FFXIV Initial Impressions (For curious FFXI peeps)
Posted: Fri Sep 24, 2010 2:41 pm
Now that FFXIV has been released for the PC Collector's Edition, I figured I'd compile a list of the good, bad and ugly of it for those either waiting for the regular PC / PS3 versions or those not interested in it yet, but curious about it. Others can feel free to add stuff as well and I'll try to keep a tallied list:
The Good:
The Good:
- Gorgeous graphics
- Faster paced combat
- Very easy to solo
- Very easy to get things done within minutes of logging in (no seeking for 3 hours to find a PT)
- Crafting / Mining / Harvesting are all mini-games now, making them more fun
- Bazaar / Muling is done via NPC now, no need to leave your character online or logout/login
- Crystals/shards are held in a separate inventory and don't count against your inventory space
- Skillups for crafting are essentially free through levequests. No more driving prices up on materials to skill up
- Sluggish UI
- Game is constantly lagged and doesn't handle lag well (needs more client-side processing)
- NO instructions or tutorials... manual tells you how to install, set up billing and create a character and that's it.
- Interactions are meddlesome and largely handled through several layers of sluggish menus beneath the main menu
- HEAVY crafting focus (hope you like those crafting mini-games, you'll be doing them a lot)
- Fishing is slower, clunkier, less fun than FFXI (but I'll leave Ennei to be the expert on that)
- Fatigue builds fast, forcing you to divide your time between Melee, Mage, Gatherer, and Crafter jobs evenly
- Half of the Levequests you can do every 2 days are for crafting, hope you REALLY like those minigames
- Overcrowding already a problem. Hopefully people will thin out into higher level areas later on.
- No delivery box system, items have to be hand delivered via trades
- NO AH, shopping consists of either going to unlabled vendors (who don't sell much) or using the sluggish UI to blindly go from Bazaar to Bazaar with your fingers crossed
- No /search, no ability to see where friends / linkshell members are at all
- Have to /t both first and last name and CTRL-R doesn't reply anymore, it sends a tell to the last person you sent a tell to
- Crafting anything useful requires many ingredients themselves to be synthesized, creating a build tree often several layers deep, which can still result in several minutes to an hour of crafting only to have a failure losing EVERYTHING on the last synth
- Several GLARING bugs that will hopefully be fixed over time