Final Fantasy XIV

As everyone else no doubt does, I compare this game to Final Fantasy XI. I played FF XI for a good 3-4 years and enjoyed almost every second of it (except the waiting around for hours on end for a party) and that's one the main features why I wanted FF XIV because i would no longer need to do this.

I played the Beta and got rather excited about how this game would unfold over the coming months...however it didnt happen. I played for as long as i could during the time they were altering, updating and faffing aorund with layouts, gameplay etc.

I purely hated the idea of damaged gear...Imagine getting one of the best weapons in the game and then BAM, completely ruined and you have to spend like 10 hours getting the items to repair it, no thankyou. The fighting type I did enjoy I must admit and playing with someone you know was a joy. The fact that you could change your class by switching your weapon was genius however the fact that you then had to faff around with all your abilities each and every time you did this was not!

EDIT - The damaged gear is easy enough to repair via an NPC up to 75% quality in any major town. Also they have made universal repair items that allow you to repair any item so long as you have the correct job/rank level!

This game is heavily based on Mining, fishing and all other sorts of gathering, collecting and selling and if you do not do any of these then you CANNOT progress in this game.

EDIT - The levequests aren't as tedious now since the 1.18 patch and leveling up botanist for example isn't as annoying as it was before.

Who ever thought of the idea of saying "Hey maybe It'd be a good idea to limit people playing" is an idiot. Yes i think it's nice that people who don;t get to play often can still progress at a good rate, but why hold back the vast majority of the people who play this game!

EDIT - The fatigue system has now been removed!!! Thankyou to whoever got rid of, however i have noticed that the overrall experience has been dropped generally all over the board by a small amount.

I would like to stress how awesome the Graphics are, anyone who has a mediocre graphics card in the average system, don;t even consider this game. This game deserves to be played at maximum graphics and if your system can't do that...then replace it.

Since the 1.18 patch I'm now back on the game and enjoying it again. Ranking up 10 rank 10 on any job is extremely easy and Getting gil isn't difficult what so ever. Join the FF XIV world for free whilst you still can!

EDIT. Since the 1.19a patch we have now been introduced to Ifrit fights etc. We have been informed of all the big changes from SE and they are telling us that 2.0 will be the major update, but thats a long way off. Its going to be free for another 2 months then we must start paying, i htink i may even pay for this game! The fighting system has improved a great deal, better gear is out, even adding materia to equipment (at a huge risk) We now have airships, boats and chocobos (personal chocobos rock!) and so much more. Bring on more updates, im looking forward to what is to come in the future!

EDIT!! Patch 1.21b We have now been introduced to the new Moogle fights, attribute points can be allocated to each class individually, gear no longer gets damaged as easily, crafting is not quite as tedious as before, the lag has slightly dropped. There are many more positives coming out of FF XIV than ever before. In the latest producers letters we have been informed that 7 more jobs are on the way including Warrior, White Mage, Black Mage and Paladin. They are also going to be fusing some of the servers so that more people can interact with others from their own time-zone. I am beginning to once again become excited by the prospect of Final Fantasy online. Leveling is no where near as bad as it has been in the past and parties are finally popping up all over the place. I'm not sure what other servers are like for activeness but Istory is starting to actually look like a real life city with lots of hustle and bustle! Bring on the end of February when patch 1.21 is released and more new content is released! EDIT...Servers have now merged and there seems to be a lot more players on than ever before, roll on 2.0 for even more activeness...if only they would fix the server lag!

EDIT!!! Patch 1.22 New jobs, Black Mage, White mage, Paladin, Warrior, Monk, Dragoon and Bard have all been released and how great it is to have them in game. Its added a new dynamic to fights now, new strategies to primal fights, although if im honest i think its heavily leant a LOT of the fights towards using the new jobs which means people aren't touching the old jobs quite as much. Certain classes are certainly better than others and again i'm going to be brutally honest, they have made a few mistakes with in game stats, for example, Paladin in my opinion has not had Stat points distributed properly, Warrior is a far superior tank and better damage dealer but i am hopeful that they will fix this. The two new raids are Aurum Vale and Cutters Cry, I wont go into too much detail about this but expect lots of mobs, then a boss, then more mobs, then another bigger boss...oh and i forgot there is a challenge to try and speed run these dungeons ^^ Last but not least i will briefly touch on the fact that its only one day until patch 1.22a is released which means, Garuda primal fight, Garuda Weapons, more new weapons introduced, a teaser about possible AF gear for crafting/gathering, one of the three Hamlet defenses is being released. (AF weapons have been pushed back to 1.22b)

