Working as Intended

Oh, Final Fantasy XIV. What a pretty, pretty mess you were.

There's an unwritten, but unfortunately very well known rule of MMORPGs which states that a newly released game cannot be deemed enjoyable until at least either six months or over a handful of patches have passed behind it on the road to hopefully not imploding on itself and being discontinued. Final Fantasy XIV took this principle and ran it right into the ground, being such a complete train-wreck on launch that practically everyone who touched the poor thing, including reviewers, said they thought it would be canceled within a month. If not less.

Before we hold hands and skip merrily down the road to answering if XIV is finally fixed or not, some backstory is needed behind the game's very dubious development history; and much like the series it spawned from, this history is very convoluted and long-winded. Okay? Okay. Let's go!

Development of the wacky Final Fantasy that is XIV reportedly started significant development when the Chains of Promathia expansion pack to Square-Enix's previous MMO, Final Fantasy XI, was just about wrapping up during the 2004-2005 period. The game was originally given the codename Project Rapture, and a quick tech-demo was showcased at E3 in 2005. XIV, like XI, was directed by Hiromichi Tanaka (who also worked on titles like Final Fantasy III, Chrono Cross, ect) which made a lot of fans very nervous, even back then. The biggest concern was what was going to happen to Final Fantasy XI, as it was going really quite strong at the time. The second was that, well, Mr. Tanaka was quite infamous among the community for green-lighting very... quality-ambiguous gameplay mechanics.

Specifically, Tanaka seemed to enjoy the prospect that players would have to earn or wait significantly in order get to what many would call the 'fun' aspects of the game. If this was a good direction or not would be, and still is, constantly debated among the players of XI and XIV. The more important point here is that Tanaka would basically be controlling two games at once, which might partially explain what happens below.

At E3 in 2009, Square-Enix revealed that Project Rapture would, of course, be Final Fantasy XIV.  Like with every game ever created in the series, this news split the gigantic fanbase apart and created roughly several hundred million threads on forums, with people going on about either how awesome this was going to be, or how it would devour babies and slap everyone's mother before defecating on the carpet. Shortly after its announcement, we started getting juicy gameplay details, like how "growth is not based on EXP", it would be released on the PC and PS3 worldwide simultaneously, and all sorts of other neat stuff.

Stuff that never actually came true.

On April 2010, Final Fantasy XIV entered its Alpha testing stage. The lack of information about the game up to and including this phase of development startled quite a few potential fans, but anyone who was familiar with FFXI and Tanaka's involvement there just shrugged it off as business as usual. We got some very pretty screenshots and a quick trailer here and there, which was keeping most people nice and happy. Overall, the game was still highly anticipated by many, myself included. What started to make the internal alarms of the ol' noggin' blare, however, was that the Beta period was going to start in mid-June. Which wouldn't have been a problem if the game wasn't just announced to be released in late September.

In short, XIV's beta was only going to be three months long; which is a far-cry off the original estimate, and MMO genre average, of six months. Unless XIV was somehow mysteriously already polished to a shine (and therefor eliminating the need for a Beta in the first place) the proper testing phase of the game was going to be way, way, way too short for any feedback from the testers to make it back into the product to any significant degree. With MMOs, and any game worth its salt, a well-made product needs to be constantly tested in every regard over a significant period of time. Solutions to problems need to be implemented, then those solutions need to be tested to make sure they don't cock anything else up. Then when that inevitably happens, you need to test everything again anyway. It's long, hard work, and Final Fantasy XIV seemed like it was going to try and barrel right through this as quickly as it could.

To say this would come back to bite them in arse is a gross underestimate of the derriere-chomping that would follow.

The Beta phases came and went as quickly as expected. We were only given the city of Limsa Lominsa and a small chunk of the outlying fields to explore. The game definitely showed a lot of potential, and actually delivered pretty well on a fair few of its concepts. The biggest problem here was the game very obviously wasn't finished, what with it being a Beta and all, but a majority of the feedback players were giving seemed to fall of deaf ears. There most likely wasn't anywhere near enough time for the developers to read through all the feedback, and Tanaka and his crew never gave any real indication that they were even reading them in the first place, outside of a few tiny, tiny things that could be fixed while the Beta flew by.

In a wonderful case of 'open mouth, insert foot', I wrote a very long and mostly pretty-praising article about XIV, believing that the developers would fix all the known issues amongst the playerbase before launch, just a day before the Open Beta really got underway and the big bomb was dropped on everyone. XIV's Open Beta, which was just the closed Beta in content but with more areas, was going to be the entirety of the game at launch. The game barely had any proper content (including no definable way to consistantly level and just a few cutscenes for missions here and there), the launcher was glitchy (you couldn't even alt-tab out of the game without it crashing), it was hideously optimized for the PC and... well, felt like a damned Beta. But here we were with Square-Enix and Tanaka basically kicking its arse out the door and screaming "It's done~!"

The backlash from this is what you'd expect.

Final Fantasy XIV absolutely tanked upon release. Square-Enix tried to hide the game's shoddy state from the general public by placing an embargo on mainstream game reviewers until a couple of weeks had passed, but word was already spreading across the Internet from the players themselves. The game was nowhere near ready, and it was considered by many a downright insult for Square to expect people to pay for this. When the reviews did come out, hoo-boy. Let's just say they were about as forgiving as the players were.

Less than a month later, we received this lovely little gem from the developers.

Since the official launch of service on September 30, 2010, we have received a wealth of constructive feedback from the FINAL FANTASY XIV community, and the development and management teams would like to take this opportunity to express their sincerest gratitude. For those who purchased the collector’s edition and began to play one week before official service began, the month-long free play period is drawing to a close. Considering the nature of much of the feedback we received, however, and the current state of the game, we have decided to extend the free trial period for all users. Please continue reading for further details.

The forums, and whatever remaining playerbase, went into various levels of hysterics over the news. Here was Square, and more importantly Mr. Tanaka, admitting that the game was unfinished and needed desperate work done on it. This 'free-trial period' (which wasn't free, since you had to pay for a blasted copy of the game, but whatever) would be extended every month, until one day they just went, "Bugger it. We'll just tell you in advance when we decided to start charging again. Until then, go crazy-go-nuts."

But the damage had already been well and truly done. People didn't trust the game, the company, and most importantly, the director anymore. Even with it being technically free-to-play for quite a number of months, the playerbase just kept getting smaller and smaller. Patches were being done to the game, and some of them did help fix the smaller issues with the game; but the biggest, most grievous errors were still flaying about, hitting players in the face every time they tried to complete even the smallest of tasks. Players weren't seeing the significant work that needed to be done, and just left for greener pastures.

And finally, we come to the end of this ridiculously long recap of XIV's development. Just two months after the game's launch, many remaining players clicked onto the XIV Lodestone page and came across the sound of angels singing the most jubilant and awe-inspiring of songs. To wit!

Thank you for your continued interest in and support of FINAL FANTASY XIV. 

While more than two months have passed since the official launch of FINAL FANTASY XIV service, we deeply regret that the game has yet to achieve the level of enjoyability that FINAL FANTASY fans have come to expect from the franchise, and for this we offer our sincerest of apologies.

After thorough deliberation on how to meet those expectations, it was decided that the most viable step was to approach improvements under new leadership and with a restructured team.

To realize this vision, and in doing so, provide our customers with a better game experience, we have assembled our company's top talent and resources. Taking over the role of producer and director is Naoki Yoshida, a passionate individual for whom customer satisfaction has always taken top priority. Not only is he one of our Group's most accomplished and experienced members, Naoki Yoshida is also a charismatic leader possessing the skill to bring together and effectively helm a team which encompasses a wide range of responsibilities. We also welcome several new leaders handpicked from other projects to work with the existing talent on FINAL FANTASY XIV. 

We realize time is of the essence and are fully determined to provide our customers with quality service. It is because of this that we ask our customers to be patient until we are able to confidently present them with a concrete plan outlining FINAL FANTASY XIV's new direction. The free trial period will be extended until that time.

