The following is based off of my opinion as a player of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 - 1.23 and from Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Alpha - Beta Phase 3. All of this is of my opinion only, I do not represent anyone else or try to claim this is of everyone elses opinion. This is going to be a very long post, so if you are really truly wondering about this game then I recommend you read it, if not then it's probably best to not waste your time. I'm not leaving a TLDR; because i'm not Naoki Yoshida. I will not hand you everything, as some things must be earned through active participation.

A lot of people are quite skeptical of Final Fantasy XIV, so i'm here to give you my thoughts as to why I feel Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is heading down the wrong path and isn't as well off as Square-Enix will lead one to believe.

Final Fantasy XIV had a rocky start, it failed miserably at launch, and had a myriad of issues that it had to overcome in the years following its launch. After release, Square decided to put Naoki Yoshida in charge to change the foundation of the troubled MMO. At first I was quite skeptical considering this man largely unheard of before this, if at all. Yoshida gained popularity and did put out some good content patches leading up to the end of the game. New storyline, fun and intuitive boss fights, massive revamps on key features of the game and much more. He had earned my respect. With the coming launch of A Realm Reborn, I was so excited. What could go wrong because Yoshida was in charge?

Sadly a problem did arise through this transition. Yoshida changed his vision on how to handle the design process for the game. He decided to cut quality in favor of quantity. This is absolutely shocking to me considering he once mentioned he would always favor quality over subscription numbers. In essence he pulled a bait and switch on his fanbase. It wasn't until close to the launch of the Alpha that Yoshida had backpedaled on his decisions.

When A Realm Reborn was announced, it wasn't touted as an entirely new game with a new combat system, or a massive revamp of current systems. All that was stated was that the graphics engine was being rebuilt to accommodate the PlayStation3 and lower tech PC's, a new UI would be put in place, there would be redesigned maps along with some new content. He was very firm and adamant about this, but now it's being touted as a new game, one that changes seemingly everything about the previous MMO.

Now one might say, "that's a good thing right?" and my response is no. Final Fantasy XIV failed because it was unfinished and it had some fairly poor feature sets such as a bad UI, poor combat, lack of content (major problem), it tried far to hard to combat real money traders, and it was plagued by latency issues. It did not fail because it tried to innovate, and in many ways follow its predecessor. Towards the end of the original Final Fantasy XIV a lot of the issues were fixed, but some things did require a coding change in order to be fixed. It was headed in the right direction.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn scraps the feature set of console focused gameplay, tactical and challenging combat, quality over quantity, and to a degree side story telling. Yoshida had changed that foundation and replaced with the more typical and over used themepark style found in MMOs such as Aion and World of Warcraft. Now those games mentioned aren't bad games by any means, but the thing is if I really wanted to play those games, I wouldn't have ever played Final Fantasy XIV. I would have been playing those games since the developers are more attuned to that style of design and have a lot of experience with it.

So if you've made it this far, you're wondering what possibly could they have done to make an already poor MMO even worse? I'll outline my thoughts below, and explain why I believe they make Final Fantasy XIV take quite a few steps back.

Combat:

This is a core function of the game that has been criticized and debated since the first day of Alpha, and it's also something Square-Enix is being extremely stubborn about even in regards to discussing. It largely changes the style of play Final Fantasy fans are used to in favor of the more common Global Cooldown, faster & slower paced combat systems. Yoshida has made lengthy posts detailing his new vision for combat wanting it to be easy to not induce stress, be easy to learn, and difficult to master. The problem with his logic is that the very foundation is flawed. There's a lack of depth, an oversimplification of mechanics (something that will reoccur here later on) and very little in regards to skill ceiling. The abilities/skills themselves are quite minimal, and some only useful on rare occurrences. The entire foundation is too basic, too easy, and not very thought inducing. The entire system has basically been dubbed a "spam fest" by many XIV beta testers. If you can hit buttons and understand basic mechanics like running. You will be pro at this game.

Limit breaks were being touted as a battle mechanic that would help player interactivity within parties. That didn't really work out so well. As you play a limit break meter will fill and then once full only one party member can use an ability. So unless you're the best geared DPS in the party, don't expect to ever use this function in end game. It's very shallow and doesn't promote any sort of depth within the even shallower combat.

Latency issues:
They still plague this game. This is something I really don't understand at all. They created data centers to avoid this issue, and they still haven't gotten it right. You can still get caught in enemy attacks even though your out. Fall damage takes a full 1 second to activate sometimes. There's latency issues in the open world. To make matters worse this hasn't been addressed by devs at all. Wasn't this game recreated to remove this?

Quest based leveling:

If there was ever such an over used concept in video games. It is this. Are you prepared to be sent on a mountain of trivial and annoying fetch quests? Sure, there's bits of lore....but there's no thought to gameplay at all in this entire cess pool of laziness.

Another feature the forums have been rallying for is the return of open world experience parties. People don't want to run through hundreds of quests that are for the most part.... the exact same thing. The answer given is always the same: We do not want players competing. It leads to stress, while the option is there, it will be far from worth doing.

