@raven10:
Yeah the starting armor for the cat girl race isn't really reflective of the majority of the armor. Also the notorious subligar which people hate or embrace is in full effect. To your point though, an armor that bugs me is the female Dragoon AF armor. Just asking to be stabbed in the stomach! Also "fire resistant" armor I think they were called are pretty much swimsuits, but that was the intention. I think most of the revealing armor is stuff you wear by choice or for crafting / gathering.

@bishop113:
Do you even want to play an online RPG? I'm asking 'cos your question comes off as rhetorical.

Combat is pretty much old school target tabbing. Styles vary with class but in general it's engaging enough for me that it's not brain dead. I had the most fun in parties or random FATE encounters as a tank class. There is a sense of build up in game difficulty with dungeon progression. Online FF games have a history with difficult bosses so I look forward to more challenge. Outside of combat the game has been stellar for me, there's a lot to enjoy and production is excellent. There's an attention to detail in this game that puts it aboveboard for me.
I think it's worth a shot, try to join the open beta to check it out.

Don't you know? Skimpy armor on females is best because bad guys are contractually required to aim for the armor when attacking players. Less surface area = less chance to hit and cause damage. :)

For sake of clarification, paraphrasing from Mogworld

@raven10 said:

@nadesico33 said:

That's highly counter-intuitive, since that directory isn't even on the same drive where I installed the game. Well, here's Hibari, who only exists for this beta. When real characters are keep-able, going back to a Hyur Male.

Well I see they kept with the standard MMO trope of having the armor on female characters basically be bikinis. Great way to expose the softest part of your body. You know how real cats get really mad if you scratch their belly for too long? They know what's up. Never expose the belly. You are just asking to die. Videogames.

I can not tell if this is serious or a troll but if you really believe that wow. It is a Fantasy game and this is not even armor but rather clothes. If you wnat Bikinis they have that as well.

AS bonus:

Equal Armor

FFXIV is actually far more modest than most MMO's in terms of not making the female versions of most gear overly sexualized and fan service-y. Most of the gear looks completely modest, and those that don't are equally revealing for both sexes (see above).

Level 1 racial starting gear and a few oddities like the DRG AF aside, the vast majority of gear models completely cover up female characters: heavy armor, light armor, and robes alike. This is no TERA by any stretch.

I want to play an MMO in that I would like to play a game with tons of people running around and a big open world where you fight big creatures and such. My problem with MMO's usually boils down to the way they delve out content to force you to use your subscription as long as possible as opposed to just letting you experience the content on a good pace like a regular game.

The character models in this look pretty good for an MMO. Of course that only makes me wish they'd done something more creative with the races.

More screenshots from last weekend, because i can!

@m_shini: When I see screen shots like these I always feel like there's so much more to see. Hurry up open beta!

Man I wish I could get into this beta. It looks awesome.

@enns: Theres plenty beautiful environments to see if your able to venture out and go explore, and ive only been too a couple of the cool locations, seems they haven't placed any npc's in those areas for phase 3 but then cap is at 35 so not like people could do those quests unless your 50 anyway, still its nice to have a peak at whats there and see that there's great looking views where ever you look majority of the time, so much more craft in the environments that what was there in 1.0.

I know graphics don't make a game but it sure hella helps when everything you look at looks great, just sells me on it more on top of the stuff i find entertaining playing with groups.

Man playing the beta just made the wait for this game even more painful. Really loved it and got hooked right away. Took some getting used to the controller scheme, but it's super smart once you get it down. The game really does look great and ran perfectly for me. Tons of people everywhere too. All too often I get into an MMO way too late and it's a ghost town. Really excited to experience my first launch MMO (well a few days earlier since I preordered already, but whatever).

15 minutes about the duty finder and how it will work. Seems really good for new players.

Nice that its been added, beats final fantasy XI and xiv 1.0 old school standing around in Ul'dah city waiting afk for shouts to show up for hours.

The duty finder looks like a really great feature. Looking forward to trying it out.

That's pretty awesome and smart. Making a lot of great choices for this game.

So he mentioned that up to 15 you can solo, but after that you'll start grouping up. Is that required? Or can you still continue to level solo all the way to 50 if you so choose?

I don't think and hope that you will be able to do that. It is called MMO for a reason and with this duty finder it should go really well do get into parties.

there are many people that like to play MMOs solo, especially for leveling

Pretty sure that's just for dungeons and stuff specifically. You can still solo, from what I understand.

