Played it for a month or two.
The game had too many problems sadly to the point i just quitted it. They need to overhaul the game completely if they want to get my attention and my friends back ( this is based on 3 people that started to play the game ).
Website and account:
1) Incredible garbage website and registry process i had to make 2 times new e-mail accounts because the game just didn't wanted to work with you.
They are also super anal about your birthday, if you just ram something random in ( because it's none of their business), u better of rebuying the entire game because u will never be able to get access to your account if you lose the pass or want to buy anything. Dumbest shit ever.
By far the worst i ever saw in any game really.
Also if you register your account with a key u bought, and download the game ( friend has really bad internet so took him 2-3 days to download ) it already drains your subscription for 2-3 days even while u never logged in even once.
The best way to do things is, free account to level 35, then buy the base game game with 30 play days, then buy the expansions one by one to get lots of gametime for free. Or if u can get the complete edition for super cheap get it. Sadly i bought the complete edition and just went with it which removed a ton of play days.
2) Lack of information and just calling stuff different to be edgy what has universal names in the MMO department. Stuff like servers / linkshells etc. It's incredible confusing and makes it just hard for new players to understand what goes on and what they even should buy when they want to upgrade. I had to reroll a complete different char and buy another copy when i realized i could play with a EU account on NA servers which would save me a good amount of cash. Terrible.
Game itself:
3) Overwhelmed with information and yet barely get anything explained because u steamroll so fast through the content at the start that honestly u hit level 50 with nothing unlocked and all content locked away from u its a endless stream of information that keeps popping up. I didn't even know there where raids at level 50, because its all gated in useless quests that give you no rewards and which u will never do unless u specifically know about it. As u rush so fast through main quest early levels u will not do any other quest as u outlevel most likely already the content anyway. Feels very much like boosted wow content. Yet 3/4 content is locked away behind those normal blue quests.
4) Leveling is the fastest through MSQ which u need to do ( main story quest ). However if you don't like your class after 60 levels and u reroll those are no longer available unless u reroll your entire character. ( your character is basically a full blown account in wow terms so u won't be doing that ). This means dungeon grinds are the only options and frankly wait times are brutal to the point u just don't bother.
If you are a DPS u are basically screwed or have to nail yourself towards these boring as hell endless tower runs. Because dungeon queu's are 30-50 minutes for a 15 minute run that at 60+ gives you barely 1/5th of a level. The grind to max level is incredible bad. Monsters don't give experience, guests are stupidly low experience wise that u won't even bother with. U basically have to play support which i couldn't care about to get any content going. It's bad game design.
5) Play with more people, that are different levels?. don't worry u can all join each other and levels scale down + play with your friends is easy now. Uhhhh but what they forget to tell you.
If you are 10 levels higher, u probably get 5x more experience out of a dungeon of your own level. That u friends can't join because to high level, that your skills get downgraded to the point u can't even cast your skills anymore because u replaced them for your higher level skills on your bar. Which results in u having to push different bars forwards just for lower level content and make rotations obnoxious to play with. It's a wonky system.
6) No dps meters, when u sit in a dungeon there is no DPS meter or any meter at all. U can just stand there AFK auto hitting and nobody would know. The amount of times i would just press 2 buttons and follow the group because i had no idea if my dmg was anything worthwhile even remotely or if i did a rotation right because i can't see dmg numbers.
Now people have illegal 3rd party programs that act like dmg meters which i also got installed ( wonky as hell programs with a lot of work ). And then u realize how utterly shit dmg u actually do, because people that are 70 and downgraded towards your level will always have max damage output through gear cap while u stand there with your leveling gear do not even a 5th of there dmg. It makes u feel even more useless and makes dungeon play extremely dull as u won't even try anymore as DPS ( i only play dps i couldn't care about support classes ).
People can't complain even if they know your dmg is low, because that would result in them having dps meters which is illegal. So yea gg with that logic.
7) Dungeons system needs a overhaul entirely. The game lacks support massively. most people play dps that has always been the case in any mmo. Yet when wow has 3 dps and 1 tank and 1 healer and always struggled hard to get the support positions filled.
These guys went even further with that shit concept making 2 dps 1 tank 1 support groups to do dungeons with. So basically 50% support needed to get a dungeon to go. Which means with 95% being DPS that queue times are insanely obnoxious long for DPS. ( who would have thought that. ) stupid as hell. They need to make dungeons more flexible where more DPS join, like 8 dps with 1 healer and 1 tank or whatever ratio queued up. And no endless tower (its stolen from ro anyway ) isn't a solution as it barely is any fun at all. U get skills so fast and roll through it so fast u are just walking from room to room to room until u fall asleep from boredom. Horrible leveling way also queue times are obnoxious at times even in that.
