A return to Final Fantasy XIV - Impressions from my first two days (WARNING: Long!)

[Loony BoB]

Since Danielle and I got engaged we've basically forgotten about gaming altogether, so I don't think any of us are active now. Perhaps after we get the big things out of the way things will be easier... a guy has to hope! xD

[Rostum]

They had a free 10-day trial for existing accounts, so I thought I'd try it out. To be honest I just couldn't get around the completely draconian system, especially after experiencing something as smooth as Tera recently.

That is to say the log in / character select / graphical options / etc. Not only can I not choose Windowed Fullscreen, but I could not change the main graphical options inside the game. Then there was all the lag in Ul'dah.

In saying that, overall the game was running much smoother and the in-game menus were much nicer to navigate, though I can't wait to see a redesign of the UI. I love how the battles feel weighty, like you're really packing a punch. The only other MMO I've felt that with has been Tera.

Anyways, I'm still excited and it just reinforced my decision to wait until 2.0 since they'll be redoing all of that to be up to today's standards, including servers. I guess I'm not too worried about missing the current content either, even though the Ifrit / Moogle / Garuda fights look pretty cool.

[Loony BoB]

We re-returned to FFXIV this weekend and managed to get some solid gametime in. We did a couple of job quests each, killed some Notorious Monsters and partied for about seven hours, one hour with just the two of us then six hours with a full party (8 players) found simply by asking people found via Player Search if they'd like to join us. Five of us were there for the entirity of the six hours and it was great fun, I got from L38 to L45 on my paladin so I'm pretty happy with that. Got a bunch of new gear afterwards, some which had materia in them (finally spending about 500,000 of the 8,000,000 I made via some hardcore crafting and selling months ago).

We're hoping to get my paladin and Danielle's white mage up to L50 soon so we can really start trying out all this endgame content people keep talking about, something I never did when playing FFXI. The people in this game are fantastic and although we don't have a linkshell we are constantly finding the same people on our social list to party up with which is really great. We're starting to notice the people we pass by more regularly, waving and catching up. Since our return a couple of people have got back in touch just by seeing us on their social list from when we were last playing at the start of April, which is nice. The community feel has definitely kicked in for me. When we lacked ideas of where to level, we asked on the forums and I got replies almost instantly, too, and they were all constructive, which was a real bonus.

Fighting feels like it should, crafting is just the same as before but still something I do when I'm sitting watching TV (luckily the timer is gone so we don't accidentally get sidetracked and then come back to a failed craft). Tanking as paladin, I was able to keep hate about 90% of the time on a single target, which I feel is about how it should be. It of course depends on who you party with, but I guess I was lucky enough to get a lot of people who knew that if they drew hate too often then they had to tone it down. Still, six levels in six hours isn't shabby! I wish crafting was that fast. xD

Along with reaching L50, I hope to get cracking with the remaining paladin quests and the main storyline quests, too. Then it's back to slowly grinding my armourer and blacksmith up... I've got a long way to go there!

Should any of you guys jump back into the game on our server (Sargatanas), let us know!

[*Devore*]

I'm back on now. I dont go on very often but I will be on tomorrow at some point. I'm trying to level up my conjurer so that I can have a stone skin/protect combo again.
Then I'll need to grind my archer from L30-L50 so that I can get all those OP moves like wide volley back. Oh how I miss being able to take out several monsters with one attack.