FFXIV: A Realm Reborn - This time it's actually playable!

[POS Industries]

LAST TIME, ON FINAL FANTASY XIV:

Originally Posted by POS Industries

Literally everything is awkwardly and ineffectually set up. Movement, combat, communication with NPCs, communication with other players, video options... anything that one would consider the bedrock of a video game is just absolute shit.

It's something that I've noticed with a lot of new MMOs where they don't want to be accused of being a "WoW clone" so they try to avoid it in the most wrongheaded manner by just trying to reinvent the UI in a way that's as far removed from what Blizzard did as possible (and invariably coming up with something unplayably worse) and leaving all the generic MMO gameplay elements that people associate first and foremost with WoW in place.

It's like they're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, except they're keeping the bathwater.

So after three years of having to completely redevelop their MMO from square one () and then fucking up the relaunch with a week's worth of server problems that they finally got worked out a couple days ago, I'm pleased to report that Squeenix has successfully put the baby back in their bathwater. Granted, I think said baby has a completely new set of parent, but this time they've got themselves a pretty damn good MMO on their hands.

As far as the gameplay goes, this time it totally is a WoW clone, but it's being a WoW clone right. The combat is fairly smooth, although the global cooldown is longer than I'd prefer, but it's FF and I dunno maybe that's supposed to be a throwback to how it felt waiting between attacks in the oldschool ATB days. For the most part, you're not going to notice any sluggishness (especially when playing a caster class), but be prepared to stand there feeling like a chump for a couple seconds after using an instant cast ability, is all I'm saying.

The class system is fantastic, though. Your class is based on the type of weapon you have, so switching classes is as easy as switching weapons, and the layouts of your actionbars is saved for each class. It also has a system set up to where you have gear loadouts saved and can switch back and forth between them seamlessly, which makes class changes even more of a breeze. The only major downside is that you start out in one of the three capital cities based on your starting class, and each city only has guildmasters for the classes that start there, so if you start out as an arcanist and then want to train up thaumaturge, you have to wait until you get through the story quests up to the point that you're allowed to take an airship to the appropriate city to become one. Not that any of this takes all that long.

Also this game is still beautiful, but it's a FF game, so that's not gonna be a surprise. Gorgeous graphics, great music, the usual. The english voice acting is pretty terrible, though. I'm usually pretty forgiving of that stuff but this was one of those times where I ended up switching the cut scene audio to japanese and not looking back. Also, I guess one thing worth noting is that the graphics are too good, so you may find yourself having some trouble running it. It runs fine at 1280x720 for me, but unfortunately my monitor is 1080p and there's an issue where the game won't run properly at fullscreen 1280x720 that I have yet to find a solution to (it doesn't fill the screen vertically), so I'm stuck in windowed mode for the time being. Shitsux.

Anyway, I'm Torch Maranda on Gilgamesh. Come find me. Or don't because my server's full most of the time so you might not be able to get on it.