FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot and other reviews & hilarious discoveries about FFXIV

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

As always, Tycho from Penny Arcade is the voice of reason in a world gone a little too serious when it comes to gaming:

The Gametrailers review of Final Fantasy XIV is as, um, "direct" in its speech and presentation as any assessment I've ever seen. It doesn't sound like a review at all, it sounds like an indictment - a formalized recitation of the facts in evidence. An MMO seems like such a strange thing to review, even under the best conditions. Did you catch the world event, did you interface with the right social framework to invest the generally quite mechanical gameplay with meaning, did you stumble on something organic and real in some disused corner of the simulation?

Even if the game had been ultrafresh, literally banging off the hook, I'm not entirely sure the model FFXIV is based on even exists anymore on PC. We'll see how the game is received on the Playstation 3, because the dynamic is very different: this genre doesn't infuse every micron of the console space, and there are people who want an experience like this and can't have it. On the PC, I couldn't begin to list just the free games available to enrich your leisure hours. I don't have the cilia to number them all.

[Ziero]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Oh and Ziero I agreed with a lot you said and that I'm not defending SE (but just playing a very poor "Devil's Advocate")

Oh I know, I didn't really mean any offense or anything. I honestly do like the game and it's world, but I'm not going to downplay any of it's real problems either.

I haven't played FFXI in a while and you may be right about there being no limitation on actually purchasing (as long as you're within range of viewing the bazaar) This could also be a bug in that there shouldn't be a limitation on purchasing from a bazaar if you can view it. But then again, this may be intentional, perhaps to reduce "localized" lag when certain number of players are clustered in a very small area (maybe in the game's frame of reference, a diamater of 5 malms?)

I'm playin XI right now, and if you can check a bazaar you can buy from it. If it's intentionally short, then allow players to move while browsing. If it's a bug, it really needs to be fixed if this "Bazaar Based" economy is gonna last.

I mean, I'm sure these things will be fixed eventually, I'm not one who goes around crying about SE "not doing stuff" because they in fact do fix things, but right now they're real problems. I know in time they'll work things out, but this is really Beta level problems that should have been ironed out before the game was launched.

[Malacite]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Speaking of bazaars, player bazaars need to be done away with, now.

[Grizzlebeard]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Aaaand the reviews keep on rolling in.

IGN UK 5.5 Score for FFXIV

[TheGrandMom]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

I mean, I'm sure these things will be fixed eventually, I'm not one who goes around crying about SE "not doing stuff" because they in fact do fix things, but right now they're real problems. I know in time they'll work things out, but this is really Beta level problems that should have been ironed out before the game was launched.

Thats just it, we've endured these things for months longer than some people. While its alpha/beta you can grit your teeth and bear it but it starts getting old watching the same damn shit happening in retail. I think the fans of FFXI who are playing FFXIV, that have been waiting years for this game to come out and hoping that things would change because SE has learned things, have a right to be complaining about legitimate issues.

[Feba]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Final Fantasy XIV Online Critic Reviews for PC at Metacritic.com

56 on metacritic so far.

The user score is actually lower, at 4.2

This game is statistically worse than SpongeBob Squarepants: Creature from the Krusty Krab.




Just puttin' that out there.

[ShepardG]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Feba, you make me smile....

Sadly, I canceled my Click-to-buy account (which involves an e-mail to click to buy with your customer number along with some statement saying you want to cancel your account, which if you don't they will randomly charge you a dollar after 364 days of inactivity)and have put my CEdition in the FF section of my media room. I wish i could say it was fun for the 2-3 weeks I played it, but when there are so many things to do, and every one of those things leads to a frustrating conclusion (I wanna craft, I need mats, I have to search the wards; I wanna level, guild leve's not up, partying is borked; I wanna harvest things, my inventory is full of mats i don't want to get rid of) blah, sorry. didn't mean to go into all that.

When the lead of 12 quit siting "health problems" and later the truth came out that he had a nervous break down when dealing with Square Enix corprate. We the fans should have realized the direction of SE and their products.

[Tickmeoff]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Final Fantasy XIV Online Critic Reviews for PC at Metacritic.com

56 on metacritic so far.

The user score is actually lower, at 4.2

This game is statistically worse than SpongeBob Squarepants: Creature from the Krusty Krab.




Just puttin' that out there.

I lol'd heartily

Especially at the highest review saying they do not recommend spending money on this game.

