From outside of the box, this is a Final Fantasy game. And that means a memorable story, but one that will be fought tooth-n-nails against the "system" itself. It's a system of unlabeled, unbridled ignorance, treat you like a child but make you think like an adult, and of stubbornness beyond imagine.
There is a charm about FF XIV and a certain polish that you won't find anywhere else, but there's also an antiqueness, an ancient system of player-usability that fortunately hasn't existed for more than a decade, but has returned.
If you ask any player in the beta, there is something that they really hate about this game. I have never met a player that was in love with the game once they played it.
The Hate:
-Gamepad is a requirement. If you want to get anything out of this game, get a gamepad. Square Enix will not fix the mouse, they never fixed the mouse with FF XI almost 10 years ago, they will not fix it now.
-Guildleve system. The system itself is alright, once you understand it. But as it is right now, you cannot acquire and accomplish more than 8 guildleves within 48 hours. That means that once you finish questing, you have to wait 2 days in order to begin questing again. And right now, questing is the only way to really get experience. Grinding is long and tedious and you don't get nearly as much exp from that. They say it's to prevent hard-core players from having an advantage over casual players. I'm a serious casual player and I say that's bullshit. There's also an experience cap which I have never witnessed but have seen a lot of rage about.
-No NPC data, unless you talk to the NPC. The NPC system is a washed up mess, nothing makes any sense about who sells what. If you don't already know where to look for what you want to buy, then you can spend an hour talking to every NPC and still not find what you are looking for. There's no indication of what an vendor sells (their booth can give you hints, but they are mostly wrong), plus there is no indication that an NPC is even a vendor. Some vendors don't even have a booth, some are located on a bridge overlooking the water but will have some important stuff to sell, but you won't know until you actually ask them.
-Map is almost useless. It's just a map of hints, doesn't tell you where NPC's are, no search, no noting system, nothing. I've had one NPC mark where to go on my map, but never again when I need to find a specific person in a generalized area.
-Combat is a little awquard right now. There's very little information about any actions that you might have queued, and just when you think you have an action queued, it's gone and you have to enter it in again. Plus it's lagged, the enemy loses it's HP several seconds before your attack animation actually starts.
-Lag. It seems like EVERYTHING is server based, nothing is local based. If you want to go through your inventory, you have to scroll through it while the server is trying to load it to you. The less inventory you have the less lag you have. Starting the crafting technique takes about 10-20 seconds to start, pretty much doing anything takes a while to request the action from the server and the server to respond.
-Inventory. Another jumbled mess. No way to sort, can only scroll down through your inventory. You inventory is organized by the order in which you attained the items, fail. And inventory takes 3 times as long to go through if you want to sell stuff to a vendor, takes about a minute to sell one measly item, another fail.
-Serial Based Menu system. Only one menu can be open, anywhere anytime. 20 years ago we experienced beautiful multitasking, being able to open up and click several windows at a time in Windows 3.1. But in this cutting edge game? No, we have to deal with opening only one menu at a time. Can't compare items, can't open your skill window to make sure your spelling the skill name right for your macros, and can't compare items in a vendor to what you already have. It's a memory system and it sucks.
No comments:
Post a Comment