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A Realm Reborn BETA Impressions
With the NDA restrictions of the Beta of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn lifted slightly I thought it'd be a good time to give you some insights into my experience. Things have definitely changed for the better as the Beta progresses… you could even say that things have got BET-A… *audience groans*
I’ll preface this by saying I never played Final Fantasy XI Online or Final Fantasy XIV 1.x so the thoughts contained in this piece are from a complete n00b to the world of Final Fantasy in MMORPG format. I have played other major MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, RIFT, TERA and Neverwinter so I’ll be using them as points of comparison.
The character creation offers you an impressive array of customisation options. From height, to muscle tone to even being able to having odd characters if you want to channel some Summoner Yuna – pretty much everything you’d want to change is here. I love being able to customise my characters and I can easily lose 20 minutes here getting everything just right. You can even change the background and time of day just to make sure everything looks perfect even when you’re not in the right light. I’d love to see more hairstyles though as even though most races have around 10-15 some of them are very similar and there’s a distinct lack of ponytails! Also a lot of the voices sound strange but this is par for the course when the sound effects are done by Asian voice actors – especially the female one, it’s not bad but you’ll notice the difference! Once you’ve sorted your appearance you can then set things such as your characters birthday and patron deity who affects some of your minor stats but nothing game breaking. From there you pick your starting class this determines which of the three city states you start off in. Once that’s all done you pick your character’s name and surname and away you go!
There is also one other thing about the character creation that’s really worth mentioning and that’s the background music which is a fantastic re-arrangement of the Final Fantasy Prelude theme. Unfortunately the NDA still prohibits us from sharing music and video but believe me, you’re in for a treat!
Combat and questing is pretty much the bread and butter of any MMORPG and Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn plays it relatively standard here. Combat is a simple affair of having abilities hotkeyed and it’s certainly nowhere near as dynamic as more recent MMORPGs such as Guild Wars 2 and TERA. For the most part you’ll be standing still and just pressing buttons, occasionally you may need to move out of stuff but there’s no real major active dodging ability element. If you think of the combat in WoW and SWTOR you’re pretty much on the right track. It does feel slightly dated at times but it’s mostly made up for by very graphically detailed abilities and that it feels slick and responsive. When you’re out in the world you can kite things and play around a bit more which does add a bit of a more fluid feel to the combat but inside dungeons you’ll be standing still and using abilities as they come off cooldown or as your resources permit.
Likewise questing is nothing particularly revolutionary. You progress from hub to hub picking up quests which then unlock more quests at the next hub and so on and so forth. You also have a series of overarching story quests which tell the tale of Eorzea and the events since the Calamity at the end of 1.x and setting the stage for the upcoming events. The quest themselves are the usual run of the mill “kill X beasts” “pick up Y objects” “give A to B.” Again they’re nothing revolutionary but for the most part you’re rarely fighting the same type of mobs and the locations are varied and detailed enough that it remains interesting. So whilst it is run of the mill it’s polished enough that you don’t really think about it.
There’s also a subset of quests called LeveQuests which are scalable difficulty quests that usually involve killing things or looting things within a time limit and you are rewarded based on the difficulty and the time you took to finish. These are a nice little diversion from the main quest lines and when you find a set of LeveQuests you really enjoy it’s easy to lose an hour or two just doing them over and over until your daily limit runs out. There are even subsets of LeveQuests for your crafting professions too.
This brings me to my first complaint that I really hope they change before release. As soon as you’ve made your character you see the opening in-game cutscene which doesn’t really change at all based on which class you are. It’s not bad, it’s really interesting the first couple of times – but if you simply want to make a character to test out the animations and basic abilities it becomes quite tiresome for a couple of reasons: 1) It’s not skippable, 2) you have to do a series of tutorial quests that explain how questing works, how emotes work and sending you on a run-around of the main hub to find all the Aetheryte nodes (basically quick travel points) etc, 3) the above two things mean it can literally be upwards of 20 minutes before you even get into your first battle. It’d be nice to either be able to skip this entirely if you already have a character over… say level 10 or something similar to TERA or Guild Wars 2 where you get a prologue type tutorial that gives you a few class abilities to try out before putting you into the world proper. The tutorial quests in the main area I don’t mind that much but the lengthy non-skip-able introduction cutscene gets a bit tiresome after a while. In the grand scheme of things this is a really minor complaint.
