Final Fantasy XIV Online

So the audience is divided, the press is spilling out unenthusiastic reviews, and the development team is promising everything will be alright by December. That's the condensed three-part saga of Final Fantasy XIV Online, leaving you more or less up-to-date. The final chapter of a poor launch is the patches that start flooding in to balance out the obvious issues. And it's unfortunate that one of the resounding catchphrases that's come out of the FF's first month is "you can't patch fun".

For the veteran WoW player, FFXIV is just weird. By design Eastern MMOS feature more grinding than their Western counterparts, an aspect that some Asian MMOs have tried tuning down for the sake of a wider appeal. Aion in particular marketed itself as a limited grinder, and while aspects of the Asian grind design philosophy are referenced in FF, it's dealt with in a truly bizarre manner.

Instead of limiting the grind by bringing in more varied gameplay, FFXIV just limits gameplay altogether. And it still gives you the grind. Go ahead and log into the game, and you get a quaint pop-up window reminding you that:

"Exploring Eorzea is a thrilling experience. During your time here, you will be able to talk, join, and adventure with many other individuals in an experience that is unique to online games. That being said, we have no desire to see your real life suffer as a consequence. Please do not forget your family, your friends, your school, or your work."

Bless. Translate that sentiment another way, however, and it's essentially a portent of doom for gameplay. Because this is one of the dark clouds, the shadowy gorillas of FFXIV: there's a limit to how many quests the game grants you on a daily basis, and a temporary penalty on your EXP if you continue grinding.

FFXIV has a few forms of quests, ranging between the game's Levequests to its ongoing storyline. Within the first few levels of the game the quests you pick up are part of a single story-arc that uses cut scenes and player-instances to drive the plot. And while FF Online is essentially an attempt to emphasise the RPG side of MMORPGs, its RPG tendencies still only make up a small portion of the game. Specifically, its story is limited to questlines that are only available at certain levels; you start one at level one, get another at level 10, another at 15, and so on. Meaning in between storylines you'll be dealing almost entirely with Levequests.

For the layman the closest similarity would be daily quests, and similar to dailies these are acquired from a central location. A regional Levequest might ask you to go to a particular area to kill a certain number of enemies, for instance, within a particular time limit. Alternatively you get local Questleves which can be dealt with without leaving the area and which generally involve crafting.

Then things get a bit muddled. FF offers eight regional and local Levequests per 48 hours, which reset at a specific point server-side. When you trade in your finished quest, the stars awarded for the completed quest increase the rewards of the next assignment you choose. However, if you happen to log off or move to a different zone while on your quest, it will fail and you'll be unable to pick up a new one until it resets. If you're confused by this, then you're in good company. FFXIV has issues that go beyond the East/West divide. It would be easy to blame the difficulty of the game on years of being mollycoddled by the Western traditions of the genre, but similarly the problems extend far beyond an FFXIV/WoW divide.