“Hey Rho! You should try Final Fantasy XIV if you’re bored with WoW. I know you didn’t like it when it launched, but it’s different now! It’s MUCH cleaner!”
-My IRL friends
Hey gang! So I caved and decided to try out Final Fantasy XIV again. I’m feeling kinda burned out on WoW content (Who isn’t), and decided to see what’s on the other side of the fence.
So, I get the game installed, deal with the nonsense that is Mogstation, get the character creator loaded up, made up my character, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand
I can’t make a character on the server I want. The server my friends play on. Not just that server either. SEVERAL servers are prohibiting character creation.
I nearly uninstalled on the spot. That is absolutely ridiculous. Even Blizzard allows trial characters to be made on every server. You just have to wait in a queue to get into them first.
Why is server selection the LAST step? Why let someone make a character, then slap them across the face by saying “Mm, sorry, have you tried this garbage, low-pop, PREFERRED server, tho?! :D”
No. I want to play on the server my friends play on. I want to join their guild. I want to actually enjoy playing video games with my friends again, which is the entire point of dipping my toes in other MMOs again to begin with, as they don’t play WoW.
I’d love to tell you that this game is awesome, but I can’t f***ing play it.
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I haven’t actually played FFXIV but have a friend who does, isn’t server basically irrelevant with cross server play?
Yes and no.
You can’t join a guild from another server, but you can play content with them and visit.
Which, if you’re looking to jump ship from one MMO to another, having a guild and getting into a community is a primary focus.
EDIT: It’s the same thing with WoW and going cross-server, but you don’t need a friend on the server you want to visit.
I actively play that game, and although I enjoy it, I share your frustration as I too had to deal with the same when I started playing when Heavensward was current…and still have to if I were to ask anymore friends to join me.
All of my friends were playing on Balmung - the most crowded server on the Crystal datacenter. I ended up having to create my toon on another server and transfer it over once I met the requirements.
Having a character roll system that is tied to server pop means you’ll have to wait until the logins have died down - which is usually right after maintenance or in the middle of the night. Balmung had a “hard” lockdown at one point (I think it was during Stormblood) where you could leave the server but not join it, while Squenix encouraged people to use the free transfers to spread out. I haven’t checked lately if such restrictions are still in place or whether you just have to wait until low logins.
Sounds frustrating. I can only imagine, and I can’t fault you for having a low opinion of a game you can’t even fire up, essentially.
I’ve been playing full time since 3.1 or so, and have spent hundreds of hours each on just about every major MMO on the market. Preferences will vary, but IMHO, FFXIV is the best MMO on the market, and well worth the time, money, aggravation of getting started, etc.
I’m sure it really doesn’t seem like it right now, and it might not for awhile, but depending on what you’re looking for in an MMO, FF14 is one of the best for sure.
If you can solve/get around the character creation issues you’re having, I’d say to stick with it and give it a solid shot.
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I actually managed to get a character made just before the servers went down last night.
So far
THE CONS:
- The zones feel absurdly claustrophobic.
- Exposition Dump
- Many characters presented I’m supposed to care about with very little offered for that.
- 2.5 second global cooldown.
- Class-based starting zone separation
- Very little race identity outside of a tiny snippet you get at character creation.
- City-locked tutorial. Very little to get you invested until they finally give you quests to LEAVE.
- Invisible walls gallore
- Very little to explore and see.
- Loading screens separate different sections of both outside zones AND CITIES.
The Pros:
- Class identities are on-point. You know what you’re playing and how to play them right out the gate. Progression of abilities feels natural
- Acquiring new gear feels rewarding, even if the quests are kinda lame.
- DUTIES ARE FUN.
- HUNTING JOURNAL IS FUN.
- Getting a surname with your character is awesome.
- Character customization, as a whole, is LEAGUES better.
- The level up sound is so, so satisfying.
All in all, there’s just enough to keep me going. It’s so far a 4/10, but as I haven’t done any instanced, dungeon-based content yet, I will hold off on condemning the video game.
It is king of the planet in terms of WORST first impression, though.
Fair. First impressions have killed many people’s desire to invest at all in FF14, and imho, that is the games biggest flaw.
Your cons list is accurate, and many people share them. Many of those issues either fix themselves, or become non-issues later on, but things like small zones… well, even when you get the ability to fly, they’re still small. But at least they cram a helluva lot of detail in some of those zones. And you eventually get used to the loading screens.
