FFXIV - Win Or Fail

^this guy =D

WoW was "a massive game complete with endless stuff to do right when it came out." It was also technologically stable and feature-complete because they put 500+ developers on it and parked it in open beta for almost a year.

Even if you hate WoW like me, the landscape of what is necessary content and tech-wise for a successful MMO release has permanently changed since WoW. No MMO, even AAA titles with $50-100M+ budgets, have survived in this new landscape with a release that suffers from even minor bugs or problems with content quantity.

Warhammer, Age of Conan, Lord of the Rings, Aion, doesn't matter. They've all launched with 500-700,000+ subscribers and fallen to 10-20% of that within a year, because consumers just don't have the patience for shaky releases anymore. There's just too much competition from established titles.

The only thing I am wonder and I need to know.
Can you swim in FFXIV?
Do galkas in 11/ galka equiv. in 14 fear water?

This is what ive been saying -.-
but people are jumping on me saying "YOU CANT COMPARE A NEW GAME TO ONE THATS BEEN OUT FOR 7 YEARS!!!11ONE"

No you cant but thats what it is up against

I'm not knocking XIV because I want it to fail. I'm knocking it because I desperately want it to succeed, and I'm very scared for it given what I've seen so far, with launch supposedly only a few days away.

I just have my fingers crossed that SE is secretly brilliant and I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Obviously since you're knocking it you havent been in the beta and you are just a ffxi fanboy who doesnt know a good game when he sees one <.<

because anyone who knocks FFXIV is a retard

stop being a jackass and know when a game is good and doesnt need to be changed at all <_<

Nothing needs to change at launch because its perfect the way it is!

if anyone thinks serious about what i just wrote good for u

Jaerik is right, even though a bunch of people will want to like it because it wears the strong name of Final Fantasy, a lot of people will dislike it for a few things it's currently missing which is pretty basic, the search function is horrendous, the crafting system in a way is the same as FFXI, at this point people would expect to have a look at all the crafting recipes ingame at any time, not having to rely looking them up on the internet and a few other tweaks and such that are minimal.

The core of the game is good, and the mechanics, but all this few issues will easily turn a lot of people away quickly, and once people already has a bad concept and bad first impressions of the game it will be hard to draw people back.

i know jaerik is right

And a lot of people will insult it just because it's not FFXI, just like everyone on this forum. "It's different from FFXI so that means it's bad". Just ask Artemicion or Stiklelf.

You have to keep in mind there's a lot of trolls here butthurt all their time is going to waste.

That's exactly my point. People in this forum in particular are biased AGAINST the game, not for it. What few people there are that do have opinions are generally people that are still enjoying FFXI and see no reason to stop playing it.

That, or don't have the computer to support FFXIV.

but arguing on a forum ur time goes to waste...

Too bad you are on the same boat :/

Brilliant looking.... and yeah, basically that's it.

It's not the lack of challenge, shitty game-balance, complete lack of auction house, blatant disregard for what the userbase wants, a decade-old mentality of leaving out information everywhere, balancing the game for casual play(Exp penalty for extended play, levequest limits), while every mechanic for the world is a dead turn-off for casual players (No auction house, no information about what to do or what your decisions are), the lack of unique rewards, focusing the entire game around uninspiring repetitive grind with no variety or the absurd lack of proper communicative tools that will bring final fantasy XIV down; it's square enix.

Have you seen ANY of their recent games? Kane and lynch II, Supreme Commander 2, Nier etc. etc. and although i haven't played it and can't say anything about it, from what i hear FF13 have recieved lukewarm responses at best.
I know these were PUBLISHED by square enix and not directly developed, but they still played key roles in a lot of them, and NOT for the better.

SE does not listen to its users. They never have, and i don't see any signs of them starting to anytime soon. A competent developer would be able to resolve the issues FFXIV have in a month or less, but look at FFXI; 6 years in and we STILL have balancing problems at the core of THF, something as basic as windowing the game, common functionality in every god damn windows application even solitaire is capable of and they can't be arsed? GMs are useless, playonline is a usability travesty and look at their current development strategy! If ffxiv is also going to be constant contentless DLC expansions with 1 piece of equiptment and a single battle along with text quests a 5 year old could've written in the course of an afternoon then noone is going to pay to stick with it.

If FFXI had been released in the current market you can bet your mom it wouldnt have survived; for a company to not develop mentally for a full decade is god damn ludicrous and i fail to understand why any of you are defending this??? Look at the site you're on; why would anyone be here if they weren't final fantasy fans?
We all want this game to succeed, we all want square to get their heads out of their *** just long enough to notice that there is other stuff than feces in the universe, but not all of us are going to put on logic armor and grab our crusading blades with additional fire damage to stoicly defend SE until the bitter end; we ask WHY this game would do well and you ask why not; but thats not how consumerism works!
When i saw FFXIV i had NO idea why i should buy this game; i had NO idea what it had to offer, no idea what the story or setting was about and no idea how the classes work or how the game is played. After playing the game in the beta (I know beta is flawed, but thats not the point) i still don't know any of this, which forces me to conclude that the game does not have a unique selling point. If people can't see the point in buying a game they wont. That is why FFXIV is doomed.

