Final Fantasy XIV - The good, the bad and the "omg what were you thinking?"

I've been dabbling in Final Fantasy 14 for a while now - even got my cousin into it so that I wouldn't get bored. And here are my thoughts about it.

The Good

Single player

Lots of content. The main story line appears to only have the occasional dungeon segments where you actually require other people to progress, but it looks to me that most of the game's side-quests are designed for just one player.

Inventory space

It's large enough so that people who play just for the questing/instancing component don't have to worry about it. However, if you plan on having a fully developed character, you'll soon learn that inventory space is precious and requires planning. Overall, in my opinion, the available capacity is about right.

One character, all classes

I just love this. I'm what one would call an "alt-aholic" (from WoW) and not having to swap characters when I want to play a different class is a big big plus. Especially considering that I can gather up gear for the other classes while playing with the same character.

Leve allowances

The game features repeatable quests, but you are limited on the number of times you can do them. Instead, you have an allowance (leve) which is awarded over time (even when you're offline). This is an easy way to help infrequent players to keep up with the regulars. This goes in addition to the widely implemented "rested bonus", which basically does the same thing.

Proper NPC hubs

Some games have really poorly designed cities. Where do the citizens actually live? Where do they grow their food? Why are they not walking around town as normal people during the course of their lives? FF14 got this right - the cities do feel "real" (at least Uldah does). Gridania and Limsa Lominsa probably not so much though.

Voice acting

Main story quests have (some) voice acting, which was a surprising element in the game. Well done.

The Bad

Voice acting

Nearly non-existing for anything other than story line quests. NPC's won't say "hello" or "goodbye" to you.

I miss WoW's Orc's "Zug zug".

Baked animations

With today's hardware, it's not impossible to have some randomness on animations. After a couple of hours of sword swinging, you kind of know the animations by heart already. Some variety please!

Loads everywhere

While most games will allow you to seamlessly transitions from one game area to the next, FF14 won't. You have loads everywhere. It's quite annoying really, because they're not fast either - even with an SSD. Seamless transitions between areas have been around for AGES! Even worse, going back to an area that you just left won't make the load any faster. Hasn't Square ever heard about caching? I have 16GBs of RAM, time to put it to good use! As of 10th April, Square seems to have improved this.

Crafting

Crafting is dull. Sure you have the "auto-synthesis" to let your character automatically craft a bunch of the same item, but EXP-wise, it's not profitable. If you want to really level up the crafting class you have to painstakingly spend hours crafting items, striving for the highest "Quality" bar you can produce.

Also, it seems that all crafting classes are intertwined - at some point you need the others to level up one or you'll have to buy the materials off other players, which might hurt your profitability. But I suppose this can be seen as a good thing too: only the truly dedicated succeed.

The interface

For a "medieval" and "magic" theme'd game, the game interface feels very technological. The colour scheme of the menus, typefaces, mili-second resolution numbers...

Also, when you finish quests with a final cut-scene (such as the crafting quests), when selecting the quest reward, you're not able to open your inventory to compare the item stats. You can't talk to NPCs while mounted either (at the very least the game could auto-unmount you).

You can't change gear when the crafting log is open. I see no reason why this is so.

You can't "/tell" (send a private message) while in a dungeon (or in a single-player instance). Why?!
The launcher needs some clean-up. I wish we could have automatic login. And I'm always asked for the one-time password. Surely it would only be needed the first time you login on a different IP address. And you can't update the game without actually logging in.
If the connection drops after launching the game, you have to restart the whole process again. There's no neat re-login screen in-game. Bah...
Lastly, my biggest grief - the equipment sets aren't synchronised with the server. This means that if you play the game on a different computer, you have to set up all your sets again. This makes no sense to me.

The class names

Why name it Thaumaturge? Why not the alread-estabilished "wizard" or the typical Final Fantasy "Black Mage"? My spell checker doesn't even recognise "Thaumaturge" - is that even a word?

Date formats

This plagues lots of games. When releasing a game internationally, you'd expect bit software firms to get localisation right and use the standard date format (or at least an un-ambiguous one). Either DD/MM/YEAR or YEAR/MM/DD please.

Distance measurements

While Blizzard went the way of the dinosaur and used "yards" for WoW's distance measurements, Square opted by the next worse thing, "malms", "yalms" and whatever which have no meaning for the players. I assume of course they meant "miles" and "yards" and whatever primitive measurement still in use by some countries, but that is no excuse not to use proper metric system.

Not that we can measure distances in game anyway, so I suppose this point is moot.

The "OMG what were you thinking?!"

Gear style

Seriously, no one in the real world would wear bright yellow armour. That's begging to be shot at. If people want to use such colours, they can dye the gear (which you can do) but please, don't make me pass by a piece of equipment just because the colour is abhorrent, because I am that vain.

And some pieces go beyond ridiculous. Let me show you: (other gear pieces removed for added effect)

Interestingly, this isn't on my belt slot. It's on my trousers slot (leg equipment). But the funny part actually is that this "leg" gear piece is actually smaller than the underwear the characters have should you be completely nude:

I've since dyed this piece in pink. Got some laughs out of it!