First days of Retail - 1 week early

So, I got a Collector's Edition of FFXIV and therefore got to play a week earlier than those "only" getting the Standard Edition.

I kept the name Naurha Mups, and rolled on Besaid. I found a linkshell with a lot of nice people in it (Luna Veneris) which is BIG atm with a lot of people from all over the world.

Okay, so what's different from the Beta?

• menu lag is reduced
• you can scroll the inventory
• you get more alerts when you are doing something wrong. E.g you can't switch your abilities when in fighting mode. In OB the game wouldn't tell you that. Now it shows a message in the chat.
• less reward from the first few quests
• less time in between leves
• less gear rewards from leves
• more people --> flooded starting zones. Which is as expected, I guess it will get worse next week when the SE comes out. 
• probably more I forgot right now

Okay well. I started out in Limsa Lominsa this time, because I played both Gridania and Ul'Dah during Beta and I wanted to know the LL story. This is also where I was able to make this awesome screenshot:

I guess there will be a Musketeer class sometime in the future. But at this time, the NPC took the weapon away from me again =(.

I tried out Botanist for the first time. And, I love it. You can either harvest grass strips, or log trees, the latter is wrapped into a nice little mini game, basically hot and cold. I somehow just love the whole concept in FFXIV where you have to work to get stuff. To log and get wood, in other games you just have to right click the tree while having the axe in the inventory. Here you a) have to be a botanist to do so and b) complete the minigame to successfully log. During the whole time you play you just have the feeling to achieve something, to do something that has an effect and that is just totally awesome.

You basically see this little glowing orb on the map and there you can harvest. Another awesome thing is that these points are shared. You can have a lot of botanists harvesting or logging the same grasspatch  / tree. Your tree can't be stolen by others. Okay, that may be a little unrealistic, because especially in the starting areas you can have like 8 people hacking on a tree, but I prefer this over not being able to log at all. 

In this lower picture you see the minigame. The orange pointer goes up and down and you stop it at one point and it tells you how close you are to success. You have about 3-4 trys, during which you usually get closer and closer based on the messages the game gives you. 

You can log one tree or grass patch up to 6 times!

I grouped up with 2 people from the linkshell to do leves. It was the first time I did that and I have to say it was pretty awesome. We were 2 Conjurers and 1 Thaumaturge (me) and we pretty much just mana burned the mob groups. The feared Dodo's stood no chance against so much magic power! :D Doing leves is very lucrative. Each of us made about 70k gil while having a lot of fun.

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Just a very pretty sight of Ul'Dah by night, I think.

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Oh, this is something I want to talk about. Do you see the earring on the blond Lalafell and the Choker around my neck? In this game, you see the accessoiries you equip! And it isn't just a ring or whatever, this guy had "Fang Earrings" equipped. All the models of the deifferent accessoiries seem implemented. So much love in detail in this game.



So I'm still loving it. I just hope they implement some kind of search function in the market wards soon. You can't really trade well, because of this. So far I gave stuff to guild members or even NPCd stuff because it's just so annoying to trade without auction house or search function.

Last days of Beta!

I'm just going to post a few pics. But first I'll have to tell you all about something I read on a German forum concerning FFXIV. As we know, the game at its current state has its flaws, like rather bad ui, lag, etc.
And someone said, translated:
"I WANT to like this game becaue I have never seen such a beautiful MMORPG. But it won't let me. It' like seeing a beautiful person who constantly burps into your face".
Just wanted to share shis awesome quote as it made me laugh. A lot.

Anyhow, here a few screenies where I messed around with my archer.

Moogles! YAY! Cute fluffy weird little balls. :D

Another one, during the first story quest.

I wonder who named this guy. This is NOT a "Raging Ram". It's a weird round ball with horns, resembling a little to a sheep... Cute anyway.

My other character with Hamen ;) If he decides to play in the real game, this is probably how we are going to look, except that I'll main a caster.

Yes, my archer looks like a witch. But I mean... why should an archer not be able to wear a robe with a witch hat? This restriction never made sense to me in other MMORPGs. I mean, A cook can still wear a plumbers uniform, even though he isn't one? I mean I can understand when a potentially physically weak caster can't wear a plate mail, but other way around it makes no sense to me to forbid it. So yeah, now I'm looking cool (and the stats on the robe were still better than my starting equipment, btw.)

