Eorzean Evening Post: Play With Me... Please? .

I need to start this week’s column with an errata – last week I called the new healer class/job “Astrologist”, when it’s in fact “Astrologian”. Sorry about that, folks.

With that out of the way, I hope you’re all having a good Starlight Celebration! I have to say that I’m of two minds when it comes to this event. I do like how they’ve used the player owned houses as a part of the daily quests, but I was quite disappointed when the new stuff that was supposed to be introduced on the 24th turned out to be nothing except a new, alternative price for Hoary the Snowman. Either we misunderstood Square Enix completely, or something went very wrong somewhere.

With no big news coming out over Christmas, I’d like to discuss something different this week – getting friends to play Final Fantasy XIV. Or, to be more exact, having trouble with getting them to stay once they do.

JOIN THE DARK SIDE

Over the last month or so, I’ve managed to get two friends to try out Final Fantasy XIV with me. We used to play World of Warcraft together back in the day, and while our lives – and gaming habits – look completely different now compared to what they used to, both happily accepted my recruit a friend-codes. Both of them logged in, both of them disappeared again soon after.

The first friend did give some good feedback on the game before he stopped playing, so I’m not 100% sure why he stopped logging in. The second one did get back to me and didn’t have many nice things to say about his first steps in Eorzea. Granted, he didn’t play long – and have kids taking up a lot of his time – so his views might have changed if he had been able to get more hours in. MMOs can be notoriously slow in the beginning and can also be really bad at wowing people straight away – an issue for many games, not just Final Fantasy XIV. Still his criticism was valid and made me think about the things that can scare a new player away within the first few hours. And if that criticism was valid, why did I personally stay and what hooked me?

KILL TEN RATS

Let’s be honest here, Final Fantasy XIV’s quest design is far from innovative. Most of the quests are of the traditional “go and here and click this thing/person” or “kill 10 rats”-varieties. When you start playing, a lot of your time is spent in your starting capital city – talking to people, picking stuff off the floor, running outside the city only to kill some low-level mobs. While the pace of the storytelling does pick up after a while, this quest design will follow you through most of your journey to level cap and beyond. The only thing that deviates from this norm would be quests that send you into dungeons, but that’s still a regular staple of the MMO genre. Not very exciting.

Here’s where my second friend ran straight into a brick wall. When he sent me a text complaining about it, I realised that I couldn’t really argue with him. That’s just the way it is. I’ve personally panned games in the past because of these exact reasons. It doesn’t get better either; try explaining the tome-grind to someone already fed up with killing ten rats (or marmots).

COOLING DOWN

I didn’t think that much of it when I started playing again, but after leveling one job to level 50 it become obvious when I went back to level the rest – Final Fantasy XIV’s combat can be slow. One of the reasons is the global cooldown, which is really long for MMO standards. If you’re used to World of Warcraft or, even worse, Wildstar, combat in FFXIV can feel like a slog.

While my friends never mentioned this, I did get a bit worried when I heard that the second guy had decided to start out as Thaumaturge – one of those classes that many seem to agree can be pretty boring until they hit level 40 or so. But I feel the hit every time my dragoon is leveled down for whatever reason. The more abilities and spells you unlock, the faster the game gets. Take them away and combat becomes increasingly slow and – at times – boring. It’s kinda frustrating to see the final attacks in your regular combos get grayed out. For a new player who doesn’t know how crazy it can get later in the game, it can be a deal breaker. When you have three or four abilities to choose from, “Titan Extreme is really crazy intense” isn’t much of a selling point.

GIVE ME THAT OLD TIME RELIGION

In short, Final Fantasy XIV is really traditional. We’ve done its quests countless times before, the combat is slow and the same old hot-bar-tab-targetting affair we’ve seen in oh so many MMOs. It follows the holy trinity of class design, without adding anything new to the dungeon experience. I’ve seen the dreaded “WoW clone”-label thrown around.

There’s no real reason to defend the game against that criticism, or try to come up with excuses for it. So why did I stay?

There’s a few reasons why, the most important one being that all of this is wrapped up in a long, epic story. While it might not be grand literature, very few games are, it’s filled with great characters and exciting plot twists. When the Leveilleur twins turned up for the first time, for example, I simply had to know who the hell they were. When you see the Ultima Weapon being transported in one of the first major cut scenes, I knew I was in for some real Final Fantasy goodness. It might be superficial in some ways, but it was one of the main reasons why I stuck with the game.

I have to admit that I did find some comfort in the traditional gameplay of Final Fantasy XIV. It didn’t manage to grab me around the launch of 2.0, despite the amazing changes from 1.0, but when I started to play again this year I came straight from Wildstar. Wildstar’s combat might be one of its strong points, but I burned out on it – and the rest of the game – really quickly and found something soothing in FFXIV’s non-attempt to reinvent the wheel. In a time when I felt like giving up on the MMO genre, it was exactly what I needed.

With the lack of abilities, I simply didn’t know better and didn’t think about it. The global cooldown was a shock at first, I had forgotten how long it took, but I also got used to it really quickly. After a while, I didn’t think about it anymore. Again, Wildstar might have had a role to play in this. Its combat is frantic, to the point that I often started to evade it because I couldn’t be bothered. It was good in short bursts, but a MMO is meant to be played for hours, days, weeks and months – silly perhaps, but I never really felt like I could relax when playing Wildstar. Once I unlocked increasingly difficult dungeon, the encounter design really started to shine as well.

OPENING UP

That only explains why I kept playing, though. Why am I as hooked as I am, why do I even bother with the soldiery/poetics farming and tome grinding (because seriously, ugh) these days? I’ve finished up the 2.4 story – both for Shiva and Hildibrand – and yet I log in more or less every day to run dungeons, turn up for A- and S-rank hunts and chat with my linkshells.

Like most MMOs, Final Fantasy XIV takes a while to open up. Once it does, I saw it for the great, solid MMO it truly is. Combat might be slow compared to other games, but it works so well – and it opens up for some really great, and challenging, encounter design later. That you can be all classes on the same character might feel incidental at first, but the synergy between them – the cross-class skills – has made me approach them like I “gotta catch them all”. I love my Chocobo in a way I’ve never felt for a mount in any MMO before, all thanks to the training montage cutscenes when feeding him. Eorzea, as a world, is a really cool place – the story helps to build it up and fills it with details. Then there’s the usual Final Fantasy-stuff, like characters, monsters and story tropes, that feeds my constant nostalgia from when we locked ourselves up for weeks playing the Playstation 1-games right after having moved away from home for the first time.

Add in Square’s aggressive update schedule, and what looks to be an incredible expansion, and I’ve finally found a new MMO that I can truly say that I love. It’s traditional, but it doesn’t matter when it’s been polished to such a shine. That said, that is also the game’s biggest weakness for some players, and I’ll simply have to accept that fact.