Regarding the PlayStation 3, it is not our wish to release a simple conversion of the Windows version in its current state, but rather an update that includes all the improvements we have planned. For that reason, we have made the difficult decision to delay the release of the PlayStation 3 version beyond the originally announced date of March 2011.

The FINAL FANTASY XIV team is working hard to bring our customers an unparalleled adventure, and we ask for your continued understanding and support as we march ever diligently towards that goal.

First of all, I would like to apologize for our inability to fully satisfy our users with the initial release of FINAL FANTASY XIV. I take full responsibility for the game's current situation, and have therefore made the decision to step down from my role as producer. A number of concerns that have been voiced by users, such as the design of the user interface, availability of tutorials and game content, and battle system functionality, represent key issues that must be addressed. While improvements are already well underway in many areas, we were unfortunately not able to incorporate player feedback as quickly as we would have liked. We are aware, however, that in many cases, addressing these issues will call for a reworking of game elements. As these changes are our first priority, they will be commanding our full attention and efforts. It is to that end that we have put a new organizational structure into place for the development team. Under this new system, FINAL FANTASY XIV will see changes and additions in line with the desires and expectations of players. Though no longer producer, I will be continuing to support the development team in other capacities, and personally hope that you will continue your adventures in the realm of Eorzea.

I mean, damn.

If previous news of Final Fantasy XIV's development sent the fanbase into hysterics, this news made them go absolutely ballistic. The Producer/Director, Assistant Director, Lead Game Designer, Lead Combat System Designer, Technical Adviser, Lead Programmer and Lead UI/Web Designer positions were all changed. With Tanaka off the project, possibly as a mimicry to him being taken off directing Final Fantasy XI just a few months prior as well, fans were starting to looks towards XIV with new-found and especially keen interest. Would Naoki Yoshida, a man with now one of the hardest jobs in the video game industry, be able to salvage the massive and increasingly expensive wreck that was Final Fantasy XIV?

It's been well over half a year since the announcement, and several patches (1.18 being released last week as of writing this diatribe) are now in the metaphorical rear-view mirror. So, has XIV managed to... not so much totally reinvent itself, but at least fix some of its major problems, and more importantly, does having a new team working on it make the game glimmer with future potential and promise?

Time to find out! In an entirely personal, long-winded and easily subjective journal post in the middle of nowhere that aims to solve nothing and most likely won't sway anyone that isn't already myself. Hooray!

Wait...








The above trailer is what Final Fantasy XIV is, or at least was, trying to sell itself so gosh-darn hard as being.

Patch 1.18, mentioned before as being released just last week, is not some super-mega-glorygasm patch that will descend from the heavens themselves and carry us all to the land of wonderful and perfect gameplay, like many seem to believe it would when they apparently misread every single article Yoshida and his crew have said about it. What ol' 1.18 does, however, is start the process of recovery for the ailing MMO. Lots of gameplay/overall mechanic changes here and there, and some little bits of new content to improve upon over the remainder of the year. I'll blab on more about it later, as is the custom of my people.

For the sake of this... I honestly don't know what you'd call it. It sure as hell aint a review. I guess 'exceedingly long and hopefully insightful to some capacity rant' works as well as anything. Anyway, for the sake of the long string of lettery words that are here, I'm going to break up my thoughts on each aspect of the game into categories based on what I encountered first on my trip back to this crazy game. I've reached Rank 24 out of a possible 50, so while that isn't intimate knowledge of every single aspect of the game, being basically half way through the leveling run (at least in terms of rank. Certainly not EXP/SP required) seems like as jolly good place as any to stop and mull over my thoughts here.

Right. Long introductions all done and done with, let us begin!





I really hate to start off the looking at the New and Improved XIV with such a negative rant, but... what Square-Enix calls their Account Management System is just so insultingly backwards that I can't help myself. This is what every single player is going to account first, naturally, and it's just such a shame that the current system is so very, very terrible. This really isn't anything Mr. Yoshida or his crew can specifically combat, but more something the marketing and administrative sections of Square-Enix (not very well known in the past for their sane outlooks and methods) seriously need to look at. I can see this turning more people off the game than anything the game itself can muster up.

Where to begin... Well, the actual finding the account management page and signing up is relatively straight-forward, and at least the manual for the game walks you through the steps pretty decently. Had no real hassles there, which is a positive sign. After that however, is when things start to fall apart. The biggest issue being the god awful payment system.

As of writing, there are two options available to any would be money-bags honoured customers; You can either pay with your credit card directly, or you can purchase Crysta. "Now!" You might be saying, if you're the type that speaks aloud with reading something online, for unexplored reasons, "I can just put in my credit card information and that'll be that, right?" STOP RIGHT THERE, OVERUSED REFERENCE! Before you put in your credit card information you have to sign up to a third party, called Click and Buy. A company that.. uh, shall we say, doesn't have the most reliable track record ever seen. In any case, if you go down this route, you'll be then asked to put in your card's Verified By Visa details.

Which raises a very large roadblock to people who, say, don't use a Visa card.

Or do, but haven't signed up for the Verified service.

You can try and ring up Square-Enix's call centers in California and point this out to them, and they might bypass it for you, but there doesn't seem to be any certified policy for it; since the number of people that have managed to get this step bypassed seems to be roughly equal to those who were turned away. You can certainly give it a shot, but there's no guarantee.

"Well, that sucks! But, hey! I can just use the Crysta option, whatever that is, right?" Well, anonymous person I'm using as a poor example of the reader, I suppose you could do that. As long as you're in a country that supports the Crysta system; and a distressingly large amount of them do not. If you're not in such a country, and you have no success with the SE customer support over your credit card, then... well, ya kinda shit outta luck, aren't ya. Isn't this just great?

Also, even if your country doesn't support Crysta, the "Purchase Crysta?" option will still appear in one of the sub-menus. It just gives you an error when you go to click on it. Whoopsie-daisy!

Crysta is basically Square-Enix's version of currency. Sorta like Microsoft Points, or various equivalents. You can purchase these (thank goddamn Christ with PayPal) and then use them to pay for the monthly fee that isn't actually in effect yet, but soon will be. This isn't too bad of a system, except for one rather glaring problem. Like Microsoft Points, you can't actually pay for the exact amount that you'd want. You can only buy it in certain 'chunks' (like 500, 1000, 2000, ect). Which basically means you're going to be overpaying almost every month, until the surplus points you've purchased equal out to the average monthly fee of the game. Which some clever little sport over on the XIV forums deduced would take at least four years of paying to do.

This was made worse when it was discovered that the Japanese don't have this issue, and can purchase the exact amount of Crysta they need. Granted the game is free to play right now, but if these payment methods aren't fixed or majorly updated before the fees do go into effect, I can see this creating a world of hurt for all concerned. Hell, its sheer presence right now is a major stumbling block for many players. For example, to sign my silly little self up for the game, I had to purchase a copy of the game, then create a United Kingdom account (despite being Australian) just to sign up for the Crysta service, since SE's customer support didn't feel like bypassing the Verified by Visa step for me. The biggest bone to pick here is that you can't properly tell if your country supports Crysta/PayPal or not until after you're registered your product code. If it turns out you can't, then you'll need to make an account in a country that does, but... you've already used your game's code. So, uh... have.. fun purchasing another copy?

I'm sorry, but in a market where you need to make the payment system as crystal clear and stress-free for the consumer as humanly possible, Square-Enix's attempts here are downright asinine, and reek of a company that doesn't properly know what it's doing. Hell, even the often-complained PlayOnline accounts for FFXI were many times more intuitive and user-friendly than XIV's system.

Which just makes it all the more annoying that they're scrapping the PlayOnline system for XI in order to move it over to the Click and Buy/Crysta service that XIV offers. I mean, for god's sake, Square-Enix. If they want to honestly improve the account management and payment system, the easiest solution would be to go to World of Warcraft's account site and just rip the damn code right out and use that instead. Every MMO copies enough from that juggernaut, so ya may as well take the one exceptional thing you desperately need from it.

Assuming you can, or even want to, move through the ungodly payment system, it's time to update the game!





