My feed may be all a-Twitter (/wrists) with debate, discussion and fury about the Cataclysm beta, but I’m not particularly interested in Cataclysm. Call me a luddite, but the massive overhaul of the talent system and the merging of a lot of stats is a little too… Cataclysmic (I’m just full of them, aren’t I?) for my tastes.

Instead, my beta attentions have been focused on FFXIV, having managed to get in the last few days of closed beta, and poke around the open beta.. I’ve been rather looking forward to FFXIV since it was announced last year, hoping that SE would have learned from the mistakes of FFXI – namely, the crippling difficulty in doing anything without a party, the iffy controls and the clunky UI – and produce an MMO that would be fun and easy to play. I’m not sure why I got my hopes up.  I’m not saying it’s a total trainwreck, but it’s far from great. Let’s look at each area, and score it out of 10.

Story

Pros

I’ve finished the intro section of story for each of the three City States, and found all the stories to be pretty intriguing, enough that if I do pick up the final release, I’m no longer sure just which city I’ll start in. Also of interest is that it seems the storylines of the three city states will come together at some point – each intro involves at least one character with a strange pair of tattoos on their neck, suggesting there’s some sort of overarching plot to the game.

Cons

Emote quests. As the intro story basically serves as a tutorial to the game, there’s a small bit in each city state where you have to emote at an NPC. In Limsa-Lominsa, this quests was merely a bit boring and time consuming – it was pretty clear which emote you had to use. In Ul’dah, it was significantly less clear which emote you had to use, and, critically, in what order. In Gridania, you seriously begin to wonder if it’d be possible to repeal child cruelty laws, because there is very little explanation given of what emotes to use, and the Children don’t even use the right actions. It’s just fortunate you only have to do that once.

Score: 8

Aesthetics

Pros

Character models are excellent – if I looked half as good as my character, I’d be gettin’ all the girls (I’m just sayin’!) Plenty of options for customisation, and very detailed. Monster models are also pretty detailed – assuming you’re fighting something that isn’t basically a balloon animal, a la the mole a bit below.

The cities each have their own distinct feel, and look pretty good.

Cons

The starting areas are pretty large expanses of… sameness. They look kinda pretty, but they aren’t all that detailed in actual fact, and they seem the drag on and on forever.

Score: 7

Combat System

Pros

The combat system in FFXIV is pretty good – when compared to FFXI, at any rate. In FFXI, most melee classes were simply about auto-attacking enemies until you had enough TP to fire off a weaponskill, repeated ad nauseum. If you were a lucky class like THF, you might have had an ability or two you could use every minute, which was highly exciting in comparison.

Firstly, there’s no auto-attack option in FFXIV – you instead have to press a key for your basic attack. This has recieved some criticism, but I don’t see it as a particularly bad thing – it makes it seem (very slightly) more like an Action RPG than your usual MMO. In addition, while the level of additional abilities in no way approaches the level of WoW for melee classes, you do get a good few buttons to press, and TP is far easier to generate than in FFXI (and is not all used up in one attack), so if you have multiple weaponskills equipped you can often fire two or three in quick succession for massive damage.

The ability to fuse abilities from one class with another is effectively a much improved subjob system, and allows for at least a degree of customisation on your character.

Cons

Occasional difficulty in targeting an enemy – more than once I’ve targeted an enemy right in front of me, only to be told “you are not facing the target.” This has cost me a couple of battles against aggressive mobs. Likewise, you cannot attack enemies that are, say, on a small ledge (less than a couple of feet high) above you, even if you happen to be an Archer, which is pretty pathetic.

Score: 8

Synthesis System

Pros

Cool animations during crafting – if you are a blacksmith, you do it at a little anvil, a carpenter has a workbench, a weaver has… that… circular thingy with cloth on it that people use for embroidery. It’s a nice little touch. Synthesis actually involves active pressing of options – allowing (in theory) you to chose between making high quality items, at significant risk of failure, or making them quickly and efficiently, but the resulting goods being of poor quality.

