Final Fantasy

Off-Topic Games, Gaming and Hardware
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So, I thought I would give WoW a little break and try something different. I google and see the Final Fantasy 14 is supposed to be good… And right of the bat - typing 'final fantasy 14" or “ffxiv” is cumbersome and makes googling things horrendous. For WoW all I have to type is “Problem/Question WOW” and boom.

And this is why I am making this post.

The QoL Blizzard and Activision has put into their Account Management/Creation is LEAGUES above even their closest competitor. I mean honestly, have you dealt with this Square Enix website? Account creation and management is a nightmare… I have a million things to say about that.

The game itself.

The graphics are supposed to be "much better than WoW, but the fluidity is crap. Like literal trash… and maybe it’s me, but the whole anime graphics things is not what I consider to be high quality.

I know WoW is not polished, but holy hell. The majority of this Final Fantasy 14 (I have the name copied and pasted at this point) game is not voice acted, the cut scenes look like they were created by a developer who graduated with a 1.7gpa from DeVry…

Look, I’m not WoW fanboi, I have a TON of issues with the game’s philosophy and the like… but after this experience, I can AT LEAST say, there is SOME emphasis put into the game and user experience.

I can’t post links here, but if you’re interested, take a look at FFXIV’s (Square Enix) account page. It looks like something out of 2002 Compaq computer.

Yeah,… I just can’t see myself dealing with the logistical headache of a company who doesn’t even see the need/value in creating a responsive, intuitive, user experience for their customers.

If it were F2P, I could kinda understand, but you charge just as much as WoW does and have more players. /mindblown

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I only just started playing FFXVI like 4 days ago but it’s not so bad. I’m lvl 28 conjuror and plan to make my way to a lvl 80 whitemage.

It sounds like you were expecting a lot from this game that you shouldn’t have. The textures are more refined but other than that graphics aren’t very different from WoW. The world itself feels much smaller/restricted compared to WoW but that’s not necessary a negative: at least it’s easy to get around.

[Edit: I’ll reference Rift again since I invested timed into that MMORPG. It has amazingly realistic graphics (and somewhat dark/gritty theme) but it didn’t manage to make it big. A big part of that is on the developers but graphics don’t make or break a game. They do matter but not that much.]

By flow I assume you mean the odd laginess to combat? Or do you mean the 2.5 seconds global cooldown? I think the combat laginess you get used to and is just part of the game. If the longer GCD annoys you that’s just personal preference and it gets better later in the game when you have more instant casts and stuff off the GCD.

But did you seriously go into Final Fantasy with gripes about anime like graphics? Just why?

I mean they certainly aren’t the greatest but I have doubts people are that invested in the story. I’m just trying to get to level cap and usually I hit the ESC key so I can skip the cutscenes. It helps to think of it like an old school console game. And always remember that there needs to be limitations in place to be compatible with PS4.

You are complaining because the account page doesn’t impress you? It’s just an account page! Are cutscenes and account pages THIS important to you? Will you also complain if their forum set-up isn’t up to your standard? I care about the actual game play. It sounds like you are simply looking for reasons to not play.

Don’t you dare recommend this! This is the death of games. This is what games do when they are failing and looking to get what they can before it dies. RIP Rift. This leads to many changes that turn away players in mass; players that will happily pay a subscription fee to keep their game NOT F2P. I have never understood people that will whine and complain about a meager $15 fee to access a fun game for an entire month. I have never once thought my subscription to WoW, Rift, FFXVI, or any MMORPG was a waste and I probably never will unless they become exorbitant.

My biggest complain with FFXVI so far is the laginess to combat and although I haven’t played pvp I know it’s not going to be nearly as good as WoW. The casting animations are overly flash for my taste but I knew that going into the game because it’s a fricken Final Fantasy game. Oh, and there is a short queue when trying to log in depending on the time of day. I’m not a fan of queues but at least that shows the strong playerbase.

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I agree with your counter arguments a lot. However:

I’m complaining because it doesn’t look secure and the SSL technology they use to encrypt your data has been replaced by TLS long ago. I had to investigate the site’s integrity to make sure I hadn’t clicked on some phishing website.

Maybe I worded that wrong - What I meant was that the anime style of graphics was not enough to make me overlook the the dated-ness of the graphics. And while WoW is “cartoon-y,” the zones (WoD and forward) have great amount of polish to them and fits well.

Also, I agree with that wholeheartedly, what I was saying here is that the lack of quality in this regard would be understandable if it were a FTP game or Indie for that matter. However, this is a large studio with a huge budget. It’s unacceptable. They’re charging a premium, I expect premium.

Lastly, what I didn’t speak on in my original post, is the ordeal I encountered with just downloading the game.

