Ten Reasons to Avoid FFXIV
Final Fantasy XIV was announced as a timed PS3 exclusive back at E3 2009, and wowed attendees with its spectacular graphics and promise of showing just how polished and enthralling a cross-platform MMO could be. Fast forward to 2010, and the final product is an absolute mess, with Square Enix going as far as to encourage media outlets to NOT review their game. Here’s 10 reasons why this happened.
1. User Interface
It’s not common for a game’s installation and setup process to be indicative of the experience as a whole, but that’s exactly what happens with FF XIV. The troublesome patching system and signup process are about as unfriendly as it gets, and it only goes downhill from there. There’s no way to open up something as simple as an item menu with the click of a button; you need to physically navigate through the menu in order to do this simple task. And if you want quick access, you need to create macros from scratch to build your own shortcuts.
2. Game Options
Of course, if you’d like to adjust your graphics settings, you actually have to quit the game and do this typically simple task from the main menu. Then there’s the nickle-and-diming. The $10 monthly fee only grants you access to the game. If you want an actual character slot, that’s an additional $3 a month per slot. Square Enix should actually be investigated by consumer protection groups for pulling this kind of stunt.
3. Lack of Direction
Video games are famous for the fact that the first few minutes of gameplay typically walks players through the ins and outs of the game world, as well as what their goals are. Final Fantasy XIV, however, avoids teaching players the skills they need to navigate the game, instead opting to let players figure everything out on their own and smack them when they do something ‘wrong’. If you wander off in the wrong direction, the game respawns you where you started and tells you that you left the zone instead of where to actually go.
4. Shopping is a Pain
When it comes to getting new gear or obtaining important items, you’ll be hit with a torrent of design screwups that waste your time. Though a few NPC vendors are labeled on the map, the majority are not. Located in merchant strips, these vendors have zero visual indication of what they sell, and until you remember which vendor offers what you’ll find yourself clicking on each one in hopes that they have something of interest. Player-based transactions require that you place the items you’d like to sell in a “retainer”, a character who acts as your store front. Once you find the market ward (which isn’t visible on the map), you place your retainer there and begin shopping around with other retainers. And yes, you need to visit each retainer one by one if you hope to purchase something.
5. Traveling is a Bigger Pain
Eorzea may have chocobo stables and airship docks, but those transportation methods haven’t been implemented yet. You’ll need to either hike to your destinations, or teleport using Anima. And unfortunately, Anima takes a long time to earn. This is an easy fix via patching, so hopefully Square Enix fixes this minor detail soon.
6. Repetitive Enemies
This is one issue that highlights a possible lack of resources within the development team, which is that you’ll see a lot of the same enemies over and over. I know it’s expensive to design custom creatures, but MMOs offer hundreds, if not thousands of hours of gameplay, and thus these games need to have a massive amount enemies to encounter so that the experience stays fresh. Even 30 hours in, you’ll still fight the same rats and birds that you fought in the first few hours.
7. Inaccurate Enemy Indicators
The designers were kind enough to include blue and red enemy indicators to highlight which enemies are pushovers and which are challenging. What’s funny is that these indicators are often inaccurate, with ‘easy’ enemies putting up a strong fight, or even killing you, and ‘hard’ enemies being dominated in no time. Again, a patch would easily fix this. It’s just hard to say whether Square Enix thinks this is even a problem, considering the game shipped like this.
8. Crappy Combat
If you have a tendency to want to keep party members alive, you may want to rethink that strategy. Group battles are undoubtedly more fun thanks to the cool animations and sound effects, but the game doesn’t consistently reward players for taking on support roles. Experience points are calculated based on player rank and whether a target is taking damage. And what’s weird is that the game doesn’t distinguish between enemies and fellow players, instead requiring you to cycle through every target (both friend and foe), which is very messy. You can’t click on a group member’s name to cast a spell on them, and while you can design macros to overcome some of these issues, you shouldn’t have to.
9. The Quests
In addition to the story tasks, the player receives levequests from the local guilds. These don’t include any sort of character development or story progression, and are pretty barebones. It’s obvious that the development team was asked to design simple tasks, such as killing a certain number of creatures. And while it is fairly lazy design, what sucks is that you’re limited to only eight levequests every 36 hours, despite the fact they sometimes take minutes to complete. The limitation indicates that the team felt players were doing too many levequests, but what would have really fixed the problem is if levequests were more complex and possibly integrated with the story, even on a superficial level.
10. Communication Issues
Group members are visible as blue dots on the game’s minimap, but the game doesn’t let you zoom in and out of the maps (believe that crap) and the main map doesn’t identify group members at all. Thus, you better clearly communicate to your party where you should all meet up, otherwise you may be split up for good. Some may argue this is “more realistic”, but really it’s just stupid. There’s party chat in the game, but the developer made this feature a pain to use via the Linkshell system. Linkshells are chat channels that require you to invite people into those channels. But in order to be invited to a chat channel, or invite someone else, you need to be within interaction range. If you’d like to group up with someone, you’ll also have to be within interaction range (i.e. clicking distance).
The game’s a mess, but this is just the PC version at the moment. Square Enix is still hard at work on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. The PS3 version has a solid release date, but the 360 version may be in limbo due to Xbox Live. Either way, we can’t recommend this title until Square Enix creates more content for the title, changes some odd design choices, and recognizes the fact that monthly fees shouldn’t include character slots.