FFXIV

****IMPORTANT****
Please discount the following review posts as FFXIV has changed almost completly since I wrote these, and now with the old servers shut down and everyone waiting for version 2.0 to come out the info here is not really relevent any more. I will however leave the posts available to read for anyone who may be interested to see how it all used to be.
***END OF EDIT***



Well I've now been playing FFXIV for a little over 2 months and as the game has just had it's first major update I thought I'd post here with a sort of review for those who might be interested.

First though I'll just say that if any of you want to get in touch with me outside of XI, then please PM me on this forum as I still check here regularly.
Oh and yes, I am still playing XI, just with my free time at a premium right now I don't get as much time to dedicate to it as I'd like.

For any of you coming over to XIV I'm on the Melmond server under the character name Feylorn Sylph. My old friend Baileywith is there too as the character Ravenwolf Bailey, so look either of us up to join our linkshell. You can add people to friends list on XIV even if they are not logged in, so it's easy to find them.

*IMPORTANT* For the purposes of the following reveiw, this is of the game as it stands 'after' the update of Nov 26 2010. This update got rid of a whole lot of lag that some people were suffering, re-jigged the UI, added more inventory space, better inventory/gear management etc.
Now personally I didn't have many things before the patch that I had problems with. I got hardly any lag, but I'm playing on a really good PC. Saying that tho I can see the improvements they made, the whole game feels smoother and more polished, things just work better now.

Right, on to the review.
Firstly I'll repeat what I have said elsewhere on this forum, and to some of you in XI: XIV is a whole new game, do not expect it to be XI with better graphics.
While there are similarities, the races are pretty much the same with different names, and some of the mobs are the same, the game play is totally different.
Combat has no auto attack function, if you the player don't give commands, then your character will just stand there getting hit. However, when you do issue those commands, combat is fast and often brutal as you can throw out strings of abilities and WS way faster than in XI.
One of the biggest changes for people coming from XI is that XIV has no subjob system.
Instead of a subjob you get to use almost all abilities earned for one job, on any of your other jobs.
Basically this works sort of like BLU spells in XI. Each job gets a certain ammount of skill slots depending on the job level, and each job ability has a set point cost. Apart from certain job specific abilities, most job abilities can freely be used on other jobs as long as you have slots to put them in your setup, and as long as that other job is high enough level for the ability.
An easy example is the setup I have. I mainly play Lancer for my combat job and currently have it at rank 18. I also have the Pugelist and Conjurer jobs levelled both to rank 10. Now this means that in my lancer setup, I can also use the Second Wind ability of Pugelist, and the Shock Spikes and Stoneskin from Conjurer. Essentially 'every' job you have levelled acts as a subjob, it's just a matter of mixing and matching abilities to find good combos. Essentially you get to design your own job around how you like to play the game.

Next big difference is how you level.
In XIV you actually level 2 things at once, as you have a character level separate from your job level. These are called Physical level and Rank level respectively.
Now, the important thing here is that your physical level governs your HP, MP, physical stats and elemental resistances, and your rank level for your job governs what job abilities you get. As these level independently, your physical level soon outstrips your rank level, unless you just stick with one job. Sticking with one job though is not a good idea, as the whole system is geared towards the job ability mixing system mentioned above, and only levelling one job will likely become a struggle after a while if you don't level others to support it.
Also of note is that it is way easier to get physical level up if you level a few different jobs, and that then in doing so, each successive job becomes easier to level. This is because if you level job A to 10, and thus get physical level up to about 10 at the same time, then you start job B, job B starts at waaay more HP, MP and stats than it would have if physical level was still 1, so you can just blitz those early levels in no time.

