Welcome to the land of Eorzea.
In the world of Hydaelyn.
Okay. I think the problems with this game start with the settings: Eorzea and Hydaelyn sounds like one of those names you come up with when trying to make up some pretend story, like some satire for something you're making up as a joke. I actually had to google where or not I was spelling it right because it's just... Yeah, I'm digressing from this.
Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn is an MMORPG after the original Final Fantasy 14 failed. And by failed, I mean it BOMBED. Zero playtesting went into the game, the developers probably rushed the game in development, producers probably told them to move even faster and when it came to ideas, they were told to reuse whatever they can. In the end, it sold horribly and had to publicly apologize for it's awfulness and went back to the drawing board. And in the end we got A Realm Reborn.
I'm pretty experienced when it comes to: Final Fantasy, RPGs, MMORPGs and Final Fantasy XI. I've actually played Final Fantasy XI for a good while*, got myself 2 level 75's back when they were relevant and enjoyed what I found; Final Fantasy XI was vast, it took time to get what you needed, it required teamwork, it forced trolls to not be trolls, and everything about FFXI made you feel rewarded. You EARNED your items, your gil, your quests. It did NOT hold your hand and it definitely made you think on your toes. The last thing FFXI was, was player friendly. And I suppose in a society where games are nothing BUT player friendly, holding your hand and catering as much as possible... FFXI can get tedious and looked down on. I can see why.
So what did they do? The exact opposite: FFXIV is definition of player friendly. It does nothing but reward the player for doing menial tasks. Players don't have to help anyone anymore, the class system balance is non-existant since they aren't even required 90% of the time, but let me elaborate on everything:
Starting with the races; they're literally just reskinned FFXI races. Tarutaru are now Lalafell, Humes are Hyur, Elvaan are Elezen... etc. To me this just seems lazy, it kind of reminds of me those games you see like Ninja Blade where it's just a blatant carbon copy. In this case, it's the same people who made the original... Why not just keep the same names? I mean Moogles are always Moogles, Chocobos are always Chocobos, the world is ( almost ) always Gaia, why not just use your tradition and reuse the same names? Or better yet, why even have a different setting? Why not keep Vana'diel in the same setting? You're using almost all the same NM names and enemy models... But I can get over all this, this is all very minor and from the changes, it's all very good! All the NPC models are very different and have much more emotion to them. But for a game in 2013, this isn't really a pro but an expectation.
You have all your basics from an MMORPG: Quest Grinding, Crafting, Auction Houses, Open Worlds, and Dungeons. And what's kinda sad is that FFXIV gets almost all of this wrong, in one way or another.
Quest Grinding is pointless and it took me a while to learn this. Yes, it kind of keeps you busy, but in the long run, you can run something called FATEs which are Global Quests for MUCH more experience and faster than you can do Quests. Yes, you get more gear and money from Quests, but gear is very cheap so... So what the game ends up being is you finding Fates from beginning to end and MAYBE in the off-time doing some quests. And trust me when I say... this gets boring and tedious VERY quick. And you'll see that 30-70 people will be with you as you get to higher levels, as it takes longer to level. I'm sure this was a complete oversight from the developers but this has been around since beta... and it still hasnt been fixed.
But you wanna know the BIGGEST insult this game throws at you? It took me a while to really notice this... The game is criminally small. You have:
The Three Main areas, the North, Sound, East and West fields around each of the area; Mor Dhona, and Coerthas. You also got some Dungeons you queue into which I think was an awful idea since instead of being focused on exploration, it's now a rush down instance instead.
There is so much more I can say about this game and it's flaws. There might be so much more that I will find, so much more that will grow on me but so far this has been a huge step down. This is the year 2013, almost 2014 and these things are not oversights, somethings should be standard in their game. World of Warcraft came out 10 years earlier and it featured two GIANT continents, all with huge ranges of monsters, areas, and questing sites...
With future update, yeah... things will be fixed. More areas open up, grinding will be fixed and maybe classes will become a little more diverse... but as of right now; I have a very hard time saying I'm enjoying the game. I'm sure future updates will fix it and I'm happy to see other people enjoying it but I just figured I'd jot down my thoughts. I don't really feel like getting TOO into it since I have far more complaints with it but these two just seem to big the biggest glaring flaws.
* until the level 99 patch came out and pretty much ruined it