Over simplification of content:

Now over simplification of content is a broad thing, so i'm going to have to break this down into a few subsections.

Stats and Gear: Long gone are stats such as Attack Power, Cure Potency, Enmity+, Enmity-, HP+, MP+, Critical Attack Power+ and much more. Gear is very one dimensional as these stats have been grouped into a single category to reduce stress. Gear upgrades do not feel like upgrades. It feels as if you are on a treadmill moving from one piece of content to another to gain that extra +2 STR ACC VIT DEX. There's no customizing, or even situational gear to be found. Not to mention most of the gear earned by players in the first version is rendered either useless or mediocre (especially materia gear).

Stat Allotment: This is one of the most useless features i've ever seen. So utterly one dimensional that it's sickening. As you level up you get bonus points to throw into stats such as STR, DEX, VIT, MND, INT, and PIE. The problem is that certain classes only benefit from one stat. So for example Dragoon will only benefit from STR. There is no point to even use it on DEX or PIE. Why is the system in place at all if it is this one dimensional? Only one correct (proper rather) way to do it. It must be place stress on the player to allocate to two or more stats.

Competition: Absolutely no competition in open world. It leads to....stress. Never mind the fact there's a thread with over 3,000 likes on it asking for Notorious Monsters outside FATEs. A 5 minute respawn timer was too much. One can't be expected to wait 5 minutes. Outrageous. Anything and everything can be attacked by anyone. So there is no waiting.

Gameplay content such as raids: Are you expecting any challenge from levels 1-49? Don't because apparently it takes that long to teach players how to get into parties and play their roles. Forget the old days when the tutorials ended at level 1-10. Nope...must take the entire game cause well, you know.....stress. I definitely wouldn't want to ever die in a boss fight. It might teach me how to adapt and become a better player. Every single dungeon in Alpha through Beta was easy, and has been made even easier.

Gathering: Now this one isn't actually much of a change from the first game. It's still just as annoying as before, except now all you have to do is spam click on the item you want instead of remember the placement of an item. Any sort of depth to this system would create so much stress.

Crafting and the marketing system:
One of the changes I was actually excited about was crafting. It has a lot more depth then the original game had...but the problem is that crafted gear is about as useful as a rock. Raid gear will always be better with no exception. It's designed to be used as fillers until you can obtain such raid gear. Materia will enhance this slightly but materia stat caps will hinder this process. The only thing crafting is useful for currently is consumables, and even those are incredibly unbalanced currently (52 pieces of VIT food, zero for strength? Make sense? Didn't think so.)

This makes Gil fairly useless outside of teleports and Housing. It's so awesome there is a teleport location in every single zone so traveling and exploration as minimal as possible.

Music:

This is one of the strangest things i've ever seen on the side of a developer. The music of A Realm Reborn is exceptional. People want to hear it, listen to it, and take it in....the problem is that they can't. After a small clip plays it's back to ambiance and it's going to stay that way until you move somewhere else. People have been asking for a loop function... but they are refusing because "this was a design decision." Okay...well thanks for that.

Now if you are actually reading this, then I congratulate you. I doubt even a 10th of the people who see this post will actually read it without skipping to the end for a TLDR;

You may have noticed a reoccurring of the word stress throughout this post, and you're probably wondering why it was used so many times. It's quite simple, that's the same lousy weakass excuse that Yoshida has been giving for awhile now. He wants new players to feel not stressed, so they can get into the world and have fun. The issue at hand is that he is over simplifying, handholding, and unstressifying (yeah not a real word but who cares) every single thing this game has to offer. He is forgetting that there's are a plethora of people used to MMOs wanting challenge and depth. It's so damn simple that it's making me STRESSED!

He even touts himself as a hardcore player that got pked upon logging into his first MMO. He got back up, had fun, and created his own journey. What journey is he offering to new players in ARR? How to be handheld through the entire game? How to follow map markers to every location? How to play a game that offers very minimal thought processing? I don't understand... this is not the same Yoshida that came on board a few years back.

I do believe that if you have any interest at all in this game then you should try out open beta. It starts in roughly 2 weeks so make your decision now so you don't come to release and possibly regret the purchase. A Realm Reborn is what it is, and with Open Beta vastly approaching, not much will be changed on the design.

Now if one were to ask me. "Hey, do you think ARR will be successful?" I'll answer yes.

It isn't all bad. There are people who love this game afterall and they definitely will not be afraid to show that they do.

There are a bunch of things that are wonderful about FFXIV ARR, but the problem with it is that it still leaves a lot to be desired similar to the original. It feels more like a step forward...but then it steps right back into place because it replaces key issues with others, or doesn't address them at all. There's so much handholding, so much simplification that it just ruins the experience. It's trying to hard to be a mimic and capture the casual player then it does offer originality and depth. It leads to such an unsatissfying experience and it's such a heartbreaking shame.