EDIT!! The new story quest of the 7th Umbral era has been released (won;t go into too much detail as people tend to play the FF series for the story) and Artifact weapons which i must say are the biggest challenge that i've seen set by any MMO for gear. Also a lot of new information in regards to 2.0 has been released in the past week, plenty of screen shots with how the game will look (or almost will look, its actually meant to be approximately 15-25% better visuals) the roadmap that they have laid out including completely new map design, complete world re-creation, game engine, game UI and all new servers, Yoshi-P even hinted that they may be putting some servers in Europe on one of his interviews but there were no promises. One if the new kooky little ideas which some people might find interesting is how they are introducing summons. There will be, say, one Ifrit per world and your party must go find him, beat him and then have 2 weeks to build up a gauge/bar, once it is complete you can summon him at any time, during any fight for a set amount of time. One other thing that Yoshi-P mentioned is that after the first stages of the 2.0 beta the game will actually be down for approx 1 month, just a warning to all you out there thinking of waiting a little while before you try this game, don;t wait, try it now before the long change over occurs.

(As a foot note i have attempted to change the fun star rating up to approx a 3 or a 4 but Amazon won't allow me to alter it)

Any online RPG is, at launch, a work in progress, so the experiences of the first few days really give very little sense of the long-term potential of the game. I am writing this review after a week of (moderately intensive) play, and these views are just a first, shell-shocked insight for anyone thinking of devoting months of their life to this world.

The best thing about FFxiv is its crafting, which is incredibly deep, if rather frustrating. Even crafting a level 7 dagger requires the services of a blacksmith, a carpenter, an alchemist, a botanist and a miner; by the time the blacksmith assembles it, there will have been well over an hour of playing time devoted to manufacturing it. Usually in each low-level recipe there will be at least one item that can only be crafted by a higher skill level, usually in another profession; this stimulates trading between crafters, but pushes up costs, sometimes out of the range of the low-level character for whom the item is intended. Try the wrong recipe at too low a skill level and you will lost the materials. It's enough to make you tear your hair out, but is intriguingly complicated. Repairs, for example, can be conducted on items with the right crafting profession, the right materials and the right skill level. In theory you could make an in-game living simply by repairing other people's armour!

If it sounds as though all this crafting requires massive cooperation, perhaps through a guild of adventurers, then "yes and no". One character can, in theory, master all the classes and all the professions, which will suit a player who wants to concentrate on one character. Extra characters (unlike in World of Warcraft, but like FFxi) require additional subscriptions, so this will be a very expensive game for anyone hoping to spread out their gaming across several.

Cooperation is, however, a key aspect of any online game of this sort, and on the social side you can form guilds called "linkshells" so that you can ask questions, give advice or just chat. Many players currently use the translation system, meaning that conversations can be slightly garbled, and there is a problem with the number of words allowed for a line, and input lag, that means that the social side is not as enjoyable as one would hope. Given that most players are crafting for much of the time, the fact that you can't chat successfully while doing so is a major inconvenience.

The class system works very well, with even low-level characters being able to use the abilities of more than one class at any given time. Not all abilities can be used with all builds (some are specific to the weapon rather than the class) but it is very rewarding to find that your main combat spec has picked up a nice new ability from one of your minor specs. Changing class is as easy as equipping another weapon or - in the case of crafting or harvesting - another tool. Unfortunately you do seem to need to change the abilities on your hotbars, however, which makes things slightly unwieldy, and you cannot easily stop between fighting to mine an ore or chop down a tree, because you need to re-equip and change class.

The battle system in FFxiv is not entirely satisfactory. Although the game may improve in this area, targetting feels quite clumsy, and there is so much lag on battle animations that you feel oddly disconnected from things on-screen. Given that the game has a beat-'em-up logic (blocking, for example, is an active, not a passive skill) this lag is more than a minor inconvenience. Enemies feel few and far between but, worse, it is difficult to tell whether an enemy is an easy kill or impossibly hard: there is a system of colours that is meant to help you, but enemies that are supposed to be easy prey can be hard to kill, while enemies that show as very tough can be easily defeated if your character's physical level is higher than its current class level.

