OrtizGames

Okay. So I got into the Final Fantasy XIV Beta. As a disclaimer, there are certainly things that could have changed from when I played until release. But let’s face it: release is, what, tomorrow? After the chaos that was betaregistration, the idea that Square Enix know what they are doing is laughable. There is only so much Square Enix could have changed about the game between beta and launch. And most of the game is horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s begin with the good things.
Final Fantasy XIV’s character creation system is miles ahead of XI’s, and even ahead of World of Warcraft’s and Everquest 2′s. I never played Aion, so I can’t be sure of how it compares – let’s say it’s a step up from Monster Hunter’s character creation, which, in my book, is a pretty good place to be. It certainly doesn’t have the freedom of Brink and All Points Bulletin, but those are less parts of games as they are software in and of themselves. I was overall impressed by the improvements Square Enix made to their system and, despite being unable to find a hairstyle I liked (as is all too often the case for me in MMOs), I felt comfortable with my character – I felt ownership over him, like he was my creation. I played with the editor to try to make the most hideous character possible and discovered that it is actually very difficult to do so. It’s the opposite extreme to games like Demon’s Souls, where the tiniest nudge the wrong way will cause your character to flat out burst into flames of ugliness.
I was less pleased with the class system (What, there’s no class that wields a two handed claymore? Seriously?) but when the game started I felt I was off to an okay start.

That’s when everything went downhill.

My immediate disapproval arose when I was thrust into in a tutorial space where no actual tutorial took place. There are no actual players in this small private instance; instead, you’re given basic instructions on how to walk and look and talk, and are free to talk with a handful of NPCs of different persuasions. Despite the fact that I spoke to every NPC in the area, however, I got no hints on other aspects of the game, no special instructions – not even a decent bit of exposition about the world around me. I tried to leave the instance only to have the game warn me “Are you sure you want to leave this instance? You won’t be able to come back here if you do”, which immediately made me paranoid that I would miss something important, sand so I went back around and talked to everyone again, searching every nook and cranny for any valuable scraps I might have regretted missing later on.

But There Was Nothing! The game was warning me that I was leaving nothing behind! Why the hell was I here, if there’s nothing to do? To practice moving forward? Is that really the extent of this map – a map to teach me how to walk? And then you warn me that I might never see this “walk map” ever again? Good riddance with the walk map! It’s as boring as sin and you just made me waste ten to fifteen minutes on it, running back and forth like an idiot!

Fast forward a little and I’ve watched the first few cinematics in the game that include your character walking around and being featured in the overarching story of Final Fantasy XIV. Some people are thrilled with this new addition. After seeing what Bioware has been doing in The Old Republic, however, I’m not nearly as impressed; your character stumbles around in predetermined patterns like a drunken mute, and you have no control over his/her reactions to situations. It throws any preconceived notions about who you are as a character completely out the window, and what’s worse: the grand majority of the time, it seems your character plays a walk-on role in the majority of the story, with other more epic, more recognizable characters whoring attention like some horrible reenactment of a childhood musical where you play the tree while some other kid dances and sings with a cane and a bowler hat on center stage.
I understand if your character is a complete nobody at first and then slowly grows to become a powerful, notable individual. I am fine with the rags-to-riches/humble-beginnings story. It’s evident in almost every MMO out there. However, the odd thing about FFXIV is that the way the exposition is presented, it really doesn’t feel like a story about my character. It feels like you’re watching the cinematics of a Final Fantasy play out, with a plot and a story and drama and memorable characters and some dark evil force trying to destroy crystals and whatnot, only when the cinematics end, instead of getting into the main character’s shoes and moving them around, getting into fights and equipping legendary weapons, you gain control of your MMO character, who was standing around in the background the whole time like some retarded stalker.
This really kills the magic of the MMO – MMOs are about the self – that’s why the key aspects of an MMO (achieving, exploring, socializing, killing other players) are so self-satisfying. The elements of the game should emphasize that player experience as one of the player experiencing the MMO world through a character. Instead, Square Enix seemed to awkwardly present the MMO experience through other characters, and merely using the player’s character as a set of eyes fairly unconnected to the events occurring in the game.

This problem can be noticed in the environments, as well. Don’t get me wrong, Final Fantasy XIV looks beautiful. But it suffers from the same design problems that plague other [insert stereotypical "Asian" country here] games. The world, as beautiful as it looks, appears dead and uninteresting. I look up at the beautiful sky and feel nothing, because I know that my potential to explore that glorious landscape is pretty much zero. Japanese games have this thing about them where they just don’t want you interacting with the environment – it’s only there to appear stunning, not to serve any purpose. It’s like they just threw up a beautiful matte painting for a background but didn’t supply the cast with enough props and stage pieces to make the illusion convincing. It really doesn’t make it feel like an experience.

