New Player: General game review

[squidbunny]

Welcome and thanks for your positivity!

[Ceodore]

First a little back story into my days playing MMO's. I played WoW for 4 years, it was the first MMO i had ever played. I raided endgame content as a healer for those 4 years and was positive i would never play a different MMO. After the recent Draenor expansion, i realized that the game i had used to love and play each day was no longer holding interest for me. I would log in, do my garrison dailies and log out. Nothing made me want to go out and explore after reaching the end game raid. Nothing made you go out either. You could sit in your garrison, go raid and nothing required you to step one foot out your garrison door. A lot of the WoW forum posters were expressing what type of different games they were moving to and Final Fantasy was one of those mentioned quite often. So i decided to download the game and give it a shot.

So because you have 4 years of MMO experience in only a main stream MMO, you decided to make a review of a second main stream MMO? Dang, If that's all the experience I need to write reviews of MMOs, I should start doing it too. I admit, it's a good game, much better now with new and more complex classes, but this honestly feels like a it was written with almost a biased stand point with overly flowery text. The sentiment is appreciated, but the amount of glee in this just detracts from serious criticisms that should take place too if we want to really make the "perfect" MMO.

For starters, the glamouring system isn't bad, but the best glamouring system I have ever seen was in RIFT, where you literally just had a glamour window where you just dropped pieces of armor you wanted the appearance of into it, and then you were done. No crafting. No exploitation of lower levels who didn't have a level 50 crafter. Just equip the item to your glamour slot and no matter what new item you equipped, you would still always have the glamour. The armor didn't disappear either if you unequipped it, just went back into your inventory for future use.

Or on the crafting system. Why make any of the items unable to be mass produced? I also feel your critique of the crafting was not all that warranted. It is well understood that if you are a new player, crafting is going to still be difficult. Just as all the veteran players put in time, gil, and effort into raising their crafting, why should a new player be able to come in and just level up their craft as if it's just as simple as banging on open world mobs with 1,2,3. Yes it's hard, but it's not suppose to be easy, or it wouldn't be a challenge.

And the flying was done well with the quests, but they don't actually have you stick around in the zone all that long after you aquire flying except in Churning Mists where you unlock a god aweful number of mindless chore quests from the moogles. It's hardly anything to be considered fun, just flying around playing for hide and go f**k yourself with pom pom bobble heads. Even SE has stated themselves that they regret the moogle quests. Most of the other areas though, you unlock flying in the area and then almost immediately get punted into a new zone and get grounded again on a repeat of the same search and find from the last area with flying still locked behind the MSQ. If they had given players a choice as to which way they wanted to unlock flying, that would have been smarter. Either gather several locational aether currents and unlock flight, or do these quests and unlock it. But give players and incentive to do both by making the flight speed faster if they do both. That would have been my personal approach to it.

As far as quests go, I believe Guild Wars 2 had a good design to theirs. They didn't have quests per say. Instead, they had areas where help was required. If you wanted to help, you could help and get some reward. But it wasn't just mind numbing tasks. Many of the same areas had dynamic events that sometimes took place that often incorporated progress in the regional quest with the event too. You could participate in the event and gain progress in the regional quest. Completing the event almost always gave full completion on both the event and the regional quest. Further, the EXP from the quest was based on your current level, and not the level of the quest itself. This allowed you to always gain good experience from quests despite possibly being at a higher level than the area you were in. This encouraged more completion of the area because people were likely to stay in an area to complete for the EXP before just moving on. The quests also didn't have just one completion method, but several ranging from killing mobs to gathering items, to defending structures, and all of them were able to complete the quest without having to perform all of the desired tasks. It was less in the spirit of questing and more in the spirit of helping out someone who actually had more dynamic needs. The MSQ in GW2 was really the only old fashioned quest in the game that involved decisions and the legitimate necessity of a certain task be performed. This made GW2's story more immersive and more unique to the player while still resulting in similar outcomes. GW2 did a great job with their "quests" and if I were going to choose any kind of system for a game, theirs would be it. Not to mention the fact that it would work well with the F.A.T.E. system in FFXIV.

I would personally give raiding to RIFT. They had some really well designed as well as complex without being overly difficult to understand tactics with their bosses. Even their lower dungeons had good difficulty to them with dynamic interactions between bosses, adds, and interactive objects in the boss room. That being said, I am pleased with some of the new fights in Heavensward.

I like your positivity, and I do agree that this is the best MMO I have played, between WOW, RIFT, TERA, GW2 and others. Don't take me for just being completely negative, but I believe there should be some perspective when talking about what games really did what best. All of those games had things they did great while also having things they really did so poor on that it was disastrous. Guild Wars 2 had an atrocious gear treadmill that only allowed for horizontal progression rather than vertical. RIFT lacked in their end game content as well as the size of their world so much it felt like we were all living in a snow globe. TERA, while having a great battle system, also lacked in end game content as well as a healthy economy. WoW has held out with millions of players for a long time, but due to management changes, has seen a decline in gaming quality and thus a decline in player base.

[AsteriaStarfall]

@ Ceodore, i appreciate that reply. I agree, there are room for improvements, there are in any game. That's why more expansions keep coming out, and forum threads get started, it's a never ending and sometimes vicious cycle
As i continue to play, i plan on starting a thread about improvements as well. However that is some time away, since there are already many of those type of posts on the forums to begin with. Sometimes developers read comments such as the forums, and never really get the praise for all the hard work they have done, my post was just for that. So that someone at SE knows that they have done a great job, and have made a player happy (and a new customer at that).

[NovaWulfe]

Great to have you as part of the FFXIV community! Thanks for the very detailed review, always nice to see some positivity on the forums. You were certainly right to not judge the community by internet forum standards.

[StrejdaTom]

Welcome, I am glad that you are enjoying the game. It is always good to see new faces.