Final Fantasy XIV

October 05, 2010

Story

I hit THM 15 and therefore got the next story line quest. Here Final Fantasy stands to its name. The story (Limsa Lominsa) is nice. I'm not going to put spoilers here, just post some screenshots.
I was very surprised and happy to see that they had rendered cutscenes with voice not only at the beginning of the game! I got stuck in a sea fight :o!
I do regret though to have started in LL because I like the Gridania story better. If I had started in Gridania I would have missed the LL story completely though and I didn't want that.
Anyhow, I'll just post some of those awesome screenies I took. :)

Group play

It has been about a week and I have several topics I want to write about. I will split this in three posts though, so the titles fit.

First, I want to talk about group play.

This is how the screen looks like when in a group of 6. While it looks tidy and doesn't have unnecessary elements taking away space like for example character portraits, its functions are rather... non existant. First, you can't target your party members via the F-keys. Nor does it seem to work to klick their names on the menu (however I only tried this once and I might have mis clicked...). You have to either tab through all the characters on the screen until you reach the person you want or click the character model directly.
Both of which is PRETTY bad if you want to heal someone who is about to die. Basically if you are healer, you need to stay locked on the tank and do nothing else. That is freaking boring, I imagine. I really do not understand why they took away the great group gameplay form FF11. That was simple and awesome. This is stupid and complicated and just a mess.
I didn't even address the bugs. Sometimes you can't target your party members. They show as 0 HP and 0 MP and don't have their character names displayed above their heads and you just simply cannot target them. Then, when you are in a group of more than 2, not everyone will gain skill points from attacking the mob! Isn't that great?
That basically means that groups bigger than 3 are stupid and unefficient. At 3 you can have one healer who heals and ONLY heals (how interesting, isn't it?) and the other 2 can hit the mob (probably tank and DD).
Ugh, this makes me rather mad, as you can probably tell.
However, if you do not want any EP but rather the reward of a quest or something the group play can be fun especially because of the monster design. There aren't any innovating things though. Just mobs with AOE or cone attacks so you have to be positioned correctly and stuff, but this really isn't anything new. Just fun as it always has been.

Sorry for the rant. But this is just such a mess. I also don't really understand people who actually support this and think it's okay like this. I like the game overall but after the first few awesome days are over I start to see the bad parts of the game. And especially group play is so important.I guess there is nothing we can do but wait for SE to fix this.

September 26, 2010

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.

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

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.

September 17, 2010

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.)

September 13, 2010

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. :)

September 08, 2010

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!!

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

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

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

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

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.

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

On the ferry, admiring the water effects. :)

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

Dawn approaching.

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!

September 07, 2010

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.

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.

: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.