This brings me on to another big change from XI, the crafting.
in XIV each craft is a job in it's own right, complete with higher level equipment, and job abilities as you level up. Just like with combat jobs, these crafting abilities can be used on other craft jobs that are of a high enough level for the ability, and thus it is a good idea to level multiple crafts to take advantage of the different abilities. Also the crafting jobs give a lot more exp to physical level than the combat jobs do, so even when you are crafting you are making your character a lot tougher and more capable of survival for when you get back to fighting.
I have found crafting to be a lot of fun, and way easier to start than it was on XI. This is mainly because of the levequest system (more on that later), as when you do a craft levequest you are given the materials you need for free, so can just get straight into crafting without needing a load of gil/materials beforehand. The craft quests also get you a ton of materials as rewards, so you can very soon start making yourself some equip, or stuff to sell.
I found I could make a lot more items at low craft levels than are possible in XI, for instance it didn't take me long to make my first polearm for Lancer in XIV, but on XI it took a huge amount of time and effort to be able to make even the most basic polearm with woodworking.
Saying that, crafting on XIV does require a little more skill than on XI. You really do have to learn which craft skills to use and when to use them, as well as learning which types of synth to use depending on the difficulty of what you are making.
Basically a synth takes place over a number of 'rounds', each where you have to select an action before a timer runs out. if the actions works then you progress the synth towards completion, and the item quality improves. If the action fails or you run out of time that round, then at best you progress a little, and lose a little material durability, at worst you make no progress and lose a lot of durability. If durability hits 0, then the synth fails.
The basic synth abilities are: Standard synth (best chance to succeed, normal advance towards completion and increase in quality. Rapid synth (medium sucess chance, large advance towards completion, low quality improvement) and Bold synth (low sucess chance, low advance to completion, large quality increase). Naturally the chances of these succeeding are based off your crafting level and the recepie level. What this means is that on a hard synth you can play it safe and stick to standard synths, on something you are pretty good at making you can finish it fast with rapid synths, and on a low level one that you can easily do, you can use bold synths to aim for an HQ result.
On the whole, I really like the crafting system, so much so that I have way more craft jobs levelled past 10 than I do combat jobs right now.

So, this brings me on to the last of the 3 groups of jobs, the gathering jobs.
Like with crafting, these are full blown jobs in their own right, with higher level equip and job skills as you level them.
The jobs are Fisher, Miner and Botanist (basically logging and harvesting combined).
All work pretty much the same way, find a spot to use them, in the case of Mining and Botany you find a glowing point on a cliff/cave wall, tree/grass patch. For fishing you just find a spot next to some water, or a glowing spot on a beach for spear fishing.
Now with the secondary gathering methods, quarrying in caves, harvesting in fields and spear fishing on beaches, that's all there is to it, you will automatically try and gather items with results depending on your job level and gear used.
For the primary gathering actions of mining, lumbering and fishing though things are a little more complex. Mining and botany are almost exactly the same, first you pick a spot to aim at (just on a little slider that pops up) then you get a little mini game where an you click to stop an oscillating marker. When you stop it you either get the goodies, or you get a hint as to how close you were, or you fail if you have used up the action meter for that attempt. The higher your level and the better your tools are then the bigger the sweet spot on the meter will be and you'll get better and more items out of it.
Fishing differs only slightly, as you need to use the right type of bait for the fishing spot you are at, and you have to wait for a fish to bite before you get to the mini game bit. Then it works the same as the other two jobs.

These jobs take a little longer to get the hang of, but once you learn how they work it's a lot more fun than gathering in XI ever was. Plus yet again, levelling these jobs also levels your physical level, benefiting all your other jobs to boot.