Basically fix your dungeon system.
8) Nobody ever talks with each other. The game feels extremely dead because of it. Nobody ever ever talks. Because they have linkshells ( chat group, yea the name thingy again ) or something (took me a day to figure that out, if only they called it chat groups oh boy) which got replaced by discord community's which is just endless random discord channels u can google and hope u find something interesting.
When i started to play the game i didn't found any help in the game whatsoever through the lack of chats. If u sit on a free account for first 35 levels, u are even more limited. U really feel like u are playing a single player game instead of a mmo.
Terrible experience, they need to introduce chat channels in this game or some half decent functioning chat system.
9) Names in the game are borderline bad and not memorable easily. Incredible difficult to remember ( city names or area's ) unless u are a massive ff nerd. U will struggle to recognise names of area's or remember them even remotely when u plow through them quick.
Sorry but Ala Mhigo, Limsa Lominsa. Ul'dah. I can't even pronounce that even if i tried lamo. Translation team should have used some honestly different names that are easy to remember and actually speakable for western society's. It's just gibberish most of the time.
Then we didn't even address the god awful npc names, most of the npc names etc are all borderline impossible to pronounce which basically makes it, oh its the red haired lady at that village left from main city. It's terrible.
10) Map, never saw such a clusterfuck of a confusing map in my life. Incredible hard to work with. I still don't know where most of my area's are located i just click stuff and see if it pops up. Wow has a so much more better system on this front. All of us had this issue.
11) High ping kills the game for you. Some chars are even unplayable entirely because u will never be able to do the rotations to play higher level with it. It's so bad some people basically advice u to skip classes entirely because of it. I play oversea's because of friends so yea 160 ms was terrible to play with.
The game focuses on position ridiculous hard. It's basically half the game. U gotta move out of aoe etc, and it doesn't work well with high ping. Which results in me having to reroll to another class that was more mobile.
I basically have to walk instantly out of aoe or else u get hit. as the game has 2 seconds delay to recognize my position. So i walk out of there and 1 sec later the aoe hits i still hits. I died endlessly because of that.
They need to address this.
12) Something completely different now: pre order bonuses.
I hate content being locked away from you that u cant get anymore if you are coming in late. And ofcourse FF14 has lots of it. And not even minor cosmetic stuff nope. It's full blown 30% 1-70 exp increase ring which is MASSIVE. Feels like a spit in the face for new players and frankly doesn't encourage u to continue playing much when other people that have it out level u massively because of it.
Never ever lock stuff which such drastically effect away to never be gained again. It's dumb as hell. And it was a constant conversation we had with eachother as one of our friends that already played the game was outleveling us massively because of it.
Main story quests and content unlocking:
Some information what main story quest is:
FF14 works this way, u have normal quests, blue quests, purple quests and main story quests. Normal quests are totally useless, the blue quests have mostly features locked behind them. There are so many of those that u honestly will be skipping them all until u get to expansions where u gotta do them in order to fly basically, then u got purple quests which are events, trash experience but the only thing that gives u some experience if u wait on queue's i guess ( good at the start to get to dungeon levels range ~15 ).
The main story quest is basically the entire story of the game, and u cannot skip this. Everything is locked behind it. U will always have to do this to advance so nothing else matters then this quest. U are level 50 and your story quest is level 30? have fun doing 30 quest content and get no experience. It's utterly pointless to do anything but main story quest u need to go through all of it.
13) Main story quest system is AWFUL. by far the worst shit i ever had to deal with in any game. Let's make a list about it as this is by far the main complain.
- At the start of the game the story quest is fine, it feels like your typical mmo questing until u hit probably 35+ Which is fast as its pretty much heirloom leveling in wow kinda of deal hitting level 60 in comparison u blast through the content.
- soon after u hit 35+ the story quest starts to become a drag, Its basically walk here walk there walk here teleport there for the next 100's of hours. And that is if you skip the cutscenes which are obnoxious long, bad and not voiced mostly with just characters standing still with a text dialogue.
- It becomes worse that constantly those video's have to load in which takes a ton of time and the main NPC's are all locked behind loading screens on loading screens. specially first expansion they put there main npc behind 2 loading screens for whatever reason.
