Final Fantasy XIV Hands-On

I’ve spent a huge, inordinate chunk of the last two years writing about Final Fantasy. Thanks to UFFSite and this place, the amount of coverage I’ve had to churn out about Final Fantasy XIII, XIV, Versus XII, Crystal Bearers and a ton of other titles bearing that name is insane, yet it still hasn’t quite sunk in that Final Fantasy XIV is less than a month away.

In fact, if you’re buying the special edition it’s only a little over two weeks away, with that arriving on September 22nd. It’s slightly surreal to think that we’re going to get two numbered Final Fantasy titles in one year, only just over six months apart – but then you have to remember – this is an MMO – essentially Final Fantasy XI 2.

It definitely feels like that, too. While some things have been changed for the better – the battle system sped up massively, for example – the game still bears all the signs of being made by a team who felt that Final Fantasy XI was a very strong MMO, and has consciously steered away from the trend towards accessibility kicked off by World of Warcraft in favour of an MMO that is more immediately accessible but just as horrifyingly, life-threateningly deep once you scratch past the surface.

The way Hiromichi Tanaka and his team over at Square Enix Japan have made the game more accessible is simple – they’ve made it easier to solo. Final Fantasy XI was famed for requiring a group for all but the most menial of quests, and for those who don’t have friends who play the game or those with more irregular playing hours, this was a massive problem. Final Fantasy XI required major commitment, while XIV is designed to be a game that one can pick up and play for half an hour at a time – and alone, should you wish to do so.

It’s all based off the GuildLeve system, which we’ve gone into immense detail on in our previous couple of previews, found here and here. However, in a nutshell, GuildLeve lets you choose how many players are undertaking a quest at its onset. You can choose from solo right the way up to a massive mob of players, and based on what you choose the difficulty of the enemies, the number of them, and how impressive the rewards will be.

I spent a good chunk of my time in the closed beta playing alone, though I did team up with a few buddies later on to see how grouped quests play out. The answer is pretty much the same, but with more factors, as to be expected. There’s a dynamic map that’ll direct you to the next quest object or enemy, which is always nice, though I did encounter a bug a few times where enemies I had to kill to complete the quest wouldn’t spawn so I had no choice but to quit.

Overall the GuildLeve (or LeveQuest) system is a very welcome addition to the style of the game and is a perfect fit, offering up plenty of solo opportunities and also allowing players who think they’re a bit bad-ass to take on a quest solo but choose the “party of four” option to see if they can hold off enemies designed to be taken on by a larger group alone. It’s a fun idea, and manages to keep Final Fantasy XI’s unique quest giving but also make it friendlier.

Another way in which the system has been streamlined is the job system. Like in Final Fantasy XI regardless of your choices in character creation you can fill just about any role by just changing the weapon in your main hand. In line with that, characters have a ‘physical’ level, which determines base stats, and then a ‘rank’ with each weapon, determining their proficiency and the moves available to them with that weapon.

What quests you can take on are determined by both physical and weapon level, so it’s definitely important to concentrate and focus yourself in certain areas to ensure a continually moving progression.

It’s a fun, interesting and unique system, and I found myself switching effortlessly between spellcasting, using my spear (my natural class weapon) and crafting basic items of clothing by just switching weapons.

This new ease of which you can swap has informed other design decisions in the game, making the whole experience hinging on your ability to quickly change and be an adaptable warrior rather than a one-move wonder. The dependence on swapping drops with a larger party, but if you’re soloing you’d better get used to swapping.

In terms of how you swap, it’s easy – you just open up the menu and switch the weapon in your main hand, but the menus themselves are a bit of a pain. Final Fantasy XIV is, like its predecessor, a game designed to be played with a controller, though when I plugged in an Xbox 360 controller I found the menus often confusing and difficult to navigate.

It’s a weird situation, as combat and general gameplay actually functions better with a controller, but many of the menus feel sluggish, unresponsive and badly laid out when you’re using a controller. In fact, they feel that way often enough with a mouse, but the controller amplifies the problem.

The whole situation with the slightly rubbish UI is actually analogous to a lot of the issues with Final Fantasy XIV on the whole: the game has great concepts and ideas that are damaged by the way they’re presented.

For example, the cutscenes are lovingly produced and impressive for an MMO, but so many lack voice that it feels a little soulless – mouths flapping in cinematically directed scenes, with only subtitles accompanying it – it’s distracting. Not to mention the fact that the chat window never disappears, even when you’re in a cutscene that takes place in an instance.

This causes a weird phenomenon where the text of what characters are saying not only appears in the dialogue box (center of the screen) but also in the chat box (to the left), twice, within pixels of each other. I find it hard to believe that nobody on the team has flagged this up, as while it’s petty thing to find irritating it really began to naff me off when I was trying to concentrate on the game’s story, which promises to be high quality.

Likewise, the server performance in the closed beta has been mediocre at best, and weird graphical glitches are fairly common, but all these are things that could change significantly before the final release, so it’s hard for me to outright call them out in case they are fixed.

Final Fantasy XIV feels like a marked improvement and evolution of ideas in Final Fantasy XI, but the fact is that looking at the closed beta it seems incredibly likely that it’s going to take a period of time before the game reaches its true potential. Final Fantasy XI likewise launched a little broken and grew into itself, and it feels like Final Fantasy XIV may have to do the same.

If there’s one thing Final Fantasy XIV has going for it, it’s that it is an almost completely alone beacon of something different in a sea of World of Warcraft clones. It’s brave and different, like its predecessor, and that alone is sure to impress some. It’s also very pretty, which helps.

We’ll have to wait and see how many of Final Fantasy XIV’s issues remain by the time the game launches, but the important thing so far is that the game has some really impressive, solid fundamentals of gameplay. Here’s hoping Square Enix build on them in the correct way.