Full disclosure: I've never played World Of Warcraft. Not really anyway, they have the "Play for free until level 20" thing, and I got up to about level 7 a few months ago and never went back in. I played some The Old Republic but never really felt compelled by it, ditto for the recent free-to-play Neverwinter. So Final Fantasy XIV just hit Steam for $15 and I thought "Hey, it's like a free game, what with the monthly fee and all!" Specious reasoning in hand, I headed in.

Now, there are a number of reasons I've never really cared for MMOs. First of all, the monthly fee is a big drawback. It's not a budgetary thing, but it's also not NOT a budgetary thing. It's not hard to come up with $15, but why would I when I can use that to buy fancy coffees and exotic beers? It's also that the constant, nagging money issue creates an artificial desire to play the game to get your money's worth, when it should be the compelling gameplay or story that should be doing that. Plenty of people way smarter than me have made that point more articulately, Jonathan Blow comes to mind. "What about Guild Wars?" you're asking right now. I just haven't played Guild Wars, get off my back

So what happened? Why am I writing about a game that some people like instead of World Of Warcraft, the game most people love? Because, and I know this sounds stupid, Final Fantasy. I know, shut up, keep reading. I realized a few months ago that Final Fantasy 6 might be my favorite game of all time. I kinda lost track of Final Fantasy after that, not having Sony platforms until well after they were relevant, but the SNES games are some of my most vivid gaming memories from childhood. And guess what just came out on the iPad. I hated to pay $16 for a 20 year old game on an inferior platform, but I guess I hated NOT having it more. So I'm playing that,and XIV comes out on Steam and marketing synergy prevailed.

So my main class is Lancer. Sure I can be a Dragoon soon, but apart from that, there is NOTHING Final Fantasy related going on. There's a crystal, there's magic, there's Materia somewhere, but after getting introduced to that, I still have no real idea what it is. Chocobos? Magitek? Familiar spell names? Check, check and double check. That's where the Final Fantasy-ness of it sorta stops though.

It sure is an MMO though. Fetch quests, "Kill 5 specific monsters" quests, tons of people jumping around in cities wearing armor you can only dream of. The difference though: I'm playing with a controller. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it sorta changes everything. The combat in MMOs has never been the specific draw. Sure there's a certain measured strategy that needs to be employed when taking down raid bosses, but I never got that far so it might as well not exist. The lancer has some fun positioning stuff too, a backstab (An ability awesomely named "Impulse Drive") and a flank attack that gives you a buff. So I find myself in dungeons, trying to predict whatever the hell my tank is doing and getting on the other side of him for maximum damage. The controller is just enough of a disconnect to make it not just feel like I'm playing hotkey piano, burning down a boss with the same attacks over and over even though that's actually totally what I'm doing.

I know this is far from the first time an MMO has let you play with a controller and once my first free month is up, I might never touch the damn thing again. I also know this post has gone on forever, but I was bored and wanted to get some thoughts out there and share with you guys why I'm actually liking an MMO for the first time ever.

As someone who came to this MMO from years of FFXI experience, I was sort of let down by how insultingly simple everything was and how most of the Final Fantasy trappings just felt incidental. I will say the combat was fun, but in the month and ahalf I played, I completed the main story, fully leveled the only class I really liked playing (Scholar) and once I hit that point and spent days grinding for incremental gear upgrades, I took a step back and realized I was just wasting my time at that point.

I enjoyed the time I spent with it, but I have to admit I have my doubts on the game's staying power in contrast to FFXI. It was like the game was terrified of losing your attention so it never makes you work for almost anything. By the time I was done grinding for an awesome set of gear from one of the mid-level dungeons, I'd leveled up so much that it was nearly outdated anyway. I felt like I had to go out of my way to fully appreciate the game they had built because I was drowning in experience points. It all felt very shallow for me, in the end. I'd rather grind on the way up for meaningful rewards than grind at max-level gaining nothing but incremental gear upgrades. That's lame; not to mention a really stupidly misplaced way to add time sinks.

The controller support is really solid though, for sure.

@marokai: When I started XIV, I did a lap of the five major areas before realizing I had now seen the vast majority of the area and enemy designs in the game. I then got depressed and uninstalled, having gotten used to XI's vast world. Perhaps not fair, but there you go.

@towersixteen: I don't blame you. Exploring the world was my favorite thing to do in both FFXI and XIV, and I deliberately tried to take it slow to not ruin myself on it, but yeah, the lack of variety in XIV's world was a huge bummer. In XI, the size of the world made me feel positively tiny.

I've never played or really even seen anything about FFXI, but I know a lot of people loved it. My main problem with the world in XIV is that nothing seems particularly fantastical about it. It doesn't have much character. It's like instead of building a fantasy world, they built a couple really big Halo maps and put some NPCs with quests in them.

FFXI vet here as well. I've been playing the beta for a good while now and it is sort of a bummer that they really did neuter a lot of the elements that made XI so special. But on the other hand they have a ton of amazing improvements.

Doing things like finding a party as obscure classes like a dragoon took forever in XI. Here you can just instantly match make with people or play solo if you need to. So I look at the good and the bad and it sort of balances all out for me.

I'll be getting this on PS4 in April. And yeah the controller support is really really slick and useful.

I understand what you mean about the controller. It ended up being a surprisingly significant reason for why I enjoyed it enough to pick it up on PS3 and why I am considering resubscribing when it hits PS4. I kinda wish it wasn't such a big deal, because so few MMO's support it, but I just can't stand mouse and keyboard controls for this kind of game. (I was in the Wildstar beta recently, but even though it has a lot going for it, the lack of controller support really bummed me out.)

FFXIV is a weird game for me, because at face value I feel like there's no reason for me to like it (I also kind of hated FFXI), but despite all its faults there's just enough there to keep me invested, moreso than other MMO's. Even if I don't continue playing it regularly I hope the game lasts. I'd like to see what the game looks like in a couple years.