Before I write up stuff about my E3 experience, I figure I should give out my opinion about FFXIV (or FF14… or Rapture).

Honestly, at this point in time, it’s hard to say anything about it because we really don’t know too much about it.  All we got was one trailer and some Q&A stuff that is so vague that the game could be interpreted in many different ways.

D: Not really much there.

However, we did get some sort of info about what is gonna be expected in the game.  There will be solo content and that’s probably something I would desire most out of FFXI.  Sure, you want to play with friends and stuff in an MMO (most people would say this would be the main reason of even making it an MMO in the first place).  There are just times where you want to self develop a character on your own free will.  That was one of the limiting factors of FFXI was that while there were some content you can solo, the game wasn’t designed around it and ultimately, it was just 9000% better to team up with people.

The thing is though, whenever I read a game having solo content, I don’t read it as “content where only one person can take advantage out of.”  I read it as “content where a player may optionally join up with others but not needing a full group to tackle.”  Another problem I had with FFXI was that having a group of less than 6 for EXP was rarely beneficial.  It’s one of the things I love most about WoW though.  When I started playing the game with my girlfriend Liseth, it was just the two of us leveling and it was just a great experience.  It was me and my girl doing things our own way with just two people and we went up to 80 with barely any problems (I say barely because we’re on a PvP server and had to resort to help a few times).  It is actually faster to EXP alone in WoW but just because of how much entertaining it was to play the game with someone, be it a friend or a significant other or family and also just how much the game didn’t penalize you that much for having one extra person tag along or even two.  If FFXIV had the same example, it would be so much more playable and accessible to players.

I think a lot of people show concern that FFXIV will cater too much for the casual player.  At this point, it’s all speculation as to how far it’ll go on the casual and hardcore side.  What I really liked about FFXI was the hard battles.  What I really hated about FFXI was trying to get into those hard battles.  What I really liked about WoW was getting into the hard battles right from the get go.  What I really hated about WoW was the constant nerfing of bosses to cater to everyone.  If FFXIV can strike a fine balance between all of this, I would enjoy that quite well.

Finally, I also did hear that FFXIV will not have a traditional EXP type system involved. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen an MMO that escapes from the traditional EXP system but I’m curious to see how this goes.  This is probably the main part that interests me.  As I get older and older, my interest in gaming (be it MMO or otherwise) is starting to diminish quite a bit and I got so much more things to deal with that I honestly won’t have time to balance out a hardcore MMO like FFXI (in fact, I can pretty much confirm that I will not be returning to Vana’diel ever at this point).  Heck, I’m playing WoW “hardcore” right now and thankfully it only requires so many hours per week to really get anywhere so that fits my schedule.  If FFXIV actually turns out to be less time dependant on things, I might just check it out.  If it’s another FFXI with hours upon hours of camping and claim bot competition among linkshells, I’ll pass.

As for the world itself, it seems to be a bit more technologically advanced and I like that.  Galkas without tails?  I guess they have peens now? D:  Humans not looking stupid?  That’s a great change actually.  Vista/W7 Port?  They are using Crystal Tools and it would seem that it was made with more of a computer architecture first so I think we can expect a solid port this time instead of what happened with FFXI.

So, how about changes I want to see?  There’s a long list so I’ll just downsize it to a few big things I’d want.

1. Don’t allow gear changes in the mist of battle.  With that note, also don’t make gear so diverse that you would prefer one gear over another under specific situations.  The reason I’d want this change is that the concept of changing gear in the middle of battle is just “dumb.”  We’re itemizing things for too many different situations and that’s just extra thinking and mindwork that isn’t needed.  When it gets to the point where you need 3rd party tools to extend your macros to fit all your gear, that’s something that could have been avoided.

2. Better Mouse/Keyboard support.  The game was meant to be played on controller and that’s fine.  I do think that the mouse/keyboard controls were not refined enough (especially with camera control).

3. Customizable UI.  We don’t need addons or anything but let us move things to where we want them to be.  And on that note, all information like cooldowns and stuff should be accessable in a list or something somewhere.  Honestly, we’re on PS3 and PC (probably 360), there’s really no excuse not to have this info out there without having to jump through hoops.

4. Make a female galka.  You can do it, you can actually make them look hot if you tried.  They don’t have to be big and bulky, look at Draenei. >.>;

5. Male Mithra too!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2009 at 11:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.