(PS4) FF14 Impressions so far...

So this the first time I have put any real amount of time into an MMO and I thought I would share my impressions so far.  I played for the better part of the weekend, made 3 character in the 3 different world maps and leveled one of them to 16 (beta cap is 20). Overall I must say that I really enjoyed my time in the FF universe.  It was fun exploring the different worlds and seeing all the different character, monsters and world areas.  The game looks very nice on the PS4 and runs extremely smoothly.  The worlds are richly detailed and uniquely inhabited by certain races/monsters.  I mean some monsters are the same in every area but each area does have unique inhabitants.  It was fun seeing each area and exploring them with friends.  I got to play with Kenny, Puppet and Evol at different points during the weekend.
 
Gameplay: The game mostly plays like most fantasy RPGs.  Get quest, complete quest, turn in quest.  Aside from that there are instanced battles (these are the main story line battles for the most part), guild quests (there are a little better that fetch quests and advance the story of your specific guild) and Guildheists (sp?).  The Guildheits were pretty fun.  You could take your party and automatically search for the rest required to start the quest.  Once the party was found it would auto launch the mission.  These were mostly small boss fights and they were a lot of fun.  Once unlocked, we played a lot of these.  You can also hunt around for specific monsters via the Hunting Log and about 100 other little things here and there.  Overall I enjoyed the experience but the one negative I take away is that the gameplay feels hollow compared to single player RPGs.  With a million people running (and jumping) around all the time it really distracts from the immersion I get playing SP.  Also, with the fact you are partying up with other people there is a real sense you need to hurry up and complete quests as fast as possible.  This leads to grabbing quests as quickly as possible, doing them and turning them in just as quickly.  The result is the loss of "soul" a game has.  I suspect this will be the case with most MMO's.  Nature of the beast as it were, at least till you reach max level.  Still fun, but not as deep an experience as SP RPGs
 
Controls: I am split here too.  On one hand the control scheme really is pretty good.  It took me a little while to get used to the controls but once I did It really seemed to work quite well.  Especially since it is a PC control set-up adapted for the controller.  You use a combination of the L2/R2 buttons and the face buttons to issue commands.  And coming from a PC there are a lot of buttons/commands that needed to be mapped.  That said, it really does work well.  My biggest grip is actually with targeting.  It's garbage.  Sometimes it works fine and you lock onto the target you want but other times you can sit for several seconds trying to find/lock a new target (especially in the heat of a big battle).  This is by far the most frustrating part of the game.  Generally it's only an issue during big engagement like a 'fate' or big battle but when id does happen, it really sucks.  Clearly this is where a mouse/keyboard would really work better.  (FYI - Mouse/keyboard support is available on the PS4 and FF14.  I just don't have one and don't plan to get one.)
 
Overall:  Overall it was a lot of fun.  I played for pretty much 2-days straight and never really got tired of it.  It looks good, plays smooth and never locked up on me.  The different classes were fun and the world was a joy to explore. 
 
Will I buy it?  Not sure.  I really only have time to play one MMO and with ESO looming on the horizon I just don't know what to say.  ESO is fully voiced and I am a big ES fan so I am really more excited to play ESO at the moment.  Frankly I would love to get into a beta for ESO so I could make a better judgment.  I have a feeling to will have a little more "soul" than FF14.  Still, really enjoyed FF14 so far.  More to come.  (the beta is 2 weeks)

P.S.  To any of the other PS4 guys that played FF14.  Please feel free to post up your thoughts as well.   PC opinions are welcome too.

I really enjoy this game as well. I enjoy it so much that I don't want to get to involved in the beta because I know my character is going to be erased. I am a huge final fantasy fanboy so I am pretty sure I will be getting this game and passing on eso. Eso looks fun as well but when I think elder scrolls I think single player. Plus I guarantee elder scrolls online will be a $60 game with the $15 a month, where ff14 is $30 I think and only $13 a month.

And see I am more of and ES fanboy.  I just wish I could play ESO to get a feel before I decide.  I am pretty sure there will be a beta for the PS4 and I singed up a long time ago.  I'd be nice if I get in if/when they do a beta.

