FF14 review

[Don]

Finished the main story. This game overall is sort of like the second best MMORPG out there but not in a good way, as there's definitely a game that does anything FF14 does but is better in that respect in every aspect, and the sum of the parts isn't much either. That said, because MMORPG is sort of in a mess right now, maybe it's still worth it. It is occasionally brilliant in the dungeons but it's pretty hit and miss. The last 2 end game dungeons are a total joke. They require 8 guys, and the first one is faceroll easy which means you'll have a group that attempt to run past 50 mobs and then wipe because faceroll isn't THAT easy. The second instance is mostly faceroll but the second to last guy takes full advantage of lag. For example he pulls a ground AE on each person that you're supposed to avoid, but due to lag you wouldn't be able to avoid. Now that's not a big problem since the AE doesn't do that much damage, but this is FF14 lag we're talking about. What's likely to happen is while attempting to avoid the ground AE you somehow get hit by TWO AEs at the same time and then die, because remember your apparent position on the screen has no meaning. The game will always think you somehow ran directly at where the two circles overlap and then you die. In fact, the game punishes you for being good and rewards bad playing. If you just ignore the AE completely you'll only get hit by one of them unless another player is standing directly on top of you (and most players aren't that dumb). But if you attempt to move at all, the lag will make you get hit by both AEs.

The whole game alternates between brilliant and utter stupidity. For all the talk about Demon Wall's difficulty or whatever, the hardest part is if you get too close to him, you'll clip through the wall and then while you're wondering where did the boss go you'll probably get hit by one of the game over abilities (that are actually reasonably avoidable) because you're going to be confused wondering what happened to the boss when he suddenly disappears from your screen because you're actually inside him due to lousy clipping. That said, Garuda is a very cool battle that almost makes up for stupid moments like that. In short, there's no incentive to be good at this game because of lag and dubiously designed encounters, though you don't want to totally suck at the game either.

The story is pretty weak and certainly far worse than SWTOR. I think it's funny that appaerntly Square is too cheap to have all the story stuff voiced even though all the recent FFs are fully voiced. Yes I'm sure people will just complain about the voice actors never shut up and it's not like they're actually good, but it just feels cheap that the story NPCs only talk about 1 out of 5 quests. The guys you fight feel empty since you never actually have any conflict with them. Instead of having approximately 205 fetch quests that are part of the main story, it'd have been better if we actually have quests involve the Garlean guys that you're supposed to fight. Sure it'd probably be like you fight one of them and they'd leave for no reason or escape for the nth time, but it's still better than "I need the legendary hero to deliver this mail for me." quests.

The whole thing about having telegraph circles on the ground and then bosses suddenly stop using them is incredibly dumb. This isn't about making the game hard or not. The telegraph circles are a welcome addition because it's generally impossible to actually make any sense of how wide an enemy's ability is supposed to cover. Also, having telegraph circles with the same color as the background is dumb. This happens during Ifrit and Isgebind's white circles on a snowy background. Still, the addition of these things is probably an advancement for the genre, though FF14 does a great job at making you forget anything good it ever did when you suddenly have bosses that have avoidable attacks with no telegraph circles. In fact because you're trained to believe there are telegraph circles it just makes you think the ability is unavoidable when it's actually not.

The crafting game is actually decent though there's really nothing to do with it at the end because crafting 2 star is just too expensive. Similar to SWTOR's end game crafting, you need several million of currency to attempt this stuff and you're better off just advertising paying a guild the money for gear instead. It's nearly certain you can get it for much cheaper because gil is actually very hard to come by in this game.

[Shrinweck]

I don't think any MMORPG that has been announced is going to touch SWTOR for storytelling. Between the amount of effort and the crazy budget, it doesn't seem like anyone prioritizes it as much. Elder Scrolls just isn't interesting enough even though it has rich/lengthy lore. Wildstar gets a lot of cool information releases that make the story sound like it could be good as well, but I imagine the potential of the lore will outstrip the actual story brought into practice in the game itself.

Star Wars also has the advantage of having a TON of pre-existing nerd fantasies for people to live out. Who hasn't wanted to hunt people in space? Be a god damned space magician? Crush your enemies throat? Be James Bond in space? Fantasy lore like Final Fantasy and Skyrim just can't really touch it in terms of imagination since the ground is so well tread by games and movies in the past. George Lucas may have done his best to potentially ruin a ton of stuff but he could have released fifteen Star Wars movies by now and just COMPLETELY ruined it for everyone.

