The Other Grass: Final Fantasy XIV

After all my drama's a few weeks back I had to settle for waiting for the official release of FFXIV, that day came this Wednesday with the week early Collectors Edition.

I apologise now this will be a little long.

I got the game home and opened up the box, a beautiful box about average CE size with some very nice box art. Please excuse the slightly below average quality photos as they were taken on my phone.



The first item pulled from the box was the Security Token (Authenticator) which I still stand by is a very good idea and I am still surprised that Blizzard did not follow suit with Cataclysm.


Following the token was the world map which came on a very nice silky fabric, its almost the kind of material that a window polishing cloth is made of. Despite what it is printed on it is printed very well and it is a nice change from the paper, cotton or stiff burlap maps I have had in the past.


Next was the game itself which came bundled with the behind the scenes DVD and a the case itself with again very beautiful artwork on the cover.


Next item was the Journal, a leather covered notebook which was to include art from the game and some never before seen work. This book is about the size of my hand but made very well. Inside the art is beautiful again however the pages contain the same set of artwork looped 3 and a half times. The back few pages consist of some new art and some landscapes that been scaled down to fit sometimes even two a page, far smaller than work of this quality and detail should ever be and certainly to small to be truly appreciated.


Finally we have the Travelers Tumbler, a metal flat bottomed cup with a FFXIV branded leather wrap and a lid. For a started I thankfully received mine in good condition but many report their Tumbler showing up covered in mold, then we have the fact that the cup lid won't actually stop liquid getting out. Finally as shown by this warning the Tumbler is not fit to hold anything at all bar water and air, anything else will probably break it.




Aside from a few minor problems the items still at least look good on my desk where they will probably stay not used.


Once I had my fill of the CE items I went to install the game, one solo disk was all it required and the install of the client did not take long. After the install had completed the client needed to run some patches the first was only a few Mb and took a few seconds. The second larger patch put me right back where I was with the Beta, downloading a large slow patch on SquareEnix's P2P network with no download and alot of upload. I was not about to get our second plan this month capped so canceled the download and sat there frustrated at the inability for me to play.
After a short time I did what I should have done in the Beta and hit the fan site forums looking for a direct download, sure enough I found one quite quick and 10min later including search time I have it on my PC and patching was done.

What happened next was nothing short of pure stupid. I in my infinite wisdom miss read the card in my case and simply saw the words "Registration Code" and assumed this was the code to let me play the game. I registered to the EU SE site (Yes SE thinks New Zealand and Australia are in the EU not NA like everyone else), when I tried to log in it would not take this user name only the one I previously registered through the NA site. That NA site gave no option to add a code ordered as mine was. For the next day and a half I posted on forums and mailed SE trying to get this fixed, until that night something clicked. I read the card again and it said "Members Registration Code" and then sure enough on the back of the manual was the "Game Registration Code" in the format I needed.
With my tail between my legs I apologized on forums and input the code, signed up my Security Token, set up payment details and finally unlocked my first character slot. (BTW yes you do pay per character slot in FFXIV so no alts for me.)

Thankfully my code worked, there have been quite a few stories from people that have received games with expired game codes so even if they did sign up right they could not play.



After creating my new toon I logged in for the first time as my new Roegadyn Gladiator Orthien Lightsguard in the Forest City State of Gridania.

I will state now that I had planned a lot of screenshots from the opening to show you all but as it turns out "PrintScreen" does not take Screenshots in FFXIV in fact there is not Screenshot option at all, so sadly no images from the first part of the game.

The first part of the game if full of alot of cut scenes all featuring your own toon interacting with others, a very cool feature. My first taste of game play came in the form of a fight, a fight where I had no instructions and almost no help. There were some in game help tips but they were small and hard to get to anyway.
After the fight there was more cut scenes and then a little more game play then more cut screens. That is the way it has gone so far for most of my first 4 levels.
There has not been much action, most of my playing has been spent running or killing stuff just because I could and not because it had to. The whole experience has been part of one quest so far with everything being a run to this place for a cut scene with the exception on my first introduction guildleve which sent me to kill 3mushrooms for 1000gil.