Cons

You’re told to watch what your synthesis is doing to determine what actions to use, but that’s rather cryptic. The only way to find recipes in game seems to be to be told them after local guildleves, of which you are lucky to get three in a two day period. There’s community involvement, then there is forcing people to use time they want to be playing the game to use that time to find recipes.

Even early, basic component recipes often need full crystals, rather than the shards which you will obtain easily from killing mobs. I had plenty of materials on blacksmith to make a few bronze nuggets, and from the nuggets, some other items – but I needed Fire Crystals to make said nuggets. There had better be an auction house in the final release, otherwise obtaining crystals and materials is going to be ridiculously difficult.

Score: 6

Gathering System

Pros

I haven’t tried Fishing or Harvesting, but I did give mining a shot for a good while, to gather some materials for smithing. Gathering at a point starts a simple mini game, so that the gathering process is a bit more involved than “find node, auto hit node, find next node.” Gathering is never likely to be exciting, but it is, at the very least, not boring.

Cons

Only real con is a small niggle with the gathering interface, which is simply one problem within the gigantic problem that is the UI. Basically, why do I have to press the menu button labelled “Strike” when they could either make it automatically start the minigame, or the first click in the minigame wheel would start it.

Gathering: 7

Levelling

Pros

Guildleves are relatively easy, able to tailor them to group size if solo isn’t your thing, and provide a source of gil and the occasional piece of gear.

Cons

Hoo boy. Here’s the first big criticism section.

There simply aren’t enough Guildleves. People were optimistic during closed Beta on this score – “Oh, well, there may not be many Guildleves, but they won’t be the only way of leveling, who knows what other aspects of the game will be revealed in Open Beta!”

The answer, of course, was absolutely bugger all. When you are out of Guildleves, suddenly you are back in FFXI and you have to grind mobs for EXP. In a modern MMO, that is just ridiculous. You are able to get through the first five Battlecraft leves in the space of about half an hour, and after that… you’re somewhat at a loss. Their stated aim with FFXIV is to attract more casual players – but it seems, to me, that this has went so far past “casual” they are almost approaching “hardcore” from the opposite end. Honestly, how little time are we meant to be playing a day? Fifteen minutes? Yeah, right.

Grinding mobs, quite aside from not really being any fun, is also highly inefficient due to the absolutely stupid way you level up. You have your “Physical Level” which affects your stats (STR, DEX etc) and elemental resistances, and then you have your “Rank” which is effectively your level for whatever class your playing. Mobs give far too much Physical experience relative to Rank experience. Given that we are being encouraged to play multiple classes to mix and match their abilities, the fact your Physical level goes up far quicker than your Rank is ridiculous.

The reason it goes up so much faster than your rank is that mobs give set physical EXP. However, to rank up, you are reliant on getting class skill increases during combat, which are then awarded at the end of combat. With guildleve mobs, the contrast is stark – you may be fighting a bug that takes two or three hits to kill, thus providing little opportunity for skillups, but it then gives you something ridiculous like 900 Physical Exp. Even in longer fights, sometimes you get a good run of them, other times you are lucky to get one skillup of 40 in an entire battle.

The speed of Physical levelling itself is not a problem to me – it’s just a problem when compared to how much your rank lags behind, given you are encouraged to rank up multiple classes. It’s disheartening to be 3-4 Physical levels above your Rank when you haven’t even tried other classes yet.

Score: 4

Controls

Pros

Uhhh… If you played FFXI you might not have a huge amount of bother? That’s not really a pro, is it? No, FFXIV loyalist community, it most certainly is not. Movement isn’t too bad, as it’s standard WASD. That’s not really a pro either, it’s only a pro when compared to FFXI.

Cons

Mouse controls still pretty awful. No actual hardware mouse, so movement is laggy, targeting sometimes iffy, and there’s a distinct lack of hotkeys. There is a map hotkey, praise be, but no hotkeys for anything else – given how absolutely dire the UI is, some hotkeys to go straight to menus would be appreciated.