TLDR; {crickets}

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Don't be afraid to share your view on the game. It could be vastly different from mine, and I respect that.

Big read, read most of it....I have only mucked around on the beta so far & only played the original for about 5 hours but I do remember the latency issues were the main thing that was pissing me off back in the original so was hoping that would be sorted -_-

The FFXIV beta was really boring, I was hoping they would reshape the game into a FFXI-2, but it still feels like a generic MMO with FF quality music. Oh well, I still have yet to dig into the Seekers of Adoulin content, FFXI seems like it will remain superior for times to come.

I didn't bother with the original release, and I've been pretty skeptical that they could really successfully rejigger an existing MMO into something that will attract and please new players without pissing off old ones (a much larger task than just making a good game in the first place), but this still sounds pretty disappointing. I have some fond memories of playing FFXI back in the day and was considering maybe giving FFXIV a shot, although the closer it gets to release the less I feel compelled to do so.

Either way, I don't think its chances of commercial success are very good. The Final Fantasy name isn't what it was a decade ago, and the subscription-based MMO market seems to have moved on as well.

In some ways I hope it fails hard again, then SE may give up on these MMOs.......Nah there too dumb they would probably remix 14 a 3rd time xD

I wonder what the ramifications would be. I think it was Yoshida who said that the company couldn't afford another failure like FFXIV, and I wonder whether he meant another, completely new game failing like that, or that ARR simply has to succeed after everything they've invested in it. Their financial report makes it sound like they are all in on this revamp, so it oculd be the latter.

Between this and DQX, I do hope they get the point that the MMO market isn't what it was in the WoW era. Their ability to draw the correct lessons from things is highly suspect, though.

Very well written! . Anyway after reading this I feel that the game was not worth the wait . It's a shame because I would have given it a try and convince my friends to get into it but now I feel like playing lol xDD.

Just going to answer a few points. First and foremost.  Wagram's impression is coming from a beta, and from a level cap that is maxed at Lv20 content wise, with not all the features implemented in this beta phase.

Combat:
I agree combat is easy for me as well. I've been in version 1.0 and I have my class/job levels capped at Lv50. So yes, I agree the Lv10-25ish content is easy for my experience and equipment level. Furthermore I think the combat is a step up from the old version because there is positioning combos, and the global cool down is like a ATB bar with a different graphic. The combat is not just a face to face smack fest either, because now you can step out the way from a frontal attack against you, or from a circular area attack before it hits you.

Latency:
I have not had any Latency issues. I play on a 4 year old laptop with a geforce gt 130m card, and on PS3. If people are experiencing issues such as latency, then I think its their hardware or their connection.

Questing:
About questing. I have not played a Final Fantasy game that has none. It is Final Fantasy and the story and lore should feel like one, and its an MMORPG after all. I certainly enjoy the questing because some of them is funny. I'm not going to give any spoilers ::coughbiggsandwedgecough:: but it encourages people to explore at their own pace especially if they don't have a lot of time on that day to play for many hours. XP partying can still be done in dungeon raids where there is optional objectives to fulfill. Besides once you complete all the quest on one class/job that will be it. There will be other methods to gain exp such as, dungeons, pvp, hunting logs, guildhest and some others I can't remember right now.

About content, competition and gears. I can't fully answer this because the beta is capped at LV20 content wise, and nobody knows anything about the Lv50 contents such as The Crystal Tower, Bahamut Maze, the Primal battles, and Frontline PvPs.

About NM in FATE. Its a hell of a lot fun. Its dynamic, some requires task that must be done or else it'll end in failure. But...Some people like camping for long hours, and fighting with other players for claim. "A camping and claiming competition" I call it. I don't think that will ever work in this game because it contradicts cooperative play in PvE content.

The music is kickass.

Anyways that is all. I'm very pleased with my experience from the beta. Thank god it is not a FFXI-2. I've played that for 8 years and I do not want to play it again.

Out of curiosity, did you by chance do Halatali, Brayflox, or Haukke? Those are above level 20 content (which is why there's currently not story quest attached).

It's still very easy to see the direction they're going with this. Yoshida even coming out saying Brayflox is harder in Beta then it will be in retail is largely concerning because Brayflox isn't even difficult.

and deskpro is right. This is still in Beta, but Open Beta is coming... so changes can still be made, but with the few that have been done so far i'm quite skeptical.

Very well written review. I did not play FFXIV and I was really considering purchasing a brand new desktop for this game. Being a HUGE fan of FFXI for years, back when it was released, I wanted this game to have MANY things that carried over.

Playing WoW, Guild Wars, and EQ2, nothing compared to the feeling of FFXI. It seems that the game is taking the direction of current MMO's and that's a HUGE shame. It's corny, but in FFXI I felt a part of the world and my class and race did as well. It also felt like a living world where characters, quests, and stories mattered. All other MMO's are about grinding to get better gear and leveling up. While fun and addicting for a short time it gets stale with level cap increases and OP gear and classes. FFXI still has things current MMO's do not.