[Malacite]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

What sucks is there's just so much crap that all the major improvements over XI that have been made are going unnoticed/unmentioned:

- No more skill ups. You skill your weapons, but that's really just essentially EXP for that class. Atk, Acc etc automatically go up.
- Auto-maps. You don't have to buy maps anymore, as it's already done for you, which I love as what kind of adventurer goes out into the world without any sense of direction? A dumb ass that's who.
- No more scrolls! Magic and abilities are automatically learned as you gain ranks.
- Crafting for profit. Yeah, you can actually level crafts and profit now without having to rely on HQs.
- Gathering is easy and fun. No more fighting over mining points, or carrying stacks of pickaxes & hatchets. And it's all skill-based now rather than expending stacks and stacks of tools in Mount Z hoping for a Khroma Ore.
- Everything except for equipment stacks. This is a huge one to me. Most items stack to 12, but things like crystals and raw materials for synthesis (including lumber!) stack to 99! Crystals actually currently stack to 999, but SE just put out a notice saying they're changing crystals so who knows what they'll do.
- The Armory System is much, much less restrictive than the sub job system in XI. Since we no longer have skill levels, but rather optimal ranks, you can mix and match skills of all classes (with some restrictions and adjustments) to create viable combinations that people would have just laughed at in FFXI, like an Archer who can nuke. You just have to make sure your stats are in line with what you want to do.
- You begin the game with 80 inventory slots.
- The action bar allows you to set up to 30 commands that you can activate with 1~0 on your KB, rather than spamming macros and the cool down timers are visible on the bar.
- Weaponskills no longer consume TP if the target is out of range. They simply won't activate.
- You can actually see your accuracy stat in your menu, and they did away with the separate ranged stats.
- You don't swap gear in battle anymore, so you don't really have to carry sets specifically to maximize a single ability (i.e. Tachi: Gekko) anymore, unless you're making a whole build around it.
- Macros can save up to 10 lines now instead of 6 (they go up to 25k lol but it only saves 10)
- You can change jobs at any time outside of combat.

^ I'll add more as I think of them, got other crap to do.

[cidbahamut]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

That's all well and good Mal, but a fantastically abysmal interface makes all of that irrelevant.

[DakAttack]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

That's all well and good Mal, but a fantastically abysmal interface makes all of that irrelevant.

The interface is fine, dummy, have a look at the real issues.

[cidbahamut]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

The interface is fine, dummy, have a look at the real issues.

The interface is not fine.

The interface was enough to make me ragequit in spite of my friend trying to help me get into the meat of the game. The poor design of the interface gets in the way of playing and subsequently enjoying the game. Maybe you can put up with it, or the design doesn't bother you, but it was a veritable deathblow for my enjoyment of FFXIV.

[Nandito]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Why's that?

Not sure if you listed it pages back, but I do clearly remember you ranting about it over and over. Do tell why!

[Raydeus]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

It would be very fun if the new FFXI team implemented some of those (fairly simple) improvements on XI too.

[cidbahamut]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Why's that?

Not sure if you listed it pages back, but I do clearly remember you ranting about it over and over. Do tell why!

Well for starters all the boxes and widgits onscreen tend to make for a rather messy interface and the default setting certainly wasn't laid out in a way that would nicely fit together. Chatboxes overlap with no good place to stick them and they're opaque enough most of the time to get in the way of viewing the world, breaking immersion with a sickening crack. On the gamepad the right analog stick had one or both of its axes wired incorrectly, making camera manipulation screwy. This may have been fixed for the retail version, but during open beta it was an issue, and correcting it by fiddling with the gamepad settings didn't help because then it was still tied to other functionality like map scrolling so I couldn't win either way. The menus are needlessly layered in some cases, particularly the simple act of equipping armor requiring something like 3 or 4 confirmations to actually swap out to a new piece. TGM's commented on it before, but chat tabs are seriously lacking. The chatbox in general needs to be gutted and redone in general. There's no using the gamepad to scroll through it or interact with it at all as far as I could tell. The context sensitive commands that only show up in the menu was rather unnecessary. Devoting a whole button to bringing up a list of emotes is also rather wasteful. That's a whole button you could have devoted to something worthwhile like pulling up your inventory screen that you'll be digging through on a regular basis. Checking what loot you had in your inventory tended to take more keystrokes to get to than was healthy as I recall. Bouncing back to the widgits, even if you do find some magical configuration in which your eyes don't bleed from all the clutter, the client doesn't remember it for when you log in tomorrow. I never found a way to turn widgits off, but maybe that's because it was burried under 8 layers of menus, who knows? Also, why does NPC dialogue get its own box when it's just going to show up in my chatbox anyway? Seems we could streamline that into one box rather than having the two overlap and make each other unreadable during the dialogue itself, just a thought.

FFXIV's interface is terribly inelegant. It is a patchwork of widgits, and none of them fit together smoothly. It made enough of an impression on me that I didn't want to continue logging in. If that doesn't indicate a problem, I don't know what does.