Back during the Beta period and early release, players used to groan and sigh in agony whenever they knew a new Update was coming down the pipe; since this meant they'd have to deal with... ugh, the XIV updating system. For the uninitiated, XIV's updater was basically just a torrent program, except very poorly coded. It emphasized getting a player's upload speed way higher than their potential download rate, which meant that even the simplest of patches could take hours. Y'see, it's hard to download something off what's essentially a peer-to-peer client when everyone you can connect to also can't download the file because the only person with the file (Square-Enix in this case) only has the bare minimum of seeds up and you've got tens/hundreds of thousands of people trying to download the dang thing at once.

The solution to this was to either wait until some generous soul downloaded the file/s then uploaded it to a direct download site somewhere (usually linked on a forum), or to use a proper torrent program that would hopefully increase your speed and range of seeds significantly. In short, the updater was very, very stupid.

Now? Well, as far as I can tell it's pretty much the same, but the downloading pace is an awful lot faster. This most likely has more to do with there being less people around to clog all those crazy intertubes then it does with the updater being... well, updated. I can't properly say for sure if been purposefully fixed, but I never had any major problems with it, even with downloading 1.18 on the day of its release. Seems to go smoothly for people commenting about it on forums too, so I guess that's a very cautious thumbs up.

As for the XIV launcher and window itself. It works without any major issues, the Windowed mode does what you'd expect, and the only real complaint I have is that you still can't freaking alt+tab out of a fullscreen XIV client, which is something Beta testers complained about constantly. Thanks for getting on the ball with that, Tanaka, you righteous think-tank, you!





Finally! We're at the game part of the game! Hooray!

Even back in 2001/2002, when the game was entering production and its proper release, Final Fantasy XI had a very limited character creation tool. Basically what it equated to was five races, eight hairstyles and a whopping two colours to choose from with any given style. You'd run into a clone of yourself (especially if you chose a popular hair style/colour) down damn near every hallway in the game. T'wasn't that fun, if I dare say so.

While Final Fantasy XIV is a far cry off MMOs such as Aion, which allow you to wildly customize every aspect of your character, the game has a broad enough list of things to customize, and number of options therein, to create a pretty unique character while still maintaining the game's very strong racial designs and personality.






The game has five races to choose from;

• Hyur (Humans, of course. HYURRRRRRRRRRRRRRR)
• Elezen (Elves, and generally sleeker cousins to the Elvaan in FFXI)
• Lalafell (Adorable little munchkins, and similar to the Tarutaru of XI)
• Miqo'te (Hunter-based catgirl-things (well, guys too, but not yet). They're basically the same as the Mithra in XI)
• Roegadyn (HULK SMASH! Tail-less brethren of the Galka in XI)

Which leads to, not really a criticism, but more an aspect of disappointment in XIV's characters. There's not a single new race between the lot of 'em. They're just streamlined and very purtied up descendants of the races in XI. I know why Square-Enix went down this route, and I actually don't mind it, since XI had some very strong character designs and being able to recreate my XI character here is mucho appreciated. I just wish they put in at least one new race to play as. This is a new game, so some new content would par the course, ya'know?

But, as said, that's not really anything critical. What is, however, is when you go to select your character's date of birth and what deity they fall under. You might be asking how any of this impacts your character or the gameplay, and I'd have to respond by saying that's a damn good question, because right now they do absolutely nothing. There were talks a while back of the old team finally putting use to these two little doo-dads, but that never saw the light of day. So, as of writing, choosing your character's date of birth and deity does jack-squat, except maybe for setting the player up for disappointment when they finally figure that out.

Overall, though, the character creation system does its job perfectly fine, and while not as exhaustively varied as the most extreme MMOs, it does have more to offer than a lot of character systems in the genre, so there's not too much to really criticize. A new race would've been nice, but that's more a request than anything overly critical.





One of the largest criticisms laid against Final Fantasy XI was how depressingly newbie unfriendly the game was for the longest time. After an initial cutscene you were promptly thrown out in the world of Vana'diel and basically told, "Right. Giant world out there, try not to get yourself killed. What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of me not giving a shit that I didn't explain anything. Amazing!" If you wanted to learn how, well, basically anything worked, you needed an already knowledgeable friend or helpful passer-by to teach you the ropes. It was a nice attempt at trying to make the playerbase bond, but most rightfully dismissed it more as the game just being horribly unintuitive.

Final Fantasy XIV improves upon this is some pretty significant ways. First, and more importantly, there are a rather lengthy series of tutorial cutscenes and sequences during the opening moments that do a pretty bang-up job explaining the gist of the world and mechanics to the most likely confused player. You're introduced to Instances, the battle system, Guildleves, general questing structure and all that jazz within the first 20-30 minutes of the game. It doesn't hold your hand anywhere near as much as World of Warcraft, which people making alts will see as a definite plus-side, however it does lose a few vital instructions in the process as a result.

Crafting, the Market Wards, in-depth battle mechanics (especially Regimens), Retainers and so on can fly right over the average player's head for days, if not weeks after playing the game before they finally discover them. Almost all of 'em are pretty important too, which makes their not being included in the much-needed tutorial sections quite puzzling. The new crew said they'd be going back and overhauling the opening moments and sequences to the game, so there's hope yet!





This element of the game will slam into your face harder than a sack of particularly stubborn bricks before you properly start out on your adventures in Eorzea. To be perfectly blunt about the whole thing, I really didn't want to put the word optimization in the subheading section here because that would imply the old team actually did any. To be even more blunt, this game isn't optimized for the PC so much as it managed to one day run on one without taking out an entire city block, the developers said "Good enough!" threw it into a box and called it a day.

I have a fairly powerful computer. Or at least one powerful enough to run a pretty decent array of the latest PC titles on High to Very High settings; yet to get XIV working at a stable and consistent framerate I have to slam everything down to Standard, turn off features such as Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field, get rid of most shadows, and most notably turn the resolution of my normal 1920x1080 monitor down to 1440x900. Then, and only then, will I get 40-60 FPS in most areas of the game. It's honestly a wonder my PC didn't explode in a hellfire of pure agony when I originally booted the game up at full resolution with the settings set to High.

I have no clue if this is even something that the new team can properly combat. The game is horribly optimized, and a lot of PCs out there will not be able to handle it at all, unlike a lot of other MMOs on the market. The original team tried to skirt around this issue by saying that the game was designed to be 'future-compliant', and PCs in five years time would be able to run it with no issues. This is basically shit-talk for, "Yeah, we have absolutely no idea what we're doing here. Hell, Bill didn't even know what a computer was until we hired him for the optimization process. But, yeah. Totally future compliant! If you could instantly believe us right now that would be just super."

If you ignore the... dubious optimization process and just focus on the actual graphics and animation quality itself, then you're in for quite the treat. As anyone who has been following the Final Fantasy franchise for any iteration can tell you, the fact that XIV is absolutely gorgeous should come as no surprise. The models and areas, especially for the genre, are immensely detailed; the animations and effects in cutscenes and battle alike do their job very well of providing the shinies; and even with all my settings and resolution down far lower than I'd actually care for, the game is still perfectly capable of wowing me with its scenic vistas and glowing super-attacks. So, yeah, a Final Fantasy title looks really good. Quite the shock, no?

No.





Ah, the first major thing the 1.18 update overhauled. Yay!

Before 1.18 waltzed onto the scene and gave the battle system a much needed kick up the bum, fights used to revolve around the concept of Stamina. Namely, every action and attack had its own unique amount of Stamina it would drain from, go figure, a constantly refilling Stamina Bar. The more effective or powerful the ability, the more Stamina it would drain. It basically looked like this:




It was a surprisingly unique battle mechanic, and helped XIV stand out a little bit from the competition. The problem, as is always the case with these things, was that a relatively active combat system would play hell with how fast the game could read the constant inputs and translate them to the server (or at least this game). This led to some pretty dire lag between confirming an attack and when the game got off its arse and felt like trigging it. While the lag was more or less eventually solved, the battle system was still heavily unbalanced (accuracy being a major pain in the arse until 1.18) and, more importantly, while you were engaged in battle you couldn't communicate with anyone without having your character come to a complete stand still and letting the enemy wail on you for however long it took for you to write a sentence. With MMOs being the multiplayer little beasts they are, this was a concern.