Ok, next is the quest system in XIV.
For a start you can forget about just walking up to random NPCs and getting a quest from them.
While I do not know if SE will be adding in such quests in the future, at the moment the vast majority of quests are available only from the adventuring guilds in the main cities. This makes sense in the context of the game as these guilds are there for the city folks to post jobs they want adventurers to do. There are some quests you get elsewhere, such as the main story quests for your start city, and the guild specific quests after you join a job's guild at job rank 20.
I won't go into those other quests, as they are pretty standard to anyone who has played XI.
The levequests are something new though. These not only give you more exp/rank points than you would normally get, but also reward gil, items and sometimes guild points. They are also all repeatable, with differing rewards each time. You get 2 types the battle/gathering ones, and the crafting ones. You can only have 8 of each type (16 in all) active at any one quest period, and each quest period is 36 RL hours long. Essentially, if you blitz through 8 combat ones in the first 2 hours after levequest reset, then you can't do any more combat/gathering ones for another 34 RL hours. You can however still do your 8 crafting ones, and most notably, you can also party up to join in with other people's quests. The 36 hour repop timer really isn't that bad, as there are plenty of other things to do in the game between groups of levequests.
As well as good old exp grinding, there are also hourly 'behests', which are basically monster hunts starting from the various wilderness camps that all levequests are based from. These also get you better than normal exp, and gil rewards if you survive to the end.
As previously mentioned you can also do gathering and crafting, as well as regular farming drops from mobs, and all these actions contribute to physical level so when you get back to the fighting you'll be bigger and better and can go for the higher difficulty/higher exp levequests.

Ok, time to wrap this up with a little note on equipment.

The two big things to get your head round with equipment in XIV are equipment wear, and favoured job/optimal rank.

Item wear sounds like a pain, and yes it can be at times. However it does make things a little more realistic, and can keep the crafters busy even if their items are not selling.
Basically all your gear has a wear value, and an item that can be used to repair it.
Whatever craft is used to make the item can also repair the item with the correct repair material.
Or if you can't do it yourself/find a crafter to do it, then each town has a repair npc who can fix your stuff for a fee. Downside is that the NPC only repairs to 75%, while PC repairs always repair to 100%. So far I have found doing my own repairs to be pretty easy, and cheaper than getting the npc to do it, at least on anything but the starter equip.
On the whole this is not too big a pain in the ass, and the game gives you plenty of warning that your items are getting worn out. At 50% you get a damaged gear warning, and a slight loss in effectiveness. It doesn't really bite till 25%, but really there is no excuse to not have repaired gear by then.

Now optimal job/rank. Basically in XIV you can wear any piece of gear on any job at any level. However doing so is not always a good idea. Wearing an item that is not geared for your job effectively halves it's stats. likewise using an item too high or too low compared to your job rank will also negatively affect it's stats in proportion to the difference. The game is however pretty forgiving, due to how it is designed to be played. Because you can switch jobs at a moment's notice just by changing primary weapon/tool you may well be wearing high level equip for your main job when you switch down to a lower level one to party with friends or whatever. The game does not completely cripple you for this, and you can play effectively even though the equip you are wearing isn't ideal. The game puts much more emphasis on your primary weapon/tool than on the rest of your gear, so this is the most important item to keep up to date as you level different jobs. Saying that, you get 100 inventory space, and 100 storage off the bat in XIV, so there isn't any excuse for not having at least one set of backup equipment for your secondary main job, or as I tend to do, at least a partial set for melee, another for magic, and one for crafting/gathering. As stated previously, the game lets you tailor your job to how you like to play, it lets you do the same with your gear, pick stuff that helps your job build the most.

In conclusion, I like the game a lot, there is nothing I have found so far that I hate, and only a few things that I think need improvement, but are nowhere near 'game breaking' as some whiny sods have tried to make out on various websites.
From what I know of most of my friends on XI I think for the most part you will all like XIV too, and as with XI, the more good people on there, the better it will be. The software is only half the game, the people playing it are the other half.. we make the new FF what we want it to be, hopefully it will be another happy home for us all to hang out in, and share adventures together.

Hope to see you all in Eorzea !

-Fey

Great review Fey, very in depth. I might just see you in there one day!

Review Addendum.

As there has recently been another update in December I thought I'd best add to the review to cover a couple of things I missed, and some of the changes that came in with the update.

In the main review above I neglected to mention a couple of important things to do with inventory/storage and buying/selling of items.
First thing to get your head around here is that as it stands XIV 'has no AH'...
I'll let that sink in for a moment, some people have apparently found that to be quite a shock.