Since you can insta-port to anywhere in the world you’ve unlocked the aetherytes for, without a cooldown, at any time, the world will open up in a way later on. And the zones get much more vast and large later on. Invisible walls are less prominent in later xpac zones since Heavensward forward was built with flying in mind. And you will encounter more character NPCs in quests than you can remember, some notable, some insignificant. I constantly forget some of them when they suddenly show up 2 xpacs later and start asking you if you remember them…
2.5 sec gcd is a huge insta-turnoff for most wow players. It does feel incredibly slow and sluggish for most jobs, at least until you hit the 50s and start getting more instant cast oGCD spells, then things start flowing really well. At endgame, I don’t even feel a slow gcd at all, there are so many other buttons to press in between, some jobs are FAR busier than the fastest classes in WoW.
But yeah, your preliminary analysis is quite accurate. I’d be interested to see if you make it to the later xpacs tho, and to see if your rating of the game improves at all. It may very well not, but it also might really get its hooks in you 
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I can’t quite FULLY critique an MMO until I get to the ‘end’, being end game content.
I’m getting to max level, I’m doing at least one ‘raid’, or whatever this game calls it, and I’m trying out a few jobs.
I want to get a good taste off the game to see if I like it enough to quit or not. So far… Not bad. WoW’s intro experience, especially classic’s, is debatably better and more immersive, but I heard the expansions are where it’s at, so I don’t think it’s fair to judge the book by it’s very, very rocky cover.
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I commend you giving it a solid chance. Hats off to you sir.
Here’s hoping you have a great time with it!
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Not exactly. Cross-server play is a quite a bit more of a hurdle than on WoW (facing server log-in queues that can be weirdly long, atop a prior queue just to use the transfer service), at least if you want to ever see anyone from that server outside of solely instanced content or join an FC (Guild) there.
But it’s also far from limited to WoW players. Anyone who’s used to a MOBA’s or ARPG’s pacing, or any MMO outside of vanilla WoW, Runescape, or ESO is almost certainly going to be put off by it.
Especially given how little attention is given to fluidly animating attacks during movement (XIV among the kings of whacky gliding animations in combat), and how long it takes to gather oGCD abilities (especially after so much pruning to 1-50 skills), it can feel more than a little absurd.
Also,
It’s weird to think that in 1.x, it was known for the opposite. You could go hiking in Coerthas (some 7x or so its current square footage) and, awkward invisible walls around certain slopes aside, it felt very much like a real and expansive place. Sadly, the later expansions and their larger zones have never really managed to find a good balance between a sense of realistic scale, expanse, or geographic flow and providing points of interest.
That said, it will get better, by a lot, in terms of zone design. Heavensward, especially, has some beautiful ones.
Oh man if there’s anything that drives me nuts in games in this. I’m not at all into frenetic ARPG style combat, but even with “slow” vanilla style combat with GCDs and cooldowns everywhere, animations not matching up with what the character’s doing/how it’s moving is like nails on a chalkboard.
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Damn, yeah, if they could just fix that (see Windbite, Venomous Bite, True Thrust, Dragon Kick, and Perfect Pitch as the most notorious examples), allow for multiple oGCDs to be queued (as not to almost intentionally screw over high ping players on double or triple-weave jobs) or practically remove double-queuing altogether and just start from a base GCD of 2 seconds… that game would have so much broader an audience available to it. Instead, it just hits a lot of “worst of both worlds” points.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve loved that game at several points along its lifespan, and even enjoyed 1.x for what it was worth, but it could do so much better both in terms of not screwing over veteran and invested players (see: job simplification, in those parts that were largely for the worse or abandoned far more reasonably paths of change) and making it more approachable generally (faster GCDs, combos being more than mere bloat, faster ability acquisition, greater but deliberate versatility, reasonable difficulty curves, etc.).
Having recently resubbed and being fully caught up, playing Final Fantasy XIV honestly gives me the same level of excitement as World of Warcraft gave me back in 2005 and I think Shadowbringers was the best MMORPG expansion I have ever played. At this point I would probably unsub WoW until 9.1 or Classic TBC if I wasn’t attached to my guild and our weekly activities.
The game certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea though. I just happen to be very much into what it does well while simultaneously not caring much about the content it sucks at. If you’re not having fun by the first expansion just drop it and play something else IMHO.
Also, in general I think both Guild Wars 2 and The Elder Scrolls Online are infinitely easier MMORPG to get started with, and are probably better options if you’re just looking for an MMO to play until 9.1. FFXIV has huge issues with its early game, where both the combat and the story are kind of eh.
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