When 1.18 leapt out and shouted "Ta-da!" one of the most highly touted changes was the almost complete overhaul of the battle system. The Stamina Bar and anything associated with it was swiftly given the boot, and was replaced with a more MMO traditional auto-attack and cooldown timer-based battle system.

While I miss the unique flare the Stamina Bar did bring to the table, and the more action-RPG-ish combat system, I very quickly found myself preferring the new battle system in almost every way. Ability cooldowns were short enough that I almost never had to sit and just watch my character auto-attack (a big problem with XI's battle pacing); overall balance, while still needing tweaks here and there, as is always the case, was improved; and, I don't know, I just found myself actually enjoying battles a lot more. Quite the feat, since I usually don't care for MMO battle systems all that much.






While future updates will continue the necessary adjustments and balancing the battle system needs, two big changes in the near future are worth mentioning. If only for their complete replacing of existing mechanics. The Physical Level system, which runs on traditional Experience Points gained from killing monsters and is what determines your stats, is set to be scrapped in an upcoming update (likely candidate being 1.19); while the Class system is being changed, where the existing jobs will be replaced with more traditional Final Fantasy roles. White Mage, Black Mage, Monk, Dragoon, yadda, yadda.

While we don't know all that much about how the class changes are going to work, and more importantly if players will be able to keep their current levels, the abolishment of the physical levels solves a current and pretty stonking big problem with progression in XIV. Currently, when you gain a Physical Level you are allowed to manually choose what stats you increase, much like the typical RPG, and something MMOs have dabbled with in the past (Ragnarok Online was well known for this). So, what's the problem, exactly? Well, the problem is that your stats don't change when your class does; so if you level, say, Marauder first, and put all your stats into Strength, Dexterity and all that melee nonsense, you're going to be completely boned if you decide to level Conjurer or the like, which uses Mind and Intelligence. You can't pump stats into those categories, because you already 'wasted' them making your Maruader the shiznit.

There is an option to 'undo' your stats, but you can't undo them all at once. In typical Tanaka fashion, you can only undo a certain amount of stat changes over a period of time. So if you want to convert all your STR into INT, of vise-versa, you're probably going to be waiting a number of days to pull that off. Considering the whole point of letting one character access all the jobs, especially on the fly, was to promote adaptive play styles, putting in this sort of limitation is absolutely ridiculous, and the big reason why many are glad to see Physical Levels hit their arse on the way out of Final Fantasy XIV.




As does seem to be the trend with these little categories, some explanation about XIV's Beta is in order! The user interface for XIV during the Beta, and for quite some time after release, was plagued with a variety of issues. Again, another trend that's appearing here. The input lag could be upwards of 5-10 seconds for opening menus or speaking to NPCs, even in some of the more emptier subzones. Navigating the Main Menu was also quite the hassle, with there being a distressingly large amount of menus inside menus inside menus. All in all, it wasn't too bad for a Beta, but the fact that the entirety of it made it through to the release with almost no changes made whatsoever just really ticked people off; and rightfully so.

It's difficult to judge where to begin on how the User Interface is right now. I suppose the best thing to do would be to actually list what exactly got changed. So, here they are, in order of appearance in the various patch notes over the past ten months or so!


November 25th 2010 Version Update:

• Response time of the user interface was improved.
• Default camera angle was adjusted.
• Class Rank and Physical Level EXP bars were added to the bottom of the main screen.
• Attributes & Gear was split up into two separate categories.
• When playing solo, loot dropped from mobs automatically goes into your inventory, ala FFXI.
• Placing the cursor over gear now displays its details.
• Selecting a slot in the equipment menu now only displays armour that can be worn there.
• Completed Quests was added as a category to the Journal.
• The player's current co-ordinates are now displayed on the map.
• Typing in <pos> will also display your whereabouts.
• Party members and various other doodads now appear on the map.
• A whole slew of new targeting and chat options.

December 15th 2010 Version Update:

• Response time for the retainer exchange items interface was improved.
• Players seeking repairs on items will have a handy-dandy little icon appear beside their name.
• The position of the gathering and synthesis interface was changed.
• Status effects now show their remaining duration.
• Ctrl+T can now be used to bring up the name of the last person who sent you a /tell.

March 3rd 2011 Version Update:

• Icons appear next to enemy names to signify if they are aggressive or not.
• Current quests, sidequests, guildleves and all that jazz now appear in the Journal under a single list.
• Various animations while gathering were sped up.

April 17th 2011 Version Update:

• Various HP/MP gauges in battle were increased in size.
• You can now see the actual level of regular mobs.
• Shops and other services are now shown on maps.

July 21st Version Update:

• An event reset timers tab was added to the Attributes menu.
• Items can now be easily sorted.
• New options were added to the Party Search and Recruit menu.
• You can now directly invite people from your Linkshell to a party in the LS menu.
• All settings within the Config/Options menu have been categorized.
• New targeting options were added to the Config/Options menu.
• Camera speed has been improved.
• Pop-up messages and various displays were included and improved upon.

A number of other tweaks were mentioned, but that's a list of most of the important fixes and general adjustments. Now the question is were they actually of any use? I cannot speak for those who use the keyboard and mouse controls (though a good friend I've been playing with says the mouse and general interface, while not perfect, are much better than in the Beta. As in they're now legitimately usable now), but my experience with using a USB gamepad has been a mostly solid and smooth one.

The interface still needs work in a few places, but it opens when you darn well want it to and it's much, much easier to navigate than before. Talking to a shopkeep to open the Buy/Sell menu doesn't take roughly five quadrillion years anymore, and you can sell things a lot faster too. Not as fast as the rapid clicking of World of Warcraft or its similar and numerous followers, but I've never found myself getting impatient with it. It works well enough for what it needs to do.

My biggest bones to pick with the current user interface are the battle targeting system, and how the Party system works. Or, more specifically, how it doesn't. The targeting system works 90% of the time (unless you're trying to cast AoE magic, then it can get a might unpredictable), but it can occasionally, in its assumed blood lusting eagerness, target the completely wrong monster on the other side of the field and really cock things up when you've got five different mobs currently wailing on you. Definitely noticeable if you're doing solo guildleves, or if you're the poor tank of the group.

Soon to be poor corpse.

As for the party interface and menu, maybe it's just me and maybe it's actually the simplest thing in the world and I'm a complete and utter spazknuckle for writing this (wouldn't be the first time), but I honestly can't figure out how to use the damn thing for the life of me. Near as I can tell, the Party Search and Recruit feature is obnoxiously convoluted and can't actually be used to search or recruit in any meaningful way. I wish I could explain it better, but that would mean I'd have some level of understanding over the blighted thing. I don't, so I just stare at it and grumble an awful lot. If someone knows how this works, some kind words about the whole process would be much appreciated.

I just sit here and wish I could just type in "/sea all [player name]" find them, throw an invite and be done with it. Oh, FFXI, how great your party system now looks with the power of hindsight.




So now that I've scared off every single potential reader hoping that this was a quick 'yay or nay' affair over XIV, let's actually get to the good stuff. The interface, graphics, client and all that jazz have been hammered into the old noggin' more times than necessary or legally required, so... what exactly do you do in Final Fantasy XIV anyway? Well, up until 1.18, that answer would've been guildleves a vast majority of the time. Although now with new content and various adjustments to the guildleves, they sort of slide to the wayside in terms of goal and content. Still very, very important, but they're not the be-all, end-all of XIV anymore. Good thing, too.

"You explained nothing, you improvident lackwit!" you cry, because words hurt and you're mean! "Just what the flying arse is a Guildleve?" Well, to be brief about it all (now there's a change of pace), a Guildleve is your typical "Kill X amount of Y monster" quest that every MMO and their Rage Dog have grasped onto in recent years. Unlike in other MMOs however, XIV has two little.. I guess, quirks, to bring to the table. One kinda neat, the other... well, not so much.

