(no subject)
- Game is unbelievably gorgeous on highest graphics settings with ambient occlusion. Dear god. Good job, guys, but I hope that isn't where all of your budget went.
- I like the active battle system. Auto-attack has always been a pet peeve of mine in MMO's. It's pretty boring right now, with only one or two attack styles, but I can see how the theorycraft could get very interesting once you add more.
- Like FF11, the game is clearly designed to be played with a controller. The interface for keyboard/mouse is asstastic, but with a controller it's pretty smooth.
- Message buffer limit is way too short. It's enough characters in Japanese, which has a far higher information density, but not for English. It's like talking via Twitter. (Hell, Twitter would be an upgrade.)
- Putting things like character movement server-side is cool, as it prevents warp hacks, etc. But it puts a requirement on the developer's infrastructure to provide extremely low round trip latency. Near-constant R-values of 700+ms won't cut it.
- The trading system is atrocious. If you want folks to buy exclusively from other players, you need to make bazaar viewing/purchasing work over longer distances. The range is so short right now, if someone is moving it will fail.
- The retainer shops are an interesting idea, but suck as currently implemented. A room full of 100+ haphazardly placed NPC's all selling the same trash mob drops is useless to everyone involved, especially given the slowness of the bazaar interface and the fact you can only see about 10-15 of them at a time. I would recommend some kind of limited real estate system with tiered pricing models on the available stalls, and/or some kind of placement rank by amount sold. That'll make retainers selling the most useful and well-priced stuff rise to the top in visibility.
- Needs auction house, but that goes without saying. Not like I have any vested interest in such a thing.
- I'm really worried about content. I haven't heard of many MMO companies only releasing "less than 10%" of their release content during open beta. That's... highly irregular, because you want people in all of your zones/classes/items to find bugs as early as possible. This makes me worry they're just not done yet.
- Specifically, classes. I see very little difference between the melee classes and worry this is all we're getting. Without any "unique" melee prestige classes like samurai, dragoon, etc, I don't really see the point. Similarly, thaumaturge and conjurer seem very similar. I don't get the point of having two caster classes that can both heal and both nuke, unless there's some later "skill tree" type specialization that we just aren't seeing yet.
- The Armoury system is interesting, but distributed stats on physical level invalidates it. If you want to be the best melee or best caster, you will have put all of your stats into physical or mental skills, and you'll be screwed if you switch to another class via Armoury. If you diversify while leveling, you'll never be good at either.
- There are some major configuration options missing. I like that you can drag and place UI elements, but the inability to specify opacity like FF11 is a problem for reading text. Also, there is no controller option for changing active window, which is important. Finally, there's no way to adjust max number of rendered characters on screen. The default seems too high for low-end machines and too low for high-end machines.
- Hardware mouse, guys. I know that artists and designers hate it, because they can't have complete creative control over the presentation, but... srsly.
- There are some input problems with / commands and JP input. This was a problem in FF11 before you fixed it. Mainly, typing /p with JP input engaged will not correctly type the p as a single-width romanji, meaning you have to switch back to English mode to type the /p, then back to JP to type your message. This screws up the buffer logic, and the standard Enter then causes you to send an empty party message.