Final Fantasy XIV Beta Impressions

After two weekends with A Realm Reborn, Ragar gives his thoughts on the remade MMO

Conclusion

While I didn’t get the chance to try everything in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn during the two weekends, I do feel that I’ve experienced enough of the game that I’m far more interested in the game than I was before and am considering putting in a preorder. With that said, there are still a lot of questions I have about the game I’m hoping to have answered in the next few months between now and the August 27th release. What’s the plan for future content additions? What’s the small group content like? Is their tanking fun? Is endgame primarily raiding-based or is there a true endgame model for all of the players?

That last one’s especially important given the inclusion of gatherers and crafters as true professions. If the game turns out to be mostly raiding at the end, how do you keep those classes relevant? If you make raid drops that dwarf crafted pieces, then you risk destroying the market for most professions and driving those players away. If you include raid-quality crafting recipes but make them bind-on-pickup and lock them behind boss loot tables like we’re accustomed to seeing, then crafters feel like they’re obligated to raid for those recipes even if they’d rather just make things, again risking that you drive those players away. Gatherers have a similar problem: even if you do provide raid-quality crafting recipes, how do you handle the materials? Do you stick with regular materials and just require HQ pieces? Do you make certain components only come from those raid zones? If this is the case, then you either risk driving away the gatherers or you force raids to bring along gatherers or to make members level a gathering class during their downtime.

Given how well the ARR remake of FFXIV has done so far, I have hopes that these issues will be addressed, but we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime though, I plan on spending more time in Eorzea when the servers open back up again. I still have plenty of recipes to learn as a Culinarian and Armorer as well as a variety of other classes I haven’t tried like Blacksmith, Fisher, Carpenter, etc… Well, that and finish seeing the story, but you can tell where my heart lies.

Michael “Ragar” Branham

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Comments

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ugh auto-attack
# Jul 29 2013 at 1:00 PM Rating: Decent
****
4,511 posts
I'd be happy if there was an option to get the old manual attacking back, instead of the horribly irritatingly slow (and weak) auto-attacks they switched to...
YES!
# Jul 01 2013 at 10:12 AM Rating: Good
One thing I am very happy about is new game engine and other technical improvements. The big surprise is that now that I don't have to use a game-pad, they have actually made it in some ways better than keyboard. OH BOY. No need for windower or that clunky outboard config app.





Excellent
# Jun 27 2013 at 9:26 AM Rating: Excellent
For the first time I think FFXIV has a chance of pulling pulling players away from 11
GCD
# Jun 27 2013 at 8:04 AM Rating: Default
Out of all you have said, GCD kills the game for me.

I couldn't stand it in WOW, and i won't be able to stand it here. I played MANY other games like PW, aion, TERA, etc. and ALL of them did good without a global cd. I don't see the need of making the game unnnecesarily slow putting the GCD into it
What a great game.
# Jun 26 2013 at 1:32 PM Rating: Excellent
I am soooooo happy about the remake. It is going to be a great game. Have a few wow friends interested and looking to come over. It has the beauty and story of a FF game with the interface of wow. Kind of a questing system like wow. I have yet to test out the dungeons, I ran out of time int he beta and that will have to be next beta test but I am looking forward to it. It seemed for those dungeons they are level capped so if you have a high level friend they can join you but their level with be synced so you can still party with your friends if you wanted to and make it challenging. I was excited for grand theft auto to come up on sep 17th, but I think I will have no interest because I will be playing this. I played 1.0 from the start pretty much from the start and the game is a lot lot better now.
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