Beta Impressions

Yo, it's time for one of these. Let me make the start.

• Font is really tiny. Didn't find a way to scale the HUD.
• Been playing for like an hour now, haven't stabbed a single thing in the face yet.
• Whoever thought starting the game off in a huge city hub with nothing but fetchquests... BACK TO SCHOOL!

As a dude who expects to stab at least a hundred things in the face in the first hour of play, loot a bunch of useful garbs and stuff off my victim's slain bodies, and experience like 5 *dings*/*lvl-ups* in that time - I'm starting to get a little grumpy over doing fetchquests for strangers. I don't do strangers favors, unless it's about stabbin' fools in the gut.

Roberto needs his stabbin'. Unless the stabbin' is good, what is the point? Get me to where the stabbin' is at already! Didn't these guys ever play a game with a good flow to it? Jeez.

Not writing this off yet, but so far, off to a weak start!

only MMO I ever played was FFXI, and I remember really enjoying that beta even before I realized it meant we could keep the PS2 HDD for free (although the hope of that was what compelled me to sign up in the first place). So I suppose I feel kind of obligated to give this one a shot even though I highly doubt I'm of a mind for MMOs anymore, let alone finding a keyboard to hook up and chat with folks about raids.

Interested to see what the fuss is about, and how much if anything has changed in MMOs since the early 2000s, though.

fellow noobies: make sure you don't enter anything in the one-time password field. there's really no indication that you don't need to enter something there but if you do put something it'll error out of login.

The font is hilariously small. Actually, not the font so much as the display itself. Running on a 720p 50" LG with PS4 through HDMI and the intro menu is scaled like an Unprofessional Fridays livestream right in the center.

Okay. After finishing up the fetchquests in the city, I finally got around to stabbin' fools in the face. In this case... Marmots, Ladybugs, and other cuteness. The stabbin' itself feels very disconnected. There's little in terms of visual hit feedback and such. Just like olden times, the enemies don't physically exist, you can just clip through them. It feels really really old in terms of combat, even in comparison to WoW. Admittedly, WoW's combat always felt, and still feels better than most other MMOs.

FF XIV is not the MMORPG I'm looking for. It plays like a competent oldschool MMO in a Final Fantasy setting. I'm looking for a revolution. Still waiting for it to happen. Next!

Guys you can adjust all this in the settings.

I rooted around in there for a while. I didn't find anything to change the font, or scale the HUD.

You can totally adjust and scale hud elements. The hud is incredibly customizeable. Options Button > System Settings > Hud Layout

From here you can scale individual elements remove them add them whatever you want.

So, is it weird that I dislike that the death penalty is pretty minimal? You basically just have to teleport back to your home in FFXI you actually lost vast amounts of XP and could even de-level which sucked when it happened but it also facilitated really intense game play when you knew you were in areas where if something went wrong you were going to be in tons of trouble. I feel there is less risk/reward.

@demoskinos: I get where you're coming from but MMOs in general have moved away from the grindy ways of old to a faster pace, which I'm thankful for.

Even when I was balls deep into XI, I never liked the exp loss. If there must be a death penalty in an MMO, I prefer something like WoW (equipment durability loss) or City of Heroes, where you got exp debt but still gained some and did not de-level.

I just really like games with harsh penalties because it makes winning that much more satisfying. If I never feel like I'm in danger then where does my motivation for self-preservation come from?

The Miqo'te are goddamn adorable. JUST LOOK AT THAT ADORABLE HAT SHE HAS ON.

FFXIV has the durability loss on death, though it's a fairly minimal penalty.

I'm having the same problems focusing as I did on the PS3 version. There are so many things happening on screen at all times, it makes it difficult to tell what is going on, the not so great frame rate doesn't help either.

I really want to like FFXIV.

FFXIV is not grindy at all. Your first level 50 char is easily achievable through missions and yes than you have to grind but it is very very fast and easy in FFXIV. And the penalty for dying is also very very harmless. But in the beginning you should not even die much in the first place. The games difficulty really starts with level 50 before that it is a cakewalk.

So... is this game worth checking out for the 15$ it costs on steam right now?