Now let’s talk game design, because that’s the real meat of any game.
For those of you new to the boat, “game design” refers to the “mechanics” of a game – the gears that make it function, the elements that determine whether it is “intuitive and fun”. And Final Fantasy XIV is far from intuitive and fun.
Horrendously complex menus that are never properly explained aside, Final Fantasy XIV’s interface is not too complex, but makes up for it in simply not behaving in the way you would expect an interface to behave. I can’t really explain what I mean other than it feels like half the time the interface is suggesting I should attack whatever I’m looking at – whether it be an enemy, a chest, a questgiver, a door, a party member. Maybe it’s just that the PC version plays like crap. The combat plays like a mix of Final Fantasy XII and Final Fantasy XIII with none of the good elements of either – which is remarkable, as they had very clear and obvious positives which Square Enix seemed to deliberately ignore.
There are buttons at the bottom right of the screen which for a long time I just wasn’t sure what they did other than one made me attack things and the other opened my items. Little indicators would pop up at the top of the screen and I had no idea what they meant or what they were doing. I got killed by a mole rat (at least it wasn’t a damn rabbit) and I could not figure out how to resurrect for a full three minutes because the damn game didn’t think to give me a hint as to where to find the unintuitive command (As if a menu item labeled “Return” is really going to scream “come back to life”). And quests! What quests? I had one quest, and when I was in the middle of it, the game crashed, and on logging in I found that my quest had disappeared and I had no idea what to do. I ran around talking to random NPCs but none of them had anything important to say, and there were no indicators on anyone as to whether they had a quest for me or not!

The game was torture to play. I uninstalled it shortly after getting booting it up for the first time and I don’t plan to buy it or so much as look at another Square Enix game again (which is a lie, because Birth By Sleep is loaded on my PSP right now and I’m thinking of writing a critique of that as well). Honestly, I think Square Enix just hasn’t been the same since the merger, and all of Square’s great storytelling and excellent ideas have simply evaporated without a trace. I truly have no idea what they were thinking when it comes to this new MMO, other than perhaps they were trying to appeal to an audience of players that is honestly not looking to play an MMO for the sake of playing an MMO but rather because they want it to be a Final Fantasy.

I think FF7, along with other Final Fantasies (and basically any Square Enix game nowadays) have always had a bit of a disconnect when it comes to certain features of the game commuting with the rest of it. I dearly love Final Fantasy 7, but I recognize I was only able to thoroughly enjoy it because I had the patience to learn and master the Materia system, to the point where Cloud would strike an enemy for 9999 three separate times every time he attacked, and then would counterattack when he was struck and deal 9999 three times again, and then would jump in the way of attacks directed at his allies, which would cause him to counterattack and, again, strike for 9999 three separate times.

I mean, that’s just awesome.

But you really need to learn the system, and unfortunately the Japanese (and Southeast Coastal Asian, generally) culture has this design philosophy about making games un-intuitive for players, and expecting them to fight tooth and claw to figure out the nuances, then share the information freely with everyone else struggling with the same. It is a very “communitive” (not real word) experience, and unfortunately it clashes horribly with the Western individualistic ideal. In the West, we want to figure these things out for ourselves, and if we can’t figure it out quickly and get our bearings – the Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master philosophy – then we assume the game is badly made and therefore is lacking in quality. And Final Fantasy XIV, as unintuitive as it is, was built to be a grueling experience built for an Asian a specific audience.

Unfortunately, in this case, FFXIV really was badly built. It really was. My blessings go to those who’ve decided to play. May you have more fun than I did.

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My grandmother got me Bully, by Rockstar Games, for Christmas. I eagerly started playing it, and was just about ready to dive into reviewing it for today when suddenly I was struck with the strangest of urges to forget all about Bully and sit down at my computer to play with spaceships.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed–literally dreamed, like, this was what appeared in my head when I was asleep–about having a tiny, maneuverable craft that could fly through space at warp speeds, letting me jump from beautiful planet to beautiful planet in a few quick seconds of high speed rumbling. This is exactly what EVE Online has been able to offer me. So please understand and bear with me–my enthusiasm for the game is very biased.

However, I have to be utterly honest when I say this is perhaps the most refined MMO experience I have ever played, seen, or could have imagined. EVE Online, with just a few tweaks, could very well be the perfect MMORPG.

I’m going to explain this by using the basics of MMO gameplay. There’s four types of people who are involved in the whole Massively Multiplayer Online experience: Killers, Explorers, Achievers and Socialites. These are the basic psychological and attitudinal gameplay rules that have been analyzed by all kinds of experts such as Richard Bartle, the creator of the Multi-User Dungeon. We all have bits and pieces of each in us, and everyone has a different reason why they play. But for the majority, people have discovered everyone who plays this kind of game has similar motivated goals that drive their experience.

Explorers love to explore. They love to see all the rich and detailed worlds that have been generated by the fantasy game around them. They love finding and claiming new places, knowing where things are that nobody else know. They’re pioneers in the expansion of the game world.

Achievers are determined to beat the game. Not only beat it, but get everything possible. These are the people who get all the epic armor of a single set so they can look monstrously intimidating and almighty.

Socialites are in it to be with people. They love playing with their friends, starting guilds and clubs, knowing and meeting new people.

