Here, I’m going to briefly discuss miscellaneous little tidbits. Some might call it nit-picking or paying attention to extraneous things, but these are still part of the game and still should be looked at. It’s our money and, as customers, we expect to be given the most bang for our buck, right?
Let’s start with the visuals and sound. The game just looks great. The environment is lush and colorful, the enemies are detailed, the armor looks cool (at least when it doesn’t look like a leotard), and I happened to notice that during a rainstorm, the robe I happened to be wearing at the time was flapping in the wind. The gloomier zones seem extremely foreboding while the greener maps feel alive. The attention to general detail is pretty awesome.
Strangely, there are instances where blades of grass and the petals of flowers are so obviously pixelated, you’d think you were looking at a picture from a SNES game. It looks incredibly flat in those cases. Also, despite little details like the wind blowing lighter armor around, you don’t seem to move the grass when you walk through it. Odd that this is overlooked, but there’s nothing I can do about it.
The sounds work very well too. Pulling my sword out sounds authentic with its gentle scrape of metal against metal. As you craft, the machinery you’re working with sounds like the real thing. If you’re in a busy area of a city, hearing the ‘tink’ of a hammer hitting an anvil or a grindstone smoothing out a ring gives the place life. The background music really brings out the ‘fantasy’ part of Final Fantasy. I will say that when you whistle for your chocobo mount, the game begins to play something solely for when you ride around that sounds a little like the Indiana Jones theme for a few seconds. Not sure why it does, but I still find it amusing.
Like I mentioned on another section of this review, I do wish they had more voice acting in their cutscenes. There were several times where I’d just skip through the dialogue because I got used to hearing the characters chat with each other in other games and it felt more interesting and emotional. Considering the budget of some games – looking at you, GTA5 – there’s really no reason all the characters couldn’t speak.
Another nice part of the game is that they start you not only with a ridiculous amount of bag space but a rather large armoury chest as well, which is where your armor and weapons go. Hallelujah! You no longer have to worry about buying a bunch of overpriced bags from the auction house, can carry around all this loot, and can keep all this extra gear on your person for all the roles you’ve taken on, including whatever crafting or gathering profession you may be doing at the time! The one thing I wish they had was a better bag sorter. Being able to click a single button and have your bags instantly organized would be a godsend, especially since the game’s current sorting option seems to put things in random places and I sometimes have trouble finding what I’m looking for.
While you’re sitting in your home town filling said bags with crafted items or things bought off the auction house, you’ll probably see a lot of gil spammers, but there’s no real way to get around them existing and bothering people in any MMO. Fortunately, you can put them on ignore and be done with it but it’s not as simple as typing ‘/ignore person’s name’ and calling it a day. Right-clicking on their name in the chat box doesn’t bring up an option to ignore them or, as FF puts it, blacklist them nor does it give you the option of quickly reporting them. You have to open up support desk under the escape menu to do that. Typing ‘/blacklist person’s name’ doesn’t work either. It’s a four-step process in order to get them off your screen, which seems ridiculous to me. For anyone curious, here’s the entire sequence:
- Type /blist
- Your blacklist pops up and you click ‘Add’
- You type the player’s name
- Click ‘OK’ only to be asked if you want to add so-and-so to your blacklist, where you click ‘Yes’
Strangely, if someone sends you a whisper, which will no doubt be a gil seller, you can type ‘/blist add <r>’ and click ‘yes’ when it prompts. Not sure why this action is so much simpler than the standard way.
Macros are available for player use, which is a good thing. Unfortunately, since just about everything is on the GCD, trying to do more than one thing at a time (ex. use two defensive cooldowns at once) is impossible. You have to tell the macro ‘/wait 1’ as in ‘wait one second’ in order for it to use both abilities and half the time, it doesn’t appear to function correctly. I’ve also found that I need to stand totally still in order for the abilities to be used properly. I have no idea why this seems to be the case.
I think the second biggest problem I see as a whole, and this is a big one, is that there is no real way to make money in this game. You may think the auction house is a good place to go, but with no real way to generate personal revenue from the game itself and keep money pumping into the economy, the market quickly crashed. While you may sell something on the auction house, honestly, the gil is just changing hands; there’s no real profit behind it all. I believe Square Enix is working on something, but to me, it’s kind of embarrassing that they didn’t see this coming while it was in its testing stages – hell, even in early re-development – considering how little monetary reward everything outside of questing gives you.
So how do you make money? Well, there are Leve Quests available at each major town, which are simple combat or crafting quests you can do several times a day, but the amount of money they give you is absolutely laughable. Typically, the only one you’ll find yourself doing is the first one that gives you access to the rest that they offer, and while the initial reward isn’t bad, the rewards for the follow-up Leve Quests are paltry and not worth the time or effort unless you are really, really bored. One or two deaths in a dungeon and that money is gone in the form of a repair bill. Though Square Enix reduced repair costs recently, it’s still only a band-aid. The only real way to make money for yourself is to start a new character, get them to 50 on quests and then mail yourself the money, all the while never buying gear upgrades for yourself. Not even kidding.
Another major complaint I have is the targetting system. While MMO players are all familiar with tab-targetting, the way FFXIV forces you to target enemies is all over the place. As a tank, it’s not uncommon for me to have my back to a wall so the other party members don’t get hit by frontal attacks. But if I’m fighting more than one thing, tabbing doesn’t seem to work right. I have to move my camera to a bird’s eye view or spin it around so it faces me and click on what I want to hit. In some instances, hitting ‘Tab’ will select enemies on the other side of the room that I can’t even select with my mouse or enemies on the floor below if I happen to be in a multi-story dungeon. In other cases, my camera can be zoomed out as far as it will go, and I can see an approaching enemy with my eyeballs, yet because my character is behind a pillar or a tree or something, I can’t select it with my mouse. Maybe I’m the only one who has issues like this, but it’s still a monumental pain and anyone else who has had similar problems is probably nodding wildly as they read this.
However, sometimes the ability to target a mob goes beyond simply having to move your camera or character to a different position. In some of the more crowded zones, there are so many people running around when a particular FATE is active that the enemies can’t even render on the screen. Limiting each zone to a finite number of players – like what GW2 has implemented – may help alleviate this problem a bit, but exactly what could be a long time and more effective solution I’m not really sure. I’m no techie.
Another thing that really bugs me is that there’s no way (yet?) to click on item links in chat. If I see someone trying to sell something in a city’s chat, I have no way to know if it’s better than what I have or not or if it’s even something I could use. This is a big foul-up on Square Enix’s part. The only time I can recall seeing what stats and attributes were on an item was when it was being rolled on in a dungeon or when it’s sitting on a vendor.
Oh, and there’s no PVP in the game just yet. Sad face.
Gamer's Review: 