The other grass: Rift

After entering the competition I mentioned in my last post I received a Beta key for Rift on Sunday. Wednesday rolled around and after a quick install and a 7.5gig update I was into the game.
(Sorry for the image size for some reason Blogger is not accepting the thumbnails)

After watching through the intro cinematic I was greeted by half an our of failed server connections as every man and his dog with a key tried to get in at once. However after some persistence I was able to progress to the Shard (server) screen.
Initially the Shards were very hard to choose as every time a server's information updated it would just that Shard to the top of the list, this made trying to log onto the unofficial Oceanic Shard a game of 'Whack-a-mole' as the Dev's described it. This has been fixed since and is now much less taxing to do.

The Next step is character creation. While you have more options than in WoW this feature feels more limited, leaving everyone looking the same. It is defiantly nice to free pick skin hair and eye colors, slightly modify height and while the facial tattoos are very nice but there are only a handful of hair styles and many of them look alike. With very little physical customization and the limited hair styles your toon still ends up looking like everyone else around you.

Although all the races are very human like and look mostly the same, race will play a big part in how you play your character. In Rift races have very unique and powerful racial's i.e. 'Heals for 30% of damage taken, up to 50% of your total health.' or a 40% boost to Spell and Melee haste for several seconds.

Once your Character is made you can enter into your starting zone, each faction has one starting zone, however with how classes are set up you really should not need to play through it anymore than 4 times. Your first quest will be to choose your first Soul(Talent Tree), there are NPC's around the starting area to explain how your souls work if your new and have done no research.


From there its into your typical questing and lore experience.


There are 4 different classes to choose from in Rift, the Warrior, the Cleric, the Mage and the Rogue.
Each of these classes has 9 different PvE souls and 1 PvP Soul. You choose your fist Soul at level 1 right on your first quest then again at level 3 and the third Soul slot shortly after.
While 9 Souls might sound daunting you can ignore some as they apply to different Archetypes i.e. Warrior has Tanking and DPS Souls so DPS does not have to worry about the Tank Souls.
Like in WoW you can reset your points via a trainer and like WoW you can by additional Specs except where WoW only has DuelSpec, Rift has QuadSpec.

Your skills are also determined by your Souls. Rather than learning new spells as you level you learn them by going deeper and deeper into a given Soul, the deeper you go the stronger the spell i.e. At 2 points in Paladin you learn an attack to hit for heavy damage after you block and at 4 points you learn a Power Word: Fortitude.

For a better idea of how the trees work try the Zam Soul Calculator.



Once you finish your starter zone


It is onto regular questing.
Questing in Rift is very linear, you go to one hub get 2-6 quests in the one area, do them, hand them in and move on. If you finish a hub then the last quest will lead you into the next quest hub to hand in there so that your not back tracking.

After the starter zones the questing is broken up and made more interesting by the constant Rifts and Invasions.
Rifts work similar to Public Quests in WAR in that raids of random people in the area work towards a goal, Exp and Loot. Unlike Public Quests, Rifts are random in location so they may be next to the quest hub or out in the wild somewhere. Each rift will show on your map so that you can find them.
Rifts come in stages, alternating between trash packs and mini bosses before you kill the final Elite mob and seal the Rift.



Once the Rift is sealed everyone who participated will get loot based on how much work they did, loot can range from combat items to Planar currency used to buy character enhancements and powerful gear.
Rifts will also scale with the number of people in a zone so populated zones get many major Rifts and as the population moves on and the empty zones end up with only a few Rifts that can be handled by those still hanging around.

Invasions on the other hand are like very large Rifts except that instead of being in a single location Invasions will move towards camps and even citys killing all in their path.
Invasions require many more people to finish, have a lot more Elites, give considerably more and higher level loot and if not stopped will move in and attack NPC's.


Another of Rifts unique features is that it comes default with a customizable UI.



Rift also comes with features called Antiques and Collections. Think of these like Archeology except without the grind and surveying. Collections will be things like Books you find lying around the starting zones . Antiques are similar except that they show up ether from Invasion loot or as little randomly placed sparkles on the ground beside rocks e.t.c. as you explore.
You use the picked up item of ether kind and if it is a collection it is instatly added to your collection, Antiques will bring up a new screen that shows the collection you are working on and shows which slot your item goes in. When you complete the sets you are rewarded with new items or even epic gear.
The Antiques are not farmable however due to the somewhat random nature of their spawn points.

