Final Fantasy XIV “40%” – “A Step Backward for the Genre”

Bad game companies must die out and good ones receive the praise. Natural selection ftw.

The problem with this line of thinking is that you get into a cycle of "Well, the original game was bad at release, but it got it better. So will this one!" This way of thinking is bad. A release for a game doesn't need to have WoW's qualities, doesn't need to try and keep pace. That's just not going to happen. What it needs is a solid release, where such gratuitous and obvious flaws are not present.

You don't need to have a perfect game at release, patches can help smooth out the corners - but you do not want to release an abomination and then say "We'll fix it later, maybe".

I think people forget that WoW was a bit of a mess when it first came out.

The Hunter? Completely worthless. Pets had like 2 functions and the whole class barely made it in. In beta they basically STARTED to get them ready for launch and then launched the game with them half done.

I've never experienced a great MMO launch except maybe WAR which had really no problems.

But what people are saying goes beyond the usual. FFXI didn't interest me at all and this doesn't either. Looks horribly generic. A few chocobos does not make it Final Fantasy. I guess FF died after 10.

They should rename it to Failure Fantasy.

I wonder how longer it will take until Square Enix gets the message...

I just read about 20 user review on gamespot and it was worse than I thought...., there's so many mad user with "I'm closing my account" end of line, and all user that giving 8.0++ review are spewing the same review "this is for dedicated gamers" or something like that..., for the first time in my life I thank goodsmile company for sucking my wallet and preventing me to pre-ordered this shit...

Final Fantasy got Square out of the pit but that was a long time ago. I hope they are proud of turning this into a Final Failure series...and I weep for Eidos.

*saves waki picture and leaves before he gets crucified alive for spreading FF hentai*

pity gamespot if they have bought the game to review it, but i do miss the girls in the game.

FFXI is about work too, A LOT WORK, you need to do a lot shit to get something good. Level up there got super hard now, no seeking players at all, only after lvl 70 is somehow easy, due Abyssea.

Actually the only work you need to do in FFXI is the Expansion storylines and line up for R/EX gears. Everything nowadays is easymode compared to back in the days. Hell you can go from Lv40 to 80 in a day's work if you have a reliable and competent group to do Abyssea with. Not sure about 85 but I don't think much will change in terms of exp gain. You can kill just about every monster in the game with a group less then 6 barring AV and PW.

I guess for Final Fantasy XIV, the only viable solution is to sack all the idiots who came up with this horrid game, and get people in where they KNOW what the hell they're doing.

the best thing about this game is the girls.

FFXI was traditional in the sense that it had forced grouping ala EQ. This is probably why the game wasn't hammered in reviews (I also doubt said reviewers played the game to high level as there was no mention of horrible genkai quest at 50, but I digress), that was the norm. Also terrible game mechanics like world bosses that force you to play the game on its schedule, as instancing only really took off with WoW. But this is stuff that people in the genre were used to.

I've been getting bad vibes from Square games since FFXI. The idea of Final Fantasy MMOing bothered me. Probably because I always felt the FF series was, and always should have been, a good story with good characters with good plot development, a classic battle system evolving a bit with each new game and graphics ahead of its time. Since X-2, I haven't bought another SE product outside of KHII. Which is a really sad fact for me because Square made up a rather decent portion of my childhood. Even if FF has succeeded on any MMO ground, that's territory I'm not really up for exploring. And XIV is definitely no exception.

World of Warcraft really deserves that 9.5

Blizzard takes years and years developing their games, have extremely fast/good support, etc.

Anyways, haters gonna hate.

So... is it okay to release an absolute piece of shit just because it might get better five years down the road?

The review is pretty much spot on. Reading the manual is a must, the ingame tutorial for combat is -

If you click on a monster you can attack it

Not much more on any thing else either, its very much like they want people to spend hours learning each part of the game.

I did this with EQ when it first came out, started loads of characters and tried a bit of everything, knowing that mistakes would cost, accepting it as a learning experience.

But I didn't mind it for EQ, XIV is not fun.

Item handing is the worst for me, trying to sell a bunch of stuff can take 10 minutes.

It is pretty though....

ok, i dont know how new mmo's handle noobs, so ill just write what ever quest was like, at least for me at launch.

you started off with a note and thats it, no idea who to give it to but damnit you have to give it to someone, this quest was to find your guild master, and the reward, possibly the shittyest chest item ever to hit an mmo.

from there there may have been a second quest, but dammit i want to kill. so i fo to the noob side of the city and kill. and kill till i cant level off those monsters anymore

i than proceeded t zone, and kill in north ro, or east commonlands

and than reguardless i went over to owasis of mar for level 18-25 (up to 30)

i will tell you this, original eq gave you no clue what you were suppose to do, and it was damn good.

quests were there mostly for lore and faction in early eq and sometimes for items.