[Don]

There's plenty of material to work with at least on the class quests. You have the staple Black Mage, White Mage, and Dragoon at least that can certainly be interesting as per FF lore, but it fails there too. The overall story is an insane fetch quest even by normal RPG standards. It'd literally be like "Titan is about to destroy the world, hero of Light we need you to gather some cheese for tomorrow's party". I really miss the SWTOR's ability to kill or at least abuse anybody you don't like. I was hoping I can shove a leather boot into the Leatherworker guildmaster and force her to eat it, and most of the guys I have to deliver mail for I wish I can kill them too. The cast of the story is literally some of the least likeable characters ever assembled in a game. I was hoping all the guys would just get killed by Bahamut or whatever at the end but unfortunately that never happened. I get that in a MMORPG you're always the one dealing with the mess, but SWTOR had it right by allowing you to at least somewhat fight back against the norm. No you can't ever not do the quest but you can often shoot the guy you don't like after you're done with the quest, or at least tell him that he's a fool and should've been shot. That was what made SWTOR's storytelling great. Sure aside from the Agent you don't get to choose anything that'd meaningful change the outcome of the story, but it feels like you can at least get some payback. Honestly, the story of FF is worse than most MMORPGs simply because it's in the way. In a game like WoW it's not even clear if there's supposed to be a story. You just go to the next ! and click accept, so even if the story sucks it's not intrusive. FF shoves the story in your face everywhere you go, and it sucks and a large part of it is due to the nonstop fetch quests. The best story fights are generally the no name guys jumping out from nowhere to help you. Why? Because they haven't done anything to make you want to kill them. Papashan coming to help you was pretty epic. Who was Papashan? I think he's like a supplier or something. The point was he never did anything that'd make me want to kill him and he came to help you in a side quest, and despite being a Lalafell he even sounds heroic. Can't say the same about the loser bunch aka The Scion of the Seventh Dawn that you've to work with. Oh yeah, Papashan even wears plate armor, unlike Minfilia, the leader of the Scions who wears your standard battle bikini to battle, and sucks at fighting to boot. I mean it's one thing if you got some scantily clad companions that are actually good looking or at least good at fighting, but they're neither. I mean the Sylphs aren't even cute. The FF4 sprites are better looking than this abomination they called Sylphs. They really went out of their way to design some of the ugliest companion characters you could find.

[SineSwiper]

George Lucas may have done his best to potentially ruin a ton of stuff but he could have released fifteen Star Wars movies by now and just COMPLETELY ruined it for everyone.

He'll let Disney do that.

[Shrinweck]

I really wish the story was more engrossing and there was more to the end game because the crafting is so god damned addicting.

[Don]

I noticed a huge problem with endgame or even just high level stuff. You can't have a game where you can CC bosses and still have any semblance of balance between classes when CC abilities are not even. Looking at various guides, you can actually silence bosses and even raid bosses and in fact quite a few raids seems to be built around that, but silence is not a skill every class gets. Traditionally the boss encounters are just flat out immune to every form of CC unless the bosses are intended to be CCable and that'd usually be a in-game mechanism (e.g. click on something to stun the boss to stop the boss's AE, not because you can actually stun him). SWTOR has the right idea by listing the immunities an enemy may have so you'll immediately know what works on that enemy and how you're supposed to deal with its abilities. For example Sorno does not have Unshakeable (immunity to interrupt) and it's very clear that you're supposed to interrupt his two powerful abilities to make the fight manageable, though in general of course every boss just have Unshakeable + Boss Immunity. To have bosses that can be silenced is just incredibly dumb. EQ1 did that briefly due to a mistake and every boss turned out to be a cakewalk besides the Avatar of War (who has no spell like abilities whatsoever), because people just keep Dragons silenced for the entire duration of the fight so they can't even breath. I know people really think it takes super amount of skill for guy 1 to used his CC followed by guy 2 and so on but it's really not.

[Don]

As an observation, the designer of this game is very newbieish. That's not necessarily a bad thing because in some sense if you've a game where bosses can be silenced it is obviously relatively easy so enough people can actually beat it. It's the wrong way to make content accessible but it's probably better than having content that is never accessible. Still, it's pretty mind boggling that the designer of FF14 just didn't get the note "BOSSES ARE IMMUNE TO CCs" that's been enforced since EQ1 in MMORPG history. Yes there are always lapses but those are supposed to be lapses, not a design decision to let you stun a boss so that it doesn't do anything while you kill it.

[Shrinweck]

I've still been hopping between classes. I got my summoner to 30 but tossing out DoTs in this game just isn't doing it for me. I loved playing the DoT class in Guild Wars 2 because you could literally watch the hit points melt off your opponent. In FF14 you just have to take it on faith that your DoTs are doing any damage and I've read threads on the forums that sometimes the last tick doesn't even register. It's unfortunate because I LOVE the utility the summoner brings but 98% of the time I'm bored.

