I will say that since I made my post, I have gotten addicted to FFXIV. It's quite good, but you have to chug through a lot (50h+) of somewhat mediocre content before you start hitting the expansions where the production values skyrocket. With that said, the boss fights even early on are some of my favorite content of any MMO and the music is absolutely beautiful. The combat starts off very slow, but once you unlock some skills and understand weaving (more or less the art of chaining skills together as efficiently as you can) it's also a blast.
No other MMO can really compare in that sense; XIV's bossfights are an elaborate dance set to beautiful music and supported by good combat mechanics. It's just too bad that there's so much fluff you have to get through first, and even more of a shame that the story doesn't become compelling until then either.
I picked it up to try it out as a time waster over the holidays, given how many other people were talking about it.
I'm only about 10 hours into so far, but I'm finding that there are some real tedious things in the non-combat gameplay. The weird pauses when interacting with something (could be a quest object, could be an NPC to start a dialogue, could be a gathering node) - it is reminiscent of playing EQ with a 500ms-1s ping. I don't know what my ping is with the server I'm on (I'm in a North American data center so it shouldn't be terrible), but I'm not inclined to believe it is latency but rather just how the command interacts with the game. The way the hot bar disappears for a half second when you interact with an aethernet stone. The ridiculously obnoxious "Quest Accepted! Quest Completed! Level up!" banner that you can't modify in any way. I kind of don't like the quest dialogue interactions either (the cutscene-ish ones that happen for the main story, as opposed to the incidental quests that just get speech bubbles) - you can skip the dialogue but not the animations that happen between dialogues, although you can skip the cutscene entirely. Given most of the cutscenes lack voice acting, being unable to skip them 'properly' after reading without skipping the entire thing is a bit of a time waste. Come to think of it, the incidental quests are annoying in this way too, when animations are involved (handing something to an NPC or being handed something).
I really don't like how inventory/item management works. I mean in the sense of how tooltips are handled, what they show. Needing to right-click and select Equip from the dropdown menu instead of just right clicking or double click (double left just picks it up and puts it down),
and also having to right click: compare to get a comparison instead of having it in the tooltip by default (I did have some complaint about gear comparisons but it seems it wasn't this; might have to do with seeing changes in bonuses instead of just ATK/DEF/MDEF). Similarly, having to click-drag or right click: hand over to move items to the Hand Over slot, instead of just double click, or having to actively use items through that system on quest objects instead of just being used directly. (They can also be put on a hotbar but either way, why do it that way at all? There's little difference between a quest object you interact with by itself versus one you can interact with only through a specific item you only get via the object's specific quest.)
At least you don't have to loot individual corpses. I can't imagine how much more tedious things would be if looting was subject to the same half second delay as you get with every other interaction.
Gathering (at least mining) is ridiculously tedious. When you interact with the node (subject to the same half second delay as interacting with anything), up pops a list of things you can try to harvest. You click one, take 3 seconds to go through the mining animation and pass/fail the attempt. Then you have to click again. But you can't click immediately after the last attempt, you have to wait for the animation to stop, with I guess some kind of GCD or cooldown time afterward, before you can click again. Can't just hold down on what you want to harvest, or otherwise somehow not click repeatedly unnecessarily several times.
Crafting isn't much better in that respect. I understand they wanted to try making it more involved than just "mash items together and poof! result", but every game I've seen that tried to do crafting Better (Vanguard, EQ2, Wildstar, LOTRO maybe?, and GW2 though I don't remember much of its system) seems overlook the fact that crafting requires mountains of fodder items to skill up with. If you need to craft these too, having a system wherein you must craft these items individually, with an involved process, is actually worse than the old system of 'pick something from a menu, click a button and wait 10 seconds." The advanced/involved crafting systems should be used only for final products. Wildstar might have handled this best with its experimentation system to learn the recipe, then let you create the items under a generic system, though as I say, I could see this being altered to have a broader variety of results for final items.
Maybe I'm being nitpicky. The combat itself seems fine, at least once I got used to having a GCD that isn't as telegraphed as what I was used to in WoW (my cast bar doubled as a GCD timer for instants, and included a latency marker for casting the next spell when you were technically able to but the server hadn't told you so yet due to lag). That said, I'm not exactly high level yet either.
Likewise, being low level, I'm of two minds about the whole "anyone can be any class (but you still have to level it)" thing. It kind of worked in Rift but - even if meta got in the way - Rift had a ridiculous number of classes for variety, on top of being able to mix/match souls, and you still had hard limits in class separation (a warrior can't be e.g. a mage soul). Feels like FFXIV's job list is very small to be letting anyone handle any role through a simple gear swap. Maybe I'm underestimating the investment cost of leveling all the jobs? Especially if people are saying it takes 200 hours to get level 50. Experience must fall off a lot, as I am level 20 and I'm not a recommended server with the accelerated experience.
I really wish they had addon support for expedient reason of having a mod that could filter out gold spam before I ever see it, as existed for WoW. It feels particularly problematic since about the only public chat I've seen has been gold spam. Does any kind of global/public chat (more global than linkshell, which are apparently limited to 128 users?) not exist? Otherwise, I presume all the chat is in linkshells? Like, even the cities were "dead" (no one talking in public, though it was well populated by players moving around; there was some emoting now and again). No chat in the non-city zones I went to (but then I rarely even crossed paths with anyone so they might be unpopulated too).
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Topic: MMOs? (Read 16780 times)