Final Fantasy XIV 2.0: Too good to be true?

When I got back into FFXIV roughly one week ago, I was a lowly level 33 gladiator. Now, thanks to my linkshell and an incredibly friendly, helpful community, I'm a level-capped paladin. Armor set and everything included:

It has been a surprisingly short and easy journey, filled with some utterly bad game design and some of the weirdest moments in my personal MMO history. I had a group of seven complete strangers agreeing to help me finish a dungeon, so I could complete one of my class quests. I told them I still had to go fetch the quest back in town, while everyone was waiting at the entrance. They didn't mind. My PC crashed. Heat issue. Couldn't log back on for ten minutes. I came back and they were still waiting. I didn't have the nearest teleport unlocked, so I had to run all the way to the dungeon from the other end of the map. They still didn't mind.

I have never met any of those people before, never joined them on any quests, dungeons or whatever. They waited for nearly a half hour, just to drag me through a dungeon, so I could finish a quest that nobody else had. They didn't even complain when I made them wait. I won't rule out the possibility that they were all friendly and helpful, because my character looks like some anime cat girl and everyone on this game still lives in the year 2005. I don't exactly end every sentence in "...and I have a cock." But when you're used to games like Age of Conan or WoW, this kind of friendly behaviour is almost a bit creepy.

The whole 'attractive female character must be played by attractive female gamer' logic creates some truly awkward moments. I had this guy in a party, who started telling me things such as, "I'm a very stressed man and I deal with my stress by helping others", clearly hoping for me to ask about his 'stress'. The same stressed man complained about having to do his homework in a message, which shouldn't have made it to party chat. Is that how guys flirt today? Was I that awkward and cheesy when I was a teenager? Hm. Nah, can't be. I've never been afraid to say what I think, no matter how wrong and inappropriate. You wouldn't believe how incredibly successful "wanna hold my cock?" is for a pickup line.

But enough about my penis. I'm about to waste a fourth paragraph on stuff, which has absolutely zero relevance to this entry's headline. So, how about a nice, fat extra line of text, which highlights that we're about to go back on topic? Like so:

2.0 - A whole new game!

2.0 beta screenshot

About one year ago, the greedy maggots who fucked up the launch have been replaced by a new team, consisting of 250 honourable Japanese guys, who devoted their lives to undoing the damage that had been done to the series by the steaming pile of horseshit known as Final Fantasy XIV. At first, their work felt like nothing more but damage control: Some new music here and there, a slightly improved combat system, a UI which is 5% less shit than the original one. The new jobs (classes) were neat and their armor sets are incredible, the battles against Ifrit and Garuda are pretty fun, but no matter how much you polish a turd - at the end of the day, it's still shit.

So I cleaned my reading glasses, poured another glass of wine, ignited my pipe and stroked my large, manly beard and asked myself: "What the fuck are those new guys doing, anyway?" Now, if you're a jerk, you'll just follow this link and click on all the PDFs at the bottom of the screen. Or you'll continue reading my blog, where I'll analyze and comment on all the crap that's shown in said PDFs.

What Square are about to do, is probably the ballsiest thing I've ever heard of: They're throwing the whole game away and start from fresh. They've decided that the game, in its current state, is so broken and so fucked up, that fixing it would be more complicated than just completely rewriting it from scratch. And I can't blame them. The current client won't let you change any graphical settings such as resolution or level of detail without actually exiting the game first. Minimizing from full screen causes the game to crash. And while the game features some of the best graphics you'll see in any MMO to date, it performs like shit. So they went ahead and wrote a whole new client software. New graphics engine, new servers, new everything. A whole new game in every way.

More to see

I could live without those guys, but oh well...

The new graphics engine will feature cool new stuff such as realistic realtime shadows, the possibility to change all your settings in-game like in every other fucking game out there and an actual, real UI with real action bars. They're even allowing addons, just like World of Warcraft. The new visuals will improve upon FFXIV's already impressive graphics, but scale better to older hardware and, most importantly, perform well on the Playstation 3. Beta Testing for the PS3 version is supposed to start sometime around the end of this year.
Seeing how FFXIV's spiritual predecessor allowed for cross-platform play for all users of the PC, Xbox360 and PS2-Versions, we may live in hope to see the same thing for 2.0.

But we're not just getting fancy new graphics. The already insanely detailed character creation options will see some new hairstyles and race-gender-combos such as male Mi'qote. A friend of mine has referred to this new option as 'Gayheaven', but if you've always dreamed about playing some pretty boy with cat ears, a tail and a massive axe, here's your chance. Since existing players don't wanna miss out on all the new features and characters will look slightly different with the new graphics engine, all current players will be allowed to re-customize their characters.