My bard is a lot of fun but the game is almost too easy while playing one. This class probably has a bunch of impending nerfs. My monk is probably my second favorite job right now and I'm letting that character sit around to get bonus experience at the moment. I had 96 leves built up on my summoner and a ton of rested experience so I've switched gears to THM and that's probably my favorite job right now. I have fun on my dragoon too but my disciple of hand/land skills are so low on that character that it's hard to justify playing her when it'll probably take ten hours to catch her up to my other characters. Maybe some day.

I've been considering making a switch to Ultros because I like how the economy is on that server more. More items are actually worth selling as opposed to Midgardsormyr where everything I make is either useless or sells for half of what it would on Ultros. Midgardsormyr has a more vibrant shout channel in its zones though.. For better or worse it's nice to be reminded other people are playing the game with me. Even in heavily populated city zones people were all but silent on Ultros.

Edit: My Summoner/THM had enough rested experience to take me from 15-28.5... nice. And I still have 91 leve allowances.

[Don]

I started raiding and it's designed by a bunch of morons. Whoever designed Garuda needs to just do all the encounters, and if he can't do that just replace every fight with Garuda with slightly different stats. Similar to normal mode Garuda is the only required group content that isn't dumb, cheap, or stupid (sometimes all of the above). Although some of the mechanisms are on the cryptic side, you can reasonably figure them out after a few tries and they don't slap you for being good. The other stuff I've done so far:

Chimaera - Don't be a caster DPS on this fight (which I was). If you're anyone else, it's merely just a pretty dumb encounter. As a ranged caster DPS (Archers are okay), you should consider reroll or just immediately die and hope the rest of the party can carry you so you don't have to put up with how dumb this fight is. By the way, this fight isn't actually hard. It's just unbelieveably dumb if you're a casting DPS class.

Hydra - Aside from a cryptic instant kill mechanism that requires you to look up on a guide, this is probably an okay encounter.

HM Ifrit - Dumb but similar to story mode, it's easy enough to not be offensive. Basically this fight rewards you for being dumb and punishes you for being clever. You cannot realistically dodge Radiant Plumes or the triple charge. What you're supposed to do is just immediately stand smack in the middle of any one AE or any one charge because this guaranteeds none of the other ones will hit you, and it's pretty trivial for your healer to power through the damage it does. But if you think you can actually dodge this stuff you'll take 2 AEs and just die. Leave your MMORPG raiding skills at the door before doing this fight and it's okay.

HM Garuda - Couldn't quite beat it in PUG though got close. Aside from the fact that you'll group with guys who suck who will tell you that you suck (generaly problem with western MMORPG players), and that this fight basically punishes you if you still remember how you did it on story mode (because every mechanism works exactly the opposite of how it used to), this is the closest thing that resembles a well-designed encounter. It is probably unnecessarily hard but I guess it's supposed to be high end even though it's the second real raid (Primals). I recommend doing this in Duty Finder because at least will never see those guys again if it turns out to suck, whereas if they're on your server expect guys to go around telling others how much you sucked (again general problem with western MMORPG players).

HM Titan - There's no need to do this fight to know that it's going to be dumb. Whoever designed this in story mode should be fired, or worse should be forced to beat it in a PUG on a western server and hopefully will be scarred for life. I mean, even if they changed nothing, it'd still be dumb, but of course you can count on even more instant kill mechanisms with no chance of escaping.

So by my count, out of the first 5 'raid' like things, 1 is okay (Garuda), 1 requires you to leave your MMORPG know-how at the door (Ifrit), and other 3 are an insult to MMORPG players. I think the raiding game will collapse rather spectucularly, not just because it's hard, but that people don't want to put up with encounters that are an insult to the genre. Garuda is hard and it's not an insult to the MMORPG genre, but almost everything else is.

[Don]

Got to Titan HM finally. If the goal is to make people quit your game, this is a great way to do it. This is basically a random death fight. Unless you've developed skills generally found in manga superheroes, you will randomly die to one of the many cheap mechanism in this game. Although it is modified at some level by your skill, class, or gear, there's a very high chance you'll die no matter what you did. That is, unless you're a healer or a tank. So for the most part you'll have these guys talk smack about how you totally suck, when a trained monkey can easily tank this (you stand in one spot and almost never move, not to mention the tank can shrug off effects that are fatal to DPS). Healer is not necessarily easy, but since the moves are designed to take off 90% of your HP in one hit with a second weaker hit following in short succession, this is actually quite easy for healer to survive (heal yourself), but a DPS that is under the same situation is probably dead unless your healer has aforementioned superhero abilities (e.g. your healer sensed a disturbance in the Force and realized you're about to eat a bomb and healed you immediately after you lost 90% of your health half a second before the next 500 periodic pulse damage kills you. Note that if it's the healer who gimped, he would need no supernatural abilities to heal himself on time). Without being particularly overgeared, superskilled, or have all the right overpowered classes, I estimate the chance to beat this fight is around 1-2%. Now that's okay because if you tried long enough you'll eventually win, except because this is a random death fight, the most likely scenario is that a guy randomly dies early, and a guy who randomly did not die complains about the guy who randomly died sucks and leaves the party, so you have to start over (can't even add replacements). I've raided with bad players for a very long time in EQ1, and the random death fights leads to a caustic environment. It's not like say you saw this guy stand in fire and died and you can definitely isolate the problem as him. The skill/reflex demands of Titan is completely unreasonable especially for certain classes (casting DPS). Even for the favored classes I've seen plenty of them die horribly to a cheap mechanism (just less likely compared to me). Even on the attempts where I preformed like I champ I know it's actually got nothing to do with what I did but that I magically guessed all the mechanisms right.

