A Land Far Away

Anyone else in the beta? Have any thoughts so far?

1. Graphics are beautiful and exceedingly detailed but oddly reminiscent of NWN2 in their cutscenes.
2. Everyone in my start area made cat people or elves and they were jumping all over my giant woman.

Unless they change the games a ton, I'm never buying a FF MMO.

I got into the original beta before the pulled the game from live status and spent a year 're-tooling' it. Apparently I am also eligible for all the testing weekends but have yet to download and install it.

So far it plays very much like the first MMO. The races are better looking with two genders each, the graphics are much better, and it feels the same. Still long complicated tasks to do for crafting, earning gil is a pain, and you can still grind yourself silly.

Final Fantasy XIV*

Also: I'm waiting for my answer.

A Realm Reborn is a quality of life fix to Final Fantasy XIV, often referred to as 2.0. The graphics have had a bit of an overhaul to still look pretty but not overheat most machines owned by the general populace. Combat as been refined to be quicker; however, it's difficult to grasp when they only give you a taste of the overall design due to level cap. As phase 3 of beta just ended, all characters will be wiped -- any character from P4 and onward will be kept into live, so long as nothing game-breaking occurs to make characters overpowered. Legacy characters, those being characters from v1.0, are able to play in the new game if someone wishes. They are only able to play on a Legacy server for the first few months until, essentially, other servers catch up. In other words, it doesn't matter if you start on a new server, it will be the exact same as a legacy server in a month or two.

A lot of things are left out of P3 beta -- voice acting, opening cut scene (they have a horrible placeholder scene instead), various repeatable quests and so on. The designer behind this facelift has been doing a great job, and they actually respond to all feedback in a specific thread where they outline all the questions and respond as to how they will fix it or what they plan to do (example: http://forum.square-enix.com/ARR-Test/threads/36485 , if you own a beta account). If you aren't a fan of Final Fantasy, I would suggest passing on this game, otherwise there's no real issue that wasn't resolved from v1.0 (and issues that are still withstanding are due to beta and P4 having all of the big changes and updates, like the Arcanist class and so on).

Magile wrote:If you aren't a fan of Final Fantasy, I would suggest passing on this game, otherwise there's no real issue that wasn't resolved from v1.0 (and issues that are still withstanding are due to beta and P4 having all of the big changes and updates, like the Arcanist class and so on).

If they fixed the issue of the game playing like a piece of shit with a joystick and buttons stuck in it, I might give it a look.

Swift wrote:

Magile wrote:If you aren't a fan of Final Fantasy, I would suggest passing on this game, otherwise there's no real issue that wasn't resolved from v1.0 (and issues that are still withstanding are due to beta and P4 having all of the big changes and updates, like the Arcanist class and so on).

If they fixed the issue of the game playing like a piece of shit with a joystick and buttons stuck in it, I might give it a look.

It is indeed fixed.

I liked everything so far. It is endless grinding, BUT with a main plot series of quests that piqued my interest right away. The characters are beautifully made and fun to play. The environment is beautiful and nearly identical to the previous MMO. There are FF style cutscene boss battles, timed challenge quests, battlegrounds, and instances. There is no auction house. Instead there is a complex system of porters and bulletin boards I have yet to toy with.

It does make a little sense simply because of the tremendous inflation and gold selling that went down in the MMO. They also removed the ability to mule items from character to character or send the gold to your same account.

My main complaint I made was about crafting. It is just too complex for the modern day gamer and too time consuming to go over and over and over again making one component at a time. They also did not offer a step by step tutorial for learning a crafting skill. So I was left trying to remember how I did it nine years ago.

And of course my final thought, chocobos are the silliest mount ever with their dorky chocobo riding theme song. Even bad-assed armored ones look like chickens in armor.