Thats correct, grouping isn't necessary for leveling to 50 but at the level 15 main quest-line does have you complete 3 dungeons that you have to take on with a party of 4, the duty finder will be there though if you don't know or don't like being social and joining groups and guilds right off the bat though. So the hope is it ease's you into grouping up with party's at least at some point since you will need to for other later story quests too and for endgame of course.

And there are a lot of casual mmos out there to do that. I wished it were like 11 though when it was impossible to level alone after level 10-12.

I like that you can do your leveling on your own, the boring part of XI was when you didn't have anyone to level with or there were no party's going all you could do was sit and wait, i do like xiv forces you into group play with the storyline quests and all the dungeons though, and even more so with the duty finder, hoping someone does a shout for the specific dungeon asking for your specific job or class so you can get the class specific piece of gear you want was always lame since it was a race to see who could send a /tell the quickest to the person shouting for it.

I will say though ive never stuck to any mmo that i end up 'soloing' so try joining up with GB or friendly people once you get settled in if you can.

Yeah it was badly handled in FFXI but the duty finder seems to address this problem really good. In FFXI you had to build u an reputation to get fast invites which kind of was great too. If you can solo all the time you will never understand how a party works or what you job is when you are suddenly forced to. That is the problem with FFXI nowadays since you can now solo people are not doing parties at earlier levels and later they do not understand their job or their role.

Out of curiosity, how big is the download for the client? PS3

The client is about 28mb and the update was about 6 gigs

Yep, and that was great.... back when I was in high school and had all the free time in the world. The duty finder will help expedite the process somewhat, but I've played WoW as a DPS and used their cross-realm dungeon finder. It can still take you upwards of 25 minutes to get in a group at times, especially, as he pointed out in the video, if you don't play during peak hours (night shift workers, etc.). So solo play is still welcomed for those of us who maybe don't have a lot of free time that day to spend playing, but would like to maybe hop on for half an hour or so and enjoy the game. Or hell, being that I have a child, the sheer number of times I have to suddenly walk away from my computer for various reasons means I tend to stay away from group content until after he's asleep for the night.

I can totally understand this but then maybe MMOs are the wrong games for you to play. Or maybe it is only FFXIV. AS I said there are enough casual MMOs out there and honestly I do not know how much time I will have at release myself but I don't want the game to get dumped down because of me or other busy people. That is also why I want this MMO as core as possible even it will be sadly not as deep and complex as FFXI was.

Don't mean to be THAT guy, but given the direction MMOs have taken, maybe they've just become a genre that's not for you. Or not what you think they should be. The fact is, the average gamer age is in the 30's these days, and 30 year olds have responsibilities and in general less free time to spend doing menial tasks like shouting in chat for a group for an hour. Times have changed, is what I'm saying, and MMO's have changed with it, for better or worse.

As I said before that searching for an hour or even hours with the wrong class like in FFXI should be over yes. And yes MMO's have changed thanks to WOW but that is even one reason more to have one exception. The reason why every MMO is F2P these days is because you can beat the content in like 2-5 days. People could complete Guild Wars 2 100% in 3 days and the reason for that was that they could do everything solo.

FFXIV is no F2P game and the people who make this game are not believing in F2P games. 'And to make sure that people have enough content to motivate them until the next expansion will be released they actually need to force party play. Also the name alone suggests Multiplayer game and not Singleplayer.

I'll just chim in and say my first impression of the game. First and foremost, my god did they turn this game around since the last time I played. Granted it was in the first beta but, the interface was slow, the game was kinda bland, the performance was not that great either. All that totally changed, the interface is smooth and slick, giving the game a very clean look, there's a lot of detail on the character and there's a lot of custumization that can be done. For example, I made a Mi'qote male because I could not believe they put both gender in FFXIV. :D And the nice thing is that you can change both the color of your eyes, different shade in your hair + all the normal stuff you find in other MMO. (scar and the like).

I'm at the very beginning and did not play a lot right now, mostly because my PC have a hard time with game that demand a little more and just overheat and shutdown if I play for too long, which is a bummer . :/ But overall when I play the game it play more smoothly that I would have thought. All the music in this game is really great and I find the leveling up fanfare to be really gratifying, but the nostalgia may be a big part of it. :)

Overall, I really hope they can pull off a miracle with this game and that it has the same magic FFXI had for me at the time. I played a lot of MMO since then, but nothing took my attention as much as FFXI did.

