Personally, I loved FFXI. Played it for almost two years from launch before I had to give it up for school. I always wished I could go back and play it again, but by the time I could the game had developed so far beyond what it was when I left that it felt a bit pointless to try and catch up.

When I heard about XIV just over a year ago, I was stoked beyond words. I KNEW that it was going to be great and I KNEW that the gameplay and immersion were going to be above and beyond anything we've seen in the MMO market in a while. I had absolutely no inkling that there was any chance that Square might disappoint. None. FFXI was just that good to me that I had no question that XIV was going to be awesome...oh dear, has this week been an eye-opener.

I've got a long-standing pre-order that I'm going to need to cancel, unfortunately. I've been playing the open beta for 4 days now and in my opinion Square just doesn't seem to have their shit together. Technical, server-wise, gameplay-wise. About the only thing that's meeting my expectations is the art design and direction - and even that's not perfect. I agree with the criticism of some of the technical issues that many have pointed out - really poor server performance, unoptimized game engine, bad UI, etc...

...but I won't talk about that as I feel it's been well-discussed on these boards and elsewhere.

Even if Square had all the technical issue fixed, the game is still missing so much of what made FFXI a good game. It's not intuitive. It's clunky and and the new player experience/tutorial is very sloppy and vague. Even as FFXI vet I had trouble figuring out what I was supposed to do next at times. The flow of the gameplay and combat are both slow and unwieldy. Targeting is a pain in the ass - you can click or tab; either one is likely going to wind up with you selecting yourself or the wrong enemy half the time. Using abilities is laggy and a pain in the ass. Abilities often lag out or don't respond at all and have to be used again. Crafting is just a total question mark. The only way to figure out how to craft anything is to do research on the web - and that's just not immersive, especially when alt-tabbing crashes the client 100% of the time. Harvesting is mind-numbingly boring. I can barely get myself to harvest for an hour, I don't see how I'm going to want to do it for hours or days, let alone how you're going to coax me into paying $15 a month to do it. The whole Levequest system feels like it was tacked on at the last minute. It seems to be born out of laziness, which is strange for a Japanese game - instead of writing real quests with dialogue and depth like XI had, you get this crappy quest-from-a-crystal thing. 30 people all standing around a crystal to get "run over here and kill x amount of things" quests. Ugh. To make the whole levequest system worse - you would think it would encourage partying, but it does the opposite. People seem more prone to solo when all they have to do is go to the crystal, run to mob, kill mob, get teleported back to crystal. Rinse. Repeat. They've taken all the running around out of the game to make it easier for casual players, but in the process they've made questing feel trite and meaningless and ruined some of the immersion. Combat doesn't feel as well thought out as it did in XI. It's not clear how abilities should be used together. The flow of combat is clunky. So many abilities require positioning to be effective, but positioning is nigh impossible to maintain because enemies move and path erratically during combat. Oh, and forget about ever getting armor/weapons/repairs/crafting materials when you need or want them. Not having an auction house makes it pretty much impossible to find what you need in less than half an hour to an hour because you will be spending that time running around the entire city clicking other players and hitting "Browse". I could go on, and on. Suffice it to say the list of things that need work is much longer than the list of things that work.

/rant

What does the game have going for it? It's visually stunning. Character creation is deep and rewarding. The three beginning storylines for each city seem interesting, though some more than others, and the storylines are well integrated with the gameplay just as they were in XI. But really, that's about it.

I would love to see what kind of game XIV is in 6 months to a year. But I know that at launch it will be bad, because 2 weeks is simply not enough time to fix all the issues that the game has. I won't say I'll never play FFXIV, but I can say that I won't be playing it in 2010. I'm tired of rewarding developers for pushing half-baked products to market. In the meantime, Square Enix will be joining the growing list of developers who had great debut titles in the MMO market, but who failed to deliver on their sophomore endeavors: Mythic, Turbine, and Verant/Sigil/SOE.

I didn't understand the statement of KoTOR being a "Second-Age MMO"... I thought this was a single-player game? And he can't be referencing Star Wars: TOR since it's not released yet. I'm assuming, then, that this was a typo?