Quests (called "leves") are thin on the ground at present, with low-level characters required to do the same leve several times in order to raise their level. Oddly, you can only currently do eight of the main type of leve in 36 hours, together with eight of the crafting leves, so everyone has to go and collect their leves from the main city at the start of each period. Leves can be shared, making them easier and enabling characters to do more than their own eight. Moreover, behests, which take place on the hour, are a good way to try out parties, and present what can be quite simple combat challenges.

Sound is very good, both with regard to music and ambient sound effects. The graphics are (as ever with Square Enix) at least as good as they need to be and often better, but due to the graphical detail there is currently an absurd amount of draw-in delay: you can be walking through an empty market that after a minute suddenly fills up with ten npcs and sixty other player characters who were simply invisible previously. Perhaps once the servers are less busy, or after Square Enix increases its server resources, this will improve, but it is currently very poor indeed.

Another irritation is the economy. There is currently no auction house (and as far as I know no plans to introduce one), which means that players sell to one another either via their personal shop, or via their retainer, who keeps a permanent bazaar at the markets. The problem with this is that if you want to buy something you have to schlep from player to player inspecting them to see what they might be selling, although there is already a third-party bazaar finder online and the slack may be taken up by other websites and developers. An Economics student would probably have fun analysing it.

Overall, this is a game that requires a huge commitment in order to make progress, and it is currently not clear that the effort will be rewarded. Given that the first week of live play was marred by frequent service interruptions, a wise player might consider trying this out once the bugs have been ironed out and the server population stabilised.

I'll update if anything materially changes, and please feel free to add future changes in the comments to this review if you feel that it has become badly outdated.

[last revised 8 October 2010]

Being a loyal and devote fan of the saga, I am especially sad about this product that doesnt' delivery any kind of fun.
Levelling your adventurer is slow and boring, and not even the wonderful graphic helps you in relieveing the chore of exping and grinding on rats to reach the next level.
The quest system, you have 8 quest and then you can't quest anymore, is simply too slow even from a casual player point of view: easily in one hour you do all the quests and you then can't do anything else then crafting.
Crafting is again very boring and utterly random, even very low level craft breaks easily even if you spend gils (the FF money) on having a special buff for the crafting. The crafting system demands also you have at least 3-4 different craft levelled to do anything - it took me litterally 2 hours to make a shirt level 5 from scratch and in the end I couldn't finish it because I had to be leatherworking leve 10 to do one of the ingredients, for item which should be Weaving level 1.
Finding the material for craft or even items to wear is difficult: the entiere system is based on player Bazaars with no AH whatsoever.
On top of that, the User Interface is laggy and repetitive and you have to confirm your choice so many time - to craf something you have to press the button at least 5 times, each time with few seconds lag.
The world design is weird and clearly done for economy of textures... very often you see a path between rocks and you think you can pass through but you hit an igzinvisible wall. Very often you find yourself running for half an hour to reach a mysterious camp for a level 1 craft quest in areas full of enemies that one-shots you. It took me at least one hour once to just run to the destination for the quest I was on...

Most of these points here are bad points even in FFXI, which I played for at least 6 years and I loved so much. But the comparison is useless: FFXI was and is a beautiful game, well designed for its time. This one is indeed dated even for FFXI standars, the only beautiful point being the music and the graphic detail - although you neeed a very strong computer to experience it in HD (my laptop with i5 core, 4 GB, radeon 5870 is not enough and I have to play it with low levels of details)
Don't buy this game so far, wait for the patches and the updates because as it is, this game is not ready for the market and has so many problems and bugs that will ruin your experience and your days off.

I am particularly disappointed and sad in saying all these things because I am a big fan and I don't have any words to explain what they have done to the beauty of the saga with this uncomplete and utterly useless piece of beautiful graphic art...
There is no game, for the moment it's just a time sink waiting for content which I hope will arrive soon.

Gamespot rated the game 4.2 have a look there and check the video review they made to realize at what stage is the game.
Don't do like me, that I didn't believe them and I wanted to try it.
It's a waste of money and time.