The game as a whole of what I have seen in the first few hours can be sumed up by a character the I saw run past me when I first got to town, his name was "Disappointing Gameplay" and I feel its rather appropriate.
For a game that was meant to have studied games "like WoW" in an effort to make it more casual friendly and fun to play very little has changed from FFXI to FFXIV bar the obvious graphical and UI changes.
Very little is ever told to you as the player most of what I know about the game came from fan sites/podcasts before hand or my own MMORPG knowledge.
The menu system is clunky with everything being in the one main menu that you have to open up like a windows start bar, each new option from there opens in a new window that will have to be closed one by one when you wish to leave. This is made 1000x worse by the fact that despite improvements to it the mouse it still moves incredibly sow.

To make the multiple windows and slow mouse worse is the systems strange designs and over complication.
Here's an example for how all this adds up, my toons just dinged level 2 and to show it I get a small "Rank Up" message on my screen. Down in my chat window a single line appares saying "You learn ability Red Lotus" which is quickly pushed out by and action you do as they all display messages in the chat window (this includes looting as the chat window is the only evidence that you got something).
I hit home to open the menu and slowly drag my mouse down to ability and skills.
Selecting that I open the next window and am showing my hotbars and list of skills.
To assign my new spell I have to click box two on the hotbar then right click the skill I want to assign, then I have the choose which hand I want to use it (a nice feature but a useless step when you are a tank without a shield yet). Picking Mainhand it is then assigned to the second button, in a few levels I have to do the another 2 times for the next spells. I finish off by closing that window then the main menu and return to play.
That is far more complex than it needs to be. Things like this and many other of there game systems make me think that their "Study" of WoW consisted of someone being told a quick overview of the game and no one ever playing it.
Even the camera is done badly, it sits right behind you even at max zoom and making it far to easy to click yourself as you run into a mob and end up not being able to attack for a few second while you try to pan around your large body to click a squirrel.


In the end there are a lot of things that this game really has going for it, first and foremost its the amazing graphics.
My thoughts can really be summed up nicely by Mike from the BFF report where he basically nails my initial thoughts on the head, he even picked up some things I missed. This is a game that I have waited a long time for and really was kind of hoping would be my personal WoW killer but all I have been given is a semi unfinished disappointment. The BFF report on FFXIV can be found at
http://www.zam.com/bffreport.html?bffreport=41
(Sorry for some reason blogger would not link this).

So Cataclysm seem like it will be my MMO future for now, with both of the games I could have seen leaving for being not up to the task I hold slightly reserved hopes now for the next in Warhammer 40k: Dark Millennium.

I will finish out my free month of FFXIV what happens from there can only be swayed my a radical change in game in the coming levels and several patch's.

The Other Gra...Nope Rain Check That.

My plan for this weekend was to get cracking on the FFXIV open beta and tell you what I thought. However that has not gone to plan.

After a delay in the Beta relace due to a critical bug Applications were quicly opened up and just as quickly closed down again. There was alot of anger as beta tickets were put on hold and new applications were hot linked right to the Server Error page. SquareEnix were quite obviously having alot of trouble handling the huge loads that the beta was bringing(Not a good sign).
Finally though sign up was back running again and after some more errors I managed to get through and snap up a key before the site went down...again.

With key in hand I followed the emailed instructions and set up my account and off I was to the Beta log in site to download the client. Again faced with an issue, while I had the key each time I logged into the site proveded I was just returned to the loggin screen with no message. After a while of testing and looking for answers I found that New Zealand is considdered part of the EU for SE and dispite my email comming under the EU title the Beta site link given inside was for the NA Beta site.
With the correct site in hand I was once again on my way to getting into the Beta and promptly downloaded, installed and started running the Beta client.

There I hit another snag, the client was patching really, really slow. I mean like 5 local connections with 10 kbs download was a good speed for me.

Now it is 3 days later and I have 50% of the 1st of 8 files in the second batch downloaded.

So far SquareEnix is not filling me with confidance in FFXIV. I still will keep my preorder but I an almost sure now that they will follow the path of Warhammer and the like before them if they do not fix something soon.

The "Casual" Bonus

This entry is a look at our own "Casual" bonus and just how lucky we are to have one that works so well.

In the world of WoW those players who level casually are helped along with the catch up system known as "Rested EXP". We all know it, it comes in very handy and when possible you log out in an Inn or city to get it. As a system it is very simple and works perfectly at what it is designed for, the people that play a lot get a small period of time with the bonus. Those that do not play so regularly get large quantity of time on the bonus and as such have a little helper to bridge the gap to those that can afford more time. The system really does not have any big negatives, sure the more hardcore will still level faster but the boost is a nice little helping hand for those that can't.

