Okay here is my two cents. First off, since I had surgery on my hand last week, I had plenty of freetime to spend this weekend doing nothing. Coincidentally the open beta for this game started the same day. So here are my experiences thus far. For reference I have a Miqote character on the Palamecia server named Kuro Neko (black cat in japanese). I have made it up to level 13 thaumaturge, 6 pugilist, 6 lancer, 9 goldsmith, 6 fisher, 5 miner, and an assortment of other classes up to level 2 or 3 rank.
As of right now, I'm not going to go into technical problems with the game. Things such as patcher problems, crashing, and such do not need to be gone into as this is a beta and those are expected. Things such as the combat system is something I will talk about since those won't change much once the game is released if at all.
Still I will mention that the servers were a cluster-fuck the first few days. All of them, from the website to the game. They just did not expect the sort of load that they got. I can't believe they didn't recognize this before hand, but they severely either underestimated the interest for open beta testers or severely overestimated their capabilities. I'm chalking it up to both. Luckily they did this all during testing and come live they won't be nearly as incompetent as they were for open beta. So, because of that, I can not fault them for this at all. That is the purpose of an stress test, which open beta is, and their systems got stresses alright.
Now, the guild I'm in has had several people doing all stages of the previous betas so I had quite a bit of help starting out. Without it, I personally might have found the game daunting to start playing, just like FFXI. Why? The UI is geared to console players and makes figuring anything out a royal pain in the ass. What's worse about this game compared to FFXI with the same setup is that the menu system in this game is even more convoluted and layered. Add in the fact that very few actions are intuitive, even when compared to previous incarnations of the FF series, and you are going to end up with some seriously confused and frustrated new players.
All that aside, lets get into the meat of this review. First and foremost, the game graphics are GORGEOUS for an MMO. Heck, they are stunning for most single player games. The game is graphic intensive, which means if you have a crappy system, don't expect to play the game all that well and definitely not on high settings. As one can see from my signature, my system is fairly top notch so I had very little problems cranking the game up in the eye candy department and still remaining playable.
This game borrows heavily from the characters of FFXI and some of the settings. Things are different, but much is the same or reminiscent of FFXI and even of previous games in the FF series. From the graphics, animations, to the characters, to the sounds and music, if you are an FF fan then you will not be disappointed from the aesthetics aspect of the game. There is nothing more that can be said beyond this. In terms of visual quality and sounds this game is top notch. Oh and I LOVE the animations and emotes. They were nice in FFXI, but got expanded for this game. Also the character customization is expanded out so there is not a choice of 1 of 4 looks for any of the races. Although by the time everyone is in armor, all the people from the same race/gender are going to look similar.
Now I am going to speak heavily about the game play aspects. As I noted above, the UI is terrible. I will state this, I played FFXI in beta and after release for about a year. There were UI aspects of that game which they did back in beta and had to fix later. They've made the same stupid mistakes with this game. Number 1 is lack of hardware acceleration turned on for the mouse. Luckily, someone this weekend found the hex code offsets in the ffxivgame.exe executable that re-enables hardware acceleration. While technically this is hacking their software and is a violation of their beta agreement, they can suck it because they are too damn stupid to enable their mouse acceleration in their own game. Other things that are dumb are little things they got right or fixed in FFXI such as being able to invite members into your linkshell without having to physically be next to the person. FFXIV core I believe had a Q&A session with one of the developers and actually brought up that very thing about the linkshell invites. The developer was dumbfounded and pretty much was like, "why didn't we think of that?"
My guess is that Square Enix (SE) kept the same art and sound team from previous games, but got a whole new development team together for this game. This can easily be seen as the game has more western elements including quite a few western influenced "easter eggs" in the game. For example there is a huge reference to the Radiohead video "Just" with a character laying on the ground in the city of Ul'dah. Since all the servers, like FFXI, are international and everyone from around the world plays on the same set of servers these references can only mean that there are some developers who are not only Japanese working on this game. This is a good thing. The bad is that the gameplay designers for the most part are the "old guard" of the FF series and have some crazy outdated ideas they have implemented in this game. Luckily they have backpedaled on a few of the stupider ideas such as limiting the amount of experience people can earn per day.
