Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

[lecompte]

Any community interest in this game?

A group of friends and I are going to be going into this game pretty hard to carry us over to EQ:N. We'll be on the Gilgamesh server and firing up a linkshell/company.

Anyone else going to be playing? If your looking for a crew to play with when it comes around, our linkshell/company information is available at http://meteorology.shivtr.com/ so you can track us down.

[Millburn]

A few of my RL friends and their FFXI linkshell will be playing when it goes live. We're all on the Cactuar server for this beta phase in the meantime.

[lecompte]

Nice! How're you guys liking it? Got into the beta but I don't like pre-playing these sort of games because it removes that thrill of the first go around. If I get into an early beta I'll play because I want to help make the game better but at the stage of load testing, I just pass.

[Millburn]

I played FFXI semi-hardcore many many years ago but never went into the whole end game scene with it but the people I'm playing with have basically devoted their entire online gaming life to FFXI. The general consensus with them is that it's the second coming of Yoshi-P or something haha.

I've been enjoying it a lot so far. The interface has vastly improved and the sluggishness of the engine that we all know and love (lol) has for the most part been stamped out. Those two things have gone a long way in terms of making it feel modern and lessening that barrier of entry. It feels like a whole package now even though we're missing at least two classes and who knows how many jobs.

[lecompte]

Ya sounds like the expansions/new content are going to be coming hard and fast. I wonder if they will take on the Eve model and just keep the subscription but release new content in a steady stream for free... One can hope.

[Ishukone]

Picked it up this weekend for a beta test, fun as hell. The flexibility of characters is really refreshing from a standard mmo.

[Khaleesi]

Originally Posted by lecompte [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Any community interest in this game?

A group of friends and I are going to be going into this game pretty hard to carry us over to EQ:N. We'll be on the Gilgamesh server and firing up a linkshell/company.

Anyone else going to be playing? If your looking for a crew to play with when it comes around, our linkshell/company information is available at http://meteorology.shivtr.com/ so you can track us down.

I'm pretty critical of ARR, however am also fair.
The game is not as good as FFXIV 1.0 (with 1.23 combat and patch) - 1.0's strength was that in contrast to the market trend of MMOs, it was difficult, not a hand-holder and felt more like an updated FFXI but with it's own spin on things.

ARR is a very watered down, ease of access, spammy style version of 1.0, that moves even further away from FFXI heritage and more towards our modern expectations of online RPGs.

Having said that, the story is strong(even if the cut scenes are horrendous), the group play is cohesive and the overall enjoyment is there - it just however gets repetitive when you realize that it's yet another game that forces you to push through half of your level cap in order to start actually enjoying it.

This is not the game that should tide people over to EQ Next (which is nowhere in sight), unless of course you are valuing social relations more than anything else.

However if it's group play you like, then NeverWinter online has a lot of communal connectivity and is setup to be very multi-person friendly. It's greatly accessible, much like GW2, to let you and your pals jump on, play for a few hours and accomplish a lot, then log off and not worry about it.

Originally Posted by Ishukone [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Picked it up this weekend for a beta test, fun as hell. The flexibility of characters is really refreshing from a standard mmo.

Maybe from your perspective, which may be limited - yet the job system is not new, it and in other forms has existed for many years. FFXIV 1.0 had the best of them with the overall adventure level, and then subsequent individual job levels beneath it. Unfortunately ARR did away with this, so for example if your adventurer level was 44, you could travel to places with mobs at around that level without significant fear of death or penalty; even if your highest job level was only 36. Now in ARR, your job level (obviously only one active at a time), IS your level. If you advance one job to 50, and can go around traveling with little resistance(as rightly you should, you earned it), you then switch to your 15 Conjurer, and you're now fresh meat again for the mobs.

[lecompte]

Hrm, sounds like an interesting mechanic.

[xCry0x]

FFXIV in the late beta up until launch was such a horrible experience they would have gone beyond free to play and actually paid me to install it and give it a go on launch.

The perspective that FFXIV had anything 'good' about it is amazing.. you are entitled to your own opinion but when a game was such a catastrophic flop that the company comes out and publicly apologizes it speaks to the extent of you being in the minority. (given I never played it in launch)

Maybe the mechanics of the game were misunderstood but when I played the crafting system seemed to have a giant degree of randomness to when your combines would go critical and explode. The crafting system was huge in FFXI and intricate to the point of the moon cycle etc... I spent a good amount of time doing wood working in FFXIV, spinning in circles, timing the hour of the day, talking to the more advanced japanese crafters.. all the feedback was that it was random and you just had to sit and suffer.

Then you get into the class system... some people like it but I hate games with no real defined holy trinity system. I enjoy playing the healer for one game, the tank for the next, dps for the next etc. I rolled some sort of mage in the FFXIV beta and it felt underwhelming getting into the 20s (iirc) and basically just nuke heal nuke heal etc etc etc. I liked the EQ-ism of FFXI forcing you to group at level 3 and I liked the whole class system where you could mix and match jobs to be a healer/mage if you leveled up black mage/white mage or whatever but then you were subject to the short comings of making yourself a 'hybrid'.

[Ishukone]

Khaleesi calm your autism I was just saying I liked the game jesus christ