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Originally posted by Venger
Well deserved indeed!  To bad more developers don't try to expand on UO's core design instead of pumping out EQ's core design over and over and over (did I mention over) again.

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Indeed. I don't know why the UO design was never built on. I find skill-based MMO's far superior to class-based/level treadmills.

It seems Asheron's Call tried to pick up where UO left off, but that's really the last notable appearance of the skill-based MMO. Unless you count EVE, but that's an entirely different genre and different niche market. I'd love to see a modern, successful re-imagining of the skill-based system. One that doesn't try to hybridize it with a leveling/class system either.

Congrats to UO for the honor, it's definitely deserved and kudos to Forbes for the old school MMO recognition. :D

It's hard to pick just 3, but I'll try. These are 3 moments in an MMO that I'll never, ever forget.

1.) Playing my character with the Skara Brae Rangers on Lake Superior shard. I played an archer/bowyer/ranger-type with no magic skills at all. The SB Rangers were an RP guild, and we spent a lot of time defending Skara from unruly types, hunting orcs and visiting Rivendell, the nearby player-run town. Our guild hall was actually the ranger guild right outside the SB docks that some GMs had fixed up for us, and I had a blast defending it from murderers and thieves that would always show up for a fight because they knew the Rangers would always be there to give them a good fight. Obviously this was before the whole Trammel disaster that ruined the game. The moment that sticks out most in my mind was when we trapped this one infamous murder who got a little too confident of his skill in our box formation and humbled him a bit.

2.) My time in the Armie uf Oggok on the E'ci server in the original EverQuest, before any expansions. It was an Ogre guild, another RP guild and I played an Ogre warrior named Gamkrog. I remember a few weeks after launch, we got really brave because we were all around level 15 and ready to leave the Feerott and Southern Oasis area. So a group of us, 7-10, I think) ventured out one day to the Rathe Mountains which was a completely unexplored territory for us and most everyone in the game, because it was just a few weeks after launch and it was so far from the other starting areas of everyone except Ogres and Trolls. So we ventured in and explored a bit. Lots of great roleplaying and excitement of what was around every corner. We ran across giant skeletons and freaked out, but our leader rallied us together and we tried to fight one. It was a long and brutal fight, and we ended up losing, but it was so much fun and a great RP event for the guild. Also, I had my first item camping experience here a few levels later when another Ogre from the guild and I traveled all the way to Befallen to camp the ogre shadowknight for his Barbed Bracers. I stayed up all night and my partner hung out with me until we both got a pair of bracers. First camping experience, seems a crazy thing to do in retrospect, especially in modern MMOs but we did it, and so did the majority of players. :D

3.) In World of WarCraft. I was hanging out with some guildies (Horde) in Western Plaguelands goofing off and popping in and out of the dungeon there (can't remember the name of it for some reason). But we got bored, finished the instance, or whatever and started to wander into the Alterac Mountain zone where that little Alliance camp is. Well, we decided to flag and mess around with the locals. :D We would flag and walk around in formation, sort of RPing. Even though we weren't attacking anyone or anything, just being flagged and walking in formation was enough to provoke curiosity from the Alliance, and a few of them started to attack us. We went into guerilla warfare mode and took to the trees near the border of the Alliance camp. We'd wait for some Alliance player to try and flush us out, then our rogue friend would jump out of the shadows and disable them and we would destroy them. lol. It was great fun cause we were all on Vent, and doing something out of the ordinary for a change and hopefully making the game a bit more interesting for the Alliance players that were fighting us too.

I really don't game near as much as I used to. I'm finishing up my last year of college and have a part-time job...so all free time during the week is spoken for.

I try to play games on the weekends, but I just can't find anything I like. Even singleplayer, FPS, RTS and other "classic" types of PC games bore me to tears. The last game I got really hooked on was WoW, and I stopped playing that over a year ago.

