FFXIV Open Beta
The Final Fantasy XIV open beta started this week. I never played FFXI, so I can offer no comparison there. I've also only been at it for a few hours, not had much chance to explore or give it a chance to make sense, but already, there's so much to say!
First off, the intros are gorgeous. I love the way they're done for each city to get you right into the action on your character, to make you feel like part of the story. They're well done, but in terms of visuals and writing. It's a good start.
But then... well... at some point you have to start playing the game instead of just looking at how pretty and entertaining the cut scenes are.
1. There are no tooltips. For anything. There are no indications of what NPCs just have flavor dialog, which are merchants, which you need to speak to for a quest. Maybe it makes it more immersive to not have these hints, but it's also a pain in the ass.
2. The first night I played, the mouse response was abysmal. It took forever for the pointer to respond to my mouse moving. This made the game nigh-unplayable. It seemed a lot better, though by no means perfect, last night.
3. Escape doesn't bring up your menus. You have to click the menu button at the bottom right, which might be slightly less obnoxious if the mouse response weren't so slow. And... if you didn't have to bring up the menu all the goddamned time. They give you this 'linkpearl' you can use to get hints of where to go next from the NPC quest giver, and it flashes in the top right of the screen. Clicking on that does nothing. You have to go to the menu to access the linkpearl. You have to go to the menu to open your quest logs. You have to go to the menu to assign your skills and traits. You have to go to the menu to do damned near everything because nothing has its own buttons or shortcut keys except opening the map.
4. The map is static, unresizable. You can't zoom in or out. You can't scroll left, right, up, down. Justin's resolution is higher than mine, so he gets to see more of the map. That seems entirely unfair and impractical.
5. It's a closed world, at least in the areas we've explored. You can't stray from specific paths laid out for you. It's not open world. This concentrates everyone into little clusters over the same mobs and mat nodes. It also makes running from one point to another ridiculously long. If they aren't going to let us stray from the path or take shortcuts, they could at least make the paths shorter.
6. Combat doesn't make much sense. They don't explain to you how it works. There's no tutorial. It will tell me, sometimes, that I can't use a skill, but it doesn't tell me why. Sometimes, when I hit 3, my bar still looks like I'm casting the skill bound to 2. I have to click on the mob to confirm some of my attacks. I could, apparently make some of my attacks area attacks, though, and that seems pretty cool. Maybe. Not like I've fought multiple mobs at once, ya know.
7. Questing seems ridiculous, incomprehensible. We've had a hard time figuring out what to do next, where to go. Are we supposed to just go kill things? Are we supposed to follow this one quest line, this single linear path? Maybe it gets better after the first quest chain, once we're a proper adventurer. We'll see.
8. When invited to a party, it doesn't tell you who invited you! Uhm... what?
9. There seems no difference between 'left' and 'strafe left' (or right/strafe right, obviously). Neither of them turn the camera (unless you're on auto-run, I think). There is no keyboard turning. It's all mouse turning, and the mouse response is sluggish, as noted above. I don't know why there are separate keybinds for Q&A and E&D if they do the same things. Yeah, I'm a keyboard turner. And I'll kick your ass.
All that said, I'm probably still going to play some more tonight. I'm hopeful that it gets better at some point, that maybe we just picked a bad city to start in where everything kind of drags or that maybe once you're out of noobhood, you're able to do more. Not that it'll change the technical and usability issues above. There's a lot that I like. It's very pretty--my catgirl's so cute!--and the story seems great, if occasionally poorly localized.
It's just more likely that I'll enjoy playing Champions this weekend or puttering on Shang.
Edited to add: Also, you can't jump.
First off, the intros are gorgeous. I love the way they're done for each city to get you right into the action on your character, to make you feel like part of the story. They're well done, but in terms of visuals and writing. It's a good start.
But then... well... at some point you have to start playing the game instead of just looking at how pretty and entertaining the cut scenes are.
1. There are no tooltips. For anything. There are no indications of what NPCs just have flavor dialog, which are merchants, which you need to speak to for a quest. Maybe it makes it more immersive to not have these hints, but it's also a pain in the ass.
2. The first night I played, the mouse response was abysmal. It took forever for the pointer to respond to my mouse moving. This made the game nigh-unplayable. It seemed a lot better, though by no means perfect, last night.
3. Escape doesn't bring up your menus. You have to click the menu button at the bottom right, which might be slightly less obnoxious if the mouse response weren't so slow. And... if you didn't have to bring up the menu all the goddamned time. They give you this 'linkpearl' you can use to get hints of where to go next from the NPC quest giver, and it flashes in the top right of the screen. Clicking on that does nothing. You have to go to the menu to access the linkpearl. You have to go to the menu to open your quest logs. You have to go to the menu to assign your skills and traits. You have to go to the menu to do damned near everything because nothing has its own buttons or shortcut keys except opening the map.
4. The map is static, unresizable. You can't zoom in or out. You can't scroll left, right, up, down. Justin's resolution is higher than mine, so he gets to see more of the map. That seems entirely unfair and impractical.
5. It's a closed world, at least in the areas we've explored. You can't stray from specific paths laid out for you. It's not open world. This concentrates everyone into little clusters over the same mobs and mat nodes. It also makes running from one point to another ridiculously long. If they aren't going to let us stray from the path or take shortcuts, they could at least make the paths shorter.
6. Combat doesn't make much sense. They don't explain to you how it works. There's no tutorial. It will tell me, sometimes, that I can't use a skill, but it doesn't tell me why. Sometimes, when I hit 3, my bar still looks like I'm casting the skill bound to 2. I have to click on the mob to confirm some of my attacks. I could, apparently make some of my attacks area attacks, though, and that seems pretty cool. Maybe. Not like I've fought multiple mobs at once, ya know.
7. Questing seems ridiculous, incomprehensible. We've had a hard time figuring out what to do next, where to go. Are we supposed to just go kill things? Are we supposed to follow this one quest line, this single linear path? Maybe it gets better after the first quest chain, once we're a proper adventurer. We'll see.
8. When invited to a party, it doesn't tell you who invited you! Uhm... what?
9. There seems no difference between 'left' and 'strafe left' (or right/strafe right, obviously). Neither of them turn the camera (unless you're on auto-run, I think). There is no keyboard turning. It's all mouse turning, and the mouse response is sluggish, as noted above. I don't know why there are separate keybinds for Q&A and E&D if they do the same things. Yeah, I'm a keyboard turner. And I'll kick your ass.
All that said, I'm probably still going to play some more tonight. I'm hopeful that it gets better at some point, that maybe we just picked a bad city to start in where everything kind of drags or that maybe once you're out of noobhood, you're able to do more. Not that it'll change the technical and usability issues above. There's a lot that I like. It's very pretty--my catgirl's so cute!--and the story seems great, if occasionally poorly localized.
It's just more likely that I'll enjoy playing Champions this weekend or puttering on Shang.
Edited to add: Also, you can't jump.