Pretty much the FFXIV game is designed as a slower and more tedious grinding game. It is an Asian game still, and for some stupid crazy reason, Asian love to grind in RPGs. Luckily this game is not nearly as bad as 99% of the Korean created games out there for grinding. Still, it is something to expect. If you abhor grinding, then I recommend staying away from this game. That being said, I don't find it as bad as even the original Everquest was. It is slower than WoW for sure and most other recently released MMOs, but not as bad as many others. To me it is too hard to tell if this is going to bite them in the butt or not later on.
I will grant them this, the game is certainly more solo friendly than the previous FFXI game. WAY more solo friendly. Here is a comparison to FFXI. In FFXI you could solo on your own with most classes up to level 10. Some could solo a bit further like beastmaster up until level 18 or so. Others like white mage had to stop around level 7 or sooner. Starting around level 10, you really needed to hook up with another player or two. Full groups were not required until around level 25 to 30. By then, you NEEDED to be in full group. The group make ups were also important by that point. Basically by level 30 no class could kill anything for experience on their own. The lowest level monster worth any experience to a level 30 player was a level 24 NPC if memory serves me right. Which was impossible to kill a level 24 monster solo as a level 30. It was that bad.
FFXI also had the introduction of "skill chains" which are present in FFXIV as well. Skill chains were special bonus affects that occurred based on the abilities used by players. Some were awesome, most were good, and a few were mediocre. The problem was that the skill chains that could be accomplished were different based upon the make up of the classes in a group. While skill chains were not needed to do prior to level 35, after that level if your group was not doing skill chains then your group was wiping a whole lot. This meant that if your class was not a wanted class for skill chains for a group, you could be stuck doing nothing for a long time. To top it all off, there were very limited spawns, slow respawns, and limited areas for players of just about any given level to gain experience in and you have a combination for frustration. Unless you had a group of friends that you could regularly group with, being picked up for a group was an exercise in futility. I remember once waiting 4 to 8 hours a day for 3 weeks at level 45 looking for a group because everyone else I knew quit. I managed to carry on past that for a bit, but I finally quit. Add into that the large zones, long load times, and slow traveling around most places and FFXI was a very slow game and still is.
FFXIV has done much to overcome that from what I can tell. I'm not sure it is solo friendly up to max level, but it certainly seems more solo friendly thus far. As a mage at 13 I can kill equal level monsters still. Albeit, it is not easy to kill equal level monsters solo, but I can do it. Except for the occasional monster that isn't tuned right for the level range. Which is annoying when that happens. Meaning I can fight one monster at a given level which does 100 damage per hit to me for example. I fight a different monster of the same level and it may do 1000 damage per hit to me and completely destroy me. Not all of the monsters are that badly tuned, but there are a few. Skill chains are also present in FFXIV but they are not easy to do as they were in FFXI and so far I haven't needed to do one even in a big group of players killing harder monsters.
Speaking of which, agro for grouping is really messed up. Some powers, especially most caster powers, draw monster agro like iron to a lodestone. Which makes playing a mage right now in groups also an exercise in frustration. Meaning you will die a LOT in groups. They said they tuned down the agro generation of heals on Saturday, which they did somewhat. Which means you can heal now once the monster is either provoked or down at least 1/3 of its health. If you need to cast a heal before that then you are going to draw agro, and most likely you will die.
One of the cool things though about combat this time around is AoE selectable skills. Almost all caster powers can be selected to be AoE or single target. There is no power loss either for going AoE instead of single target. Meaning if I have a damage spell which does 200 damage to a single target, it will do 200 damage to each of 7 targets if I hit them all. The downside is now I have 7 very angry monsters at me. So why would anyone ever use single target? Because they put in "curious" monsters in this game. There are tons of non aggressive monsters everywhere that get "curious" and decide to check out nearby players and follow them around. This means if your group is in a tough battle with a hard couple of monsters and you decide to use an AoE blast, you could end up hitting a curious monster or two that came along if you were not paying attention. This can easily ruin your day. Luckily, monster agro is very specific to hostile actions. Unlike other MMOs, if someone in your group attacks a monster then that monster only has that person on the hate list if no one else does anything to further piss off the monster. This is good because if say a puller grabs the wrong monsters and dies then the monster doesn't rampage back to where the group is at and annihilate everyone.