This game actually punishes you very heavily for being aggressive on DPS, except Titan has an enrage timer so you can't exactly take it easy. I mean sure if my goal is to just not die I can easily survive the entire fight until enrage kicks in, but that wouldn't be very useful. By attempting to contribute, you run the risk of appearing like a gimp, which is actually a serious problem if you're playing strangers because they'll just bail on you. I guess Sqix thought you'd go with your 7 friends who have went through all adversity and can put your life in each other's hands, and if you got a group like that sure the encounter is almost fair. If you can be assured no unreasonable blame will occur after you wipe 50 times to this raid, it's actually quite challenging. But the only way this could happen is either the scenario I described, or that all the guys you ran into have a fundamental understanding of the encounter to know that people are supposed to randomly die.

[Don]

This chart is a good example of what's wrong with the game environment: http://i.imgur.com/KP8wXYZ.png

And the guy doing this is going to be guy telling you that you totally suck while he 'just stand there'.

[Shrinweck]

I have zero interest in the endgame grinding in this game. It sounds like a nightmare. Even if the raiding content planned for the future was flawless in design I'll probably remain uninterested. Everything that keeps me strapped in for more in other MMORPGs like LOTRO, SWTOR, and Rift is missing from this game. Still... it'll be a nice distraction for another month or two.

If you have players charging other players for runs into dungeons for endgame gear your game is somewhat broken.

If future expansions release classes and new crafting skills I could see buying back into the game in the future if Wildstar isn't the pants-dropping dream that it reads as on paper.

[SineSwiper]

I have zero interest in the endgame grinding in this game. It sounds like a nightmare. Even if the raiding content planned for the future was flawless in design I'll probably remain uninterested. Everything that keeps me strapped in for more in other MMORPGs like LOTRO, SWTOR, and Rift is missing from this game. Still... it'll be a nice distraction for another month or two.

I think I remember Tortilla calling FF11 the grindiest MMO known to man. FF13's end game was pretty fucking grindy, and that wasn't even an MMO. (I put many hours of effort in trying to get all of the best gear and failed to do so because it was SOOOO grindy.)

[Don]

Well, the part of problem of all MMORPG is the community. It's kind of like how MOBAs have a problem with its community too. However there are ways you can design encounters that will at least make people act sort of nice. Having a guy (the tank) who is perceived as the most important that can stand completely still and yell at other people for sucking is not how to do it. If you want to randomly kill people you need to also randomly kill the tank as well. This is not done for encounter challenge but for the sake of sanity.

I'm actually not opposed to the idea you might only be able to beat an encounter 1% or 10% of the time and it's not beaten in a deterministic manner but the problem with such a design is that most people THINK they can beat something in a deterministic manner. E.g. if I beat it it must be because I'm awesome which means I should beat it 100% of the time, when all that happened was you got lucky the last time.

Also Bards right now dominate the end game. Right now the best DPS setup is 3 bards + the token LB guy (usually melee, but occasionally a caster DPS depending on the encounter). In terms of gameplay it's sort of workable, but in terms of community it is not, in the sense the game is borderilne trivial as a bard to survive and again you'll have these guys yelling at you how you suck. Bards do not have a casting time, and are ranged. This means they're completely not affected by any movement mechanism or any anti-range or anti-melee mechanisms. The end result is that they're almost certain to have the highest overall DPS (even though they're fine baseline) and because they don't have to be in melee range nor do they ever have to worry about interrupting a midcast, they usually end up get to tell you how you suck to get hit by the AEs. Heck, even something minor like AE being instant cast is a huge quality of life thing. Try to cast an AE on Gardua's feathers as a BLM and you'll generally see them make a lap around the battlefield before you're even finished casting and end up hitting one target. A bard's AE is instant so they can actually come pretty close to hit the feathers when they're all clomped together, not 3s later when they all take off like the Roadrunner.