The first thing that differentiates Guildleves to typical MMO quests is that Guildleves are not given out by some random asshole standing in the middle of a town with a thumb up his arse. Guildleves are sort of 'official tasks' set out by whatever town you're currently in and depend on what level and camp you plan on visiting. They all revolve around bopping monsters over the head real good, so while there's not much in terms of variety right now, the centralized location of them (an adventurer's tavern in each respecting city) and the ease of heading out and getting some killing done is actually a pretty nice step in making it quick, easy content for players with less time to dedicate to an MMO.

The second thing Guildleves bring to the table almost entirely takes away from any positive aspects it does, and this is something anyone who's familiar with Mr. Tanaka's contributions to FFXI knows all too well. As mentioned at the beginning of this abyss of text, Tanaka seems to really enjoy putting limitations on how much enjoyment players can get from something. They can never just do what they want to when they want to, despite that practically being the damn point of a video game. So, with this in mind, when creating guildleves, Tanaka and his crew decided it'd be so gosh-darn spiffy to put limitations on this too! Namely, you could only do eight quests every forty-eight hours. Eight quests, two days.

To say this was a stupid-arse decision would be quite the upsetting remark to all the stupid ideas floating about in the ether that is humanity. This blow could have been softened if, at launch, the game had other ways of progressing your character at a decent pace too. Unfortunately, when FFXIV launched, all it had was the guildleve system, and some storyline quests which didn't give you an EXP or other stuff. That was it. Kinda makes you wonder just what the hell Tanaka and his team were bloody doing the entire time, doesn't it?

So... what did you do while you waited for that 48 hour period to pass by? Well, your only other option of progressing was to find a group of monsters somewhere out there in Eorzea and mindlessly thwack them for meagre EXP until you gained a level or shut the game off in frustration upon realizing that it's 2011 and XIV decided to incorporate MMO gameplay decisions that were considered bland and tedious damn near over a decade ago. Well, at least that's what the smarter people did.






To be perfectly frank, ever since I first heard of the limitations I always thought they were a stupid and completely unnecessary implementation; as well as an insult to all the players out there whose time this would massively waste. There is no need to limit how many quests a player can do, and it especially doesn't need to be put on a server-based reset timer. If it was done out of the fear that players would progress too fast, and that's an angle and I actually sorta understand, then lower the rewards but let people do them at a consistent rate when they want to. There was so much talk from Tanaka before XIV's launch about how more friendly and thoughtful the progression system was going to be in this game, in comparison to XI. This... this is nothing like that.

This is pure speculation on my part, but I feel the reason they did put the 48 (now reduced to 36) hour limitation in was to try and hide the fact that, honestly, guildleves were really all the game had to offer. If people got to Rank 50 and realized there was literally not a single damn event waiting for them there, well... I'd say they'd get pissed off, but people already did that when they ran out of guildleves to do for the next two nights and went, "Damn! Oh well, I'll just go do something else inste--Oh, wait, this game has no other content, does it?"

So, anyway, have Guildleves been improved upon since launch? Well... yes and no.

As just mentioned, the reset timer was reduced to 36 hours, and 1.18 started the overhauling process of the entire thing, where guildleves were now to become the easy, occasionally-done solo content for the game. Something for someone to pick up after a long day of work that didn't require much investment, but still churned out rewards that made it worth doing. It's not quite at that stage yet, but I can see it getting there real soon.

Another element of guildleves are the concept of Behests (as seen in the screenshot above) at each major camp across Eorzea. Behests are basically guildleves, except they can be done every 30 minutes, with no overall limitation on exactly how many times they can be accepted. Unlike the more solo-friendly guildleves however, Behests are generally group-oriented and require taking down more foes than usual, but offer pretty good EXP in return. You can do 'em solo, but you usually have to be at a slightly higher level than the camp they're at for that to work without you kissing the dirt to the point where it'll need chap stick when you're all said and done.

Usually there's at least 2-3 people at each camp that are interested in undertaking a Behest with fellow players. Most of the time I was invited by Japanese players (what with AU and JP timezones being so darn close) and didn't have a single problem undertaking the Behest or figuring out what was going on. After the Behest was done, everyone cheered everyone else, disbanded and went and did their own thing until the Behest was offered again a good 30 minutes later. It works pretty well.

If it weren't for the stupid "hurrrrr only X amount of quests in Y time hurrrrr" malarkey surrounding it, I would actually really dig Guildleves. While there's only a handful of tasks at each camp, and removing the limitation would make the lack of options rather obvious (as if they weren't already), I'd still find them enjoyable. Sure, you're just running around killing monsters, but that's what everyone's here in an MMO to do! The major difference between undertaking a guildleve, and just running around mindlessly killing mobs for hours on end is context. As flimsy as it is, being specifically told to kill Y amount of Z monster is justification enough to be a vast improvement over just killing the monsters yourself while running around in a circle for hours like a complete loon.

The idea that we're completing and handing in tasks is definitely not the most awe-inspiring reason enough for leveling in an MMO, but honestly most people don't care. Like in World of Warcraft, a vast majority of players don't read the text that accompanies a quest. They just want to know the reward and what needs killing. If you told them that there suddenly weren't any more quests and they'd need to traditionally grind mobs to level for a while, they'd rather rightfully storm off in a huff and go do something else. As little context as it really is, it's enough to spur the little cogs in the ol' brain to go do it.

That's not to say that the option shouldn't be there for people to grind mobs the traditional way. After all, if they find it enjoyable who's to say they can't play that way? It's just not a system a lot of MMO players enjoy these days, and they want reasons behind doing something. Even if they don't properly realize it themselves.

In my opinion that might be totally wrong, but I'm rather fond of it so nuts to you, I say just lower the gil reward (maybe the EXP/SP too) and just let players tackle as many guildleves as they want. It's up to them how and when they want to progress. Having the game basically scream "NO YOU CAN'T LEVEL TODAY COME BACK SOME OTHER TIME" isn't going to make them shrug their shoulders and return tomorrow. It's going to make them play another game and never come back. Afterall, why come back when the game they're playing now lets them play how and when they want to? What possible incentive does XIV offer?

I think it's a jolly fun system and all, but there's too much holding them, and the player, back right now.




With guildleves now all explained and what-not, it's time to move onto the rest of the content in the game! Which, honestly, means this category wouldn't have been here when the game launched, because apparently Tanaka thinks that giving people actual things to do in a video game is for losers!

I'm not going to blab on endlessly about every little smidgen of content the game has mustered up until the time of writing, because being the lowly Rank 24 Lancer I am, I'm still not even a stone's throw away from a lot of the mid-high level content. Not that there's a terrible lot of it right now, but it is growing. I figured I'd throw this disclaimer in here to avoid having some random person scream at me for not going absurdly in-depth about the new instanced dungeons or what have you.

What I will blab on endlessly about right now however are the sidequests! Which are basically just slightly glorified versions of regular MMO quests, but whatever. For the past few patches, more and more sidequests have been included in the game, and 1.18 added in EXP rewards (technically class Rank points) for completing them. They differ from the usual MMO quest in that they don't just slam a giant wall of text at you and go "GO KILL ME THIS THING RIGHT NOW". I mean, in the end that's what they do, but the presentation is a lot different, and often a single quest will involve running to and from multiple NPCs and developing a cute little story.

XIV's sidequests actually do a pretty good job of giving you a reward in equal to the effort and time you have to put into them. There's a few lackluster examples here and there, but they mostly do the trick. Unlike most MMOs, which pretty much do everything in their power to drive the quest-giving NPCs directly into your view when leveling, in XIV you generally have to do a bit of searching for 'em. Also, some sidequests can have you traveling quite a ways out into the Eorzean fields. It's pretty much a non-issue, personally, but if you want do complete, like, a hundred quests in a solid evening, then prepare to be disappointed. With new travel options coming soon, the distance complaint might be going away anywho. We shall have to see.

As mentioned just above, unlike most MMOs, where the text and justification given by the quest-giver is ignored by all but the most diehard of lore buffs, I've been rather entertained by some of the little stories XIV's told. They won't win any awards, or bring tears to the eyes of even the most jaded bard, but they're interesting enough and occasionally hold some delightfully tounge-in-cheek comments about the nature of NPCs and quests. In XIV, the quest-giver speaks pretty much directly to you in their obligatory NPC text box at the bottom of the screen, which is a darn sight better than lumping the entire thing into a "Quest Book" at the side of the page and calling it a day. It just feels so impersonal like that, y'know?