They supposedly just released a new and “improved” launcher…

This launcher downloads and patches like the WotLK launcher of 12 years ago.
I spent 3 hours trying to download the game from their terribly-slow servers, only for it to give an error and forced me to START OVER.

It’s has no way to pause the download, it doesn’t even cache the files it did download in the event it fails, as it did in my case.

I’m really not one to complain - I have no issue with the game being different than what I am used to, albeit I was leaning on the “Well WoW does “x” better” at the start, but I realized this and thought deeper as to what outside of that did I have an issue with.

Side note: I did fill out their survey the offered and gave feedback, but not how I did here - this was more of a frustration rant to my community than actual feedback for a person to consider.

Thank you for:

  1. Responding without immediately dismissing my claims
  2. Offering counters that made me reevaluate my stance
  3. Giving insight to a part of the game I have not yet seen
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Well your claims aren’t completely baseless. I don’t get upset with forum posters unless they start directly attacking people or their ideals; I’m not new to the forum scene. FFXIV does have its flaws. Things like ‘being difficult to google’ seem whiny though. You get used to typing ffxiv pretty quickly and it seems to be all you need for basic information.

Visually, their website does look dated I’ll admit, but I really do only care about the game itself. I don’t know anything about site security so I can’t comment on that. I agree they should have the resources to upgrade it. It did take my high speed connection about 3 hours to download the game I think but after it downloaded I didn’t have any problems. The account creation process does feel a bit clumsy but I patiently worked through it.

FFXIV is kind of in an odd situation as a PC MMORPG because of the PS4 compatibility. As a PC player it will be odd only using what the stock game provides. There are no add-ons besides some parser I’ve heard of. Thus enemy NPCs tend to telegraph their attacks far more: they have no DBM. The mechanics seem quite basic so far but I’m only lvl 30. Unlike WoW the world is penned in. It feels odd not being able to go places cause of walls and loading into each zone when you leave another. The smaller world makes travel easy though and there is a cheap form of teleportation that allows you too easily switch zones. Smaller zones inspires less awe and immersion I guess.

Not having seen the end game yet I do feel that WoW is the superior game (especially for pvp. Yes, the pvp I have yet to personally experience). I’ve played WoW since 2005 so I’m obviously biased but it’s really easy to see where other games lack in comparison. People struggle to switch from WoW cause so many games seem like downgrades or they are simply too different. I do NOT think FFXIV is bad though. I did need to play something different from WoW and most its competitors either die an awful death or are a different genre of MMO that I’m not necessarily interested in.

Even with the current state of WoW I’m not sure FFXIV has more active players. I thought WoW was still dominant there. When Shadowlands hits it’s not going to be comparable. I’ll likely crawl back but I’m trying my best to not jump back into WoW. FFXVI looks like it might be more casual end game based, which could be interesting coming from the competitiveness of Mythic WoW raiding.

Edit: I really like healing in games and their healing design does seems a bit lackluster but I’ll have to experience it at max level before I can say anything definite. And I’ll restate how much of a damned shame it is that Rift didn’t flourish. It was so fun to play in 2011 and had a lot of potential.

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I play both and you sound like a blizz fanboy.

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This is what I post here for - quality feedback such as this.

Well thought out, insightful and contributes to the discussion.

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Doesn’t matter what anyone says, you are just going to defend WoW and crap on FF14. You are the definition of a fanboy.

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Here we go:

/yawn

/10char

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Fanboy :rofl: I assume you pre-ordered Shadowlands the moment it was announced aye.

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Dude struggles to use Google. Great game review.

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Imagine sitting on a discussion forum all day with absolutely nothing to contribute other than kindergarten-quality sarcasm.

Are you that burned out that you feel the need to lurk on forum posts and attempt to troll?

Since you’re that well at googling, and I’m obviously not, why haven’t you taken the time to google how to properly troll?

I try to understand the mentality goes into spending that much time doing non-productive things, and outside of cheap entertainment, I can’t think of anything.

Do you play the game? Are you working on any achievements?
I’m curious.

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Woah

Why are you pinning this on me? This was about you, Mesric.

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FF XIV is leagues better than WoW in every single area. I have no clue what you are blabbering about but i will guess you got into the game as a trial account and did not even hit level 20. You try playing WoW to just level 20 and try to review it and people will insult you as i am now.

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As you sit on a WoW forum with over 156 posts, several max-level characters, and an active subscription:

/yawn

Next.

