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Final Fantasy XIV Launches To Scathing Reviews
RogueyWon writes "Now that the massively-multiplayer Final Fantasy XIV has been on the shelves for a couple of weeks, the reviews are starting to arrive; and it appears that the game is the subject of a critical battering unprecedented in the history of the main Final Fantasy series. First it was the Amazon user reviews, then Gamespot weighed in, describing the game as a 'step backwards for the genre,' and now IGN has described it as 'an arduous experience that, in its current state, isn't worth playing.' Given the general dissatisfaction that surrounded the release of the (offline) Final Fantasy XIII earlier in the year, many long-time fans of the series must now be wondering whether the magic hasn't departed."
I guess I'll have to turn to one of about 10,000 other spikey-haired-hermaphrodites-on-the-rails-rpgs if I want my Japanese game fix.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I've been playing online RPG's since MUD's in junior high and FFXIV was the first time in my game-playing history that I've ever desperately wanted a tutorial.
Haven't played FF XIV, but the issue plaguing XIII was the insistence of the developers on having a beautifully-rendered world full of gorgeous eye candy.
Turns out you don't have enough space on a standard PS3 DVD to make a beautifully-rendered world full of gorgeous eye candy that is as open and expansive as FF players have come to expect. Result: one of the most boring, linear games I've ever played. In fact FF XIII is more like watching a several-days-long film than playing an interactive game.
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It feels like they just plain gave up and didn't want to take the time to polish it. The now-infamous Gametrailers review is pretty much spot on.
If this and pretty much every Final Fantasy game since VII have proven anything, it's that this series needs to just go away. It's far too late for a graceful death, but put it out of its misery.
YMMV, just my opinion, etc apply.
Living With a Nerd
I heard from a friend in the beta, that it was basically Final Fantasy 11 with a fresh coat of paint-- and this was a guy who enjoyed Final Fantasy 11. Given that 11 launched during the Everquest era, when players were treated with total contempt by devs, soloing was a grind almost as agonizing as waiting for a group, and it was easy to lose days' worth of progress in an encounter gone bad, it's not surprising that something in a similar vein would go over very poorly today.
What happened to Final Fantasy? I grew up with it, the original Final Fantasy was my first RPG, and then Final Fantasy 2, and then, what I believe to be the greatest RPG of all time, Final Fantasy 3/6 came out. Final Fantasy VII was great, and breathtaking, but since then, it's been downhill. Nine was a quick breath of fresh air, but VIII is the only Final Fantasy I've never played past the first hour. Ten was super linear (geez, *another* cutscene?), and X-2 was a joke (please stop making intrepid adventurers act like tween girls, it's insulting to everyone except tween girls). XII seemed to be on the right track, but that's because they used an established world and mythos from the Tactics series, and the biggest problem was it's abrupt ending and auto-gameplay, but at least there were some compelling characters and power struggles, although it fell short in that area. And then XIII I haven't played yet, because I took one look at the map, and lost all interest (hint, it's a straight line), and nothing I read said that the story made up for that lack of exploration.
It seems to me that the problem, more than anything, is the failure to dream up a really compelling setting, characters, and plot, and then let the player loose in it. Earlier games had those, but it seems that lately all that they're interested in is new systems of combat and leveling up. There are no villains like Kefka, no tragedies like Rosa's attempted suicide, no big reveals like Cloud's backstory, no tortured protagonists like Cecil.
In a lot of ways, it's as if they've substituted "cool" for "good". They want a cool story, a cool main character, a cool setting, not good ones, not well developed ones. The potential for storytelling in videogames, from a technological standpoint, it's all there. There's nothing really holding anyone back, but instead, we get flashy graphics and a new battle system, instead of characters we care about. When I was 14 years old, watching Rosa throw herself off a cliff, or Terra almost decide against saving the world, or even the NPC orphan teenage couple obliquely considering an abortion because Kefka had turned the world into a wasteland, that was good storytelling, and I expected it to only get better as technology improved, and it really didn't, at least not for the Final Fantasy series.
It's a shame, and maybe this is harsh, but I consider the Final Fantasy series to be like M. Night Shyamalan movies. Sure, "Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" were epic, and "Signs" was pretty decent, but at some point you have to give up on things and count yourself as no longer a fan, but a harsh critic.