Here's some screenshot I took:

Tried out the first two dungeons and didn't really care for it. Threat and skill management weren't an issue and it just reminded me a little too much of the things I don't like about WoW. I need to see if there's a way to filter out the animations for other people's skills because there were just too many fireworks going off on the screen. You don't need to pull carefully, or stun skills, or sleep adds, or skillchain and magic burst.

I also did some exploring and was a little bummed out at how many enemies were recycled FFXI models in higher def. I loved FFXI so call backs are appreciated, but I didn't get the same sense of place from the enemies. At level 17 I was fighting a 2 story tall buffalo thing that should have kicked my ass. You also fight demons and squid guys in Tamtara and, to me, these are not the types of enemies a level 17 character should be able to take down.

Also you've got qiqirn, but you change the names of all the races? I still do not understand why they renamed the races and I know that's petty and irrelevant, but cat-people are mithra and short people are tarutarus to me. It's like changing the word "chocobo".

I'm still into the game and will continue to play it, but I'm feeling more and more that it has lost a lot the nuance of FFXI in favor of a regurgitated WoW feedback loop.

Hay its a screenshot thread so screenshots!

The first few dungeons are pretty easy, and other than a couple bits here and there yeah there isn't too much skill that needs to happen to finish them, do get the impression they are basically easy mode tutorial/exp for low levels anyway, i still need to try the other level 32 which is the highest atm but more interested to see how the 24 people dungeons turn out since i reckon that's where some of the interesting stuff could happen like in Xi.

Fingers crossed get to mess with that in phase 4 but i wont hold my breath.

Huh..........not sure how i got to this....

Some images from my adventures this weekend. Finally got to try the Ifrit fight, it was pretty fun! The dungeons are a little easy so far, but what I've played seems promising.

Finally got to play and man what a blast. A bit disappointed my level from 1.0 character was wrong as I was missing my Thaumaturgist and Conjurer but overall had a blast. It reinvigorated me on the game 100%. So while I re-leveled my caster up it was nice to see how great Ul'dah looked.

My only disappointment is the amount of load screens still but I understand wanting to instance off the world for better fidelity.

Didn't think to take screenshots but man am I sold again.

Some videos I made with screens and thoughts.

@sniperxan: Liked the podcast, though I think you guys were too harsh on FFXI. I thought Abyssea was a really great way to modernize the game and was a natural evolution of a bunch of 6-player parties all camping in the same spot. It made partying way more accessible. It's fair to say that things were made easier, but after 5 or 6 years of LFG it was nice to come back to the game and just level up some jobs I hadn't pursued because it would have taken months to hit 75. Abyssea retained a lot of what's great about FFXI and made it modern/accessible in a way that isn't WoW quest hubs or dungeon spamming for exp. End game did seem easy relative to CoP or even ToAU, but I still found myself needing to group up. So I get the gripes but I thought Abyssea freshened up the game a lot, even if it did curb the difficulty way down.

@nicked: The only issue I have with XI now its so hard to get through the 1-30 now as grouping at those levels is next to impossible. As someone who tried to go back and couldn't recover their original account it was kind of depressing. However once you get passed that it's pretty easy to find groups and level.

SS Dump!

I seriously can't wait for Phase 4 to start so I can actually start accomplishing stuff.

Played A LOT this weekend but didn't take any screenshots. I haven't had this much fun playing an MMO since World of Warcraft (Burning Crusade). I've tried a lot of MMOs (including FF XI) and this one seems to be one of the better ones. We'll see once Phase 4/Full release comes out if the game can keep my attention and money for longer than a couple of months. The only games to do that so far are Everquest 1 and WoW.

I'm actually pretty interested in this, but the monthly fee is what's going to keep me from playing it. I hated the feeling of "wasting my paid time" whenever I would be playing anything except for the last MMO I played a monthly fee for, which was WoW. I want to play other things too, you know!

Tyni Wins in all his glory.

My Mithra lancer I created. Eye patch totally sold me on the race.

I had finally figured out how to take HUDless screenshots towards the end of phase 3, so I don't have much to show for it, but here goes!

I wish I had taken a bunch of screens of this. Put in a ton of time during the beta weekends and enjoyed my time with the game, especially being impressed by the alright gamepad control.

I'm super excited to start playing it for realzies soon.