The Good
- The process of Crafting is awesome. I like the mini games and I enjoy sitting and crafting for a few hours.
- Likewise, I enjoy Harvesting, especially Fishing.
- The game world is beautiful
- You can solo for a bit though I understand party xp is emphasized later.
- There's a good main story
The Bad
- The gathering of materials for Crafting can be horrendous. Why you need items that far outrank your skill level in a craft you've barely trained or haven't trained at all, I don't know. Regardless, you shouldn't need level 21 items for a level 10 craft.
- Menus suck. These game designers should take a lesson in modern psychology of learning or interaction. The more steps between the actions you wish to accomplish and the actual accomplishing of the act, the greater the lack of understanding and frustration. There's a difference between being intellectually complex and just plain obtuse. I don't need to read that I'm selling the feather of a dodo and wait 10 seconds until I can sell the next item. Just give me a visual of all my materials that I can sell quickly. This is an example of where the fun portion of the game is obscured by very unfun portions.
- The walking is super tedious. The world is so big, and for players with only a little time to play, just the act of logging in and getting somewhere can take up half your game time. Why so much effort to make you do things you don't enjoy instead of letting you do things you do enjoy? I don't need to instantly teleport anywhere, but a transportation system would be nice.
- The wards still suck. I hate going there, hate searching, and find it useless.
- The combat is awful is so many respects.
*Targeting system is still unintuitive.
*Battle animations hiccup or stutter, making it difficult to know when your next action is up.
*Battle lag can kill.
*Still not enough mobs.
*I don't need more leves per say. I don't even need more bonus to SP, just give me a narrative
framework for why I'm killing. Speaking of which...
- Leves suck. In terms of providing SP and cash they're the highlight of the game. But there's no narrative
framework. In WoW, yeah you technically know you're just going on a kill-fetch quest. But sometimes
the quest chains that rewarded you XP were super intriguing, took you all sorts of interesting places,
and revealed interesting lore that fleshed out the background of the game. You just get a blank
"Proprietor of x needs this made". While on that note...
- The story sucks. At least, everything outside of the main city lore does, because there's pretty much
nothing else. No side quest chains, nothing to make you feel the city's citizens are important. You learn
nothing about the city's defenders, its religious, nothing. Because there are no quest lines to flesh these
out. There is no story beside the main story.
- No content. No dungeons. No bosses. It's all field killing. Take WoW. By the time you reach lvl 20 as a
Night Elf, you've got access to an underwater cave I can't remember. It's long, takes a party to
get through, takes you through ancient ruins, and ends in a crazy awesome boss fight with an extra
boss that's optional. You get great gear and cash for it, and a ton of lore gets fleshed out. This wasn't
something added later, it was there at the beginning.
- The world is pretty bland once you've been through it a few times. It's pretty to look at at first, but then
you realize there's just tons of area with nothing to do but grind. The Golden Bazaar sits there, off the
beaten path, with nothing to do. There are no towns, just these camps, which are grind or crafting havens.
- There's just nothing original to do. If the FFXIV name weren't sprawled on the title, this game wouldn't
even be receiving attention.
- The process of Crafting is awesome. I like the mini games and I enjoy sitting and crafting for a few hours.
- Likewise, I enjoy Harvesting, especially Fishing.
- The game world is beautiful
- You can solo for a bit though I understand party xp is emphasized later.
- There's a good main story
The Bad
- The gathering of materials for Crafting can be horrendous. Why you need items that far outrank your skill level in a craft you've barely trained or haven't trained at all, I don't know. Regardless, you shouldn't need level 21 items for a level 10 craft.
- Menus suck. These game designers should take a lesson in modern psychology of learning or interaction. The more steps between the actions you wish to accomplish and the actual accomplishing of the act, the greater the lack of understanding and frustration. There's a difference between being intellectually complex and just plain obtuse. I don't need to read that I'm selling the feather of a dodo and wait 10 seconds until I can sell the next item. Just give me a visual of all my materials that I can sell quickly. This is an example of where the fun portion of the game is obscured by very unfun portions.
- The walking is super tedious. The world is so big, and for players with only a little time to play, just the act of logging in and getting somewhere can take up half your game time. Why so much effort to make you do things you don't enjoy instead of letting you do things you do enjoy? I don't need to instantly teleport anywhere, but a transportation system would be nice.
- The wards still suck. I hate going there, hate searching, and find it useless.
- The combat is awful is so many respects.
*Targeting system is still unintuitive.
*Battle animations hiccup or stutter, making it difficult to know when your next action is up.
*Battle lag can kill.
*Still not enough mobs.
*I don't need more leves per say. I don't even need more bonus to SP, just give me a narrative
framework for why I'm killing. Speaking of which...
- Leves suck. In terms of providing SP and cash they're the highlight of the game. But there's no narrative
framework. In WoW, yeah you technically know you're just going on a kill-fetch quest. But sometimes
the quest chains that rewarded you XP were super intriguing, took you all sorts of interesting places,
and revealed interesting lore that fleshed out the background of the game. You just get a blank
"Proprietor of x needs this made". While on that note...
- The story sucks. At least, everything outside of the main city lore does, because there's pretty much
nothing else. No side quest chains, nothing to make you feel the city's citizens are important. You learn
nothing about the city's defenders, its religious, nothing. Because there are no quest lines to flesh these
out. There is no story beside the main story.
- No content. No dungeons. No bosses. It's all field killing. Take WoW. By the time you reach lvl 20 as a
Night Elf, you've got access to an underwater cave I can't remember. It's long, takes a party to
get through, takes you through ancient ruins, and ends in a crazy awesome boss fight with an extra
boss that's optional. You get great gear and cash for it, and a ton of lore gets fleshed out. This wasn't
something added later, it was there at the beginning.
- The world is pretty bland once you've been through it a few times. It's pretty to look at at first, but then
you realize there's just tons of area with nothing to do but grind. The Golden Bazaar sits there, off the
beaten path, with nothing to do. There are no towns, just these camps, which are grind or crafting havens.
- There's just nothing original to do. If the FFXIV name weren't sprawled on the title, this game wouldn't
even be receiving attention.