Every time a new MMO launches, I've got this baggage of playing WoW for 2-3 years. I expect the game that comes out to be as polished and as good as WoW. It's unfair but my logic just ends at "why don't I just play WoW instead." I hope other people are different but that's what I keep thinking and what leads to my termination of game play. I don't go back to WoW until an expansion comes out and then I just level max my characters and drop it after a month.
I played Darkfall and it was very unpolished. I've played a lot of MMOs like it. It gets into development and then it feels like the source of funding forces an early release and the thing falls apart. If I think back before WoW to my first MMO which was Star Wars Galaxies, I can recall the complete lack of a tutorial, the completely unpolished game play and the glitches right off the bat. But I stuck with it for a long time right up until the combat upgrade because I didn't know that there was a World of Warcraft. FFXIV lacks any tutorial or basic guide. It lacks polish. And I scrutinize it unfairly and don't give it a chance. I was in the beta and the lag killed me. I'm told that got better but I wasn't giving up another $50-$60 for a month of a game. I don't think that's a bad deal, I just have had it with unpolished games.
I have given up on FFXIV unless my friends inform me otherwise in the future and I now away The Old Republic. For me, it's just looking for that next MMO to sweep me off my feet like SWG and WoW did. Unfortunately, it's going to need the interesting and immense world of SWG with the refined and polished combat of WoW before I dive into it forty hours a week for over a year. So far, there's been three or four candidates that have fallen short. FFXIV is just the latest. I'm starting to feel like it will never end. Please, game publishers, do not release an MMO before it's ready just to make some quick bank only to drop it like a prom night dumpster baby on the pavement. You are killing your developing team's vision.
Side Note: FFXIII was terrible. What a linear game! Have they forgotten how much players like to customize their characters to their own desires and goals?! I think there was maybe one dimension of that game that allowed me to customize my characters through their skill spheres and even that was a no-brainer-everybody-has-to-take-this-path style of game play. I gave up after five levels of "now you must go here, you cannot grind, you cannot do anything interesting, you cannot explore, you can not investigate." What a stark departure from a franchise I have loved!
My work here is dung.
GameTrailers isn't a fan of the game either
Just for a quick bit of info, from what I understand in the Japanese culture the effeminate looking bishounen (prettyboy) with the heart-shaped face is actually an ideal of masculinity. The massive square-jawed body-builder a la Zangief is actually their stereotype for gay.
So, yeah, those spikey-haired hermaphrodites are Real Manly Men.
Yeah, it makes no sense for me either.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Video game industry followed the movie industry down the rabbit hole. They are dependent now on blockbusters and are always one bad game or expansion away from bankruptcy it seems. Bad release? Time to lay off half the studio.
The EA\Sony\Activision nonsense of the uber publishing house has run its course. Eve Online continues its slow lumbering growth by rejecting the contemporary model. Minecraft outsold SC2 for a couple of weeks, with 1 guy as a developer. Dwarf Fortress soliders on and grows. Indie games are making a comeback and all that the big 3 (here in the US at least) can do is more reboots and sequels... just like Hollywood and we know how well that worked out for them for quality... blegh....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
No spoilers, god dammit! You've just ruined 5000hrs of gameplay for me.
Meta will eat itself
This should be a wake up call to every 1st tier MMORPG developer:
Money and a strong IP do not equal success!
How many of us felt intuitively that Square Enix has been losing its way with the FF franchise for years? How could FFXIV be anything other than what we're seeing right now?
Just like the offline industry that spends hundreds of millions now to develop offline AAA titles, the MMORPG market is suffering the same, eventual fate: to be usurped by quickly built, fun, disruptive games discovering new monetization models ala Minecraft. Yet, we're seeing the big boys approach development with the same WOW-killer attitude again and again, instead of innovating.
Some might say: well look at FFXIV's switch up from the auction system to player markets! Sorry, that's as old as Ultima Online and finding items you want is just as frustrating.
It's so very disappointing to see Final Fantasy XIV hit the shelves like this, I can't even believe it.