The rest of Rift is very much like WoW, you move the same, gather mats the same, chat the same, craft the same, it even has an achievement system.


This is not a bad thing though, It means that anyone coming from another MMO particularly WoW will know exactly how to do a lot of the functions and can focus on the game rather than learning basic functions again.

Overall I think this is a really polished game for just being in the Beta stage and most issues are fixed very quickly by the Dev team.
The Dev team has been very active in the community to date and seem to be listening to their customers well.
While Rift has a lot of unique features they have not tried to do anything to new which looks to be working well.
The game does take a bit to get into and is nothing special until you leave the starting zones and start encountering Rifts. The core gameplay almost needs a bit more work to come up to scratch and become addictive as with the more unique game aspects but are not bad in any way.

This game has a lot of potential and I am really having fun playing the Beta, from all the MMO's I have played recently Rift has the most potential to succeed, is the most clean and polished and its still in Beta with a releace date not for another 2 months.
I swore off buying new MMO's on release after Aion and FF XIV but with how Rift is going I think I might pre order the Collectors Edition for it and possibly play for more than the free month.


I will leave you with a screen cap of my level 13 Paladin-Reaver-RiftBlade Tank not tat the gear looks quite good and yes that is a one handed mace.

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 Other Grass: WAR 2 years on.

Over the weekend I got to flicking through my old art book for Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. I picked the art book up with the collectors edition of WAR just briefly before WotLK came out. I thought what better way to kill time before Cataclysm than to look at just how green the grass is on the other side.

When I first heard the announcement of a Warhammer MMORGP I like many was very excited, now sure I am more a 40k fan than the fantasy game but they are very similar worlds and still I had high hopes. As more and more news came out the hype grew and still like many I waiting on the edge of my seat. When release day came I was there at EB Games to get my copy and that afternoon I was playing. Half and hour later that afternoon I was horribly disappointed.
The game as many were to quickly find out was in no way finished and was full of many many bugs. A very large amount of subscribers left after their first month of free play and went back to which ever MMO they came from, myself included. Since that free month expired I had not been back or really thought about WAR, until this weekend.

After getting a taste for Warhammer I went looking for articles that could tell me how it has changed since release, and while I didn't find what I was after I did discover that they had now put in place two new systems. The first is a free 10day return for all old players, this comes complete with many other returning bonuses such as bonus exp based on the time spend away(with two years gone I should have alot). The second was what they call an "Endless Trial", not wishing to waste my 10 free days at the end of the weekend and knowing the game would need to be patched from release client I went for the trial option.
There were a few restrictions on the Trial such as not being able to use the mailbox, being restricted to the first tier of content or having a restriction on servers available but nothing that sounded to restrictive though.
After creating the account and installing the base game I got to patching, compared to a full WoW patch the 2.5gig for WAR was nothing and it was not long before I was in the game.

The character creation was as good as I remembered with a similar creation to WoW but with more choices and ways to customise. Then however I stepped inside game.
The first thing I noticed after the intro movie finished was the share wall of Gold spam in my chat window, now I am not just talking about any run of the mill gold spam this was "super" gold spam. Imagine Trade channel on you busiest day, now imagine that everyone in Trade was posting a 2-3 line gold message instead of LFMICC, finally add a second Trade channel doing the same thing, that is what this was like. This while annoying wasn't to much of an issue for myself, I just had to find the "Region:1" and "Advice" channels from a list of 30 odd and turn them off, for someone new to the game however and new to MMO's they would have no clue how to get into chat settings and they would be limited to only /say to talk to people.

Once I got rid of the gold spam I was hit with another kind of spam I call "Knowledge spam". This issue is every time you find something new it is added to your Tome of Knowledge which is a very nice place for you titles, achievements and lore based stuff, however every new entry causes a popup message on screen and makes your Tome flash until you read it. When you are moving about in the beginning your finding all kinds of new things, places, monsters, people of interest etc. all of them flashing away in your Tome until you click them then back track to the menu and click the next one. It gets really annoying clearing the 20 new entry you got for entering a graveyard killing a ghost, a bat and a zombie then finding a grave.

