HappyBivouac said:
Potential in:
-Amazingly gorgeous design in the evironments, characters, equipment, etc.
-Unique progression/job system that lets a player really flesh out his/her character the way he/she wants to.
-Story content with production values through the roof for an MMO.
-Uematsu.
-FFXI's community is/was one of the best I have ever seen in an online game. This game's community is largely composed of those same people. (This one isn't universal, but it's how I feel)
-Thoroughly integrated economy, given time to develop properly, will offer a much richer economy than what FFXI has and what most other games have.
-An overall experience and design philosophy very different from what the "standard" MMO offers. I could elaborate on this one but I won't in this bulleted list.
-The environments are basically just rolling hills though, they're pretty well textured rolling hills! But they're devoid of life and content and landmarks, the attention to detail is extremely subpar even compared to it's prior.
They aren't going to sit down and suddenly make things spring up in them either. This is one of the big problems, Square is fairly lazy and cheap, when they update, it's after a lot of procrastination and it's usually mostly simple things. This world is what it is now, more than likely, and that's absolutely massive zones with nothing in them
-The job fare boils down to an awkward follow up to XI's, it's was nice feature eight years ago, but it's not something to rave about, especially considering how bad the numbers play at the moment and issues with point allotment. I wanted to see improvements to FFXI's job system, not what it'd look like after being hit with a hammer.
-What production values? I've failed to see a single bit of polish past the intro cutscenes. They're not even voicing things barely, it just looks silly as everything else is in the same style as early FFXI with slow pans and flapping lips. Voice work, cutscenes, etc aren't rare to the MMO anymore. Nothing in this game has high production values compared to what's going on in LOTRO, Cataclysm, Guild Wars 2, and several others.
That aside, FFXIV barely even has story currently, it has some occasional background lore discovered through means not relating to any actual gameplay, but the quests barely provide simple context and and outside of the token quests you get after umpteen levels (which are very bland, quick and simple) it's back to nonsense in the lifeless, empty world.
-Uematsu is great, I concur, but I also don't need to subscribe to a game to hear it's soundtrack.
-Community is kind of a non-issue, but I agree, XI did have a solid one, well it did years ago, I can't speak for now.
-What economy? There is no economy, do you mean the crafting? Yeah, outside of the fact that it's really unrefined, crafting and gathering is solid. It's somewhat convoluted in some ways regarding simple things and recipies, but it's still the best thing that the game has going for it.
But it's still not that in-depth enough to hinge a game on, and there is no economy, there's not even mail. Retainers are something I think even a lot of F2P Korean games would be ashamed to rely on. They're creepy, clunky and awkward.
I just don't see much potential, we're barely talking about gameplay here even, which saddens me. If they clean it up, hey, I'll jump right on board, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm actually more interested in resubbing to FFXI and checking out all the large updates I've missed and the new ones too.