It feels like all the games I try to pick up nowadays are so similar, nothing stands out. I'm losing my passion for the hobby. I went from a high school student who spent 99.9% of his free time playing video games to a graduating senior who can barely play a game for 5 minutes without losing interest.

I think I'm... I'm getting... old! 

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Originally posted by SundersGhost
Okay, so let me begin with your first sentence. It's just not going to work out well for YOU.  not Us.  YOU.  From then on, what you state should be rethought from the angle of YOU, not US.  Thank you for sharing with us how the game will not work for YOU.  If that is truly the case, as has been said before by even Mark himself, don't buy the game if it is not right for you.  For those it works for, they can play the game and be happy.
Also as has been said, if you want the game to be delayed and it is not, simply do not buy it.  Wait 6 months, or a year, however long you think it should be delayed, and buy the game then (If the game is something you are interested in) and it can be the same as if they had delayed it... for you.
To save people the time of posting tangent rants about how we should not pay to Beta a game, that too is the choice of those who wish to pay for the game now, as opposed to later.  If YOU do not wish to pay for the game in its current state, don't.  For those that find it worth paying for now, permit them to without imposing your personal agendas on how they wish to spend THEIR leisure time and funds.  Thanks.
 

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I'm sorry, SundersGhost, but this post was for US not YOU. So kindly remember that when I was writing this post it was for US not YOU. So if YOU don't agree with it, YOU don't have to comment on it, YOU can let US discuss it. YOU should go to another thread to comment where people are writing posts for YOU. Thanks.

See how pretentious and annoying that is?

It's just not going to work out well for us, any way you slice it, unless the game is delayed until it is FINISHED.

They're cutting two tanks, and two melee DPS. Now maybe those classes are only being delayed until after launch or maybe they're not going to be put into the game at all...Mr. Jacobs said they haven't decided yet.

Here's the problem:
If you cut out the tanks for any race, you now have a race that has no tank. This means they're no longer self-reliant. They now have to depend on a tank from another race if they need a meat shield for any specific content.

Normally that wouldn't be that big of a problem EXCEPT that A) It doesn't really fit with the lore of the Warhammer world (Games Workshop has to be upset about this) and B) They've ALSO cut the cities down to only TWO cities!!!

Now what's going to happen? You have races that can't be self-reliant, which is going to interfere with the lore of the game world and strip away racial identity because players are going to pretty much be forced to mingle with other races. You also have all the races smashed together in the Human and Chaos cities. This will strip away whatever small bit of racial identity was left for the Orcs/Dwarves, High Elf/Dark Elf segments.

Remember all the race-specific Tier zones? Whatever happened to all that? Each race with it's own area to level up and battle their own sworn enemies. Guess we can kiss it goodbye, because it's going to be hard to have race specific areas if everyone is starting out in the same city.

What the eff, Mythic? The thing I was most looking forward to MMO-wise was seeing an accurate depicition of the Warhammer world, a world with a lot of racial tension and infighting. Now you're spinning your heels on us this late in the game?

I could deal with the frail alliances between the different races for the sake of game mechanics, it wasn't a big deal. But this latest move of cutting a fourth of the classes and mashing all the races into one city each...it's really a bad, bad idea.

I see no way this can work the way you've laid it out and still end up a Warhammer game. You said you wanted to do it right. You said you wanted to be faithful to the material. You seem to be ACTING like you want to be the next Blizzard and not release games until they're done. So DO IT and stop caving to stockholders.

When it comes to haughty development principles, it's put up or shut up. Actions not words. Make the game the way you intended to, the way you told me you would, or I'm not buyin'. Tell that to your benefactors.

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Originally posted by Gayia Feel like Ive spent most of this early access in downtime. sigh

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I'm gonna be all over the Bear Shaman...decided this several days ago. I played a troll shaman in EQ and love the idea of shaman magic with melee thrown in. I expect the AoC shaman to be a bit more melee-oriented, though. :D

Originally posted by Cikbik

no it wont, its still going to have the same elitist horrible community

Question: How can an MMO have an elitist community when it controls 70-80% of the market, and thus the majority?

You can't be elite if you're part of the majority.