But they're not stopping with the characters. The entire game world will be rebuilt! The 3 dull, every-repeating, mind-numbingly boring landscapes from the original game? Gone! The current storyline, walls of incredibly stupid text and almost complete lack of speech in all cutscenes? Gone, gone and gone! 2.0 will feature a whole new story and speech in four different languages. The game world will be divided into smaller zones with more visual variety and more unique landscapes.


More to do

Dragoon vs Coeurl

Content-wise, we're looking at brand new dungeons, as well as team-based and arena-style pvp. They've announced a so-called 'Content Finder', which will allow you to team up with other players from every server for specific quests, instances and other activities. The abysmal trading system is getting a revamp and will finally feature an auction house and we'll finally be able to exchange mail with other players. They're also planning 'large scale pve' which could mean massive raid scenarios similar to Dynamis from FFXI. God, I hope it's not Dynamis. Just google it, look at what people have to say about it, look at it on Youtube, check out how awful it is. Let's not bring it back, mkay?

They're also mentioning summoning and pets. The previous game had a Beastmaster class, which had the power to control pets, wore heavy armor and split skulls with axes. Dragoons will most likely get their signature pet wyverns, which could be named and customized to some extent in the previous game. With all these new features, the release of new playable classes are really just a matter of 'when', not 'if'. Ninjas and dual-wielding may finally make it into the game - fingers crossed!
Prime baddies like Ifrit will become summonable by so-called Player Companies, which will also be a new feature. Players may create said companies for certain benefits and goodies, most of which are yet to be announced. They're likely to work like guilds on other games, but with stricter rules than Linkshells. Oh and did I mention they're adding the ability to fucking jump?

Can 2.0 really work?

The jump attack is the Dragoon's signature move

Final Fantasy XIV was such a massive failure, even the guys at Square admit it has seriously damaged the name of the series. Any reasonable publisher would have shut it down for good. Not just re-launched some crappy F2P-Version but completely killed the whole thing and pretended it never happened. But they didn't. They scrapped the monthly subscription fees for a whole year. They said the game is so shit, they cannot possibly charge people for playing. And they've been working on improving it ever since. All this time, the game has cost them money.
To actually get people interested, the game will be free again for several months. Distribution of 2.0 is supposed to start in early October and playing it will remain completely free until early 2013! There is no risk here, you can try it for free and you don't waste any money on something you'll hate.

And it looks like they've finally learned what people expect from their MMOs: A cross-server content finder, UI-mods and addons, pvp, more dungeons, pets, mounts, more of everything. An actual game instead of a dull, lifeless game world, where your biggest worry is repairing your fucking underpants or spending 2 hours baking a million cakes to level up your cooking skill. Where you spend most of your time finishing quests, killing baddies and enjoying the actual content instead of waisting a full 30 minutes on figuring out how to fucking get there.

They're actually turning this whole thing into a real game! They can't afford to screw this up again. They don't want FFXIV to be known as the black sheep of the series, the worst game of them all, the massive failure, that disappointed and alienated so many fans. And in order to fix that, Square will have to release one hell of a product, something that truly blows people away or, at the very least, does everything it promises to do and is good enough to draw players back in!
And they know that. You don't revive a horrid game only to screw it up again. You don't blow out heaps of cash to fix a train wreck, then do a half-assed job at it. This is it. This relaunch will either turn the whole thing into an incredible game or they can shut it down for good.

But can it really work out? For all we know, work on 2.0 has been started little more than one year ago. The game is supposed to feature all the stuff you'd expect from games such as WoW. But even with a massive team of 250 people - how much can you really create within just one year? How many of these promised features will really make it into 2.0 right away and how much stuff will be added later, possibly another year or more after the reboot?

When this game was originally released, there were no mounts, no airships, no dungeons... the whole thing was unfinished and lacking in every aspect. If 2.0 comes out lacking most features again, the community will be rightfully pissed off. Logic suggests, they'll try to cram as many new features into the game as somehow possible. No proper beta testing, no time for a lengthy QA stage, they're releasing this sucker pretty much straight away. They must be incredibly confident with their product or incredibly desperate and stupid.

And with a more modern, possibly more western approach, can the game really remain unique and stand out? With a dungeon finder, pvp rewards and all the pets, mounts and other stuff you see in every other game, will 2.0 have any cool, innovative features at all or is it doomed to become yet another WoW clone? And can pvp really work in this game? Anyone familiar with the classes will know that the majority of them are so specialised, they'll be practically useless in pvp without some major balance changes. And balancing pvp vs pve is something no MMO has really executed well.

Their plans and promises sound awesome. The screenshots look incredible. But we've seen this all before - back when the game first launched. At least this time we get to try before we buy. Let's hope Square can restore our faith in them.

-Cat