I have been playing since it was released (not the collectors early release) and I have found it quite enjoyable. The main thing I have a problem with right now is the bazaar-only system. They really need to implement an auction house. I've left my game logged in overnight several times just to sell off some inventory, because the market wards just seem too cumbersome to actually use them. I'm sure my video card loves that... and high pop servers probably appreciate the associated lag of loading everyone's character model etc. Another thing they ought to do is give us recipe books. The crafting system is intricate enough without having to go to a 3rd party website to look up mats for everything you want to craft. Love how crafting damages your gear too.
I figure they have until WoW:Cataclysm comes out to sink or swim, at least for me.
Here's an overview of the issues with FFXIV:
Laggy menus. the vast majority of menus are server side. You have to wait for them to load (1-3 seconds normally, 5+ seconds for vendors)
-Awful interface design. No keyboard shortcuts. To interact with a crystal I don't double click or right click it, I have to open up the main menu and select a menu that only displays near a crystal (I actually had to look up how to interact with crystals).
-Crafting requires you to go through 4 or so (laggy) menus and confirmations. You then start a (slow) crafting process where you're given no information what to do and how to lower the chance of failure. Most crafting requires materials only made by other professions
-No AH. Instead you've got to manually visit dozens of player stores and hope one of them has the item you're after. Laggy menus make this even more of a chore.
-Worthless maps.
-NPC do not give any directions at all. They'll say things like "go get some materials from xyz". You then have to open a help website if you want to know where XYZ is because the game gives you no help at all.
-Limits to the number of guildleves (quests), XP and skill points you can get. All on different counters, all reset in different ways, all punishing the player for playing the game they've paid to subscribe to.
-Worlds are filled with copy and paste scenary.
-Nowhere near enough content. Only story comes from story quests you get once in a blue moon. Other than that it's solo grinding or guildleves.
-Even creating an account is a mission in itself. You have to deal with stupid amounts of unexplained jargon even at this stage, you have to sign up to some paypal clone (with its own cumbersome registration process). Oh and they put on a leaflet in big letters "YOUR REGISTRATION CODE", silly me, I thought that was the code I should use to register. 30 Minutes of wondering how I enter a code with that format, I discovered that wasn't the registration code, that was a code to enable me to use the forums. The code I really wanted was on the back of the manual.
MMO developers need to man the fuck up and start making better games. MMOs have a long tradition of sucking. If you took the same quality of game and made it single player, it would be a universal bomb in most cases. The reason they got away with it was because they are MMOs. People really want that experience of playing in a large, persistent, world with others and thus would put up with crap if that was what it took to get it.
That shouldn't be the case. MMOs should need to be good like other games. For it to be considered a good game it should, you know, actually need to be good, to be fun, to not have massive amounts of problems, etc.
The reason WoW sold MMOs to the masses is it was the first MMO to be good. Not perfect, not without flaw, but good. A well designed game on its own. It was easy to get started in, fun to play, inviting, etc.
That is the standard people need to meet. It isn't just about getting the bugs out before you launch, though that is part of it, it is more about game design. You need to design the game to be inviting to new players, fun to get started on, plenty to do for everyone and so on. A very simple example is the very beginning of WoW. You watch a little movie and then gain control of your character. You are in a colourful world with an inviting NPC with a bigass ! over their head. It is the only thing that really draws your attention. They set you off in the world, and in one fell stroke teach you several things like how to communicate, how quests work and so on. Things are very easy and go at your own pace, you have all of two or three abilities to use, and you get a nice sense of achievement each time you kill something and the experience bar ticks up.
Basically it very slowly eases you in to the world. It makes it easy to accomplish something right off. No sitting through tons of boring "training" no feeling like a fish out of water, having trouble coping with what to do. You get in to the world and can have fun right away.
There's a lot more than just that, but it is design like that. Actual, good, gameplay things that are more or less required for non-MMOs to be considered reasonable games.
So while I don't want new games to be "another WoW" I do want them designed to that standard. I want them to be good games. That is not unfair at all.
It seems the beta testers were doing a pretty good job of communicating the problems up to the developers, but the developers never gave much feedback about those messages and did not really address most of the problems that were pointed out. If they fix that feedback loop in the future, it would surely lead to a better game.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I bought two copies of the collector's edition for pre-release fun... That's $150. Just so my gf and I could play early and 'enjoy' the less crowded newbie zones, etc.
