Guild Leves which are essentially FFXIVs take on Quests are limited to 16 every 36 hours (8 battlecraft / 8 field craft). These are missions where you just go around and kill/collect items pre-determined by the leve. The rewards can be decent on occassion but there is no variety to them at all. You will repeat these same leves week after week and gain similar rewards. There is 0 backstory in any of these |
Now that I have time to read in more depth and reply in greater detail, I will.
I think the Guild Leve's were a good idea but they were hampered by a few things:
- No variety
- change in difficulty wasn't meaningful
- Too limiting
- Not well explained
With its current system, the guild leve's could have been decent if there were more of them and more of a variety. With my short time with the game it essentially turned into doing the same eight battle craft and eight field craft leve's every 36 hours and those eight battle craft ones were all the same exact thing but with just different monsters. With the field craft ones (crafting), they were at least different but things like mining and harvesting were just so damn boring because they took so damn long. With things like clothecraft, they were more interesting but are explained nowhere (and it's a complicated system) and feels like it basically relies on luck more than anything.
The real aggrevating thing about these is you have do all 16 in a few hours. The battle craft leve's take no time at all (especially after you've done them a few times) and the field craft leve's take a while only because you're forced to take your time. So after about 2-3 hours of content, you're stuck with 30 hours of grind until you can do anything again. That's just unacceptable.
As for the 36 hour time limit, I understand what they were trying to do. They didn't want people spending their lives on the game and they wanted casual players to keep pace with the hard core players. That's stupid. It's stupid because you're limited in a game you have to pay to play and it's stupid because it doesn't reward the hard core players. It was a valient effort, but it just kind of fell flat on its face because it rewarded the wrong people and hurt the wrong people. Casual players were still left in the dust and the hardcore players had even more incentive to level more jobs.
=================================================================================
I didn't really play much of these, though I agree that there should have been more. It's a little surprising that the game released with so little content overall. Each of the three starting cities had 16 quests with eight of those being copy and pasted. A full scale pay to play MMO should release with more than. Plain and simple. If you want people to continue to come back, you have to give them something to do.
This was by far the games biggest failing. Instead of looking at what other games did right and wrong, they made their own interface and they created one of the worst interfaces in the last 10 years. They menus are slow, convulated, inconsistent, and confusing. To do anything you have to wade through sub menu's that don't make sense and then deal with the bad interface in general.
I get that the game is for the PS3 too but so was FFXI and it worked fine on the PC. Also, if your game is releasing first on the PC by 6 months, make an interface PC users can actually use. The problems with the UI are just far too numerous to list and it makes me angry only thinking about it so I'll stop.
I will add one thing though-- fuck the stupid macro system. With the fiery passion of 10,000 burning suns I despise the person that decided that macro system is adequate. It's 2010, these things don't have to be case sensitive.
Actually, I'll add one more thing-- I also hate the person who decided to put the config program outside of the actual game. No, when I'm configuring my keys and screen resolution, I don't want to have to exit the game, change my settings, go through the patcher, log in, enter the world, and then finally test the settings.
This was upsetting but it wasn't a deal breaker for me. The only thing that really makes it troublesome for me is it makes it hard to get your bearings when everything looks the same. They towns are already confusing enough and the world is already aggrevating enough when you can't jump/fall but making everythng look exactly alike just sucks and, as you said, makes the world that much more lifeless.
Borderlands felt lifeless because there was nothing there, FFXIV felt lifeless even though there was a lot there, it just all felt exactly the same and nothing stood out.
The asshole in me says well, what else are you going to do for 35 hours while waiting for your leve's to recharge.
But yes, I agree. They decided to put a huge emphasis on crafting which is kind of cool because I love crafting but sucks for the people that hate crafting. If you don't have several crafts leveled, you're fucked. Furthermore, if you're like me and love crafting, it makes it difficult to fund my crafting when everyone is forced to do it. Both camps are really screwed over there.
To make things worse, there are no tutorials. I don't remember how long it took me to figure out how to do my first weaving leve because nobody told me how to access the items they said they gave me. It took me just as long to find my crystals. Once you get to the crafting, there's nothing but a short explanation that does nothing to help and you're forced to just figure it out on your own which just makes the game feel luck based. Finally, when you're given a recipe, there's no way to remember it. It's just shown once in their terrible chat log.
I'm all for a game that doesn't lead you by the hand every step of the way, but the game has to give you some help. The discovery is meaningless if I'm too frustrated to care by the time I find it.
Too true. I leveled a lot of jobs in XIV and none of them felt any different. The only difference is if I was a caster, I started from range. Otherwise, I just kept spamming 1 and occassionally a skill (though not if I was a mage since I could restore MP!). In FFXI you had your roles which had their similarities, but even the various jobs in each role felt completely different.
I'll be honest with you-- I visited the market wards once and then never again. I would have laughed my ass off at how pathetic the wards were if it weren't so sad. It's like nobody ever even played the game to see that something as simple as a search was absolutely needed.
I see game after game come out with a good patching system. Hell, I'm downloading a patch for DCUO beta as we speak and it's better than the released version of the patcher for FFXIV.
The patcher was so bad and so many people had problems with it that people began just hosting the patches elsewhere on sites like Hotfile and Rapidshare. So what did SE do about that? They forced those sites to remove the patches, forced FFXIV fansites like FFXIVCore to remove links to those patches, and forced people to use their broken patcher. It's almost like they didn't actually want people to play their game.
Yeah, with no help and story quests so far apart, the game is incredibly daunting and hopeless for the new player. I really don't know why they thought people would pay for that crap.
If you look at something like WoW, you're instantly doing something cool and even killing interesting enemies. In FFXIV, I'm getting my ass handed to me by a dodo.
In DC Universe Online I get to fight beside Superman in the first 15 minutes of the game, in FFXIV I'm getting frustrated because I can't figure out how to get out of the ship port or how to leave the city.
You're not sounding like a troll at all, the game is just that bad. You are absolutely right that the game is a giant slap in the face. SE had the audacity to release this completely unfinished game and then even had the nerve to tell reviewers not to review it. I'm glad that reviewers gave it the score it deserved and gamers quit in giant waves. SE needed to have the shit scared out of them because even with the small amount of people that are still sticking with the game, keeping those servers up is costing them a crapload of money.
Sadly, I don't think they will be able to save the game. I'd say it's even chances that the PS3 version will be released and if the major problems aren't fixed by the time the PS3 version releases, nothing can save this game because nobody will give it another chance after it's first pitiful release.