S7 Interseptor wrote:And see I am more of and ES fanboy.  I just wish I could play ESO to get a feel before I decide.  I am pretty sure there will be a beta for the PS4 and I singed up a long time ago.  I'd be nice if I get in if/when they do a beta.

There will be betas for the consoles and actually the PS4 gets it first so you'll have a chance to check it out.  I'm sure it'll be after the PC release though as I'm betting they are charging hard to make everything just right for that release in a month.

OneBadHuskerFan wrote:

S7 Interseptor wrote:And see I am more of and ES fanboy.  I just wish I could play ESO to get a feel before I decide.  I am pretty sure there will be a beta for the PS4 and I singed up a long time ago.  I'd be nice if I get in if/when they do a beta.

There will be betas for the consoles and actually the PS4 gets it first so you'll have a chance to check it out.  I'm sure it'll be after the PC release though as I'm betting they are charging hard to make everything just right for that release in a month.

Thanks.  I was pretty sure I registered a long time ago but really haven't heard anything since.  Looks like launch for consoles is slated for June 2014 so we probably won't see a beta till May (after the PC launch as you suggested).  Sadly that will be after the launch of FF14.  Decisions, decisions...

I don't do quests with groups unless I'm absolutely required to, which is mainly going through a dungeon that requires 4 or 8 people to complete.  So I've never felt like I was being rushed to complete any quests as I leveled up.

Some of the points that I like the most about Final Fantasy XIV:
Square Enix plan to release patches every three months, which are full of new content.  They fell a month behind last patch becuase their servers were not ready for the vast amount of people who were logging in, so they were prioritizing to get that fixed away.  It's been two months since the last patch and a bunch of details have been released about the next patch which should be coming next month.  It's good to know what their plans are to keep the game going.

You can level up every possible class on one character.  You're not limited to just one battle class and one or two crafting classes, etc.  You can be everything without having to create 8 other characters.  By learning certain abilities with one class, you can be able to use them in another.  As an example, I play as a White Mage (Conjurer), and there are points where I can't wait three seconds for a heal spell to go off that heals the whole party.  If I level up a Black Mage (Thaumaturge) to the point where it learns the ability Swiftcast (next spell casts instantly), then I can use Swiftcast on my White Mage to turn that spell with a three second cast to cast instantly, which helps out tremendously at crucial moments.

While talking about abilities, I also like the fact that crafting and gathering classes also have abilities.  I admit that crafting and gathering can still feel like a grind, but it feels like less of a grind than from other MMOs that I've played.  Both classes have abilities that improve the chances of finding a higher quality item that you're gathering for, or improve the chance that the gear you're trying to craft will be high quality (better stats).  Crafting gear is a strategy in itself if you want to craft high quality items and gear.

Duty Roulette is probably the feature that I'm most thankful for.  Every day, duty roulettes give you bonus experience, gil (money), and other items.  At level 50, roulettes will give you bonus Tomes, which are used to purchase end-game gear that you'll need to combat end-game boss and earn even better gear.  This makes the grind for gear much more tolerable.  For example, there's a dungeon that will give you 100 Tomes by upon completion, but if you entered that dungeon using the roulette for the first time that day, it will net you an additional 200 Tomes.  Even if you are leveling up a class, espcially a new class after you already ran through and completed all quests using another class, you are pretty much garunteed to level up once or even twice if you're well rested by using the Duty Roulette.  But as I said, you can only get the bonus that each roulette provides once per day.

I could go on, but I feel like I've written enough for now.

Thanks for the input Xpert.  It's nice to see things from someone who has been playing a while on PC.  Which reminds me of one of the other cool features this game has.  Cross platform gameplay.  Once FF14 launches on PS4 I will be able to play with Xpert on the PC.  That really is pretty cool.

Yup and eso is going to have seperate servers for each platform it is on. No cross platform play at all.

I heard that the NPC dialogue is pretty small on the PS4 at the moment.  From what I know, Square already knows about this and it will be fixed later, but have any S7 PS4 users noticed this as well?