Second Thoughts on the Beta

After the tragic death of my Lalafell I created two new characters. A Miqote Archer and another Lalafell, Marauder this time.

The Archer plays quite nicely, they get a binding move pretty early, they do a lot of damage and since they can stay at distance they don't take much damage either. This is especially useful when fighting mushrooms that do a little aoe poison - Most of the time I could just run out of range and keep damaging him without being in danger.
Other than in WoW you actually have to refill your quiver once you used up a stack of arrows. If you don't refill you will throw stones, doing one damage a hit :)
The most basic arrows are very cheap. But technically I would say that a carpenter should be able to make arrows, but from what I saw you need a ton of mats to make 3 arrows. Taking a minute each craft it doesn't sound like fun when you have to do that to provide yourself with arrows... Maybe I just saw a particularly complicated recipe but that kind of put me off.

I started the Archer in Gridania and complete the first story quest. So apparently I'm one of the rare people that understand Moogle talk, hehe. I also explored a little bit, but in the forest around Gridania it's kind of hard to dodge mobs, because you only have those forest paths and not an open area where you could walk around. I made it to the second camp (only because some menacing looking mobs didn't aggro though). Not much to see except forest landscapes until then.

The Lalafell I created to play with my boyfriend Hamen. He had to go through a bit of trouble to make FFXIV run on his comp and even now it still lags although he plays on lowest graphics etc. He is now planning on getting a new system <_< Anyway, we ran around as Pugilist and Marauder killing mobs pretty quickly. Although I have to say that poison from Chiglets is really mean. 70 HP a tick is not funny when you have only 400 or so. I died twice to that :( We then changed jobs, me Gladiator (where the hell do you get a low level shield?) , him Lancer. We could kill stuff, but for some reason we both got super few skillpoints while doing so. I don't really know why. After getting a grand total of about 200 skillpoints after 20 minutes (on level 1, mind you!) I switched back to Marauder, promptly gaining skillpoints again. Not making much sense to me there... I must say, I miss the "old school" job names... Talking of Paladin, Warrior, White Mage, Red Mage, Lancer (well they got that one.. :/ )... and the likes. Why make new names for the same classes? It's not a big deal of course, just something I noticed which I would have preferred a different way. Also the beta is pretty nice to get first impressions, but it doesn't invite for long play because there is so little to do. You get the first story quest which you complete at around level 4. The next story quest commences at level 10 (so I heard) and in between you can do 4 leve quests a day and then grind. Or travel to another city and do the level quests there. I'm hoping they add a bit for the release, especially because the starting areas will be filled up again --> no mobs to grind on.
I'm still excited about the game, I think it has a LOT of potential. Just hope SE won't screw it up. :)

Awesome travelling with pretty bad ending.

So. After I bought myself a nice robe and couldn't find a hat I set myself the goal to craft a hat. Since I levelled clothcraft up a bit anyway. Problem: No wind shards to be found around Uldah. Internet told me to travel to Limsa Lominsa and kill sheep to get them so off I went!!

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The landscape around Uldah one last time, this time without sandstorm. As you can see the vision is very clear.

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This is the landscape in the next area. The sun was going down and I was hoping to get a red-skyish screenshot.

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Instead I got a screenshot where it looks like the ladybug killed me. It probably would have but it was really a big spider thing... No idea what's it called. It hit me for over 1000 damage :S

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Not much to say to this, I just found it pretty.

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Just like this. Alot of this stuff wants me to come back by day, I bet it looks even more awesome then. So much to explore, I don't think I will actually be questing or grinding much at all anymore until release.

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Here I am waiting for the ferry to take me over to Limsa Lominsa. 

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On the ferry, admiring the water effects. :)

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Uh yeah. A pirate taking me safely to Limsa Lominsa, hehe. 

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Dawn approaching. 

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Now the unspeakable happened!! I ran all the way to this blue... thingy thinking it was the lighttower where I was supposed to find a flock of sheep dropping huge amounts of wind shards! Instead, right when I clicked the thing, this big ugly crab killed me with one hit only to mock me after. He kind of danced at my dead body! Worse, the moment I clicked this, I think it set my homepoint right there. Everytime I hit "return" it said "This action can not be done right now" even relogging didn't help :-( So I think I am stuck there now. And even if I could get up, I'm not sure if the crab wouldn't just kill me again. So I guess I'll have to make a new character xD. Good thing it's only the beta.

