So, have any of you guys heard of SE's newest MMORPG? It's called Final Fantasy XIV and it'll be available in September 30 of this year for PC and March for PS3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxBol-NJFuA&feature=player_embedded

In the link you can watch a video of some parts of the game, specially the whole character creation process.

Will you play it? I will, FFXI was awesome until the economy went downhill and it'll help me wait for Guild Wars 2 (a free MMORPG) and SW: ToR.

 

I thought FFXI was pretty boring, myself. Then again, I haven't played an MMO yet that didn't feel like work.

I might give 14 a shot in the distant future, though. Apparently they're going to make solo'ing a little more viable, which would be pretty nice; it really sucks having to hitch your fortunes to a bunch of drooling retards who can barely work their keyboard.

 

Yes, there are going to be easier ways to level without even partying such as guild leaves (I bleieve that's the name) where you go on a quest (alone or in group). Anyway while on the quest you get your own instance (all the mobs inside are yours and yours only) and you can exp there or just finish it and as a reward you'll some exp to level one of your disciples.

So far beta testers seem to like most of the game tough they keep bitching about controls.

 

Final Fantasy XIV is now in open beta.

http://entry.ffxiv.com/ <--- Getting registration key
http://www.fileplanet.com/215249/download/Final-Fantasy-XIV-Beta-Launcher <-- Launcher
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8YIbYG9Gqs <---- Instructions on how to use bittorrent for the major patch versus the shitty launcher they use. Launcher uses bittorrent, but it throttles your download to keep you seeding longer.


Its been kinda difficult to get a key(website keeps going down), so the bottom 2 links will give you access to the client while you spam the site for a key.

 

I have a key and beta account, but I can't seem to be able to download the game. Beta site seems to be down all the time, and the torrents around are commented to be all fake >_>

Edit: DvorakQ's second link works fine. Was able to perfectly bypass visiting the beta site. Hopefully I'll be able to play once this finished.

 

Well, I'm currently settled in the server Istory and Gridania for the starting location.
Hate Myhon is my current character i'm playing. /tell me if you wanna grp ^.^

 

Haha, succesfully logged in XD

I ended up on Istory and the forest starter too. It honestly seemed like the best place to start...

Anyways, my sexy catgirl Shuzen Valeth reporting for duty.

The gameplay is kinda clunky though, and the ingame mouse is horrible. Still, it succesfully manages to feel like a Final Fantasy.

 

Sigh, I was really looking forward to this.

 

They open them from time to time, it isn't as open as SE wants you to think.

Had forgoten all about this topic, great to see some of you guys are in the game.

Are you liking it? Care to post Gridania pics?

I've my account set but I'm awaiting my Radeon 5770.

 

Okay. I played some, and was rather disappointed.

UI is shit. Controls are shit. Optimization is non-existent. There's a 1sec lag in almost everything. And the biggest gripe, the horrible, horrible software mouse. Thankfully, THIS here should fix the mouse.

I'll play more, but it looks pretty bad for the PC version right now >_>. Awesome character creation, though XD

 

Ummm... yeah.

Lets just say that I had a group of 6 friends who each got their own ffxiv account downloaded/installed... (number 7 couldn't get it to work. we're not scrubs to troubleshooting and his system definitely could handle it) None of us are playing it anymore.

I am totally disappointed in myself. You know the feeling when you go to a movie that everyone else seems to love and you just can't get over the feeling that those 12 dollars could have been better spent on beer? I can't help but think of that extra 12 gigs of porn I could have spent my bandwidth usage on.

I can't isolate why I so dislike this game. It could be the clunky controls, but theres plenty of games with clunky controls that I adjusted to and ended up liking.

It might have been the slow pacing of the combat. I don't think they could make the combat more boring.

It might have been the fanboism of the FF fans who think the game is perfect. I don't think I've ever been flamed more for saying that I don't like a game before.

bleh. I'm gonna give this game a couple more days. I really shouldn't be taking into account sunk costs, but this game has eaten 6 percent of my monthly bandwidth and I might as well make the most of it. For those who haven't downloaded it yet, I suggest you watch some streamers on justin.tv or something play it before you use your own bandwidth to download it.

 

First day I was disgusted. Lag everywhere, AI pathing being retarded. Non-standard UI and controls compared to mmos I'm used to. So my friends and I thought okay, let's try some more anyway, see if anything's improved.

Second day lag was improved slightly. AI wasn't being quite as spastic but still noticing aggro resets and following quick hp regen. Started getting used to switching between keyboard and mouse. The laggy mouse targetting is slightly better than trying to tab target.

Third day we all ended up with characters with phyiscal level 15ish and 10-12ish in primary job with some trying out other jobs.


Conclusion: Game mechanics are broken beyond patchability. I understand that SE wanted to appeal to the ffxi crowd, whoever's still playing that, but by 2010 standards everything is horribly outdated. Being made to be played on console doesn't help at all either or global servers in japan.

Targetting, movement and combat prevents any kind of skillful play. This isn't something that can be patched.

There is no way to quickly target people in your party for heals. You can't target them through your party menu, nor are there any hotkeys.

Any ability used lags before being cast, quite often not casting or overriding a previous cast. This quite clearly slows the gameplay down as if you were trying to play through viscous jelly.

You're stuck on two chatbar tabs with _minimal_ customization ability.

THERE ARE NO AUCTION HOUSES. They expect you to afk in a special instanced market zone. Not just one instance zone, you have to pick between what I recall was ~10.

Selling and buying feels like forcefully removing your teeth with confirmation popups for each and every individual sale. It goes like this:
*pick item to buy
*pop up pick amount to buy
*confirmation
Between each task there's a second delay, your mouse delays, you cannot buy several different items at once.
Emptying your bags from 80/80 will literally take you 20 minutes.

There's more I could say but this game already makes me rage enough. Fuck you Square Enix for making this pile of shit and getting my hopes up.

 

Ok, in defense of the game (and believe me no one pays me for saying this) the open beta exists for one reason only: to stress the servers. That means that the lag is intentional, SE and the users are trying as hard as they can to push the servers so that they are stable coming the 22nd.

Controls suck. Some people find that hooking up the PS3/360 control makes them better.

Optimization is null. Beast PC's can barely handle HQ with a decent FR.

The AH thing sucks (for me at least) however some people have told me that the AH building is implemented and that it might be available after the player forge the economy using the retainer system. Don't really see the point, are they trying to stop gilsellers?

 

Having no AH doesn't do anything to stop gilsellers, they've always prefered face to face trading in any mmo. No it's SE's idea of a "player driven" economy where you trade in a market like setting like in the olden days.

I could have lived with that, but shit combat was the dealbreaker. If I'm gonna spend time on an mmo,the combat needs to be fun. FFXIV's combat is the very opposite.

 

Well today marks the official release date, I've been playing since CE release and I've got to say that I'm loving the game.

Yes, it has many faults and sometimes I feel like I'm playing open beta however the fun never stops, specially since some of my oldest MMORPG buddies joined.

They've announced that they'll reorganize market wards, I believe they are going to turn them into the new AH, I find that kind of stupid, they should've implemented AH since the beggining.

Combat can be kind of boring if you are grinding, however it becomes quite fun when you are doing a guildleve even the one that go somewhere along the lines of "Go there and kill X ammount of Y mob".

 

I feel like it could be fun if I had a good group of people to play with. Any DLPers have a guild set up or something?