I apologize for all the time you wasted typing this, and for your utter lack of knowledge for anything you're talking about.

Even though this is Square Enix, it's a different subdivision of the company that makes FFXI and FFXIV.

And even though recent Eidos games have SE's name on it, that's because Square-Enix bought Eidos in 2009, and they help publish the Eidos games. They don't make them on their own.

Before you bash something, try this thing called google, you can learn everything you need to know on that website, and by the sound of it, you really need to.

I haven't played XI in 3 years. Cliff hasn't in longer. I don't think Scragg does anymore either. So there's no investment bias towards XI.

Rather, we all have a vested interest in XIV being wildly successful. If anything, we're the biggest cheerleaders around, because we would very much like to have two sites like this instead of one.

It's precisely that vested interest that has me so worried. Fingers still crossed, but if I had such a habit, I would have chewed my nails off by now.

Just a bit of kiss arse, this site, still to this day impresses me. Very well done with the FFXI game.

All I have to say is that if FFXIV is the huge success that I expected it to be since I first heard is was suppose to be released, an FFXIVAH.com with all the features that FFXIAH.com has would be awesome, specifically the recipes because, once again, there is no information being given out by SE pertaining to a recipe list or for much else for that matter.

I would like to thank everyone that made this website successful and everyone who has contributed information to the website since it helped me a great deal with FFXI while I played.

The opening months of FFXIV are going to be rough and information is going to be quite fresh requiring a lot of people to gather information gradually so I hope that everyone is just as helpful in regards to FFXIV information as they were with FFXI.

p.s. Kudos to everyone who has already come up with the plethora of information already available with it just being a beta.

I don't get why this thread came to be. I had my doubts myself but the very experience of the game is breath taking in so many ways. Seriously, what more can you ask from this game that has improved so much content than the performance of FFXI?

Aside of graphics & sound track (and the annoying bag pipes removed from the game <3), the game play is realistic giving a cinematic feel, battle performance much more realistic & fun, and lots to do with ease navigation.

Sure there's bugs to be fixed but think about how FFXI had bugs too before it was fixed. I'm willing to tolerate this & I'm sure there's nothing worry about for the time being.

I'm just going to stay optimistic and hope that they are magically holding back about 90% of the game's content and that they will add some gear to the NPCs for at least a decent span of levels...say up to rank 10 or 12. Overall, the fighting has been pretty pleasant, the crafting is meh, but I liked Botanist a lot so that is cool, but I guess we will all just have to wait and see.

In the mean time, I will be playing Halo Reach up until the release of FFXIV on September 22nd for me and the others who got the collector's edition and September 30th for the others.

Fingers crossed :)

oh and don't we get like 1 month free or something with the collector's edition so it will be tolerable for at least that period of time...you will at least get what you paid for lol.

If they keep in that fatigue system then it will fail. If they take it out then it will win.

http://kotaku.com/5621786/final-fantasy-xivs-play+limiting-fatigue-system-explained

I'd just like to note, for a lot of people talking about how great WoW's launch was...Did we see the same World of Warcraft? I mean, this is the game that lost Penny Arcade's game of the year accolade because it was NOT AT ALL PLAYABLE.

This is the game that had to STOP SELLING COPIES because the servers were constantly going down because of lag. A game that had little to no support for the first few months of play. MONTHS. Servers crashing, unannounced maintenance, you name it, it happened.

The reason WoW made it wasn't because it had a good launch- it had one of the worst ones really, due to the hype surrounding it and it's unexpected popularity- it was because Blizz picked up the pieces and busted tail to try and keep up with the QQing and the server breaking and learned the important lesson of TALKING TO IT'S CUSTOMERS.

Aion devs aren't even in the US, so their PR department mostly consists of, "Gee, we sure hope we see these things in the future, but we don't know anything until they translate the patch notes!" Sqeenix seems to just kind of...Roll out with whatever they'd planned before, regardless of feedback. VERY hit or miss.

It sounds like, despite the problems, they HAVE been listening to the player base better this time, even if they do have to put their crazy M. Night Shalamalan-style twist on everything.

I belive that they should deley the game til they fix the issues before the launch. I love the graphics on this game even though I got to play it on low settings due to me having a low end computer compared to todays computers BUT they need to fix alot or this game will fail big time like I posted on 14 fourms that I get massive connection lag when playing the game dont matter which graphic setting I use. I do not like the battle system because it feels not like a FF game but I do like how they did with mining and such but havent tried crafting or fishing. I think SE is being so selfish that they are not listening to their na clients when we are trying to help them make a awesome game but I dont see me paying money for a game with so many issues is what im saying.