If you need background I have played tons of MMOs: SWG, WoW, EQ2, CoX, Champions Online, URU Online, DCUO, TORO, GW 2, The Secret World, and tons others I cant think of or remember anymore.

I often feel MMOs have stagnated and really your first MMO will always be your favorite and after that it's a matter of trying to find it again. Like I played Star Wars Galaxies for 5 years, and I've played WoW off and on for that or more, CoX I played for a couple years, but I'd guess probably after CoX I haven't really been able to maintain interest in any MMO.

It's sounding like this one isn't all that interesting either, but I thought I'd ask. Why not? I keep looking at it on steam tempted to buy it because I'm an idiot, and even though I know I probably will not play it longer than a month I may end up getting it anyway haha.

MMOs are good for filling time if you're bored though- which is what I usually do with them these days.

@cornbredx: I enjoyed it for the story. Yeah it has a slow start story wise but the last parts of the game are absolutely worth it in my opinion. Mechanic wise it feels like the most complete MMO out there while it does nothing new it just makes almost everything right.

@darji: I know; I have a Paladin at 50. I was just explaining why MMOs don't usually have severe penalties anymore.

@demoskinos: Thanks for that tip, Some of the UI toolbars were too small,

I'm a novice when it comes to MMOs but I like it. Being a pugilist is pretty cool so far

A lot of running around with nothing fun to do at all so far. Only things to fight were little crappy pokemon monsters, and everybody in a class wears the same clothes. I don't see why this isn't F2P?

@oursin_360: Because people are paying money for it and continue to do so. They have zero incentive to go F2P.

Well, I spent my first crack at the game making fun of it's miniscule UI and staring at a wall, baffled that I was actually back in an MMO. After about an hour of doing nothing, I logged out.

But then yesterday I decided to hop on, found out some old high school friends have PS4s and were trying it out also, and five hours later I'm a level 11 pugilist turning my console off because my eyes refuse to stay open.

I'm not sure how the other classes play but the combo system for the monks is pretty cool, I played a gladiator and a monk in FFXI and there was nothing as interactive as this combo system, even if it's totally rudimentary so far.

The map situation is pretty rough. I'm glad I figured out pressing square quickly pops the big map, I was navigating to it in the menus for a few hours, but the fact I need two maps on the screen because the main map is useless is pretty wild.

Going from my decade-old memories of the FFXI beta to this is pretty jarring, I must say. I remmber getting to, like, level 13 in FFXI was considered an accomplishment. I remember very basic quests in the early levels requiring groups and clans or you were boned (that stone graveyard maze? The reptile hideout?) whereas most of this game appears to be letting rapid dogs loose in a meat market. There's very little rhyme or reasons to who's attacking what other than the whims of experience grind or quests.

This game runs beautifully. From graphics to framerate in massively populated areas I've been extremely impressed. I've forgotten I'm playing an online game with hundreds of thousands of people on more than one occasion.

I think the UI work they did, despite the embarrassingly microscopic text, is nothing short of incredible. This Hotbar concept is way above and beyond what they did with FFXI, which also worked great on a controller. I haven't played a Square game since FF XII, so this game has served as a great reminder that the folks at Square are still technical behemoths. They just can't get story or characters right.

Still, I'm not sure I could see myself paying for this. Other than the social aspect (something I got NONE out of last generation, so kudos to Sony for packing in a decent headset this time) FF XIV mostly scratches the same itch as Civilization does, that one-more-turn dilemma of turning over a half hour of your day to no particular goal other than accruing stats, items, numbers bigger than the last.

I also can't help but feel much more disconnected from the world than I did FFXI. Everything around me that isn't quests seems superfluous and blocked off, but with the chat essentially useless at its size and participation level I really have no one to consult with about that. The camaraderie that made the FFXI beta so special (even if I never ended up paying for that game either) is entirely absent from this.

It seems like a great MMO. But at the end of the day it's still just an MMO.

The UI is horrible, just unbearable. Cluttered, messy, my god. And the text! I know you can scale it up in one of the awful menus but dear lord the text. How did that ever get approved?

The first hour, so much rushing between NPCs, you can't get interested in what they're saying because it takes such an effort to read, because there's been no interesting introduction to the world, because it all just pours down on you like a waterfall of Capitalised nonsense Words and references to Things you haven't ever encountered, presented with no context.