Right, now are we sitting comfortably? Then I will begin.
No AH is not really that big a deal as XIV has a very different way of selling/buying your stuff. As you would expect you can still buy/sell from npc vendors, and for the majority of the random junk you get from mob drops this is fine as you'll get better and faster gil this way than from selling to players.
For buying/selling equipment tho you still have the good old Bazaar, but XIV puts a nice little twist in this system with it's Retainers.
So what are retainers and what do they do for you. Well, as of the December update every PC can now hire (wrong word really as they cost nothing) 2 retainer NPCs. The first and foremost thing these NPCs do for you is store your gear, each can hold 100 items, so that's 200 free storage slots right off the mark. Retainers can be summoned at bells in the Adventuring guilds of all the major cities, and also at bells in other select locations such as in the main NPC shop areas in the cities. The retainers do a lot more than just store your items though, they can buy and sell for you too!
XIV has areas in the cities known as Market Wards, each one specialising in certain types of goods, such as weapons, leather-working goods, crafting tools etc. You can summon your retainer within these market zones, and then configure them to have a bazaar and they will stay there even when you have logged out of the game.
Now the cool thing here is that you can set your retainer bazaar not only to sell items, but you can also give them gill, and set them to buy items too if somebody comes along and offers the item to them. And it doesn't stop there, if you have an item that needs repair, you can set up your retainer to hold it for you and have a flag that it is looking for repair along with a price you will pay, so any crafter who is willing and able to repair it can do so for you (no item trading needed!) and the whole deal is automatically resolved for you.
When it comes to buying items in the market zones it's now pretty simple. You can go the the zone for the type of item you are after, and start a search for the item. The search function will tell you how many npc retainers in the area are selling the item, and will flag them all both with an icon by their name, and on your mini map so they are easy to locate.
From what I have tried myself so far this system seems to work well, and I have managed to find items I am after quickly and easily. Though it must be said I don't tend to go shopping in the markets much as yet as I have been making a lot of my own stuff.

On the whole the retainer and market ward system seems to work quite well, and with more functionality planned to be added in the future I can see it being a really good system.

Next thing to mention here is the changes to crafting that came in with the December update.
I don't need to go into too much detail here as crafting has stayed essentially the same as it was when I did the main review above, but now has some very important and cool additions.
The craft interface now has a recepie history function that operates in two ways.
Firstly when you complete a crafting leve quest, in addition to the regular rewards of crafting materials and gil you also get told a random recepie for your craft level. Well now the craft interface keeps track of the last 8 recepies you were told, so you can quickly pull up the new recepies to see what materials you need etc.
Secondly the craft interface also now has a history of the last 8 synths you have done, and when you select one it automatically readies the materials for it if you have enough of them in your inventory. This makes repeat crafting of the same stuff a breeze. This system is planned to be expanded in future to include 'all' recepies learnt and synths used.. a crafter's dream come true.

Well that's about it for this addition, I'll probably add more info if I remember anything that I have not already covered, or if any more significant changes come in with future updates.
Also feel free to ask me about anything you want more details on, or anything I have not covered here.

-Fey

Yo Fey,

I've joined up in FF14. Giving it another go.

I'm on Melmond too! Lallafell by the name of Larsa Lebracht. Look me up!

Cool Rix, I've added you to my XIV friends list, will look out for you on there.

Hello? Anyone out there?

Me and fey and a few others are still playing FFXIV. It's a great game and gets better with every patch. There have been some major changes recently, and more to come, some of which look fantastic.
We have chocobos, now, and airships, it's all good stuff.

Hope to see you on there soon.

Melmond server,

Thriparip, now Dhomag Stelf.

Best way to get peoples attention is to write in a topic they've written in, makes them get a mail sent telling them someone wrote something ;p

Its too bad i haven't been able to play too much lately, i want to get rank 50 soon so i can do some fun stuff already :<

Hey Thrip und Fey! Sorry i haven't been logging on lately, i decided to wait on paying for the game as school started up again and it seems this semester is going to be pretty hectic, hopefully i'll be back again when things are calmer!