As for the tasks of the quests themselves, there's not much variety yet. You're either killing monsters, getting items by killing monsters, or talking to an awful lot of NPCs. The typical MMO Quest Trifecta, as it were. There's nothing overly wrong with this, and the aforementioned little stories keep it fresh, but I certainly wouldn't say no to some added variety. An escort quest here, an over-dramatic cutscene there, it's all good.






Newly added into 1.18, starting at Rank 22, are the Grand Companies! For all intents and purposes these are just slightly more storyline-heavy quests, but you get points for completing them that go towards purchasing all sorts of shinies, depending which of the Companies you sign up for. Since they were just added, there's not much to them right now, but I see them having some great potential for a Daily Reward system, like many MMOs employ. Except this one will have an actual story behind it. Hooray!

If you're getting bored of quests, and frankly even the most determined adventurer would get sick of 'em after a while, what else is there to do in Eorzea right now? Well, frankly, not that much. Everything involves killing one manner of monster or another, with the exception of Parley. Once you complete the Rank 13/15 storyline quest, you can walk up to random NPCs and engage in a little mini-game. It's rather hard to explain, but the gist is that you strike up a conversation with an NPC, and take turns discussing a variety of topics (shown as icons on a little 4x3 grid) and whoever has the most points when the turns end wins and gets various rewards. It's used in a few missions, but it's mostly fluff and a barely interesting mini-game.

Other than that, from Rank 25 onwards you can test your luck in two instanced dungeons that were just added in. They seem to be the standard fare of MMO dungeons, but with some neat rewards on offer, nice EXP, and with the future promise of a WoW-esque dungeon/party searching system it could turn out to be something quite more. Can't really say for now, but it shows promise. They just have to make it easier for the average player to actually find a party for the darn things.

The only other current content that's really worth noting are the Notorious Monsters. They act very much in the same way as their old FFXI brethren, and like your typical rare mob in other MMOs. NMs are a manner of powerful monsters that will spawn in the often remote corners of the game world, and have a chance of dropping some nice items for those who can bop them over the head real good. A few NMs can appear as storyline bosses and in some of the more demanding guildleves, but the majority will just be chillin' out in the field. There's some good money to be made, or saved, from people who take them on, and the vast majority are not camped to any degree. At least certainly not to the degree NMs would be in FFXI...

The thing to take away from this, if nothing else, is that XIV right now is a touch short on the content side. But considering the game launched with only two things to do (curse you, Tanaka!) the steps it's taken in the past 10 months have been quite impressive. With more events and further expansions to current content planned for the foreseeable future, there should hopefully be no shortage of things for willing players to partake in. A vast majority of it can be done solo or with a small party, so there's very little boundaries stopping even the most casual of players. A very good sign, especially coming off the almost disturbingly group-heavy Final Fantasy XI.

The issue with all this is that while content is quite appreciated and all that, it's of no good if XIV doesn't bring anything unique to the table. The game had nothing short of a catastrophic launch, and while people are definitely coming back and playing more often, they won't stick around unless this game does something the throes of other MMOs do not. So... does it?

Well, if you count the story-heavy content, then yes, but as of right now it's just a case of 'same old, same old'. Not that this is a damning thing against the game. Square-Enix released the stupid thing with such little content that, of course, the essentials to any MMO have to be added in first. While people do roll their eyes at "Oh, they're just adding in instanced dungeons now, huh?" and maybe rightfully so, they're something that the same sorely needed, and their presence, while not strong yet, is most definitely welcome. Although the best outcome would've been to have released a game that didn't have these issues at all, we sadly never got that, and as a result I just don't think it's fair, especially to the new development team, to judge the game's content completely until the essentials have been added. It's definitely lacking, but to it's credit, what is actually there I've found really quite enjoyable. We just need more of it.

Firstly, a lot more sidequests would be most welcome for the average leveling player. While there's a considerable number right now, there's just not enough to help progress your character while you're waiting for the stupid guildleve reset timer. Especially not if you're leveling multiple classes, since once you complete a quest on one class, it can't be redone ever again. I mean, it makes perfect sense not to, but it just means we need a lot more of them to help out when people are leveling other classes. Of course, if you removed the guildleve timer, this would become a non-issue. HINT HINT.

As much of a pain as it could be at times to get people together for them, I would actually really like to see some sort of equivalent to BCNMs in XIV. For the uninitiated, BCNMs were basically battlefields in FFXI that could be done at a variety of level caps starting from 20 that pitted you and usually two other friends up against NMs in an arena, and gave you all sorts of shiny rewards for killing them. The monsters, that is, not your friends. You gained entry to these by picking up Beastmen/Kindred Seals from any mobs at pretty much any level. Final Fantasy XIV could certainly do with something like that.

Maybe replacing some of the monetary rewards for doing guildleves with Seals would be a good way to balance out removing the 'leve timer? In any case, whatever Yoshida and his team end up doing, as long as players always have something to do on their path to Rank 50 there shouldn't be too much hassle. I've personally never really cared how long it takes for me to reach the end of the leveling run in an MMO. As long as there was always something to do and it kept things fresh, I was happy.








While just under two weeks is certainly nowhere near enough time to formulate a concrete opinion on any MMO's economy, XIV's isn't terribly advanced, and I'll be coming more from the angle of the average player:  someone who just wants the monies to buy the weapons and armours. In that regard, XIV's economy is... very weird, but seems to balance itself out on the prospect that the flaws on one end of the spectrum are evened out by the flaws on the other end.

First off, how do you make money in Eorzea? Well, there's a number of ways, but a majority of people will just get the gil from guildleves and rush towards the Auction House. This will then lead to quite a surprise when they discover that Final Fantasy XIV does not actually have an Auction House. In its place we have the Market Wards! Which are to Auction Houses as defecating on a plate is to a crème brûlée.

With NPC prices being ass-backwardsly expensive for a lot of items and gear (30-90,000 gil for Level 11+ equipment), your best bet for buying/selling anything will be to head to the Market Wards in any city. And by 'any city' I mean 'Ul'dah', because that's where everyone on pretty much every server lives right now. When you get to the Wards, you'll have three options. You can either manually search each ward (a room full of NPCs selling player items); find the item in a search function of sorts; or scream and storm off. Most choose the third option. While an Auction House would let you just find the item and buy/sell it on the spot, Tanaka, for reasons I don't know and frankly don't want to know, designed the Market Wards so even if you do find the item you're looking for in the search function, you then have to manually enter the Ward the NPC holding your item is currently in and wade through the ever-spawning crowd to try and find them. This can add a good several minutes onto buying an item that would've taken mere seconds to purchase in any other MMO. Including XIV's predecessor.

To sell your stuff in the Market Wards, first you have to purchase a Retainer. Retainers are NPCs who you give items to, set the price you want to sell them as, then choose what Ward they stand around in with a thumb up their arse for the next several days. I can sorta see what Tanaka might've been going for here, in trying to add personality to the almost entirely hidden and cold world of mindlessly standing in front of an Auction House counter and buying/selling your wares. The problem is that in adding this level of personality, the convenience of the system has gone flying out the window and into a pit full of fire. Also, the fire is made from acid.

To the game's sort of credit, when you have to go searching in the Wards for the NPC holding your item, they'll load up first. So you can see where they generally are. This would be considered a rather ingenious solution if the problem wasn't one that never should have existed in the first place. Also, it doesn't really solve anything, since purchasing items still takes forever and a half. The easiest solution would be to just go "Stuff it!" rip out the Market Wards and replace it with an Auction House system. Done and done!

Also, also, it's hard to accept the 'personality' argument when you enter a Ward and see a thousand NPCs standing in any direction, all clustered together. Not moving. Just staring. Always. Honestly, it's rather creepy at times.