While combat is mostly fun, the targeting mechanics in group combat is terrible. No way to assist the main tank, and no way to easily target the monster either since there is no command to target nearest NPC. Only target command is to target the nearest target. Which is your character first. Then the target command cycles though every target in front of you. As a caster this is a royal pain in the ass. I can use a mouse to click directly on my target and hope I don't miss click. With the current mouse lag it is very easy to miss click if you refrain from hacking the client to enable hardware mouse acceleration. Even with the mouse acceleration on it is still easy to miss click. Those people playing casters and using a controller will have a major problem with the current mechanics. PS3 players are going to be screwed if this is not fixed by the PS3 release in March.
Combat aside, another wonky and unintuitive thing about this game is very few things are click or target and confirm friendly besides NPCs. Most actions are done through the interaction menu. Which means you have to bring up the main menu FIRST, go through that to the interaction menu and then click on that to then get a menu that actually lets you interact with what you want to. Again, it's a major pain in the ass and FFXI did not have this. Also many of the menus are very slow to load up. Some make you wait upwards of 45 seconds before they pop up. When you consider the menu system needed to do something like craft an item with about 7 different menus to go through then this adds a ton of delay time not needed in the game. Basically their database calls to populate various menu's is not streamlined or well written at all. Either that or the hardware they are using for the database and interactions with the DB are not up to par. I'm guessing it is both.
One thing I do like about the game is the ability to switch classes for your character literally on the fly and then to mix and match skills from various classes. To switch classes all you have to do is equip the primary main hand weapon or tool for that class. Then Voila! Want to be a conjurer? Equip a wand. Want to be a lancer? Equip a spear. The base stats for that class will automatically change for your character. For example the pugilist has the highest base hitpoints. Switch to a pugilist and your base HPs go up. Switch to a caster and they go down. Also, most of the classes have skills unique to those classes which can be used with other classes. For example at level 6 pugilists get a skill called "Second Wind." This skill is a self heal that uses TP points instead of MP (magic points). TP points are gained by fighting and dissipate when not fighting. The Second Wind ability once earned as a pugilist can be used by your character in any other class they decide to switch to. This allows for interesting combinations of skills and encourages players to try all the classes. I will state this though. None of the War classes are going to have a high magic power base rating to effectively use the skills from the Mage classes and vice versa. Also, not all skills can be used by all classes. The skill Lance Thrust can only be used by the Lancer class for example.
The fact that any character can be any class and swap their attribute points and skills around allows for a lot of customization and viability for all classes from what I've seen thus far. To prevent people from taking every skill and putting it on a character is the fact that players can only have X amount of skills readied at any given time. Sure those skills can be swapped out on the fly out of combat, but there is a limit to how many skills can be equipped which increases with levels. FFXI tried to do something similar and while I liked that system as a precursor to this one, so far I prefer this system over just about anything out there.
As for the crafting and harvesting system, it is decent and fun. Both are done mini game style. The mini games themselves have no instructions on what to do with them, but they are simple enough to figure out. This means you have to pay attention while crafting or harvesting or you will fail. At low levels though crafting can be frustrating because of the large failure rate. The fact that you really only get experience for not failing means the early levels are rough. This can be curbed somewhat with gear and paying for bonuses. To get a crafting bonus buff, you have to either go to an adventurers camp sprinkled through the world outside of the main towns, visit the local NPC repairman in any main town, or find the guildhall of the craft you are trying to create an item with. There are 3 levels of bonuses. The camps and repairmen only provide rank 1 bonuses though. They are also more expensive. It costs 200 at a camp and 250 at the repairman. The guildhalls allow you to pay for any rank at a cost of 100/200/500 respectively. I highly highly HIGHLY recommend to use the guildhall rank 3 bonus when you are starting out crafting. It will allow you to craft things without as many failures earlier on.
Another nicety for crafting is that there are crafting "quests" available in the game that allow you to craft items without having to gather any materials. All materials are provided by the quest. Quests right now are called "Leves" in the game. What that word means I can not tell you, but I will talk more about them in a bit. The thing about the crafting quests though is what you create is an item for that quest, not something you can use yourself. So you can not "steal" something with free materials from the quest. You have to turn in the quest. Nice thing is all crafting quests give both money and real materials to use as rewards.
