After waiting over 5 years for the promised "next-gen" MMO once named Rapture. I have come to give my take on the current MMO known as Final Fantasy XIV. Now I know there are fans out there who believe that there should not be a main online FF game like XI/XIV. Honestly when it came to FFXI I would argue to my grave with people that XI deserves to be part of the main series. Sadly however Final Fantasy XIV does not. It doesn't even deserve the name of Final Fantasy.

Here are just some of my GLARING issues with this atrocity of a game:

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

Main Scenario Missions which are the back bone of the game. I believe my main city has 8 missions to do in total. EIGHT. You can usually do them every 5 to 10 levels. For a game that took over 5 years to make we get 8 missions. These missions are pretty epic for online standards story wise though.

The UI - At the launch of Final Fantasy XIV it was horendously slow. Most if not all menus had lags on them notably in the market wards areas (which I will bitch about in a minute). You figure this issue would have been sorted out in the alpha or beta but no it took at least 3 months AFTER release to mix most of the UI lag. It is noticeably better now but some areas still need work. The UI is also is not what I would call user friendly. Things are very cluttered.

Recycling - I know in the MMO world you are going to see recycled models and resources to save money. However Square-Enix decided to take that too a new extreme with FFXIV. Most of you have followed FFXIV at all know that most of all areas besides cities are mainly copy pasted terrain spinned in different directions. I am fine with that but when a zone is 10 sizes bigger than it needs to be we have a major problem. Once you step outside into Thanalan/La Noscea/The Black Shroud you have essentially seen everything there is to offer. Each of the starter zones have two land monument town structures within them (i.e. the golden bazaar) that are full of USELESS NPCs. None of these zones feel different. This is not limited to zones however. You will encounter MANY different recycled monsters and weapons.

Too much emphasis on Crafting - As stated you need crafting for everything in this game. Notorious Monsters which were added only recently only drop crafting items. Also when you craft you need to multiple craft jobs leveled just to craft an item to level your main crafting job. Hell even the christmas event needs crafting for you to take part.

Classes have 0 distinction from one another - You can play a Gladiator/Archer/Marauder one after the other and feel as if you have been playing that same class the entire time. There is no difference between any of them. In Final Fantasy XI classes had certain roles and were depended upon. It is definitely not that way this time.

The Market Wards - I could go an entire day screaming my lungs out about how god damn SUCKY this system is. I seriously do not understand how anyone at SE can even think this was a good idea. The Market Wards is obviously where one would go to sell their belongings. Square-Enix was nice enough to gives us (2) retainers that will hold and sell our stuff for us. The problem is that when your buying something you have to visit......EVERY.....SINGLE.....RETAINER....to find an item that you don't even know exists. I'm talking hundreds if not thousands here. If you do know that it exists you can't friggin find it. I have come across several max level players in level 20 gear because they simply can't find anyything close to their level. I am a level 20 Gladiator and it took me 2 hours to find a dagger that was level 19. I was looking for armor as well. I only found a dagger. The system is clunky, laggy, and quite frankly just stupid. Their is an item search feature update set for tomorrow the 21st but after reading it myself i'm not hopeful.

The Patcher System - Instead of having a server where you can download the patches directly from Square-Enix they decided to use a system that is P2P. It took me over 4 hours to download a 200MB patch on 15MB internet. The patcher will run very slow and give you poor dl speeds and it will also stop your dling process entirely SEVERAL times. This system is horrible and most people have to resort to getting their patches from torrent sites from those lucky enough to dl the entire patch.

There is NO content for beginners or people at endgame - When you log into FFXIV there may seem as if there are endless possibilities available to you. Well to put it bluntly, there isn't. Final Fantasy XIV fun is essentially grinding on monsters and crafting. You can throw in those repeated guild leve quests every 36 hours and the 8 main scenario missions every once and awhile. You also can occassion do a "behest" mission which is a guild leve on steroids. That's IT.

Those are just "some" of my complaints. I think i'm really at the point of beating a dead horse now. This may sound as if i'm a troll just coming off to vent my anger but i'm really not. I'm just frustrated that an incredible company can just bitch slap their customers in the face with something this pathetic. This game does have some incredible things such as its opening movie, music, main missions when you see them, and it's unbelieveably gorgerous graphics. However this is not anything CLOSE to a Final Fantasy main title. This is garbage to be honest.

Hopefully the development team switcheroo can help save this game but at this point the damage has been done and i'm doubtful. I keep hearing i'm sorry from SE and requesting that we give them more time. Well SE after over 5 years of waiting I can tell you i'm not giving you more time. I am unsubsubscribing and will be going back to Final Fantasy XI (the good one). I am tired of being told to wait when I have already waited so long. These are just my thoughts. If you have played XIV I would like to hear yours as well.

This isn't a complaint as much of my own personal preference but I really enjoyed FFXIs battle system with Auto-Attack much more than the num-pad keyboard spamming in XIV.

I pretty much agree.  The game had so much potential and had so many people wanting it (FF fans, FFXI fans, people who wanted an MMO on PS3, and people who wanted a new fantasy MMO) and FFXI was an amazing first try...but then they released that unfinished mess.

About the only thing the game succeeded at was making a good looking game, with everything else it just fell flat on its face.  It had some good ideas but just executed everything as poor as possible.  I'm still shocked that they even released it.

Where was the potential? I believe major mistakes were made on the ground level as well as some mistakes that can be rectified, I never saw much potential.

The leve system was interesting, or at least a different take on the quest system.  It's cool that you can have one quest with variable difficulty and rewards.  It's just a shame that every quest was the exact same thing and if you can one shot the enemy at the lowest level, you can still one shot it at the highest level.  When I played at least, it only really affected how hard the enemy hit.

The other thing that had great potential was the job system with how you could switch at any time and even build your own jobs by mixing and matching skills.  It was a pretty revelutionary idea that could have completely changed the way we play but, like Wagram said, the jobs all played the same and the skills just weren't that interesting.  Add onto the general UI failings and how aggrevating it was to setup and switch jobs, it just failed.

FFXIV could have truly been a great game, they just really rushed it out and released it about six months too early.  It had amazing potential, they just didn't pay attention to what any other MMO, including FFXI, did right and just tried to do everything on their own.  It's not a surprise everything in the game failed as hard as it did.

::resists urge to rant on the game::

Lol. I really didn't want to do it but I felt I had to. I'm one of the biggest SE supporters but this is truly an example of a game that is not SE quality an they need to know that. I am slightly tired of SEs arrogance and their unwillingness to listen. I honestly hope that FFXIV gives them a run for their money and puts them into a situation similar to where Sony was in 2006-2007. Then they can come back bigger and better.

I agree with everything. It's the precise points why I don't play. Thank you for typing it out for me. lol

hmm maybe I'm being too harsh on the game. I still feel some of the rookie mistakes that they made are inexcusable.

Oh the mistakes they made were pretty inexcusable but that doesn't mean the game had potential.

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.

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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.