.. like opening my inventory on the fly. Nothing is intuitive. Combat is slow and the lag is terrible. I come to find out through research on the net that all of the servers are located in Japan and that there are no plans to change this. Great. I press on. I find myself running through some random map area. I finally find something to kill, and do so pretty easily. I figure heck I should be able to check out the next area. The monster looks like a tiny squirrel on steroids. It one-shots me. I die, and respawn 20 minutes from where I was. So I go somewhere else... find an area with some mushrooms that I can kill. Great! But the lag is so bad that other players are seeing the mushrooms respawn seconds before I do, and they are getting first hit on the mob. I can't get any kills.
A few hours later and we've got all the patches downloaded on one computer, but the other one refuses to download much of anything through the torrent-only source method. So, I find a way to trick the patcher into using the other computer's files, which is a complete hassle but eventually we get it working. At this point my excitement is pretty high because I still haven't even logged into the game once. I just registered through their highly suspect payment method and managed to figure out how to login, and I've created a character.
Time for the fun, right? Wrong.
After finally getting into the game I immediately get a bad feeling. I can't jump (what is this, 1999?). In a game where you can't even jump you can forget about flying, as in WoW or Aion and others. I can't bind keys to do anything
It goes on and on like this for a few hours until I log out, disgusted. I will never play it again. Well played, SE, well played. You made $150 off of me for 3 hours of gameplay (if you can even call it that). I should've learned my lesson from FFXIII. I blame only myself.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
We know how male and female brains work differently from each other.
Male brains have an overwhelming tendency to be distracted by breasts, for example.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Dude, I'm not even talking "boring". It starts boring, sure. Then it gets stupid. I'm talking plot twists of the caliber of, and spoiler warning: these are actual plot twists from the game:
- oh, we all grew up together, but somehow we all just forgot that (while still living together the whole time. We're not talking people who lived somewhere else for 20 years and forgot their friends from kindergarten, but people who forgot their friends from kindergarten while still living in the same room with them.)
- oh, and that evil chick we've been trying to kill for the last two discs and viceversa? we kinda forgot she's our adoptive mother who raised us since we were babies. (Yeah, I guess it's the kind of thing that just slips one's mind.)
- oh, they're shooting ICBM's at our school, but they don't know that our school can move. Seriously, it's like a freaking iceberg with the visible school on top and a giant mechanism under it for, umm, moving the school out of the way of an ICBM attack. (What, your school wasn't built with such a mechanism?)
- Rinoa getting kidnapped again and again until it turns into a running gag taken to absurd extremes. Like when a whole country who was A-OK with Edea, the big evil sorceress who had attacked them and nearly caused a world war, now arrests Rinoa for having received basic padawan training (so to speak) from Edea in the sorceress business. And you have to rescue her again. And I mean, seriously, it's on par with being ok with Hitler but trying to off some guy he trained in skeet shooting.
- the final twist when your party gets to travel in time and convince Edea to, umm, adopt their baby selves and start a school dedicated to hunting witche. Err... sorceresses.
And don't think some elaborate mind-fuck or subtle philosophical arguments to convince her to throw her life away just to train some guys who'll hunt her and her kind down. Think a poor young woman sweeping her back yard, and a bunch of strangers crash onto her lawn. And it kinda goes like:
"Are you a witch?"
"Umm, yes."
"I want you to found an orphanage and school dedicated to training kids to hunt down witches."
"Umm, ok."
Not an exact quote, but, really, _that_ fracking stupid.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Come on; that's hardly fair. You can't judge the game by what it could have been, had you had the imagination. It was created to be played a certain way, and that's what it should be judge upon. Otherwise, even the worst games of all time probably should get higher scores:
"I give Dreckfest 88%. If you played the way they say in the manuals, the tutorials, and the pop-up hints, the controls were horrendous, the graphics were utterly broken, and the AI would frequently walk into walls. However, if you played the game with your eyes closed, and tried to navigate the game world by listening only to the sounds (e.g. your footsteps, enemy footsteps/voices, projectiles from your guns on various surfaces), the game became atmospheric and fun."
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.