My first thing to say is, Who's to say they may have fixed these already for the launch release? As I've said, beta2 to beta3(open beta) didn't change really at all other then new cities and a very, very very small amount of quests/story opened. Basicly, teasers to the acually game.

Alot of people have commented on the lag issue, Its not your side, its there side. Its been beaten to death and that horse needs to be burried. I think they said it was fixed for launch someplace, But I'm not going to look for a quote someplace.

How you say there not listening to NA players is a joke. NA people bitched about a ton of things, mainly mouse controls. THEY SAID THEY FIXED IT, WAIT AND SEE WHAT THEY DID IN LAUNCH DAMMIT.

Do you think SE reads this forum? It would be awesome if they did.

Well they read about the false rumor being spread about EXP surplus heh, so most likely yeah. It all depends on topics and the popularity of it too.

Danger!!! Extremely Long, Inflated sense of self worth post detected. Proceed at your own risk!!!

Every (Including Japanese) source and interview indicates that user feedback and suggestion is almost entirely consistent in terms of what is commented upon and how it should be changed. With of course, the big target being the unwieldy UI. It's hard to believe that Square acknowledges that in just about every interview I've ever seen, yet hasn't taken any measures to fix it, or if they have, they sure are keeping it under wraps pretty damn well.

I still think the game play concepts and design of FFXIV are so far beyond FFXI it's almost insulting to suggest FFXI is a better constructed game.From the combat, to the travel system, FFXIV has a strange way to make things feel uneasily naturalistic in terms of how they blend together.

The atmosphere is also much more rich than FFXI, which I have always had a high opinion of, so make no mistake that I'm saying XI was particularly weak there. And of course, the graphic quality tops even most Single-Player games, while, for all it's GPU asskicking requirements, actually plays very well when you can manage to get it to work.

The Art Dirction for FFXIV has much more integrity as well. While FFXI had great quality, the actual art (With exception of some trademark things) had a very "Generic" feel. In FFXIV, everything is punctuated by a sense of artistic style that I always found FFXI to be lacking. This stems back from the strength of the atmosphere no doubt, everything, from how the citizens(NPC) of each City-State are dressed, to the curiously bulbous dodo cocking it's head at your approach. Detail in the art brings the game to a simply phenomenal level of immersion, while keeping the wholesome FF charm that prevents things from becoming an FFVII,FFVIII angst-fest.

(nom,nom, FFXIV balls is nummy)

Okay, enough of that.

All that praise however, is almost entirely countered by the technical failings of FFXIV. For all it's depth of character design, visual fidelity, and great systems, each is brought down by one or more technical flaws that may doom FFXIV, despite all the potential the game has.

Granted, all this is based on the beta build, while it's possible FFXIV has the magic Day1 gold patch to fix everything, I am not holding my breath. The only reason I consider that even a possibility though, is how painfully wrong some of these tech flaws are, that ignoring them is tantamount to fiscal suicide for SE.

The Clunky UI is the most damning non-bug related technical issue with FFXIV. Every time you feel yourself getting lost in the world of Eorzea, you have to open up the games atrocious menu systems, and get knocked right back into your seat. I often joke, that all the time you save with things like Anima-travel, and Guildleve exp'ing, is lost half-again in the Menus. And it's not far from a fact.

The number-two concern of mine, is the Economy and retainer system. Another baffling deviation from the lauded "Quick-play" design philosophy of some of the core content of FFXIV, the Market wards are a great bazaar alternative and evolution of the concept, but, as a famous quote goes "At what cost?!". Searching for one item in the market wards is literally, trying to find a needle in a haystack. The problem is bad enough on it's own, but exacerbated by the terrible UI you have to fight through to do it. What's more, is Square seems to have forgotten that everyone is going to start Rank-Level 1. And right now, aside from "Weathered" (Level 1, and sub-par even then) equipment is all that's available. On My Beta Lancer, I'm still using the Weathered Spear (Though I replaced it a few times due to item wear) despite being rank 15. Foresight never was Square-Enix's strong point...

Optimization and Poor programming, leading to what the general consensus is, a memory leak within the game, is right now No.1 Issue. All the above can be forgivin in my eyes if the damn game wouldn't close out every 5-120 minutes, and become unplayable in around half that for low-mid end machines. The issue affects Dozens of different hardware configurations, and apparently the only ones not affected, are those who don't play long enough to experience issues. This points at a dire programming error, and not an issue with individual hardware/software.

There are many other small technical issues, things such as respec limit, anima regeneration, but those are small-fry compared to the three above. I believe those will cause the greatest pain for FFXIV players.

TL;DR:
FFXIV has Tons of potential, equal amounts of problems.

P.S. I bet you read this in Henry Killinger's voice.

Excellent feedback post and I agree on every point.

What do you mean by memory leak? What will affect from it?