FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot and other reviews & hilarious discoveries about FFXIV

[Aeni]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

"Square-Enix has the worst customer support EVER and this game SUCKS. I mean, LOOK AT THE REVIEWS PEOPLE. I'm pissed at all these issues, but damn I'm still going to support them and play. They still piss me off, though."

I only want account-based retainer.

I could do w/o everything else but an account-based retainer. Then I'll just sit there and admire a pair of hand crafted, beautifully made Miqo'tes standing around in a blank and devoid world.

[Etra]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

"Square-Enix has the worst customer support EVER and this game SUCKS. I mean, LOOK AT THE REVIEWS PEOPLE. I'm pissed at all these issues, but damn I'm still going to support them and play. They still piss me off, though."

I love you.

[Malacite]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

^ What TGM said. The slew of announcements they put out today is very encouraging.

[TheGrandMom]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

"Square-Enix has the worst customer support EVER and this game SUCKS. I mean, LOOK AT THE REVIEWS PEOPLE. I'm pissed at all these issues, but damn I'm still going to support them and play. They still piss me off, though."

For an additional free month and planned changes, yes I'll still play. Partly because I'm a fangirl and partly because I hook up with old friends in game. And there is nothing wrong with playing and complaining, how do you think shit gets fixed? With SE, its a wait and see prospect and all we have to weigh it against our experience with FFXI, which wasn't very good in the CS dept. With the most recent announcement, I've seen a turnaround in their attitude....but time will still tell, I'm not totally convinced.

[Aksannyi]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

That only applies to a few of the people here.

[Absentia]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

"Square-Enix has the worst customer support EVER and this game SUCKS. I mean, LOOK AT THE REVIEWS PEOPLE. I'm pissed at all these issues, but damn I'm still going to support them and play. They still piss me off, though."

[Malacite]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

which has always been in pretty short supply over at Square-Enix.

ftfy.

[Aeni]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

But that would make too much sense, and from the evidence, common sense is something which is pretty short supply over at Square-Enix these days.

To be fair, this has been a problem with many game developers as of late, including companies like Blizzard and Valve, where "common sense" should be driving development or a solution and instead they need to take the longer and more complicated route and in doing so, end up breaking other things along the way.

Sometimes I think game developers end up becoming the bureaucracy of their own making.

[Icemage]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

So... wouldn't it be easier to just have a separate node handling Bazaars so players could simply go into a bazaar menu and access all active bazaars within the region/world from a single window? <_<

Just like an AH, but not!

But that would make too much sense, and from the evidence, common sense is something which is pretty short supply over at Square-Enix these days.


Icemage

[Aeni]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Everything except for equipment stacks. This is a huge one to me. Most items stack to 12, but things like crystals and raw materials for synthesis (including lumber!) stack to 99! Crystals actually currently stack to 999, but SE just put out a notice saying they're changing crystals so who knows what they'll do.

Currently, each player character or each retainer is allowed to possess up to 999 crystals and 999 shards.
If you obtain crystals or shards when you already have 999 of them, the surplus amounts cannot be obtained and will be discarded, as in the following cases.

•Obtain a new crystal or shard from the loot list.
•Trade with a retainer
•Trade with another player character or in a bazaar.
•Reset a bazaar
*Crystals and shards put in a bazaar will not be counted as possessed.

We are currently reviewing this design. New updates will follow as additional information becomes available. Thank you for your understanding.

They're talking about people losing shards/crystals after topping out at 999. I think there's not even an option to (Keep)(Discard), the system just auto-dumps excess. This doesn't mean that they will increase capacity to carry more or if they will redo the stacks. They're just looking at a specific bug or kink where you don't get an option to do something with it before losing it forever.

[Grizzlebeard]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Gamespy: Final Fantasy XIV Online Review

It's a rare moment of serendipity when a single sentence can encapsulate all of the flaws of a video game; when a snippet of garbled nonsense shines like a blacklight in a grimy hotel bathroom to expose the horror that unfortunate patrons will soon endure. I discovered one such sentence while attempting to create a character after setting up my Final Fantasy XIV account:

"To create characters on your FINAL FANTASY XIV service account, you must possess automatically continuous options."

The split-second of stunned consternation you may have felt as your troglodyte brain attempted to parse that sentence into something grammatically functional sums up the entirety of the FFXIV experience: Extended stretches of confused incredulity, punctuated now and then by bursts of intense anger. And yeah -- I just equated FFXIV with a filthy bathroom.

I can't help but feel that FFXIV is cosmic punishment, meted out by some avenging massively multiplayer online deity for my years of complaining about the state of modern online RPGs. They're too simple, I've whined; too hand-holdy, too easy, too friendly, and too safe. FFXIV is none of these things. It is the definition of obtuse: poorly designed, aggressively underexplained, and shoddy in almost every respect that matters.

I laughed so much a little wee came out.

[cidbahamut]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Why's that?

Not sure if you listed it pages back, but I do clearly remember you ranting about it over and over. Do tell why!

Well for starters all the boxes and widgits onscreen tend to make for a rather messy interface and the default setting certainly wasn't laid out in a way that would nicely fit together. Chatboxes overlap with no good place to stick them and they're opaque enough most of the time to get in the way of viewing the world, breaking immersion with a sickening crack. On the gamepad the right analog stick had one or both of its axes wired incorrectly, making camera manipulation screwy. This may have been fixed for the retail version, but during open beta it was an issue, and correcting it by fiddling with the gamepad settings didn't help because then it was still tied to other functionality like map scrolling so I couldn't win either way. The menus are needlessly layered in some cases, particularly the simple act of equipping armor requiring something like 3 or 4 confirmations to actually swap out to a new piece. TGM's commented on it before, but chat tabs are seriously lacking. The chatbox in general needs to be gutted and redone in general. There's no using the gamepad to scroll through it or interact with it at all as far as I could tell. The context sensitive commands that only show up in the menu was rather unnecessary. Devoting a whole button to bringing up a list of emotes is also rather wasteful. That's a whole button you could have devoted to something worthwhile like pulling up your inventory screen that you'll be digging through on a regular basis. Checking what loot you had in your inventory tended to take more keystrokes to get to than was healthy as I recall. Bouncing back to the widgits, even if you do find some magical configuration in which your eyes don't bleed from all the clutter, the client doesn't remember it for when you log in tomorrow. I never found a way to turn widgits off, but maybe that's because it was burried under 8 layers of menus, who knows? Also, why does NPC dialogue get its own box when it's just going to show up in my chatbox anyway? Seems we could streamline that into one box rather than having the two overlap and make each other unreadable during the dialogue itself, just a thought.

FFXIV's interface is terribly inelegant. It is a patchwork of widgits, and none of them fit together smoothly. It made enough of an impression on me that I didn't want to continue logging in. If that doesn't indicate a problem, I don't know what does.

[Raydeus]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

It would be very fun if the new FFXI team implemented some of those (fairly simple) improvements on XI too.

[Nandito]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

Why's that?

Not sure if you listed it pages back, but I do clearly remember you ranting about it over and over. Do tell why!

[cidbahamut]

Re: FFXIV gets a 4.0 from Gamespot

The interface is fine, dummy, have a look at the real issues.

The interface is not fine.

The interface was enough to make me ragequit in spite of my friend trying to help me get into the meat of the game. The poor design of the interface gets in the way of playing and subsequently enjoying the game. Maybe you can put up with it, or the design doesn't bother you, but it was a veritable deathblow for my enjoyment of FFXIV.