So I finally got to experience the game firsthand when my brother got an account up and running today.
The game runs almost without a hitch once you turn off ambient occlusion. As mentioned previously, we both built new PC's just for the game and he got a score of 9100 I think on High.
i7 980x 4.some Ghz, 6GB RAM and Crossfired HD5970's.
i7 980x 3.7 Ghz, 6GB RAM and Crossfired HD5870's.
Ambient Occlusion seems to bog the game down greatly. The game looks amazing with everything set to the highest settings.
He started two characters, one in Ul'dah, a Lalafel named something Moss on Figaro server and a Hyur Female on another named Green Arrow (guess what class) from Gridania.
Story is starting out with an epic tone but of the 3 I think Ul'dah is the best with Gridania in close second. My brother thinks Limsa Lominsa is the second best opening but I suppose tastes will differ on #2.
Gridania's town looks better but Ul'dah has the best design for functionality. The maze around Gridania isn't too bad either since it has open areas for camps, but we haven't gotten to the truly maze like areas.
Issues with the beta so far are the following:
1) Errors in dialogue are apparent.
2) Character creation options are absurd. Falafels have the least hair options while Hume Female has 9 with an additional sub-category to 3 of them. Males are shafted when it comes to females in the number of options available.
I'm hoping that the retail version brings all races and all sexes up to parity in the number of options available. There is no reason something like tattoo color should be limited to just 4 options when the coding is no different than that of the hair color scheme.
3) The Mouse. Just like everyone else we have issues with the mouse as well. Typically we also play FFXI one-handed with the keyboard, and so for some reason we've been having issues with trying to change the keyboard settings.
4) Map names are not in English. I wonder what's there in that... uh... place that starts with a T and ends in what looks like an H in the lower-left corner.
5) Still a number of apparent bugs in the game. Saw a Falafel run up one of those Gridanian trees, killed a Funguar that simply sat around for half it's life with the archer.
6) Completed a few Leves but noticed that the victory song played on a loop. The first instinct was to go around killing things and then using the warp point as a free trip to camp but after we realized the music won't end, we killed the idea.
7) We will kill that Windows key and kill it good.
From our brief play through, we're both convinced to get the game on day 1 or near-to. I was also pretty amazed at how the characters animated and could deliver emotion.
Both Shard and Kumaeru from Midgard should be entering a new set of adventures soon.
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