Adventuring takes you from location to location as you’d expect. Each location is very detailed – from the forests of the Twelveswood where the sky is scantly visible at times or the barren deserts surrounded by sprawling dunes and mountains. The world itself isn’t seamless and each area appears to be “instanced” similar to more recent MMORPGs which has the advantage of allowing for a lot more graphical fidelity. Connecting areas do a very good job of feeling similar yet unique at the same time. The world itself feels alive and vivid you’ll often wonder pass NPCs blabbering about their first world problems, trees swaying in the wind and sunny skies suddenly becoming overcast and rain falling. You’re bump into all your Final Fantasy favourites on your travels; Moogles, Chocobos, Cactuars – they’re all here.
Full Active Time Events (abbreviated to FATEs) also do a very good job of making the world feel alive. At any given time a FATE can start in a region of an area. These FATEs can see you defending a village from an assault from the local beast tribes, protecting a merchant as he travels from town to town or even raiding Goblin camps to retrieve contraband for the local authorities. These FATEs are triggered periodically or by talking to certain NPCs or fulfilling other hidden criteria. At one point you can be minding your own business thinning out the population of Squirrels in the local woods when suddenly a flock of angry vultures swoops in and starts causing havoc. The cool thing about FATEs is that the game automatically tracks your contribution, you don’t need to part up with anyone to get credit – at the end of the FATE your efforts are rewarded with a chunk of XP and some Gil. They also seem to scale in difficulty based on how many people are in the area, so simply rushing them with a big group doesn’t always equate in a victory – particular in ones that require co-ordination such as killing a giant Slug that makes copies of itself each time it dies. There are also a lot of FATEs going on – on any one map there’s usually at least 2 FATEs currently running.
Dungeons, much like the other core parts, are very run of the mill as well. However the big difference compared to other MMORPGs is that each dungeon generally has a 90 minute timer on it – I’ve yet to be in a situation where we’ve run a risk of those 90 minutes running out so it seems more than lenient but it does add a bit of pressure to the cooker, especially if you want to explore some of the side objectives. As I said before the fluidity in combat is a bit more limited due to the enclosed environments and most of the encounters aren’t really anything you haven’t seen before elsewhere but they do require some co-ordination and using crowd control abilities is highly desirable. Groups do tend to follow the trinity system in that you will have 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 DPS though the healer usually has enough breathing room to use their own damaging abilities and, at least in the earlier dungeons, a traditional tank is more of a luxury than a necessity and a 1 Healer, 3 DPS group is more than capable of clearing them given good use of crowd control and kiting. Dungeons really are what you make of them though – I had groups where no-one said a thing and other groups where people bantered away and the latter produced a far more enjoyable experience even though I was re-running a dungeon I’d already done. So if you pick up A Realm Reborn, be sure to be social and friendly as after all this is what MMORPGs were traditionally about and it really adds to the atmosphere and community element making it far more enjoyable. Each time you successfully finish a dungeon you get treated to a victory camera pan across your party with the classic Final Fantasy victory fanfare playing in the background!
Killing things is a very formative part of Final Fantasy and if you simply want to go off on a murderous rampage for a bit the game also has you covered here in the form of the Hunting Log. Think Hunts from Final Fantasy XII but with less backtracking to NPCs and less reward (outside of delicious XP). For each class you’ll have a Hunting Log which contains a list of the most common foes in the surrounding area. The task is simple: go and kill between 4-6 of them. Each time you complete a Hunt you get some XP and each time you complete a whole tier of Hunts you get a huge chunk of XP and unlock the next tier of hunts. These rewards are granted instantaneously with no need to go back to any NPC to “turn in.” Obviously the higher up the tiers you get the more challenging the Hunts become – ranging from killing Elite mobs to even slaying the final boss of particular dungeons. This produces a simple, yet effective, way of grinding out a few levels if you feel like taking a break from questing or if you’ve got ahead of the quest curve a bit – which sadly, given the disjointed nature of some of the quest chains, can actually happen a bit too often.
