As you may still remember from my previous entry, my somewhat flawed gaming experience on FFXIV had greatly improved after a helpful linkshell (guild) spontaneously adopted me. Their help didn't come without an ulterior motive. You see, I'm a paladin. Also known as the only tank in the game. So when they help me get my class quests done, drag me along for epic boss battles and make plans for how, when and where I'm gonna get what kind of insanely powerful gear, they don't just do that because they're so incredibly nice, but because it's incredibly nice to have a well-geared tank around. Works for me. And yes, I said epic boss battles:
Yes, they're referring to me as a 'she'. The Final Fantasy online community still lives in some happy, slightly dated universe, where people assume that only female gamers play female characters. Nobody actually cared to ask me. Thing is, with my trademark name and everything, playing the cat race is the only logical option. And since there are no male cats on FFXIV, well... guess I'm just gonna roll with it. They're in for a fun surprise when we get on voice chat!
Something weird is happening here. In most MMOs I've ever played, I avoided guilds and all responsibility. I played most online games by myself or with friends and family and only until I had managed to get as far as somehow possible without being part of a larger ingame-community, who takes part in raids, world pvp and what have you. Get to the level cap, grab some welfare-epix, score a rare pet and/or mount, get bored, move on.
On FFXIV I'm actually training to become one of the main tanks. I'm fully aware of the responsibility, the schedules and, most of all, the severe punishment for fucking up. One of the endgame boss battles comes with fun tactics such as 'save your defensive buff for exactly this special attack or you'll die and kill the entire raid'. But hey, no pressure!
I'm not entirely sure why the hell I would do this kinda crap to myself. Maybe for nostalgia's sake - the one and only other game where I seriously tanked a lot and made a bit of a name for myself was Final Fantasy XI. Maybe it's because there isn't much else to do on there. Those 4 quests per 12 hours aside, there isn't any actual solo content. And maybe it's because the game has a community, much unlike any other MMO-communities I've ever seen.
Heh. Yeah, I know. I paused for a second when I wrote that sentence about the community, asked myself if I'm biased, because I kinda like the game. But I still think the game is shit. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but people, who actually enjoyed FFXI (aka nobody outside Japan and the US). But the community is fucking nice! Yes, those guys are helping me, because they're hoping to get a powerful tank out of this. But they're still being friendly and helpful, selfish motives and all. Everyone is. Because that's just the thing - in a game, where you constantly depend on the help of others, you only have two options: Be nice and supportive like everybody else or GTFO. Can you imagine me being nice? Of all people? HA!
If you've played WoW, especially after Cataclysm, you'll know that you don't actually depend on anybody, unless you're planning on fighting your way through endgame raids on hard mode. The game has abandoned elite ('group') quests a long time ago and everything else comes with an automatic group finder. Click one button and there's your heroic dungeon, your pvp team or a whole fucking raid group. You don't have to be nice to receive help. In fact, the game rewards you for being an asshole: Ninja-loot everything, need-roll your way through the dungeons and don't give a fuck about anybody else. You'll never see those suckers again! Pandaria will put loot right into people's bags to stop the very assholes that have been created by WoW. A nice idea, but the game still teaches people to be dicks. Quest-monsters with crappy spawn rate? Tag it before the other guy gets it. Shiny, glittery quest-loot? Shift into travel form to grab it before that other dumb fucker gets it. And keep pushing that DPS and make fun of everyone you top on the charts!
FFXIV doesn't allow for most of that nonsense. When you start a quest to kill or loot stuff, other players cannot interfere with your shit. They can't even see your quest monsters until you tag 'em. They can't click your shiny, looty objects. And with a lousy 4 soloable quests every 12 hours, you'll want to group up with people and share whatever you've got, rather than piss them off for no reason. It's a weird system, which borders on virtual bullying, forcing people into being honorable and respectful, but it works. That's Japanese game design for ya.
And I'm seriously enjoying it, warts and all. Plenty of wards, really. The UI is still shit. Lots of people talk about how good the new UI supposedly is, because the original one sucked so much more in comparison. But having over a dozen buttons for basic interaction like trading, summoning mounts or opening a god damn door isn't good. Having a shitload of skills spread over three action bars, yet being unable to see more than one action bar at any given time isn't good.
Then there's this:
Look at this shit! This picture maps a small fragment of one of the game's outdoor areas. Can you imagine how incredibly fun it is to try and navigate a maze like that? Yeah, me neither. Whatever idiot came up with this kind of thing for a leveling and questing area deserves to be crucified. And thrown in a lake. A lake of boiling cat piss.
