Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

[Khaleesi]

Originally Posted by lecompte [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Any community interest in this game?

A group of friends and I are going to be going into this game pretty hard to carry us over to EQ:N. We'll be on the Gilgamesh server and firing up a linkshell/company.

Anyone else going to be playing? If your looking for a crew to play with when it comes around, our linkshell/company information is available at http://meteorology.shivtr.com/ so you can track us down.

I'm pretty critical of ARR, however am also fair.
The game is not as good as FFXIV 1.0 (with 1.23 combat and patch) - 1.0's strength was that in contrast to the market trend of MMOs, it was difficult, not a hand-holder and felt more like an updated FFXI but with it's own spin on things.

ARR is a very watered down, ease of access, spammy style version of 1.0, that moves even further away from FFXI heritage and more towards our modern expectations of online RPGs.

Having said that, the story is strong(even if the cut scenes are horrendous), the group play is cohesive and the overall enjoyment is there - it just however gets repetitive when you realize that it's yet another game that forces you to push through half of your level cap in order to start actually enjoying it.

This is not the game that should tide people over to EQ Next (which is nowhere in sight), unless of course you are valuing social relations more than anything else.

However if it's group play you like, then NeverWinter online has a lot of communal connectivity and is setup to be very multi-person friendly. It's greatly accessible, much like GW2, to let you and your pals jump on, play for a few hours and accomplish a lot, then log off and not worry about it.

Originally Posted by Ishukone [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Picked it up this weekend for a beta test, fun as hell. The flexibility of characters is really refreshing from a standard mmo.

Maybe from your perspective, which may be limited - yet the job system is not new, it and in other forms has existed for many years. FFXIV 1.0 had the best of them with the overall adventure level, and then subsequent individual job levels beneath it. Unfortunately ARR did away with this, so for example if your adventurer level was 44, you could travel to places with mobs at around that level without significant fear of death or penalty; even if your highest job level was only 36. Now in ARR, your job level (obviously only one active at a time), IS your level. If you advance one job to 50, and can go around traveling with little resistance(as rightly you should, you earned it), you then switch to your 15 Conjurer, and you're now fresh meat again for the mobs.