FWIW I'm not particularly a Final Fantasy fan, the last ones I played through were on the PS1 and I felt that while they were enjoyable enough they also were the first games to teach me the true meaning of 'grind'. To make things worse FFXI is on my short list of MMOs I regret buying (and I've bought most of 'em), and set my record for least time played before uninstall.Originally Posted by Gomly
Given all that, I ignored FFXIV entirely when it originally launched, but at some point I signed up for the FFXIV ARR beta and ended up getting an invite to P3, and, of course, have played more than a bit of P4 (which for NA servers ends at 8AM PDT today).
I won't say it's a perfect game, because it's certainly not, nor am I convinced it'll be my next big MMO addiction as many of my friends seem to be -- sadly, most of them do that for every new release, even though they're otherwise reasonably intelligent adults and should really know better. Fact is I haven't even decided if I'm going to pre-order or not, though that has more to do the amount of time I'm willing to put into gaming having decreased vastly in the last year or so.
It is, however, a very good game, an MMO in a sense games like Defiance and GW2 are, IMHO, most assuredly not, and it has most of what I look for in a game I could see myself spending a year or three playing.
By all accounts it is vastly improved over the first version of FFXIV, having never played V1 I can't really speak to that.
The world is beautiful, it reminds me quite a lot of pre-searing Ascalon in GW1, one of the most beautiful environments I've seen in an MMO. Everything is very detailed and visually immersive. Character models and animations are quite nice and varied. Mob models are likewise varied and detailed, but tend towards to pokemon cutesy style -- personally I don't have a problem with that, but I can see how some might. There are a wide variety of classes and activities available and since you can learn all of them it'd take quite a while to run out of things just to level.
I've played it on the PS3 briefly and was impressed by how good it looked, how well it ran, and how easy it was to use with a controller. The ability to play the same character on either a PC or PS3 and swap between them is nice, if not a feature I'd be apt to use. Overall I probably would have preferred that they skipped putting it on the PS3, as I think some overall design decisions were limited by the PS3's capabilities, but the ability to have the game look that good and have a UI that is fully functional using either a controller or a keyboard/mouse is impressive.
Trion's devs would do well to have a look at what they've managed to do with cross-platform for FFXIV ARR, it puts Defiance to utter and complete shame in every possible way.
On the downside I tend to find the music a tad annoying. Just a personal thing, as I know a lot of people like it. Combat tends to be a tad boring. At least up to level 20 the number of skills you have is fairly small and the 2.5sec GCD makes things downright lethargic. It's also easy. As in really, really, really easy. I assume at some point it must ramp up, but up to level 20 or so you'd have to either be completely new to MMOs and/or sleeping to be at any real risk of death. It also handholds a lot, even by modern MMO standards. For instance, mobs you need to kill for a quest have a particular icon hovering over them. "Dynamic" events, called FATEs here, are the same sort of zerg spam crap you see in Defiance, Rift, and GW2 (oddly, WAR, IMHO, did the DE thing better than those who have tried to copy it).
The big sin, the only one I really find potentially problematic, is the zoning. There is a lot of it. Even starter cities are broken into two zones. Overworld zones are fairly sizable, or at least some of them are, but even so you'll find yourself going from zone to zone fairly frequently. Worse, the map system kinda sucks. It isn't hard to figure out where to go, once you get your bearings, but the combined effect is to make the zones feel like discrete discontinuous chunks, as if they were different planets rather than chunks of land right next to each other. AoC had that problem as well, at least to me, and I found it very off putting. I was shocked to see this much zoning in a current MMO, especially when games like WoW, FE, and numerous others have been doing huge chunks of land without zoning for eons now. Best I can guess, it's a function of the PS3's limited memory bandwidth.
Anyway, fwiw and all that.
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