Score: 2

UI

Pros

Nothing.

Cons

Everything.

The UI is absolutely god awful. It makes me want to cry bitter, bitter tears. Absolutely nothing learned from FFXI in this department, it seems. First of all, takes way too many menus to do anything. For example, let’s take changing your weapon. You need to go through the following shenanigans;

1. Open main menu, either via Home Key or clicking menu button.
2. Open the Attributes and Gear submenu.
3. Click the main hand slot.
4. Find the weapon you want to equip, click it.
5. Press the “equip” button.

In this day and age, that’s far too much in the way of buttons. I really could not care a fig they are releasing this for PS3 at somepoint, and that’s the kind of menu a console game is limited to. This is the frickin’ PC version, I expect a UI tailored for a PC gamer. Seriously.

Interacting with objects is also a huge pain in the butt. You approach an object, a bouncing ! sign appears on your screen. You press this button and, rather than take you straight to a list of interactions for that object, it takes you to the main menu. Where you then click the button with the ! next to it, and then you are taken to the interaction list. What? That is just totally uneccessary. Skip the main menu, take me straight to the action list. In fact, skip the having to click the ! button that’s in the corner of the screen – allow me to click the damn object. Why does it have to be so hard?

The Synthesis interface is fine once you actually start the crafting process, but getting to that point requires much clicking and picking. Much to my amusement, people on FFXIV community forums have been deriding the “recipe list” of WoW crafting, but given the extremely clunky UI and control system, I’d much rather press “synthesis” and then pick an item to make from a list, rather than pressing synthesis, then choosing which hand to use, then picking ingredients (one at a frickin’ time) to use for crafting, then that brings up a list of what can be made with those items, then you have to confirm the item you are making, and finally you are told what crystals it needs to be made. Too. Many. Fricking. Hoops.

Score: 0

Other Stuff that’s probably terrible but I haven’t experienced

Repair system; requires that players do it if you want repairs anything past 50%, which is pretty sucky. Better than an EXP loss system, but why do NPCs only do it to 50%? That’s penalising people for either not having that craft themselves, or for not seeking crafters out. Instead of a 50% durability penalty, how about a bonus for people who DO get a player to do it? Maybe their gear can be repaired to 120% durability?

“Surplus” system; I may think you get too much Physical experience right now, but a system of gradually reducing EXP is not cool. It’s also not the answer to balancing “casual” and “hardcore” players – it’s just gonna piss people off. Again, like the repair thing, this is punishing people for the sake of balance. Why not give players who don’t play often some sort of EXP bonus, rather than inflict an EXP penalty on those that do? You should never punish players for playing.

Overall

Averaging out the scores I allocated above, FFXIV gets a score of  5.25/10. Yikes.

I really, really want to enjoy FFXIV, as in many ways it is a much improved version of FFXI, which I played for many years,  and there are large parts of the game I do like – but the problems with controls, the UI and levelling are so fundamental to playing the game that unless those are resolved for release, I’m not going to be playing FFXIV. If I’m feeling faithful in SE in a weeks time, I will leave me pre-order, get the game, and give it at least a good go for a month. If, by then, these issues haven’t been resolved to my satisfaction, SE won’t be recieving a subscription from me, unless someone comes to me in a few months and tells me that everything has been fixed and the game is wonderful.

Yeah, right.

With the flurry of Cataclysm information unleashed by Blizzcon, most people are looking ahead to the future of WoW. However, as someone who doesn’t expect to be playing WoW when Cataclysm is released, I’ve been looking to the past.

Though it hasn’t be obvious, I’m sure, I’ve kind of lost interest with WoW recently. Actually, I’m amazed at how long it held my interest! Back when I played FFXI, I had a sort of 3-4 month on, same off way of playing… I kept burning myself out. But with WoW, I played regularly from August last year, when that blasted fool Kazura sucked me back into it, until the start of June this year – ten months!