On the playerbase side of things, it's something that's difficult to properly judge since the population in the game isn't exactly bursting at the seams. There's a lot of people running around on all the servers, which is a very encouraging thing to see, but it's hard to really gauge how XIV's playerbase responds to things. One of the biggest reasons I eventually gave up playing FFXI to any serious degree was due to the playerbase there. Despite the game encouraging, if not outright demanding teamwork and co-operation, XI's playerbase was extremely elitist and self-absorbed during its hay-day. Not to say everyone acted like a little tosspot, but you couldn't walk far into any forum or most Linkshells without hearing one group of another outwardly bashing another player because their gear wasn't optimized for every contingency ever. I mean, good gear is always a recommended thing, and nobody likes a Level 70+ Warrior drooling walking into a camp wearing nothing but Level 50 MP gear, but a lot of people just took it too damn far.

Speaking of, actually, gear in XIV is a rather funny thing. Again, as opposed to most MMOs, where gear is the sole reason for playing and poisons the mind of even the most usually apathetic player to some degree, gear in Eorzea is mostly useless in comparison. It gives you defense and some elemental resistance here and there, but your weapon is the only thing you really need to keep on the up-and-up. If you're getting hit more than you'd like, then better gear will certainly help, but there's very few cases now where gear becomes this "OMG +7 STRENGTH I MUST OWN THIS SCREW ALL OF YOU WHO DON'T HAVE IT" obsession. This is one of the best things XIV does, in my opinion.

Anyway, it's harder to be a gear-minded elitist in XIV (not that I don't doubt it exists to some capacity) and people generally don't care what you bring to the party when/if you join one, just as long as you don't stand around like a putz and act as a leech. It could just be that XIV's smaller community has a greater feeling of camaraderie right now, but there's really few things in the game for people to legitimately get angry over. This isn't so much because of the lack of content as it is lack of any particular elevated status for one player to lord over another. An uncharacteristic thing for an MMO, but it's something I rather like. Certainly beats the 60-page flame wars on forums over the most trifling of events.

When it comes to the playerbase (at least in-game) and the economy, right now there's no obvious issues with either, Market Place being a big smelly bumpit notwithstanding. Patch 1.19 is said to be introducing a Materia/Enchanting mechanic, to help boost the economy and the crafting system, so we'll just have to wait and see where that goes! I wonder if there's an Auction House Materia?

Probably be yellow, or red or something...




Although many aren't actively aware of it, the design of a world and how you get about in it is one of the most important factors in any game. You can have all the content in the world, and events where puppies and gigglekittens fly forth out of the PC's disc tray, but it won't mean squat if the player gets fed up with the game before they can reach the event, because it took too darn long to get there!

While Final Fantasy XIV has a downright gorgeous world in terms of aesthetic design, the layout and size of the zones themselves are absolutely atrocious. There are five areas in the game, and each area is, at least, twenty-odd times bigger than it has any right to. While I'm sure it was nice to tout that, hey, our zones are so much larger than those in other games, the areas in XIV are barren, worthless and nothing short of a severe pain in the arse to travel around in. It also doesn't help that there's no variety in the actual zones themselves, either. The second you step out of a city and see the grass/desert/forest ahead of you, you've seen all the zone has to offer. Everything beyond that is just exorbitantly copy/pasted terrain.

In a very rare decision from Mr. Tanaka, a while after the game was launched he did speak about the claims of all this grievous copy/pasting.

PC Gamer: Recently, players have been posting videos of terrain they think was copy and pasted. Is that the case, and if so why? 

Hiromichi Tanaka: Since FFI, we have always used the same design to show the scenery. We have one map divided into different parts, and then we use those parts. Otherwise, the data size is going to be terabytes. So, from the memory size point of view, it’s important to compile the data size. That being said, because we wanted the game to be seamless, we do understand there’s a lack of variation. So that’s why we do want to have more unique aspects in the area, depending on what area of the game it is. However, even for the 3D version for other MMOs, using the same data is quite common in designing the game. 

PC Gamer: I understand when it’s elements of a landscape, like a tree or rock. But these seem to be whole areas, to an extent that you don’t see in something like WoW. 

Hiromichi Tanaka: One of the explanations for that is the size of the parts of the data that we use. Back in the days of FFXI and even WoW, the memory of each part was much less than what we have to use now. These days, because of the graphics, the same size of the parts costs more memory size. If the PC itself has that same size of the- has got larger in the same manner, then we can increase the map in the same way. But the same size of the data is now like ten times more memory size, so that’s really costing the game data size. 

PC Gamer: If WoW could do it then, why isn’t it doable now? 

Hiromichi Tanaka: One of the reasons why is because of the quality of the graphics – it’s different from WoW. What we’re trying to do in each part is costing more memory. Basically that’s the difference. WoW was designed a few years ago, before FFXI. FFXIV is designed with the latest graphical technology; that’s why it costs that much of memory data. 

Now, Tanaka would actually have a fine point here, since what he's talking about does make a fair amount of sense. However, a lot of this could have been solved by simply not making a zone that's a dozen miles across. Copy/pasted terrain is certainly nothing new to games, and there's nothing inherently wrong with it. The problem only arises when you start making it incredibly obvious to the player that it's happening. Areas in XIV, especially The Black Shroud and Coerthas, damn near smack you in the back of the head with this fact every time to look around and try to appreciate the scenery. If you took the unique aspects of each zone, and removed all the obvious copy/pasting, you'd be left with a decent sized area that isn't a complete pain in the arse to navigate. Creating a giant zone and not doing a single thing with over 90% of it is just creating issues for yourself, and the players, that weren't needed at all.

Not every little nook and cranny of every zone needs to be a unique little snowflake. FFXI had an awful lot of copy/pasting going on, and yet its zones were still a treat to explore and travel through. They were small enough to make traversing a non-hassle most of the time, and yet seemed varied enough that you'd find yourself stopping to smell the flowers every so often. The only zones I can actively think of that got annoying were the Yhoator/Yuhtunga Jungles in Rise of the Zilart, because you couldn't navigate them due to all the obviously pasted terrain and lack of visual waypoints. XIV's zones are like dozen mile wide versions of those hellholes. Except with less Tonberries and more getting bored and lost. Well, more than usual, anyway.

Getting about the cities isn't too bad, though. Limsa Lominsa could use some compressing (and a map that's worth a damn), and Gridania should, and actually is (!), getting a almost total redesign in the future. Ul'dah's pretty fine the way it is, though there are a few places that go sorely unused. The new development team has already confirmed that zone redesigns are certainly on the way, with the plan being to start 'em up before the year's over, so it's great to see this issue is being actively combated.

Now about the traveling...

When XIV entered Beta, and all the way up until the time of this writing, there were only two ways of getting about; on foot, or by teleporting. Teleporting is actually a really convenient way of getting to and from, and something that's actually relatively unique to XIV! When you visit a city or camp anywhere in Eorzea, you attune your body to the Aethyrite (giant crystal thingy) there. Once you've done that, you can now teleport right back to the spot anytime you like from anywhere in the world. Neat, huh?

Unfortunately, this system seems to have been designed in mind to work in tandem with other, currently non-existent, methods of transport. Your character has a certain amount of Anima, which is what fuels the teleports. When you run out of these (and you will, if you hate running for damn near an hour to get to anywhere beyond the level 1-15 camps) you're pretty much screwed. I guess the idea was to only use them when you really need to get somewhere quick-smart, and then ride a mount of take an airship at all other times. I'm perfectly down with that. Except the tiny point that we don't have those methods of transportation yet.

Also, running about and seeing the world instead of teleporting would be jolly nice and all that if the terrain was varied and interesting enough to spur that exploration urge on. There's no incentive to explore Eorzea right now, outside of necessity, for very much the same reason everyone ever used the Quick Travel function in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Once you've seen one bit of the area, you've seen it all, so who cares?

Apparently nobody.

Also, is it just me, or is the area that appears in every trailer and wallpaper about the game not actually in the game?