And of course there are a hundred people running around, crowding quest givers, shops with tiny menus, cluttered screens full of meaningless junk that may or may not have been explained in a tooltip.

But despite all that I still played it for hours and loved the music and sense of adventure and running around in the forest firing arrows at mushrooms. And the levelling and the compulsion to run and complete this one quest and then pick up that one quest just there and oh I'm right by that guy now might as well.... and so on. It's all there.

I just wish it was better presented. When you go into the first inn and meet the innkeeper and the camera just pans aimlessly around as people look blankly on. No voicework, awful cutscenes, low quality textures. And yet...

Yea; again, the only other MMO I've played was FFXI, and there was an attempt at world building there, but...certainly not like this, not that I can remember anyway. So much of the main quest line in this game feels like it wants to be a mainline FF game it's a bit off-putting at first. I spend most of my time in cutscenes/conversations scoffing or shaking my head.

Considering this is a Realm Reborn, obviously the tutorial was not. During the whole introduction, I never really felt like I was learning what I needed to know. I have been playing mmo's for over 13 years now and I know sometimes you really can't tell how an mmo is going to play right away so I stuck with the game to try to give it a fair shake. All of the initial fetch quests, are horrible, especially with the in game map. Someone new to mmo's would get frustrated and quit before getting too far in this game. The whole tutorial felt like it just really needs to be redone and a greater mixture of quests thrown in. I think it was well into an hour and a half of play time before I actually killed something. Once I did start killing mobs it was fun, but I never really felt that I was being challenged at all besides trying to fight for mobs in an overcrowded newbie area. Luckily they did get one thing right and the respawn on mobs appeared to be turned up as finishing quests wasn't that bad. Depending on the server you were on, I know there could be very different extremes to this.

No voice recordings for NPC's? Really? Reborn? This amazed me. Running around the town doing all of the fetch quests and not having any sort of vocal interaction with an NPC I thought was something that ended several years ago. I can't think of an MMO that has been released recently that doesn't have some sort of voice-over acting for some of the NPC's.

I had played FFXI when it first came out on the PC and found the game WAY to much of a grind for my taste. Plus the death penalty was a little harsh at the beginning. I did feel that leveling in FFXIV was streamlined and it definitely appeared to be much more approachable from a more casual standpoint. After playing for a full day though, I just didn't feel connected enough to my character or to the world in general. I normally am very interested in the lore and the story of the quests, but after playing for several hours, I found myself just clicking through all the text and just trying to get the quests done and moving onto the next one. This is when I realized that this was not the MMO for me.

I find it bland. The fetch quests are exceedingly tedious.

One thing I forgot to mention that I'm remembering now that I jumped back in, I do miss the danger of being out in the open world and seeing something off in the distance that you knew you couldn't fight. Now that I'm level 11 it does seem like certain enemies are aggroing to me, but for the most part the most dangerous place to be in the game is in the middle of a FATE spawn when you're just trying to complete a quest. On the flip side, it is nice that the spawns are pretty much constantly refreshing pools. As a monk I can get stuck in this infinite loop of punching things spawning all around me because they spawn at such a rate that an area with enemies is never out of enemies.

Weird give and take.

my experience with FFXIV on PS4:

waited ages to download the huge thing.

struggled a while with countless 2 steps activations to get in

spend 20 min customizing the astrological sign of my character and the hues of the hair (character look stunning in respect to asian MMO design standards)

got in just to witness unvoiced boring and awfully generic introductory scenes with weird flying cats and some stuff that hardly makes any sense for a start ("think....breath...feel..." really?)

when at last I have control of my character, the axis is not inverted....look for the option to invert axis...get lost in ridiculously dense option screen...sigh...erase game from PS4.

verdict: not for me thanks

If someone could do me a huge favor and get some pics of the UI when you've scaled the text so it's readable, that would be much appreciated. I'm trying to figure out if I can actually play this or not, and font sizes would be the biggest hindrance. Thanks.

@sparky_buzzsaw: They stated in the beta that there would be a bigger font in the retail version or at the very least a way to scale the text up.

@demoskinos: I saw that early in the conversation, but I'm hoping to see pics (or video) of the larger fonts before deciding on buying it.