Can’t deny I enjoyed myself during that time – I experienced the wonders of Northrend with friends, discovered my true love of Shamanism, and met some fantastic people in raiding guilds. But if I’m truly honest, the best time was when I was a newbie, when everything was totally fresh and new.

One of the strong points of WoW, in my opinion, is how the game begins. Compared to FFXI, my previous MMO, rolling a character for the first time really feels exciting. In FFXI, you get a brief intro scene, some random citizens of your nation give you a quick hint about something, and then you are deposited in a random section of the city, without any real idea of what you should do first.

In WoW, you get that lovely little intro, sweeping across your starter area, with a brief history of your people as a voiceover.

Once that is complete, you are immediately faced with the famed Golden Exclamation for your first quest, giving you an immediate goal in the game. Over the new few hours, you quickly grow from the small starting village, into a larger town, before finally, around level 10 for most new players, wandering into your capital with a sense of awe. That build up – village, town, city – is much more fun, to me, than being dropped slap in the middle of a city!

Before you know it, you’re leaving the familiar surroundings of Mulgore, or Teldrassil, or wherever, taking your first steps into the wider world of Azeroth. As you grow, there’s that sense of anticipation, wondering what the next area will look like, what creatures will live there, and what jobs you’ll be able to do, and as you enter zones like Thousand Needles or Nagrand, there’s a sense of awe.

(My very first character, pictured here with an earlier incarnation of my beloved Erethia, on the famed Wetlands run. While the link straight to Stormwind saves a lot of headaching, it’s almost a shame to have lost such a rite of passage.)

(While not my first time –in- Ashenvale, it wasn’t until I go a full account and my Hunter into the 20’s that I truly experienced the zone, and I loved it. If I do play at some point during Cataclysm, it’s going to be so sad seeing the zone deforested!)

Of course, being an MMO, a huge part of the appeal is that you can experience this with your friends. Kazura, an RL friend, makes for a pretty good WoW companion… I guess. –grin- We had our fair share of adventures adventures as we made a push to Outlands (and beyond!), including the classic “OH SHIT A DEVILSAUR RUN!” moment.

But when you reach the level cap, the game is never the same – at least, not for the rest of that expansion. I don’t ever get the same sense of awe on seeing new raid zones and bosses as I did on that first night in Northrend, taking the turtle boat from the Borean Tundra right over to the Howling Fjord. In a way, expansions make everyone a newbie again, returning them to the excitement they had on first starting the game.

Unfortunately, that very quickly wears off. The places may be new, but it’s still the same game. Boredom creeps back into it. Though, in a way, that could make Cataclysm a very successful expansion – quite aside from the new zones, and updated old zones, classes like Hunter and Warlock are getting huge overhauls, as is the talent system – a core and almost unchanged aspect of the game. If I am playing, Cataclysm may revive some of my love for the game…

But you know what I’m really looking forward to? FFXIV. I want a fresh world! Azeroth’s history is interesting and fun, but I really do love the idea of going into a vast new world without any preconceptions, like I did with WoW (though that is part of the appeal for others – being able to truly explore the world of Azeroth they grew to love in the RTS games.)

Hopefully FFXIV learns a little from WoW, when it comes to being a newbie. I don’t want to be dropped right into the middle of civilisation – I want to start somewhere remote, somewhere it’ll feel right to start my adventure. I’m also looking forward to a new style of play – unfamiliar combat systems, different classes – though I’m kinda worried at the moment about FFXIV’s class system – there seems to be a distinct Physical / Caster split… But I want to be a Close Combat Caster, like I am in WoW as an Enhancement Shaman!

Hmmm.. Being new will be exciting. Hey, SE, WTB FFXIV now, PST.

What about you guys? Do you miss being new? Or is endgame what you live for – do bosses give you more of a thrill than they do me?

Mostly because there is some seriously messed up shit you can do in it!

Here’s some fun stuff!