Yeah, dialog is pretty limited for non-quest NPC.  Obviously the dialog for quest giving NPC is pretty decent.  But it's also all text based.  One of the things I like about ESO (aside from being an Elder Scrolls game) is that everything is 100% voiced.

Didn't get to play too much but I had fun running around with Kenny and Zak.  It did feel as though we were playing a never ending game of fetch and I wish the convos were voiced.  However, it would be nice to play with PC users, have a cheaper game, and I didn't get to really feel out the game (I'm only at like lvl 4) so I'm not ruling this one out.

The entry level subscription for FF14 is pretty nice, which is $13 per month. You're limited to the creation of eight characters and only one per world, but you really only need one in a world anyway... unless you want to create a character of a different race or something.  Also with cross play between PS3, PS4 and PC makes the community that much larger instead of placing walls between them like ESO will.  That's a small reason why I'm not going for ESO is because if I were to get it, it would be for PC.  Most people here plan to get it for consoles so I wouldn't be able to play with people in S7, and I don't know any friends outside of S7 that plan to get ESO at all.

There are certain Main Story scenes in FF14 that are voiced, but the voice acting isn't the best.  So in a sense, I'm glad that everything isn't voiced.  And I don't mind reading, because I do it a lot when I'm watching anime.  I guess it's just something I'm used to now.

I think it would also be fair to say that in whatever MMO you play, you're going to be playing 'fetch' in some form.  Because that's just what quests are.

True.  Fetch quests are all apart of RPGs in general.  But with the lack of voice acting, and the feeling I needed to rush I mostly found myself just skipping the dialog all together.   x,x,x,x,x,x... Quest Accepted!  Kill 3 lady bugs.  x,x,x,x,x,x... Quest Complete!

Now part of that is my fault for not taking more time to read and get into the quest but the combination of game design elements made it easy to just grind rather than get into the game.  That is why it felt 'hollow' to me.  I did take the time with the main quest and guild quests but everything else just seemed disposable and shallow. 

That said, I still have time with the game and overall it feels pretty solid.  I'll also be playing more over the next 10 days or so.  May try to slow it down a little with some of my lower characters.

Most of the side quests, especially at the beginning of the game really don't have any relation to main story or class quests.  They are more your typical miscellaneous quest that you often see in all MMOs.  Just the usual 'I ran out of eggs for my meal tonight, could you go fetch me some?'.  Some side quests are more important and have a story of their own, but I don't think you'd be seeing much of those in the PS4 beta since your level cap is 20.  But yeah, I find the beiginning side quests to be the most uninteresting.  But I'm not invested in the game for the small quests that I'll only be doing once, so it doesn't bother me much.

As much as I want to play ESO, the Witcher 3 is the RPG I'm looking most forward too. They have set the bar really high with Witcher 2, that I can't hardly comprehend how playing an MMO could possibly have the driving narrative that the Witcher would have.


~mrmiller

Witcher 3 is my #1 anticipated game right now. But an MMO intrigues me too.  Time will tell on these. Dark Souls 2 is first up on my hit list. We will see where the MMOs stack up with the launch of other titles.

I need to try Witcher 2 again on 360, never really gave it a good chance since I got into something else.  Depending on how that goes will determine if I'm interested in Witcher 3.  I'm curious about Dark Souls 2, but I'm really holding out to hit Watch Dogs and The Order so those might be my next purchases.  And then there's ESO, so yeah.

So I have decided that I will be getting ff14 over eso after playing both. Eso is nothing like I thought it would be. So I am going to buy the ps3 version of ff14 and transfer over to ps4 when it launches. There is no fee, you just lose your ps3 version forever. Hopefully see some of you there. Xpert and I will be on the Gilgamesh server.

Interesting on ESO Evol. I've been playing it all weekend and am loving it. Oddly enough it's exactly what I had in my head for an Elder SCrolls MMO xD

Although the fact that they have a server named Gilgamesh... (Which is my tag in ESO) makes me consider playing lol

After putting more hours into ESO, I don't think it's a bad MMO.  I like it, I just don't like it enough to spend $60 and then $15 a month for it.  I'll be sticking with FF14.  And yeah, Gilgamesh is awesome.