I bring this up to help show to you just how bad SquareEnix's proposed plan to level the field is. The aim is not to help boost the casual up towards the hardcore, rather to limit the hardcore so the casual can catch them. That's right you heard it you will be punished for playing FFXIV to much.

The system works basically like this. Each player can level different classes and those classes have a level system separate to each other, the skills learnt from each class can be used in varying ways together to help provide a different kind of experience in how you play the game. However with their system if you play as one class for 8 hours your class EXP earned will be cut heavily, then the EXP will diminish over the next 8 hours until you eventually are earning 0 EXP for everything you do. You can avoid this by changing to a different class(which suffers the same after 8 hours). Now pay attention because here is the kicker, the limit resets WEEKLY so each week you are limited to at absolute painful best 16 hours per class. Now sure the game is designed to have you learn different classes all in one, and yes there will be many classes you want to get skills from but think of it like this. You wish to tank so you take the class with sword and shield its really all you want to do, you can play that class for a little over an hour-2hours a day before it is made useless to play anymore. Think about how much you play on your main in WoW, even dipping into 2 other classes for useful spells your limited to 3 hours a day of leveling, when leveling I am likely to do that a weekday let alone what I could do during the weekend.
Now there is word that the EXP you don't earn after 8 hours could be used to boost yourself another way but as of yet we still have no clue as to what that is and the game is a month from release, we don't even have an explanation for this outside of Japanese forums.

So next time you look at the blue bar and wish you had a little more of it be thankful, at least you drop to normal EXP after it ends.

The Future of Armor

Recently SquareEnix released their third video in there "Making of" series talking about the processes behind the up coming title FFXIV.
Their recent video went into a discussion about how their game handles Armor and the unique features that their game will implement. Watching this made me think of how far MMO's have come from the WoW style of equipment.

In WoW different armor that share the same model only vary by preset colors and sometimes additional runes or glow effects, then as newer MMO's came out they added the ability to dye armor to help differentiate players from each other and add variety. With FFXIV they have taken it further adding layers to armor letting multiple sets use the same base structure but be visually quite different.


Not only does this make for some very amazing looking gear and huge variety that WoW lacks in sets at times but it helps each player look different from the next guy without adding to much additional work for the designers.
What this leads me to wonder is with Blizzards ability to take existing Ideas and combine and polish them into something amazing, what can we expect to see from their next MMO what will blow us away in terms of equipment.

A Call for Help

The fine folks at Eorzeapedia have started a competition giving away FFXIV Beta keys to its members who registered for the Beta and did not get in.
As one of those people and someone disappointed with FFXI this excites me almost as much as Cataclysm.

Here is where you come in, to win the keys you need to gather votes from friends.
If you follow this link and enter Orthien under the name you can gift me your vote. Those lucky people with the top votes will be given Beta access.

Please dear readers I as humbly for your help, get me into this Beta.

Thank you in advance for all those that vote for me.

FFXIV Has It Right and Predicts Cataclysm

Final Fantasy 14 for those unaware is the upcoming MMORPG from SquareEnix. Their plan is to take what they now know people hated from their first MMO and what they know people love in WoW to make a bigger better MMO for their fans and for the market.

The reason this is important to note to any WoW player is for two reasons. Here is a link to Eorzeapedias article on the release

1. They have just announced their collectors edition pack and what goodies it will contain. They have obviously been watching WoW and reading people thoughts on authenticators as SquareEnix are including one in their collectors edition.
This is important for us to note because it sets a very strong example for security and is something Blizzard fans have been calling for for a while. This move could possible force Blizzard to follow suit in order to keep face in the realm of security.

2. SquareEnix had also announced a September 30th release date for FFXIV.
Keeping in mind Blizzards love for squashing other games under its new release heel. I would not be sup prised to hear Blizzard are going to try to push Cataclysm out within a month or so of Final Fantasy, as they have done with both Warhammer and Aion. If Cataclysm is to come out in October then to match the it would also indicate that the Beta is very, very close if they want to keep their usually 4 monthish Beta period.

Of cause this is still all speculation, but following Blizzards track record it looks very likely.
I guess all we can do now is wait and see if my prediction for a mid July Beta still stands.

Edit The Blues have just confirmed the Cataclysm Beta has begun so my push back to mid July was under-optimistic. However the good news is this does bode well for that October release still as per prediction.