Now i got a 9900k with a 3500/3300 nvme drive with 100/100 up down connection, so yea loading isn't a issue for my hardware yet the game loads a long as time 2-5 seconds which multiple loads behind each other. It's extremely obnoxious to push those quests out fast, I tried it and the fastest i got my char to level 80 with msq out of the way, was probably about ~120 hours. And that's with skipping cutscenes as fast as possible. It's horrible.
- Now to level efficient with a dps u sign up for a dungeon while doing the main quest, this isn't workable most of the time because main quest actually needs the dungeon queue's at times which slows u down with experience gain considerable and the moment u hit a msq dungeon u will be waiting for a long time doing absolutely nothing 30-50 minutes to get a invite for that dungeon. If there is another dungeon straight behind it, yea gg with that.
U basically have to beg people for a healer or a tank to help with queue times endlessly or else u won't do much in a day worth of gaming.
- Once u hit level 50, u will be unlocked main story quest dungeons which roulettes for it. These roulettes give u a full blown level, they are needed, the average wait time is 40 minutes to get into one sometimes even a hour, and if you are unlocky even two hours. These are the worst of the worst dungeons i ever experienced in my life and u gotta do them every day to get experience going.
It's basically 2 dungeons, with a long as hell cutscene story in it that is unskippable and always the same. They can take up to 30 minutes of pure cutscenes with in between small bit sized game play of people rushing to the next cutscene. If you did those dungoens 10 times, its still the same story. It's OBNOXIOUS long and tedious and evolves no gameplay ( i guess console people like this type of stuff ) but it's the worst shit ever to deal with. No clue which donkey created these dungeons and thought it was a good idea.
Here's a dungeon u have to sit through EVERY SINGLE DAY, there is a chance u get the litle bit shorter dungeon tho. But doing the same shit over and over again is extremely obnoxious specially with the story in it that's unskippable.
Here u got the run, its 1 hour and 22 minutes long. yea it's LONG.
For your main story quest, u will also have to do both of those anyway even if u didn't care for the story u now will have to sit through next 2-4 hours with wait times to get further.. and really drags your progress down by a lot.
- After u passed level 50 and u did your main quests u are happy to think u could move on towards the next expansion. u are dead wrong. The next expansion is level 50>60 basically level wise to give you a idea, but u probably will be level 58 before u even enter the first area of new content. Because the series of qeusts that they call after patch main quests is going to kill any enjoyment u still had left in the game.
In short these are main quests that got added in patches after the original game released they do as free updates. Which is fine if you play the game on day one and just have to sit through 10-20 quests and be done again. But once u have 3 expansions and the main game to go through it becomes ridiculous
To give you a idea how ridiculous it really is.
Every single quest has on average 5 sub quests u gotta do to complete it. Some are 2 steps ( rare ) some are 10+ steps most are ~5-6 steps.With some steps having dungeon requirements which will drag u down considerable on pushing yourself through it.
A single patch has about 10-20 quests, and there are like 5-6 patches. So that means u gotta do ~450 quests, with cutscenes dungeons, endless laod times to get to NPC's just to get to the next expansion.
It's ridiculous. I slammed my head against a wall after days of mowing through that garbage and once u do, congrats u can start all over again with the next expansion to do exactly the same again and then again for the next expansion and again for the next expansion.
Luckily they are a bit shorter, but now blue quests are super important to unlock dungeon content and flying skill which also is something to laugh about.
In other words, main quest is killing new players interest in the game its the absolute worst system i ever saw in my life terrible, specially for people that just want to play together and play end game content.
- The game cannot be played because of MSQ's with friends, because u all have to basically do it in a different pace. Its endlessly walking around and teleporting. To the point if u need to wait on somebody else on your step ( not like in those 1000's of quests u will align up anyway at any point ) u will slow yourself down even far more. Also u don't need help because its mostly just running around. It's kinda anti mmo style and more single player style.
14) I far rather had them release a short movie for 30 minutes that explains what goes on grossly for each expansion that u can watch outside of the game instead of having to deal with all of those god awful cutscenes that is just a skip galore. Even if there is good content in between u will not be interested in it anymore after u skipped number 1000th cutscene. So the good content is getting skipped because i don't know what is good and what is not.
