Needs better class change management, needs more to do per singular class, needs more armor and wepons overall for lower levels. Needs something more entertaining than grinding. Needs quests that are more than "Kill this many over there" or "mine fish in that river" or "craft x many of these". Needs more plot at lower levels. All in all this is an MMO that just lacks so much substance. It feels rushed and unpolished. Really on the verge of being a great game, but falls utterly short, being out of breath, and out of ideas to make it work.
It is the first MMO that I ever stopped playing before my free trial was up. I just couldn't get in a mood to actually like it.
So far, this is my lowest rated game and it gets worse: Rating of 2 Yarg, it's more than a peg-leg, a hook, and a parrot short of a pirate!