One last thing about crafting is that there are no recipes that you know before hand. Unless of course you cheat and go to a website that has them listed out. This was done for the "mystique" of the game I guess. So to learn how to make new items you are suppose to do crafting quests. Even though you are making fake quest items in a crafting quest that your character can not use, the recipe for the real items is the same as the quest. So if you get a quest to make a bronze sword, you will see the materials needed for the sword. Also upon completion of the quest the last reward you get is a recipe for another item as well! SE intended for people to create their own codex or recipe book and write down what they learn through these quests or experimentation. Also I will state that most of the crafting requires cross crafting class components. Meaning to make a sword will require help from a leather worker for example. Luckily you can be any and all crafting classes with one character unlike most other MMOs.
Traveling in this game is slow, but not as bad with the teleport system currently in place. The zone maps are big and running is slow, but there are "crystals" sprinkled throughout all the zone maps. Once you interact with a crystal you can teleport back to that crystal at any time. To teleport, just go to the main menu and select teleport and you will get a menu of places you can teleport to. The one downside is that to teleport it uses a resource called Anima. You start with 100 Anima. To teleport to the last crystal you touch if you are not dead is 2 Anima, or zero if you are dead. To teleport to another crystal in the same zone you are in is 4 Anima. To teleport to a crystal in a different zone is 6 Anima. The problem is Anima recovers SLOWLY. About 1 Anima is recovered every 6 hours. I've already in 5 days blown through most of my Anima, which means I now have to hoof it between areas I want to go. One good thing at least with the teleport system is that if you are in a group, only one person needs to spend the Anima to teleport and the whole group can ride along for free. With a bunch of friends this can help conserve Anima and still allow people to get around somewhat decently fast. Otherwise it is about an hour and a half to get from the two most opposite major towns which is running from Gridania to Limsa (or the reverse).
Now why would I need to travel around so much to blow through my Anima? Because of the quest system. This is where I explain the current quest system. Right now there are three different quest types in the game. The main quest story line, Leves, and group quests. The main story line quest is your standard fare quest chain with the exception of tons of cutscenes that is normally found in FF games. Nothing to complain about here.
Group quests are random quests that pop up at "crystal camps." An NPC called a battlewarden will spawn and the first 15 people to talk to him and accept the quest can do it. It doesn't matter if the 15 people group up or not. The group quests usually consist of clearly out a ton of monsters in the surrounding area in 30 minutes or less.
Leve quests take a bit more to explain. There are two types of Leves: regional and local. While they are denominated as such, I will call them what they really are. Regional Leves are either combat or harvesting quests. Local are crafting quests. Regional leves you can only complete 8 every 48 hours. Crafting Leves you can complete 8 every 24 hours. You get Leves at the Inn or Tavern of any of the three major towns. There is two NPCs there behind a counter with glowing blue lights that hand out Leves. At any given town there is offered 3 to 5 random Leve quests of a given type at a given level range. Which means to get 8 done for your time period, you need to travel to another major city. Hence why I was going through Anima teleporting around. While the harvesting and crafting Leves are really solo jobs, the battle ones can be solo or done in a group. If you are in a group you can ramp up the levels of the monsters you are fighting by selecting a higher difficulty once you start the Leve.
To start a battle leve, you will be directed to a crystal camp outside of town. Once at the camp, you interact with the crystal and go through the menu system to initiate the leve. If you are in a group and more than one person has the same leve then completing the leve will complete it for everyone. So if you want to do more leves in a group, you will have to do it by completing the leves for one person in the group, going back to the main town for the next person to get their leves, completing those, going back to town to get the leves for the next person, and do that for everyone. This can be done the long way by running or quickly by teleporting and burning through Anima. When a battle leve is completed the person that has the Leve will get the main reward. Usually a large amount of money and sometimes an Item, or Guild Marks, or Faction. Everyone will get a completion bonus which consists of a decent amount of money, just not as large as the main reward for the quest. Doing a bunch of leves in a group though can net everyone in the group quite a bit of money.
Another interesting thing about battle leves is the way they set up monster spawns. To prevent the problem of random people killing the quest monsters, they forgoed the normal "instancing" solution used by most MMOs. Instead they have monsters spawn for the quest in the zone, but are invisible to anyone not doing the same quest. Of course once a person on the quest attacks a monster that is invisible to other players, then everyone can see that monster so it doesn't look like that player is fighting nothing. Since the game has a tagging lock system in place that prevents random people from kill stealing, it is not a problem.
