Futzing Around in Final Fantasy XIV

Playing as Summoner in Brayflox Longpost.

Once I walked away from World of Warcraft, I figured I was done with MMORPGs, but recently that hasn't been the case.  I've poured an absurd amount of time into Final Fantasy XIV, a game that in quite a lot of ways is very similar to WoW.  Battle mechanics and the whole hot key controls setup are very reminiscent of Blizzard's MMO, yet the game squeezes in all of the Final Fantasy-ness that one would expect from a game to bear the name.  What I'm left with is something that has totally consumed me.

It's interesting to see how far this game has come considering that it had such a bumpy launch.  When it first came out, FFXIV was not very well received at all.  There were a number of questionable design choices that folks found quite off putting, which ultimately lead to Sqaure-Enix having to completely retool the game.  So, for several years, they let people play the game without a subscription fee as the company worked to rebuild it.  A lot of places would have written off their game as a failure at that point, and moved on, so it's impressive that Square-Enix chose to dig in their heels and try to make things right.

The end result is quite good, combining familiar MMORPG conventions with various Final Fantasy ones.  At its core, the game is fairly hot key-centric fair (hit a button attached to an ability to use it), while holding to a trinity-based class system centered around healers, damage dealers, and tanks.  Meanwhile, we have the Final Fantasy job system, a decent story, crafting that's surprisingly interesting, and a bunch of snazzy graphics to boot.  It all combines to make for a very pleasing experience.

There are some interesting side quests in the game too.

At first, I just goofed around with a bunch of different jobs, seeing which I liked best.  Some time was spent with the Conjurer since I usually play healers in MMORPGs, so this was a bit of a comfort zone for me.  After that, I moved on to various DPS classes like the Lancer and Archer, which were alright.  Finally, I got it into my head that I wanted to be a Marauder, and eventually a Warrior.  This was because I tend to shy away from tanking duties in these sorts of games, and felt like trying something different.  At first, it was a bit intimidating, but after sticking with it for a little while I got used to the job.  There were still some terrible pulls where I utterly botched things up, but after encountering them once, I knew not to make the same mistake again.  Also, people in my parties were incredibly nice and understanding about it.

This is something that I really like about the game: it's community has a lot of great people in it.  Having played a number of other MMOs where folks are far from pleasant to deal with, this has been a very refreshing change of pace.  Sure, there are still some bad eggs, but it's nowhere as bad as other games.

I've also warmed up to how raid content is approached in FFXIV, as it's been divvied up into smaller, more bit-sized pieces.  Most games in the genre that I've played tackle this by introducing fairly large dungeons with a ton of bosses in them that all need to be ploughed through in one go to complete.  Here, everything is much more compartmentalized with only the rare exception.  So, what we have are largely either a single boss fight, as is the case with Primals (Ifrit and the gang), or a small handful of bosses with minimal trash in-between (The Binding Coil of Bahamut).  With this, it's easier to hop in for some quick, interesting battles in 8-person parties, then being merrily on one's way, possibly with some fancy, new loot to show for it.  The only exceptions to this are Crystal Tower and Syrcus Tower, where there is more trash and the raids require 24 people.  I've done plenty of the former so far, and quite liked the experience.  However, I can't comment on either of the towers, as I've not tried them yet due to their reputation for being one of the few bastions for trolls in this game.

Not quite sure what's going on here...

Meanwhile, there's been plenty of time to level alts.  As I said earlier, I've taken a Warrior to level cap, and have also done the same with both a Summoner and Scholar since they're pretty easy to do in tandem.  There are plenty more jobs on the to-do list for me like Bard (largely since I keep getting nice glamour drops for the job), and I really want to spend more time on both crafting and gathering related roles.

In any case, it's been a lot of fun so far playing Final Fantasy XIV.  I wasn't expecting myself to get sucked back into a traditional hot key-based MMORPG, but here I am.  The game just does a very nice job of mixing several familiar gameplay features into one package in a way that really appeals to me.