15) longer fight instance based main quests are to hard for new players, luckily when u die u can put it on very easy to go through it. Some of these quests can be long and have to be done all over if you lose at any given moment. It's also a lot of times completely unclear what the game aspect of you with the quest and u just fail for absolute no reason. It's best to instantly die in those quests and put it on very easy to save you time. They should change this so u can select it directly at the start.
15) Pay model.
U need to buy expansions for 40 bucks when they release
U need to pay for a montly fee 13 bucks a month
There is a pay 2 win shop with it
There is content that u can only buy through the shop also with it.
Basically much like wow a total fucking joke of every pay system slammed together for maximum money gain.
I played it for 2 months and frankly unless u are massively into raid grinding which i couldn't do because of lag i would die endlessly because of it, the game simple does not have much content to validate a monthly fee in this day of age.
Also PC gamers are getting extra screwed by the fact that PS4 players do not pay any sub fee at all. This results in most people sitting on consoles and chat is even more dead then ever.
16) no pay systems for my country, i will never be able to buy anything from the shop as result and have to result to key sites for gameplay. Extremely bad services from them and never saw this before in any game. They happily ignore suggestions or any other solutions on this front. It's clear they don't care at all or are completely out of touch with the environment they push there games on.
Costumer service is also a joke entirely to the point u start to wonder if that company specially with there state of there website and account system is a runned by a bunch of amateurs.
17) Lack of AA settings which makes the game look extremely bad no matter on what setup, i sit at 180 fps mostly with 70 fps in city's when its bussy on a 1080ti/9900k. With GPU mostly sitting half used. But the moment grass comes forwards it looks really really really bad. I never saw a game this ugly in those situations. The solution is to downsample but even then at 1440p which isn't working well in borderless window mode at all the jaggies say and ruin the image quality, 4k even a 1080ti isn't fast enough to push 60+ fps on that front in this game it adds a ton of MS which makes it feel sluggish and not great so u won't be doing that, also again borderless problems which with PC gaming is a standard these days.
For a game series that praises itself on visuals, they sure as hell don't bother with even the very basic of things. Engine overhaul is highly needed.
18) Visuals in general specially first expansion look extremely rough, the art is just straight up bad at times to the point it really looks like a zero effort product. Specially the environments. Shadow bringer fixed this mostly but still visually underwhelming.
19) loading screen the game really, every single map is decked out with load screens to the next area's. Its a big step down from world of warcraft on that front where loading is practically non existent.
20) far more difficult to play then wow when u want to maximize your damage with a class. Rotations are hard to the point i just feel like they added system over system for the sake of it. They should have streamlined it a bit more.
21) Flying mount unlocking requires u to do even more main quests in the form of blue quests which bloats those quests even more out which is annoying to say the least, with finding those wind circles which drags your progress even further down the point why u even wonder why you do it. Because once the flying stuff is unlocked in that region u are done with it. They basically locked the last requirement behind the last quest in that area and then u move onwards. Huge waste of time really as i never revisited those area's. I still did them tho for the sake of it.
22) A ton more minor things like mounts can be used in city's. but i covered the big issue's and will keep it at that.
The positives:
1) Gameplay if it works in general its great, its fun to play and well executed if i ignore the above issue's.
2) Dungeons gameplay itself is fun and well done, if you ignore waiting times.
3) Raid content is better then in wow for sure and i can see why wow community is moving over towards it.
4) People are extremely friendly unlike in wow or other games. I have only found 1 single edgy person in my group ( not even toxic ) in 100+ of hours of gameplay and he got removed fast.
5) Later expansion shadowbringer is indeed far better then earlier content with everything really.
6) Teleports everywhere, no annoying runs like wow has so that's really a good thing
7) Event quests are fun at early levels when people actually do that content, not so much fun after level 15-20 as nobody ever does them with u.
8) U make a entire raid wipe? no problem u are new and people will understand. Again good community.
9) Guilds are small and its hard to get into a guild without knowing what it is. It's not easy to find guilds in this game that after joining 4 guilds i gave up as they where all mostly 4-5 people active and that's about it. They are helpful tho far more then my wow guild ever was. it reminded me of ragnarok / l2 / aoin on that front so that's good.
Conclusion:
Had fun with it for a month of two when i plumbed through the content, It's not good enough for a subscription free at the end of the day. It requires a lot of polish still and its a nice alternative for console users towards world of warcraft, for PC players unless u are a die hard raider i wouldn't bother with it unless u are planning to dip a lot of money into it to boost yourself forwards.
I will return most likely with the next expansion towards it and see what's going on if they did a massive overhaul of the game itself.
