Elpizo plays Final Fantasy XIV
"Elpizo plays Final Fantasy XIV"
An amazingly epic story by Elpizo!
For some reason or another, when Elpizo went to buy "The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - 5th Anniversary Edition" in his local Game Mania store two days ago, he saw FF XIV sitting on a shelf and, having seen some screenshots and reading here that it's been improved since the disastrous launch (which Elpizo heard a lot about), Elpizo thought "Why not?" and bought it as well.
So Elpizo came home, popped the CD in, installed it, then installed the Elder Scrolls IV and played Oblivion. About 1 hour past midnight, Elpizo had played enough Oblivion and said to himself "let's check out XIV quickly before going to bed". Unfortunately, Elpizo forgot that online games first need to patch and update before they can be played. So Elpizo started the update and played some more Oblivion. At 3:47 in the night, Elpizo saw that the update was complete, and also noticed he was completely wasted, so Elpizo went to bed.
Tuesday came around, Elpizo waking up at 12:32 in the afternoon. He had some meal that he didn't know if he had to call it breakfast or lunch. Then he sat down behind his brandnew Qosmio laptop that cost him a fortune and did his usual check up of emails and internet sites. Then it was time to play XIV. Elpizo already had a SE account, for he had played the trial version of XI. So he logged in, but oh dear, the game couldn't start, he had to add service options first. Grumbling about how in World of Warcraft it was so much easier to just pop the sucker in, install and play, Elpizo did what the game asked him to do.
Yay, Elpizo could finally play! He watched the opening movie, and it looked really great. That elf and catgirl were funny. Movie over, time to make a character. Immediatly, he noticed how much nicer the interface was than in XI, and making a character was fun. He picked a catgirl because that is nice fanservice, and gave her hair like Refia, because Refia is awesome. But then he had to give her a name. So Elpizo spend 30 minutes thinking about a nice name, when the game crashed because of DirectX. Grumbling, Elpizo reset the game and redid everything all the way up to naming the character. It went much faster than the first time. Then Elpizo opened up his copy of "The Silmarillion" and picked two girl names from it. Thus he named his catgirl Laurelin Kementari. He made her a gladiator and marvelled at how nice the costume looked. Instead of a cleavage-showing fur-with-metal bikini, his catgirl was actually tastefully dressed. The outrage!
So then Elpizo picked the server “Sargatanas” because that’s where the eyesonff members play, apparently, and picked Gridania for a starting place. And then he could really begin playing! Or actually, he couldn’t, because lo and behold, he had no sound. Scratching his head, Elpizo shut the game and restarted it. This time he had sound. (Elpizo noticed how sometimes he has sound and sometimes he doesn’t whenever he starts the game. Quitting and resetting usually fixes it.)
Now Elpizo could enjoy the opening scenes. He was very impressed! The visuals were great. And oh, what’s that? My, what a lovely interface! So much better than that thing called a UI in XI. This game actually seemed to play a lot like WoW, which had nice controls. Elpizo approved.
Elpizo saw his character, the midget and that other girl get chased by a living tree. This reminded him of FF IX, being chased out of the evil forest! Especially since that girl had her eyes covered, just like Blank. This game was off to a great start! So his character was saved and we moved to a nice forest town. Elpizo messed around a bit, and found the controls very much to his liking. Then he saw something unbelievable. Characters that offered quests had an “!” above them! Unlike XI, where they didn’t, and he had no idea what NPCs offered quests or not. Everything seemed much smoother than in FF XI. Talking to NPCs is a breeze, and messages and text are all displayed in different screens, instead of just one big ugly blue box at the bottom of the screen. This kept things orderly, hooray!
So Elpizo ventured forth and followed the instructions of his storyline quest. The further he went, the more he came to enjoy the story, it was quite immersive and nice. And there even were cutscenes! Cutscenes, in Elpizo’s MMO? He was so shocked he nearly got a heart attack. Even WoW, as nice as it was, didn’t have as many as XIV. The quest took Elpizo to the forest, where he could do some fighting. It was a very enjoyable experience, much easier and smoother than in XI. SE did well to take over so many things from World of Warcraft. Elpizo was happy that SE had kept that one thing XI had that WoW didn’t have, however: battle music! Elpizo enjoyed the battle theme from XI very, very much, so he was happy to hear that XIV took this over. Sadly, the battlemusic wasn’t as catchy as XI’s, but it was still nice.
More adventures were had, and Elpizo enjoyed the storyline more and more. But then it started to rain in the forest. Wanting to keep his catgirl dry, Elpizo went to stand under a stone archway, and was enraged. “This game is terrible!” he cried, for even though he was standing under a big, stone arch-way, he was still getting wet, because the rain fell through the arch-way. SE, this oversight is unforgivable! It is totally unrealistic and breaks the immersion in the game! Fuming and frothing at the mouth, Elpizo adventured on in the rain.
After doing some levequests, he saw that it was one hour past midnight, and time for bed. Elpizo signed off and had a nice, long nap. The next morning, at 11:14, he signed in again and played some more. There are so many variables in this game, he noticed. So many professions, and Elpizo is a bit confused and overwhelmed by it. He was never quite good at all that crafting stuff, even in WoW, and in this game ‘t is even harder because there are so much more ways to craft. So Elpizo preferred to stay away from it for now, and looked to find some more quests to do. Sadly, however, he couldn’t find any, and when he looked it up on the internet, was saddened to learn that there weren’t many quests to do at all.
This he found rather sad, for Elpizo really enjoyed the game a lot! It was good fun, it played well, the battlesystem was fine and the storyline was interesting. He just wished there was more stuff to do. He remembered how in WoW he had his quest list full almost the entire time, while here he spend a lot of time just running around finding no NPC who required his aid. Elpizo hopes that this will change in the future.
So now Elpizo found some quests, and is working his way up to lv 13 so he can start the next (and last) storyline quest in Girdania. Then he is going to study some guides on the internet to learn how to do the other things the game has to offer, such as crafting and repairing and whatnot. Elpizo feels like a nub all over again. But he doesn’t mind, because the game is fun so far and he likes it. So he’ll keep playing.
The End.
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TL;DR: I got my hands on XIV and am playing it. It’s fun so far. Plays much smoother and easier than the XI trial I tried, but I’m saddened by the lack of quests to do. Finding any quests to take on is a quest in and of itself, unlike WoW, where you were flooded with them. Still a bit confused by how all these professions work, but with some time I’ll figure it out. Not going to think about endgame yet, because from what I heard there isn’t a lot of it yet anyway, and I never was an endgame player. Even in WoW I never did any raids, and only did dungeons with pick-up groups. I just never wanted to be the one who caused the whole group to wipe, you know? When you play alone, you don’t risk pissing anyone off except yourself, so you’re safe and good to go (unless you're the type who argues with himself).
Also, if it seems like I’m bashing XI here, I’m not. I haven’t played enough of the game to be able to do that. I tried the trial, but couldn’t get into it. Having only played WoW for a while, I was really put off by XI’s cumbersome interface and controls. Everything just felt so slow and more complicated than it had to be. But I understand it was one of those early MMO’s (before WoW came along and put the genre on the map), so I won’t blame it for that. It just wasn’t my cup of tea. I greatly enjoyed the battle-theme, though. I don't regret trying it out, it's the only way to find out if you like a game or not, after all.