Quests are available in 10 level increments. For example: 1, 10, 20, 30, 40, etc... To see the next tier of quests, you have to reach the max level of the previous tier. The level is determined by you class level, not physical level. Something I am not going to overly explain here. Once my character reached level 10 Thaumaturge for example I was able to accept and do level 20 quests. The other thing to note about quests is that once the reset timer has been reached you can do the same ones, or you can exchange them out for different ones that are being offered. If you exchange out quests, you can get a bonus the main quest reward. You can only exchange out quests in a ratio of 3 to 1. Meaning I can use 3 old quests to up the bonus of the new quest I getting. Also, when exchanging out quests, there is a factor to the bonus. The exchange menu will have a number next to the old quest. The higher the number, the bigger the bonus you will receive to the new quest. A zero will mean no bonus. How the game determines the bonus factor, I have no clue at this moment though.
But, as most can attest to, the current quest system is far to restricting. 8 quests every 48 hours means that you will be stuck currently grinding on monster killing. For a casual player, I guess it isn't that bad, but for someone wanting to spend more time playing this can be a major drawback. It is almost as bad as the original idea they had for limited experience gained. SE had put in originally, and removed in open beta, a limit to what they thought was how much experience a person should earn in an 8 hour period. They intended players to play for 8 hours and log off afterward. The problem is that first people want to play longer sometimes, and that their arbitrary limit was way off. Everyone could reach that limit in about an hour previously. It was that stupid of a implementation. I have heard around the rumor mill that SE has plenty of normal quests to be put in at release, but that they are not there to keep the mystique of the game going. That it was done this way to prevent people and websites from learning everything about the quests in beta. If this ends up being true, then the current quest system of Leves being a supplement to a normal quests offered by random NPCs will be just fine. Similar to how SWG works with limited daily terminal quests and regular quests.
Next note is the item decay system. From what I've heard is it keeps being tweaked. Right now items decay insanely fast. Everything you have will break in about an hour or so. The higher the level the monster you are fighting or the more times you die the faster stuff breaks. Also crafting and harvesting will break your armor and anything else equipped. The process of actually repairing your gear breaks your gear. Top it off that repairing everything you own can be really annoying to find all the materials you need for all your items and having the skill or finding someone with the skill can be a major pain in the ass. From what I heard in previous betas it was not this bad. Hopefully SE tweaks it back down and removes armor decay for crafting and harvesting.
Last note is the lack of an auction house and the retainer system. Right now there is no auction house. SE stated they made add one later. Why? They state that auction houses are the reason they get so many gold sellers otherwise known as RMTs. The RMT companies have tons of bots that manipulate the market through the auction house systems to make tons of in game money for selling. So SE has come up with the retainer system. You get 1 NPC retainer for free ($1 per month for each extra one at release of the game) that stands around a market area for your character. They act as both bank and vendor. You can put up to 80 items on the retainer and 12 items in its shop. The problem is that each major town has its own market. Each market is made up of something like 20 zones. You could literally spend days trying to find something you are looking to buy with this system. Mainly because you have to go from clicking on every retainer to view its shop inventory. Yes this does stop RMTs from manipulating the market through an auction house style system. But the current system is a major pain in the ass for all the regular players. Even if you find an item you want to buy you have no clue as to it's relative worth or price. Are you paying too much? Selling for too much? How do you know unless you also want to spend days wandering around looking at thousands of different retainers to see what they are selling and cataloging all the prices.
So here is my conclusion to the review and guide I just wrote. Graphics and ambiance are stellar. UI is terrible. Sure there are slash commands that people can use and create macros with to bypass a couple of layers of menu screens and buttons, but this doesn't completely alleviate the problem of the bad UI. Quest system as it stands is pretty bad if they don't either change the rate of quests leves or add in a normal quest system. Combat is okay and would be great if they add in a proper targeting system. The game is slower paced then typical MMOs and is still created primarily for PS3 console players. Hopefully the Japanese players won't try to ruin the game for everyone else like they mostly did in FFXI. As it stands I would not recommend purchasing this game at release. It has some fun and interesting elements to it, but there are so many drawbacks, bugs, and completely inane systems for the game that I can not justify recommending the game to anyone as it stands.
If you are still hell bent on buying this game at release I recommend buying something like a nostromo keypad. This way you can program a ton of extra macroed slash commands into it to speed up the game somewhat.