Just wanted to check, are you guys still alive and playing ffxiv? or did you guys stop? i think i might come back in a couple of weks, would be nicer if you 2 still played

Yes we are still playing. Just a head's up tho, they are migrating/merging to new servers.
Dhom and I have applied to move to the Ragnarok server as it is the official European time sone one. You might want to get an application in ASAP to do the same if you are comming back. Not long left till they lock down the migration applications.

Hmm.. interesting, good thing you tol me, i didn't think you would switch servers.
I'll try applicating to ragnarok, at first i thought i prefer to play in a world-wide server, but maybe its better to play in a server where there's actually people around when i play lol

Edit: Hmm.. seems thats not possible, i need to have an active account to apply =/ >.<

Hmm, I'm not sure how long there is left to apply for transfer to Ragnarok.. but if you don't make the window you will just get dumped on whatever server Melmond defaults to.. Aegis I think. Whether you can then get a transfer to Ragnarok after the merger/transfer thing is all done at the start of next month I don't know.

Well that sure sucks then =/ I'd rather not be left alone, but i can't register an account just yet either >.<
We'll see how it goes, maybe i'll get to switch later or something

Hey dudes! Seems i won't be able to play for the entire summer, instead i'll have to play when it ends :< Gonna be away for 2 months and although i will have access to internets i won't have a PC strong enough to play the game. So i'll probably see you guys after the break!

Hey guys a really good friend of mine has been trying to convince me to play ffxiv so i decided to come on here and see if anyone was playing it and turns out you guys are! so after christmas i should be making a new Lyth! hope it lives up to the ffxi experiance! anyway hope your all doing well and maybe soon we can quest like the good old days!

Heya Lyth, long time no see :O
How are you doing?
Yeah, me Fey and thrip all played FFXIV to some extent, som more some (me) less. Now that this version has ended it wont be possible to join until they release the next one, which im guessing will be sometime march if we're lucky lol. Hopefully we can all play together then =)

Hey Lyth, good to hear from you.
As Haru said nobody is currently playing as it is the transition period between the old version which is now shut down, and version 2.0.
I myself had not played much in the last few months due to a number of reasons, not all related to the game, however I do plan on giving 2.0 a go and hope that there are at least some old friends there to have some fun times with. I'm assuming that the servers will keep the same names and that those of us that were already playing will still be on the same world, if so then Haru (Mikain), Thrip (Dhomag) and myself (myself) should still be on the Ragnarok server.

at this point iv been investigating into the game and it looks like it will be worth the wait to play.. il get in contact through this again when its closer to release talk soon

Hi Lyth! and anyone else watching.

Wow, I clicked on this site in my favourites by accident, didn't even know it was still there. What a blast from the past.

But while I'm here. Yes, I was playing FFXIV until shut down. And can't wait to get back on. I'll be on there the minute they let us back.

I'm now Dhomag Stelf, by the way, and on Ragnarok server, at least that's what it was called.

Be good to see some of the old gang from FFXI. If you come back I will give you a warm welcome and craft you an item of your choice, free of charge!

See you there!

Thrip, now Dhomag.

I check our tiny forum from time to time, my favorite part of it is the pics from the good old times when everyone in the ls played lol
Hope you guys are planning on trying the beta. Seems like the first phase will be in 10 days and all legacy members will get in.
You make it sound like you'll be taking money from us for crafts :O

Hi everyone, there was some new info about the transfer of characters from 1.0 to ARR.

http://lodestone.finalfantasyxiv.com/pl/topics/detail?id=758c9a3a9f3045637d0d36f1afa1dd51085f4be3

Specifically this bit is of most interest "In the event that your character data has been transferred to an undesired region, we ask that you submit a World transfer application. Applications will be accepted during phase 3, and transfers will occur during phase 4."

That means if we all want to play on the same server we should keep an eye on the news and make sure we all get on the same server