1. Shower your wife with gifts, get her into bed, sex her up a little, and get her preggers. Then, fart in front of the baby (in a misguided attempt to amuse it), making her burst into tears, and you to leap from the upstairs window of the family home, onto the street below, and dash off to fight bandits.

2. When said baby is a child, she’ll decide to go off on an adventure in a cave filled with Hobbes (Goblins, basically). She wants to be a hero just like you.

-snuggles Child- Oh Annette, you silly child. You’re never going to actually earn your fathers love, no matter how much you achieve, so you might as well resign yourself to that fact and stop trying. You’re scaring your mother to death!

-blasts the heads off some Hobbes whilst escaping the cave- See, sweetie? Daddy is a master sniper. And you aren’t. Don’t go chasing Hobbes!

3. Resurrect some floozy from the first Fable in Zombie form after collecting her body parts, much to Stop’s delight. While kind of creepy, just look at those thighs!

In all seriousness though, I avoided Fable II for a while since I had been so disappointed with the first one, but I’ve really enjoyed it. Far superior to the first.

This blog is now about gaming in general.

What? It’s my domain, I can do what I want! –raspberry-

Hopefully there will still be WoW posts, but I need to rant about other games occasionally, too, and don’t want to use my RL blog for that purpose.

So, I’d like to talk about Too Human in this post.

Ok, so by this point, it’s been out for almost an entire year. I had been quite looking forward to the the game before release, but given it received mixed reviews and I was strapped for cash, I gave it a miss. Yes, reviews aren’t everything, but when you’re not making much money, you can only afford to buy the best.

Now that it’s been out for quite some time, the price has plummeted accordingly. I managed to nab it and Fable II as part of 2 for £30 deal after deciding to treat myself since I’ve had way too frickin’ much overtime for the past couple weeks and I was out of stuff to do when not working.

The story is absolutely fantastic.  It’s kind of surprising just how well the blend of Norse mythology and futuristic technology works. Going into the game with knowledge of the old Norse tales adds a good level of depth to it. I liked how they worked even minor things into it. For example, in the manual, they call Idunn’s cybernetic enhancements (which grant the Aesir immortality) the “golden apples of Idunn.” The “real” Aesir are somewhat unique amongst gods in that they were not naturally immortal – instead, one of their number, Idunn, cultivated golden apples which helped the Aesir maintain their immortality.

But the gameplay? Jeez, that really cheesed me off. Firstly, I found the controls very, very clunky. If you wanted to execute powerful finishers, you have to smash both analogue sticks in the direction you want to attack. This is actually slightly more difficult than it sounds for any directions other than forward, and aerial finishers are kinda hard to pull off at the end of a chain of normal swings.

Then there are just some really awful enemies. In the second and third stages, there are large mantis like enemies. Unless I missed something, there’s almost no way to avoid their attacks beyond attacking from afar with a Rifle. I was playing a Champion class, the strength of which lies in aerial attacks and pistols. Those bastards were tough.

The final thing is just how awful my luck with loot was. To regain health, you have to rely on health orbs dropped by defeated opponents. I found that when I was missing only a sliver of health, loads of the things would drop, but if I was low on health and dying of poison, nothing. This was hugely frustrating, especially given when you die, you have to sit through quite a lengthy scene where a Valkyrie comes to spirit you away.

Apart from that, the combat can be fun when you get into it. Something I loved was that one of the three melee weapon classes in the game was staves. It’s kinda rare for staves to actually be used for hitting things in games. Usually they just sit pretty and give stats. Thus, I mostly used staves on that play through. Also, the special abilites were a lot of fun. For example, by building up points from fighting, you’d gain combat levels, up to a maximum of three, used to cast “Ruiners.” With one combat level, mine was a fairly small explosion, with two, Baldur does an impressive backflip before charging at the foe as a fiery raven, and the third summons massive explosions over a truly huge area. Win!

Certainly isn’t a game worth the £40 it cost on release, but for £15, it was an absolute steal. Now I just need to wait ages for the sequel – dying to see how the story continues (though I have a vague idea.)