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FFXIV has a notoriously bad new player experience. I quit my first attempt to get into the game. The game’s really good later on but it does a excellent job at hiding it. The good news is that they’re fixing that on the summer patch, so people who waited until now to play the game should probably wait a bit longer…

But in general I’d say retail WoW remain the better option for people who like challenging content like serious raiders, PvPers and high mythic+ key runners. I don’t expect Method to move on to FF anytime soon. I’d also say WoW has the better engine and infrastructure, hands down.

FFXIV wins pretty much everything else though, as does WoW classic. Some people are happy with it, but a lot of players expect more out of their MMORPGs than just a rush to level cap then a rep and item level grind. This is where alternate MMORPGs are starting to shine. And where Shadowlands need to do better.

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Since I’ve been relatively bored with my main on FFXIV lately, I actually ended up starting an alt in the game just to see some of the older story events again… and since the New Game Plus feature doesn’t extend to ARR just yet (because of the planned overhaul coming in Patch 5.3… and I think 5.25 launches today), this pretty much is turning into the last opportunity to see the MSQ as it originally was. To give a frame of reference, I’ve gotten a short distance past the Ramuh encounter.

That being said, I have some interesting observations from this little foray into the older content:

  • The problem with the early game (leveling up through ARR) isn’t so much the content, but the gameplay. Classes in FFXIV are incredibly slow and plodding during the early stages of the game, and most don’t hit their stride until you’re in the level 40-50 range. This mostly comes from experience on my main (currently leveling up all my alt jobs to the cap, slowly), though I can safely say on my alt has reinforced the experience.
  • There is a surprising lack of voice acting during the ARR leveling storyline, especially compared to the expansions and even the post-50 content. Probably for the best at points, a few of the older voices are even more grating that I remember. In some ways, this is actually a benefit to the planned overhaul of the leveling content; they have few (if any) voice-acted cutscenes which need to be changed.
  • The MSQ in both the leveling and post-50 storyline involve a LOT of seemingly pointless busy-work… but I should stress the word “seemingly”. There’s a hell of a lot of foreshadowing going on (one thing I noticed is that a major reveal in the patch 5.2 MSQ actually happens to the player VERY early in the game… just without the context of the latest MSQ patch), some of which doesn’t seem all that relevant initially. I’m starting to think what they should be doing isn’t so much that they should trim down the MSQ, but shift more of it into the “optional content” side of things; this could mean there’s some more legwork involved in unlocking side content.
  • To pick out an easy example for the above, around level 15 in the MSQ you get sent to your first three dungeons in quick succession (one for each city, coincidentally) before starting to chase down your first primal afterwards. They probably don’t need all three as part of the MSQ, the 2nd and 3rd can be moved to optional early-game dungeons (technically all of them, but I think at least one dungeon should remain in the MSQ)… and apart from it playing into the hard mode for all of these pieces of content (and Palace of the Dead for Tam-tara Deepcroft), they’re largely non-essential to the MSQ. The quests and content can still exist, just moved to the optional content stream.
  • One especially annoying example from the late leveling MSQ (about level 42-44-ish) is running around trying to get the right TYPE of corrupted aether crystals needed to breach Garuda’s barrier. You end up going to three separate locations only to find out which one is going to give you the right stuff. This can be cut down to just the one location needed with ease… but you also lose out on the introduction of the Siren in a solo-duty. But again, this can be resolved by moving that solo duty and associated quest to the introductory questline to Pharos Sirius (where the Siren is the last boss) rather than outright removing it.
  • A strange annoyance… for some reason the post-50 MSQ sends you into the Sunken Temple of Qarn (a level 35-ish dungeon). I don’t recall what for, but I don’t think it was essential to the MSQ by any means.

There’s probably more if I want to dig into it further, but they can definitely find easy ways to trim down on the “mandatory” content by simply shifting it to the optional side of things without changing too much dialogue… but at this stage, if the planned overhaul is taking a different approach that this suggestion, it’s unlikely for them to change whatever their plans are.

But going back to the first point… I think changing up the lower level gameplay would alleviate a lot of the problems with the game. Or to be more specific, changing WHEN a lot of key abilities are learned.

As noted above, most classes don’t hit their stride until AT LEAST level 40. Quite a few of them are confined to on-GCD abilities only with little depth at level 50. It’s not that bad in all honesty, but really does feel sluggish coming from WoW where the GCD is considerably shorter; it’s non-issue at higher levels, but it’s those earlier levels which need work.

By level 60 (with no small thanks to the 52-60 job quests each awarding abilities), things really start to take shape and gameplay really takes off. I think spreading out the 1-60 abilities a bit better (mostly so it’s not so back-ended) would help players start to enjoy the gameplay early on a fair bit more. However, we don’t want to go too far like WoW did and players actually run out of new abilities to learn by level 40-50 (or having the rate at which new abilities are learned slow to an absolute crawl).

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