Killers just want to ruin the game experience for everyone. They find twisted pleasure in breaking the game somehow, or finding a new way to kill people that makes them irritating. They love to be a nuisance–and a successful one at that.

All of these player types fit me almost to a T, leading me to believe that I’m probably simply engineered to be the world’s most MMORPG-tuned gamer. I love every part of an MMO experience, and feel pained when a particular element is missing from the formula.

EVE Online is so amazingly brilliant to me because it misses absolutely nothing. There is nothing the player lacks in experience at all.

Firstly, let’s look at the premise of the game. EVE Online is an MMORPG based around travelling through space, in spaceships. That’s right–there’s no first person shooting, there’s no running around with a sword that’s too big for you. There are no magic points and there are no magic spells. You can’t be a gnome. This automatically turns people away. It seems the term MMORPG is unconsciously supposed to imply ‘ridiculously overpowered barbaric fantasy heroes killing dragons online’. Mega Manly Online Rippling Pecs Games.

In EVE Online, they throw all that fantasy cartoony stuff and throw it right out the window. Your HP bar becomes your ship’s shields and hull strength. When you’re shot down, you don’t come back to life as a ghost–your corporation revives a clone they have of you back in your home base and insert your digitalized mind back into it. You don’t earn experience by fighting–your characters reads books on their own. All you have to do is assign them a skill to learn, and they gain experience points over time, even when you don’t play. Of course, this also means that there’s no faster way of earning those skill sets, which is both the game’s strength and weakness.

So how does this game deliver an almost perfect MMO experience? For Explorers, there’s an entire universe to see, with different stars, planets, mining colonies, everything. It’s massive, and there’s different attitudes of play depending on where you go–going by a security 0 star is officially considered a form of suicide, because of the likelyhood of being shot down. It’s a little bit on the repetitive side, sadly, as there’s no way to see the lush worlds on the planets below. But I’ll come back to that later.

For Achievers, there is an almost ungodly number of things to get. Skills to learn, ships to buy, weapons to upgrade, money to make. There’s always something to do on EVE. You just don’t finish EVE.

Socialites have the ability to form corporations, and work together with corpmates to buy and build and achieve, reach farther than other corporations, and become domineers of the market and the social world. There’s a bit of a problem with this system, but I’ll come back to that in just a few seconds.

Lastly, Killers have the best lot of all. This game is wonderful if you love to break the game for other people. Since you have the option between being a pleasantly legal miner or a government-defiant pirate, you are capable of almost any style of play. I’ve seen pirates launch after swarms of newbies in a flood of destruction. If you can get a ship that’s quick and strong enough, you can easily assault and annihilate anyone of your choosing (provided they don’t warp away in time), making the game delightfully exciting.

But let’s come back to Explorers and Socialites. The experience is great for everyone. It’s great for Explorers and Socialites. But it’s not great enough. EVE has a wonderfully exciting universe that’s expansive and takes time and patience and know-how to navigate. But there’s not all that much to see. I flew my ship across solar systems, visiting planets, asteroids and space stations. The space stations were all beautiful. The view from space was magnificent. And then it was over. That was it. There were still places to go in the universe, but really–it’s the universe. How different are things going to get from one solar system to the next? The problem with this game is that it lacks the minute depth of something like SPORE for the explore-phile. People want to go down to the planets, look around, see the views, paint the landscapes.

A similar thing happens with Socialites–they have the power to make their own chat channels, to make corporations, to have connections all across the galaxy–but they can never really see their friends face-to face. EVE Online has a beautiful customization menu that allows you to make the most diverse and exciting characters I have ever seen in a game with customization. But all that work is then demoted to a simple profile picture, and no-one will ever see your character’s animated, fully rendered face.

The EVE Online team is currently working on a new expansion (just after releasing the Trinity expansion, jeez) which will supposedly allow players to get out of their ships and walk around in the interior of space stations and interact with other player models. That’s really exciting. I’m praying on that expansion, because I believe it may very well be what EVE has lacking that will make it pretty much the ideal MMO game.

I played through two weeks of the trail version over the winter break. It didn’t take me very long to realize how much strategy and depth there is to EVE gameplay, even though people continued to insist that newbies couldn’t understand the game until they played for at least six months. When my trial expired, I thought, “This is an amazing game. I could spend the rest of my life playing this game.” So I didn’t renew my account. I can’t. It’s dangerous–I may end up sucked into another WoW addiction that I just can’t handle. So I’m giving up EVE–because it’s simply too good, and will take up too much time. I can’t afford to be dedicated to that leisure right now. I mean, I need to review a game weekly! Not only that, but I already keep my WoW needs stifled because I simply can’t pay monthly fees–I don’t have enough budget to do so.

The Trinity expansion was recently declared “The Best Game of 2008.” I have to say, I agree. EVE really left me with nothing but positive impressions. I can’t wait till the new expansion is released, and the worlds will all become fully explorable and social interactions be heavily facilitated.

My final verdict on the game: if you want an MMO that’s not WoW and that’s seriously fun, get EVE. If you like space, get EVE. If you have free time, get EVE. It’s worth it.

And I will envy you.

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