As said, in the game's defense, the aesthetic designs of the zones are very easy on the eyes; and seeing Ul'dah or Limsa Lominsa all lit up in the distance at sunset, as you run your way back to town after some guildleves or general questin', is quite a nice sight. It's these moments that really make you feel that the world of Eorzea (well, Hydaelyn, but whatever) is quite alive. The designs are very Final Fantasy-like, and it feels like a HD 3D version of anything between FFI and FFV, but the actual getting about and the amount of obvious copy/pasted terrain is really hurting the immersion. I can't wait to see what the new team has up their sleeves with the redesigns, but for now this is one of the many things that's really bringing XIV down.




The last, but most certainly not least category to touch upon in this write-up about Final Fantasy XIV that's roughly ten times longer than I initially planned the stupid thing to be, is the game's story and quality of cutscenes. If you're making a Final Fantasy game, these are two things you most certainly don't want to cock up! So, like all the other questions asked here, does XIV's hold its own here?

While currently ending on a cliff-hanger, once you get past the rather unimportant beginning moments of the main storyline, it's actually quite an interesting little tale. For those curious, the region of Eorzea was inhabited by a variety of deities, which eventually be came to known as The Twelve. As is always the case with these sorts of things, the various tribes of Eorzea's past got really ticked off with each other about which of the Twelve to follow and started to wage war, after war, after war. This continued on for quite some time until one day the Garlean Empire started to invade Eorzea from the East. Unlike the various city-states of the region, which weren't all that technologically advanced, the Garleans had access to gigantic airships and all manner of Magitek machinery.

The first things the Garleans did was raze the city-state of Ala Mhigo, one of Eorzea's strongest footholds, to the ground with barely any effort. The remaining nations put aside their differences, and desires to stab each other in their sleep, and prepared for war. However, as quickly and mysteriously as they had arrived, the Garlean Empire just one day vanished from the region. The invasion never came.

From then on, a very uneasy peace resided over Eorzea. The remaining city-states started to cautiously rely on one another, but there was still a big problem. Unfortunately, with no real war to now take part in, the region's countless sellswords, guardians and mercenaries were out of a job. Many took to pirating and pillaging the land out of survival. Fearing further mayhem, specifically groups of brigands running around chopping people's head off while screaming "DING!" the city-states formed the adventuring industry; where a lot of the city's tasks and orders would be handed to those willing to partake in it. This helped keep the mercenaries in check, and made sure there were always able torsos brave fighters available when or if war ever emerged again.

The game's current story focuses a lot on rumors of the Garlean Empire's possible return, and why they vanished in the first place, as well as the looming threat of various beastmen tribes bringing forth Primals, the game's version of Summons, into the world to cause all manner of carnage and the like.

At the moment, it's certainly not the most in-depth story and world ever told in a Final Fantasy game, but it has a lot of nice concepts it can easily further develop, and the presence of an evil, looming empire is very much a series tradition. It certainly feels like a Final Fantasy story, and lord knows it references a lot of them in the process. Magitek from VI, the concept of Judges from XII, and the one Judge we've seen so far is packing the XIV equivalent of a Gunblade from VIII. So I suppose nobody can say XIV's writers haven't done their homework.

For those familiar with the stories told in FFXI, XIV's story is sadly no Chains of Promathia. Though that would be a rather unrealistic goal, since the main reason CoP was so strong was because it built off the existing XI story and world so damn well. XIV's tale is a lot like Treasures of Aht Urghan. New land, new mysteries, and while the tale and characters are pretty interesting, it's just doesn't have the right level of pacing or oomph to it. Though, as said, XIV's core story still aint over, so it can very easily improve itself.






As for the cutscenes proper, they're very much like their FFXI counterparts. You have your super-bombastic, holycrapthatwasawesome cutscenes, and then your slower ones, where everyone stands around and bobs their head for a little bit. Like the graphics and animation, XIV very much lives up to the series' standards in quality in these departments. Some of them can prattle on for a bit longer than necessary (so it is a Final Fantasy game hurr hurr hurr), but they're most really well done. Definitely much better than anything else currently out there in the MMO genre. Hell, some of the really high-budget ones are better than most single player RPG cutscenes out there.

Something that XIV does have that XI didn't is... voice acting! Shock! The voice acting is saved for the more super special cutscenes, so most scenes will be the standard text reading variety. It can feel a bit jarring at times, but it's never really taken me out of the experience. They're saved for when the game definitely needs them, so it's not so bad. I would've liked the entire game voice-acted, like Star Wars: The Old Republic is aiming to do, but whatever. It's not a deal-breaker by any means.

Oddly, considering the small portion of acted cutscenes the game does have, they certainly pulled in some big names. I was rather surprised when watching the credits to see names like Steve Blum, Claudia Black, Kari Wahlgren, Nolan North, Crispin Freeman and the like pop up. Very spiffy! I wish I could comment more on the acting itself, but I've yet to see everything the game offers in that department. I certainly have nothing bad to say about it, so you can take that away from all this.

Also, as expected, the game's opening FMV sequence is amazingly pretty. I kinda wished they focused on some neat forshadowing, like XI's did with showing Tavnazia years before Chains of Promathia was released, but what are ya gonna do? The opening FMV does seem to try and sell the game as being something it isn't quite yet, however; so be prepared if you watch it and go "HOLY FIGS THAT WAS AMAZING I CAN'T WAIT TO HAVE EXCITING ADVENTURES AS WELL AS AN ELEZEN FRIEND WITH A SNOOTY ACCENT"




I think that's pretty much all I wanted to say about my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV so far. Lord knows if it got any longer I'd have editors bashing the door down to cut my damn hands off. I'll keep this bit brief, since everything that I felt needed to be said already was. When some friends asked if I could write this silly pile of textual diarrhea, I responded back by asking if they had any specific questions they'd like me to tackle. So, without further ado and I can't imagine who honestly cares, here we go!

Is the game fun?

Well, it aint perfect, and I can see why people wouldn't like it at all, but I'm certainly having fun with it.

If I'm interested, should I buy it now?

If it looks interesting to you, then by all means. Just understand that it's sadly still very much a Work in Progress thing. It's getting better by the update, but we're still a far cry off calling it a finished product. If, honestly, you can call any MMO that. If you want to be safe, I would recommend waiting until Square announces a release date for the PlayStation 3 version, as that'll mean they believe they've solved all the games kinks and want people to play it for reals this time.

If you want to try it right the hell now, you can find it for pretty cheap and there's still no monthly fee.

What server should I go to?

If you have friends playing, go there. If not... eh, go wherever. Each sever's just as good as any other. Around the time of the game's launch there were talks of designating a few servers as 'Unofficial _____ Servers', like how Gysahl was the unofficial Australian server and what have you. I think that's all but fallen apart, however, with the game's shoddy launch scaring many away, and new players joining since then having no idea about any of that. I think Besaid still has its healthy role-playing community, if that floats your boat.

What server are you on?

Cornelia. Chosen by a friend simply for its importance to 8-Bit Theatre. Not a bad little hodge-podge of people, though it's very JP heavy, if that's not your thing. I started up the Linkshell (and by 'started up' I mean I just wanted to chat with my friend in some convenient capacity and it's not a legitimate linkshell by any means) Team Three Star. Just thought I'd get that out there, for no adequately explored reason.

Do you think people will actually come back to Final Fantasy XIV?

Honestly, I really do! Maybe not right now, maybe not for a while, but if Square-Enix advertises the PS3 launch just right, I think the game could have a very bright future. Something I never felt after the game launched last year. Hell, I wrote it off as quickly as the next knee-jerk loving guy. Naoki Yoshida replacing Tanaka is probably the best thing to happen to the game, and a lot of the promised content in the future could really turn the game around.

However, there's a very real chance that when/if the game does fix itself that players will just ignore it anyway. I really hope it does not come to that, since while still very much flawed right now, XIV is actually a game I see myself wanting to continue to play for a while. It shows promise! I just hope it gets the proper chance to prove itself when the time does come. Don't screw it up again, Square-Enix!

Is XIV a 'true Final Fantasy game'.

That's a stupid question.

If you were trapped in a room with any character from the game and had to sleep with th-

 Alright. That's it. I'm outta here.

But I...

Nope. Sorry. Beyond done.