Reportedly Square Enix is demanding the gaming press hold off publishing any reviews of Final Fantasy XIV until a month after the game’s release; unfortunately, players seem to have jumped the gun and are publishing their own less than favourable opinions of the game.
Review copies of Final Fantasy XIV have been accompanied by the admonition that reviews should be held back for “three to four weeks post launch” – the rubric apparently being that lots of time is needed “to give the online game time to mature.”
The demand is styled as a “polite request,” although review sites can probably be forgiven for suspecting their supply of future Square Enix titles might be in danger of drying up should they ignore the request.
Naturally, Square Enix’s growing legion of detractors (admittedly not necessarily any more reliable than Square Enix themselves) have their own interpretation of this – that Square Enix is attempting to delay news of an impending disaster.
Japanese user reviews are not so sparing – 38% and 1.5 stars over some 160 ratings:
In Amazon’s case the game carries the tags “Made in China” and “Square Enix Fraud”… In response Square Enix Wada is reported as saying “That’s just how the Internet is. I’m even telling the creators not to take any notice.”
The obligatory unflattering Photoshops (shown with the trappings of a Japanese funeral for those left wondering):
SE has the worst customer service ever. They have claimed i need to reset my account information and have provided no help whatsoever.
i’m pretty much giving up all hope with SE and abandoning them.
what a bunch of pinheads.
Closed and Open beta tester here. The reviews are spot on and it deserves what it gets. Why should it not be fair to judge an MMO when its released? People need to stop tolerating shitty half-finished releases for MMOs. And FF14 is more shitty and less finished than most.
The UI lacks info and features at many points, while also having extra superfluous info at others. The only “content” in the game right now are the daily quests which are called “leves” and 8 of them can be done every 36 hours. They are all given from the exact same guy in town, and you get around 4-5 every 10 levels. Each new tier is the same leves essentially, just higher level mobs. Kill X, Harvest Y, etc.
The game world is heavily copy-pasta’d. Check Youtube. And it lacks any sort of Points of Interest or Landmarks at all. It’s just endless boring skymaps and landscape with randomly placed mobs. No castles, no bandit camps, no waterfalls, no dungeons, etc.
Communication ingame is abysmal too. No Mailbox, no auction house. No chat channels other than Say, Shout, and Linkshell (sorta like a guild, but with no features other than a private chat channel). Group attacks don’t really work. Targeting is clunky and archaic. The con system doesn’t work to know what to fight.
The engine design is so poor that it won’t even fully use your graphics card for 90% of players. And future hardware won’t even change that due to it only using 2 threads/cores. Turning on occlusion or other special features murders your FPS to below 5, etc.
I’ve played or followed dozens of MMOs back since Ultima Online and EQ1. This is seriously the most pathetic release I’ve seen from a major developer since maybe Anarchy Online or Earth and Beyond from EA.
dammit, why don’t just focusing on standard RPG? Those MMO are sucks, especially with the bandwith
If they didnt want the game to be reviewed they shouldnt have released it.
Anyone think that this title might reach am E.T. or Superman 64 level of infamy in the gaming world and be regarded as the worst MMO ever made?