Ignoring the spam I was enjoying myself doing some quest to help my faction and picking up all kinds of experience, then DING! new level. Instead of getting the cool glow and watching the WAR logo slam together above me like I remember, I got a big popup window filling 1/3 of my screen telling me what I was missing from the full version. This continued every single level, I would be killing mobs fighting for my life when DING! I lose half my screen and can not see whats going on until I click the tiny little "X" in the corner. While I get the idea for reminding people what the full game offers the loading screen messages were enough all this pop-up did was make me want to play the full game less.

As I continued to play I came across WAR's famous public quests, I really do love this idea and they have worked rather well even at launch. The basic concept is that in any given zone there are a hand full of "events" the will run their full course then reset 5 min after finishing. Each event is broken up into "quests" that anyone who happens to be in the area can help to complete for example there is a farm over run with chaos marauders and the first part is to kill 25 of these mobs. Once the first quest is complete the chain progresses forward into parts 2 and 3. In this particular Public Quest the marauders run off and you must take down several waves of casters then heavy armoured DPS. Each wave builds in difficulty until the third wave has you facing off against Champion(elite) and Hero(Boss) mobs. Once the event is over those who participated get a score out of 500 based on how much work they did and that score is added to a random 1-1000 roll and then loot bags are given out to those who top the board with better loot the higher you get. Now while these are awesome, fun events that you can do over and over for good loot they have one major flaw. Each event is build for a set number of people and while events near towns often have an abundance of helpers making them faceroll the harder and further out events often have no one. This means that if you find one that probably has a quest tied to it also(and it likely has good gear at the end) you can only solo part 1 with the Champion and Hero mobs in parts 2 and 3 being to much for any less than the recommended size especially if you do not have a healer. I think with a simple adjustment to alter difficulty in favor of numbers these could be a very powerful way for MMO's to progress.

Another idea that WAR trys to pull off that I quite like in concept is the implementation of realm guilds. This was not around at launch so I had no idea it was coming, the concept is that at level 5 you get automatically added to a realm(server) wide guild for your faction and will stay there till you opt to leave or you reach level 20. I love this idea because it helps new players quickly get introduced to the social aspect of the game and gives them a platform free from gold spam to get advice and form groups. The problem I have this WAR's implementation is that I had no warning that I had joined said guild. Now there is the possibility that I was given one but missed it under my Level pop-up but I was not aware I was in the guild until two people started a conversation two levels later.
This kind of plays along with what I found to be a big flaw from replace and still exists now, WAR has no tutorial outside of little windows that tell you what things you have already seen are. A little more of an active hand in teaching new comers would go a long way, something WoW does even without you noticing (ie. quests to visit trainers) that other MMO's often lack.

The final concept that WAR does that most other MMO's do that I like is armour dyes, letting you pay to change armour colors so you can match gear and look how you want. When I first played WAR there was a Dye vendor in every town on colors available increased as you went on. When I went to dye gear in the trial I found that the dye vendors only exist in capital city's, places that a trial account can't get to. Now I am not sure if this is a change made to keep trails from using them or just a coincidence but dyeing armour is a concept that would make people like the game more, why hide it in city's away from new players and trial accounts?

The final thing I want to touch on and by far the most frustrating is how terrible WAR is at dealing with latency and the bugs it creates. In WoW if your lagging you simply take a fraction longer to cast your spell and not much else changes, in WAR your remain unaffected while mobs bounce around like a gold farmer with a teleport hack. Let me paint you a picture; I am having no more than my usual 300-400 latency and am running through a field when suddenly I take damage, I look around and see nothing. Suddenly a mob teleports in next to me hitting away like hes been there for 2min already, I turn to hit him and he ports back 20 yards runs at me the ports back again before reappearing ontop of me stabbing away. While this isn't always that bad various degrees of this happen far to often and it is even more annoying when its a opposing player during PVP.

Overall I was very disappointed by WAR when I brought it and 2 years later I still am. Sure they have taken efforts to improve it but with many of its issues still around since launch and the shift to kill all PvE in favor for PvP I do not think I will look at this game again outside of the odd run around on the trial account.
I had high hopes for the Warhammer series, being a long running franchise with alot of lore to back it up it could of been much better than it was. I just hope that the upcoming 40k MMO stands better than its fantasy brother.