Even the crab couldn't believe my bad luck. :(

Sooo yeah. Gonna roll out a new character! .. 19 frikkin points... for those who get the joke. The good news is, my boyfriend probably got his video card to work now so with a bit of luck we can play together soon. Gonna be more fun then I think =D!

Screenshots (1)

After remapping my apple keyboard I can now blend out the interface and therefore make nice screenshots.

Well, this was before I remapped. Those spots of flowers are everywhere in the area around Uldah. Also there is almost constantly a sandstorm kind of thing. Which is why the background looks so dusty, this has nothing to do with my system. In other areas you can see far without problems.

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Crafting (Clothcraft). While doing this you have to choose every few seconds what you do next. You have to base your decision on the color of this little glowing orb. If it's white, you are good to go, if it's yellow, even better, if it's red you better wait until it changes color. Each craft has its own animation and tool which I find very nice.

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:D I like this so much. I know emotes don't make a game, but this is just so cute that I have to post it.

Beta Key - First impressions

Hello,

I recently acquired an open beta key for Final Fantasy XIV. Yesterday I found the time to play it.

After I created a little Taru Traumaturge (Lalafell.. sorry if I use XI-Vocabulary here...) and watched the intro scene which was pretty amazing (Gridania). The graphics of the game are superb, and pure joy to walk around and just look at stuff.

After getting used to the controls (rather similar to XI, but not quite the same... I hope it will be customizable at release!). I explored a little, did my first quest and had a little bit of money, say 1000Gil. With this you can buy any weapon and therefore change job. I assume you know the basic mechanics of job changing here.
After I noticed that my Traumaturge has no access to Cure I wanted to play Conjurer first. However I was not able to find a merchant that sells the Conjurer weapon in Gridania! I'm pretty sure I'm blind because I found the merchants for just about every other class in the market quarter but whatever. :P

I just created a new character, this time Ul'dah. A bit stupid, the game crashed during the intro-cutscene! Anyhow, I quested, did those Guild Leves, grinded a bit... Did the first "main story quest" and after that was a rich Lalafell with 30k gil just from Quest Awards. That is MORE than enough to start out.

The battle system is the same as in FFXI so I like it. A lot of people complain about having to "click" the mob twice to actually attack, and my advice is: Don't use the mouse. Use the numpad, with 0 you can tab and you have a enter key right there as well. The arrow keys aren't far away either so that's the best solution for me.

Concerning crafting:
My boyfriend created a Galka (I don't even know how they are called in XIV...Rhoesomething) Alchemist. He failed the first quest and therefore was standing there with no gil, and no offfensive skill. How would he get money? I see a big design flaw right there. Most guild leves for the crafters require level 5 as well, but how is he going to level if he can't buy any mats?

Well, back to myself and my opinion on crafting. Yes, the menu is sluggish and slow as hell and that sucks and has to change. But I love the basic idea behind the crafting. You actully have to craft it yourself and not say "Make 200 Hempen Cloths, I'll go afk and be a level 10 Clothcrafter when I come back". I love that idea. They just have to add a "known recipe" section so you don't have to go through the inventory (which lags HORRIBLY) every time you want to make something. Just like it automatically adds the ingredients when you do the guild leves.

To all those people complaining about not being able to jump: People, this is FF! You just don't jump. Get used to it or leave the game alone.

Let's get to the bad stuff though. Gotta keep in mind that it's a beta though.
* no hotkeys for inventory, etc.
* doors or aetherytes are not targetable. You get a little action icon when you approach one and then have to select it in the menu. That feels really awkward. Target it via tab and when hitting enter open the door or display the interaction with the object would be much nicer.
* game crashes, but i expect this to stop after release
* no real tutorials. At the aetherytes you can select a manual kind of thing where stuff is explained, but that's about it. You kind of just get thrown in there and have to figure stuff out for yourself. Which I don't mind but I have read a lot of people complaining about this.
* Not enough spawn points of exp-mobs. This is really sucky. At peek times you run through this huge huge desert area and maybe every 5 minutes you can kill one mob. This flat out sucks. I don't mind grinding, not at all, but at this state you can't really even do that.
* controls are not customizable.