Yanno, I played EQ from the point that scars was released. Starting out, you -really- had that feeling of being immersed in the game world. Nothing was handed to you, and when you leveled up (aka:dinging, because of that wonderful sound effect) you really felt like you earned it. You didn't know how much EXP until you leveled, you had a bar, and it filled up. You earn EXP from something? You didn't get a number, you watched that little bar as you struck the killing blow. Monster higher level and tougher? Not necessarily more EXP. Need to know how to get back to town, better have been practicing "Sense Heading" and know which direction town was in. Map? No you're not a goddamn cartographer. You die? Say goodbye to not only a good yellow (20% to level) or so of EXP, but all your items if you cant get back to your corpse and -safely- drag it out (or pay a necromancer to come out and cast a spell to summon it for you, but that was -expensive- ). All of this added to the mystery, and exploration. You could look online for maps, but they were mostly crude, and akin to what you probably made yourself. There were a lot of things in the beginning that were word of mouth, personal experience and such. A whole bunch of things were pretty cryptic, and the developers were pretty stingy with what they told players, all in all it was a game that you had to figure out how to play. In a good way.

By modern terms (WoW, XI such on and so forth) the game was horrible to you, but it was so much damn fun figuring stuff out.

Now we have XIV, and they I suppose sort of want to recapture that.....perhaps...or not really, it's actually quite horrible. And I enjoyed the hell out of 12ZJS and 13. What does that say about this game?

Ah the Faydwer/Qeynos run too, then having to get a bind so you didn't loose the last hour.

Especially tough for necro gnomes as the guards aggroed on you, really tough to do a cr

Now that was a boat you didn't want to fall off, unless you wanted to raise swimming.

lol, maps? with how long i played in greater faydark i'm able to tell where i am by the mobs around me and the possession of the trees, i never once used sense heading.

and try going from faydark to erudian as a level 1 monk just to see if you can actually do it.

i played from when the game came out and i still play it now, however i was on and off again after luclin came out.

everquest made combat fun, something that videos of ff14 seams to lack

everquest made a world that wasnt reused, ff14 failed at that MAJORLY

everquest, though it gave you nothing, was still fun as hell if you were willing to get into it. and ff14, fails at that, unless you are retardedly devoted to the game.

an 11 going on 12 year old game, kicks a modern games ass at damn fucking near everything.

too bad this is a piece of crap..... i was kinda lookin forward to lolis and catgirls TT_TT

Pretty much with every MMO? It's quite simple that one would compare their old, mature MMO with a new MMO and find the new one lacking in terms of content, polish, whatever.

Some things are obviously not excusable, like crummy interface.

I'm told that the old FFXI director is the director of FF14, so I don't think this can be laid squarely at the feet of the development team.

The team that did the CoP expansion is the team that worked on FFXIV.

CoP was the worst and most annoying part of ffxi.. there was way too much bs to go through just to get anywhere with that expansion.

So is WoW IMO, but whatever...

I think he meant that FFXI was more abusive than fun.

Didn't consider WoW too abusive, except in vanilla wow..with Naxx..urgh..

There is little to no work in FFXI. Ive been playing since NA release and have found it fun the whole way through. Its so easy to get things done and level. CoP can for the most part be solo'd barring maybe 2 fights where you may need a small group of 3.

WoW i found dreadfully boring,didnt like the UI and wasnt a fan of the community.The battle system very simple which isnt that bad of a thing as anyone can just jump in a play.I just found myself missing the skill chains and magics bursts on top of the norm of spells,weapon skills and abilities found in ffxi.

FFXi is a great game and while i didnt purchase FFXIV because after being in the closed alpha to open beta i realized i needed better classes and less restriction on leveling and quests. All that will surely change within a year.Ill probably pick it up when the game shapes up a bit. Its no where near as bad as you guys make it sound or have heard.

Considering each new FF game is worse than it's predecessors I guess they'll update it into an abomination.

im not looking at it as a FF game. im looking at it a regular mmorpg. maybe thats why the reviews are so crappy. square enix is obviously not the way they were before. so the only choice is for them to start over fresh. the name square enix sounds its becoming a curse for them.

it is probably going to be like the promised DLC for ff13. they say "we'll add DLC to keep the game alive" but once they got their ill gotten sales they dropped the gamers on their heads and said "what did you lea~rn?"

they will promise patches and fixes to make this game better, to get sales. then, when they have the subscribers, "oops, you never learn do you? we gotta work on the next big game. i assure you it will be better AND it will definately have DLC."

i have abstained from buying square products for a couple years now. if they don't get the passion back, more people like me will run them into the ground.

Because you're so important Mr. Time-Machine-Tin-Foil-Theorist.

It will obviously get better as it would be hard to make it worse, but what's your point? That people shouldn't be paying for it now? Or that they should funnel money while they wait?

Because you played the game and everyone on the internet tells the truth right?

Because you've played this game and think it's wonderful right?

Not the same Anon, but I actually really enjoy FF13. I'm playing the Chinese version however (Japanese audio with English subs). A shame they didn't leave in the Japanese audio in the NA release.

And yet games like Oblivion with heavily similar mechanics get more garner, and No that just makes them look more bias that half of their points is just "This sucks" vs. "Okay here whats wrong, with this, that, and the other thing.

Gamespot has a rep for usually reviewing a game for what it lacks first, and then give the game it's "good points" in between their whining, and moaning.

lol plz, dont compare FF14 to Oblivion, they are nothing alike. It's like comparing F-Zero with Grand Turismo. Sure their both racing games, but ur missing the point