Once you’ve hit level 10 with your starting class and completed the level 10 class quest you gain the ability to pick-up secondary classes such as Crafting professions or even one of the other starting classes. For example my Archer is also a Conjurer and a Carpenter. Each class levels up independently of one another.
Crafting works much like levelling normally would. You tend to gather crafting materials just by slaying monsters or using vendors or gathering them. Crafting professions are basically secondary classes that you switch too by equipping the tools of that profession – for example if you’re playing an Archer and equip a Saw your class changes on the fly to Carpenter and you have a separate XP bar and resource bar and gear set for Carpenter. As you craft things the XP bar goes up and as you level up you unlock access to more recipes. It’s very simple but the interesting spin is you have a set number of “tries” at crafting. For example you might be making a bow and you have portion of 60 skill points to use. Simply crafting the item will take 30 skill points if all attempts are successful (yes you can fail) but you can also use some of the points to try and produce a higher quality version of the bow. You have abilities that increase the quality and replenish some skill points too using your crafting resources. This turns crafting into a sort of strategic mini-game as you figure out the best combinations to net the highest quality items and in turn the most XP toward your Crafting profession.
Switching combat classes works the same as switching to a Crafting class – just switch your weapon and you automatically switch classes. It’s a good way of dabbling in other classes without making a new character as each class has its own independent XP and quests. The inventory management problem is also solved as you have a separate inventory stash called the Armory Chest which stores all your gear, leaving your main inventory free for the usual host of consumables, quest items and crafting materials. The game also allows you to save equipment sets so that you can switch to them easily on the fly without having to equip individual items one by one.
Throughout the questing, the dungeoneering or just sight-seeing there is a fantastic soundtrack. From simple and melodic tones of the forest to the sound of grand adventure when you’re fighting through harsh wilder lands. LeveQuests, Story Quests, Dungeon Battles – each event has its own particular Battle Theme that blends in and out as the battles begin and end. Plus if you get into multiple battles in quick succession the theme blends back in from where it left off seconds beforehand - all in a seamless manner. The battle themes are very Final Fantasy in style, short looping melodies that combine to make amazing wholes. In particular during certain major story quests there’s a theme that will have you on the edge of your seat. When doing simple quests you’ll often find yourself pulling “just one more mob” to keep the themes playing.
I won’t go into much detail here to avoid spoilers but the journey also features a lot of in-game cutscenes in the style of X, XII and XIII that tell various story elements as you progress. At present these aren’t voice acted so you really get a classic Final Fantasy feel as text boxes appear at the bottom of the screen with the dialogue in. Even though I only got to level 18 in phase 3 (the story scenes were blanked out in phase 2 and earlier) the story already has me engrossed and it seems to be as good as any Final Fantasy story to date and like any MMORPG story it grows into something far more world threatening than simply urging the local bandit population to vacate the skank caves they love to occupy.
Overall I’ve really enjoyed my time in Eorzea. I can’t really comment on the Free Company or later game elements as I haven’t got that far yet but in general the game is very polished, the UI is slick (although admittedly could do with a couple of quality of life changes to the Shopkeeper and Auction interfaces which are very minimalistic in approach) the graphics are beautiful and overall it feels like a very solid whole. Whether it will be a formidable player in the MMORPG market remains to be seen, especially as unlike most of the competition it will still be using the subscription model rather than variants of Buy-2-Play or Free-2-Play. However I certainly expect that it will carve out its own hardcore following and withstand the test of time much like Final Fantasy XI has. I certainly have no regrets about pre-ordering and I'm now eagerly counting down the days until the August 27th release.
Will you be entering the realm of Eorzea?
Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions based on what I’ve played in phase 3 of the Beta during which on one character I got an Archer to lv18, a Carpenter to lv10 and a Conjurer to lv7.