I could go on. About how NPCs repair your gear to 99%, but you can't auction shit until it's repaired to 100%. About how every single quest suddenly rewards me sauerkraut. About how I'm forced to grind so much more than is healthy in any game. But strangely enough, most of that stuff doesn't bother me enough to make me stop playing.
The game knows! It knows everything!
I had an epiphany during my most recent session on Age of Conan. Where I had to spend 20 minutes waiting for a pvp match. And people were too busy insulting each other in chat to actually take part in the pvp, so the whole thing ended in a crushing defeat without anybody fighting back: I end up hating most online games, because my game experience, my personal fun will always be fucked up by stupid people. Every god damn game allows assholes to ruin the whole damn thing for me. Have people bitch at each other in pvp and refuse to fight? Fine, no pvp rewards for me. Have them steal my quest mobs? Fine, no experience for me. Have them need-roll everything? No loot for me.
On FFXIV I actually like playing with others. They help me kill some paladin quest boss baddie, I get new gear and abilities for a reward and they get nothing. But I'll be sure to help them with their quests in return. And it turns out that when there's no griefing, no trolling and no harassment, it becomes so much easier to get over some of the most awful and stupid game design of this century. Fascinating stuff!
Technically, it wasn't my first ever MMO, but Final Fantasy XI was my first true MMO-love. The first big, real MMO I've seriously played for a long time. It's a bit older than even World of Warcraft and terribly complicated, anything but user-friendly and most of my friends and colleagues consider it one of the worst online games of all times. Ironically, these same people treat Ultima Online like the holy grail of online roleplaying. And judging by its amount of world-wide active subscriptions, FFXI has been a strong second to WoW for quite some time! Long, long ago, mind, but still...
They key aspect to FFXI was on something the vast majority of today's online games have abandoned: Teamplay. And I don't mean adding the occasional group quest here and there. Leveling up, unlocking new abilities and skills, raising your level cap, acquiring important gear - all of these things were tied to quests, which were simply impossible to do alone. Every player depended on the help of others at some point, even if it meant teaming up with fellow adventurers, who wouldn't benefit from helping you in any material way, be it gold, experience or items.
In theory, that's a pretty horrible concept: You cannot achieve anything unless you get help from people, who don't have any connection to your personal quests. If you weren't shy to socialize with people and ask for help, though, the system worked out beautifully and created a community I haven't seen in any other game. Everybody depended on each other, people were willing to help and hoping to get a little help in return. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. I'll never forget the fun I had with my guild (or Linkshell, as they are called) on there.
When Final Fantasy XIV launched roughly one and a half years ago, it had no actual group content. Except, of course, inviting other players to share perfectly soloable quests with. They tried to enforce that sense of camaraderie with dumbass mechanics like gear damage, where you had to run around looking for players to repair your god damn underwear in the middle of nowhere. I'm not even making this up: Every female toon came with a set of panties, which would take durability damage over time. And it was prohibited to self-repair them, because doing so would require you to take them off. You seriously had to look for other players to repair. Your. Fucking. Underpants. I want all of you to know that this is the kind of game we're talking about here.
I tried to love this game. I seriously did. Visually, it mimicked it's MMO-predecessor so well, it looked like a prettier, much cooler version of it, with all the cool races and classes and monsters and landscapes fans of the first online FF experience knew and loved so much. But beneath the surface, it wasn't simply broken or unfinished. There was simply nothing there! No content, nothing to do! The game would literally allow you to do 8 quests every 24 hours and stop you right there. If you decided to level up by grinding baddies, the game would penalize your experience gain at some point until you'd completely stop gaining experience points for the rest of the week!
I don't want to bring up any more examples of how blatantly evil and stupid the very idea behind this game was. Basically, they created a cool tech demo, a pretty but lifeless shell with no actual game behind it, sold it to idiots like me, who fell for the neat graphics and the idea of a prettier, faster-paced FFXI-remake and in the end, they got fired. Final Fantasy XIV remained entirely free to play for the next year to come, no subscription fees, no paid extras, no nothing. And a new developer team has taken over.
I haven't really touched the game since then. Tried it here and there since it was free, nothing really seemed to change and eventually I ignored it. Then they announced dungeons, raids, massive boss battles, the fabled "2.0 total overhaul" is supposed to happen this year and curiosity finally got the better of me when they introduced the job overhaul, along with job-specific armor sets. Anyone familiar with FFXI AF armor will know what I'm talking about. And it looked good:
So I logged on and became a paladin. I loved being a paladin on FFXI. Fighting at the front line, calling the shots, setting the pace. It was unbelievably stressful and awesome at the same time. Tanking, helping out with the healing, blinding baddies to avoid getting hit too much, difficult, complex multitasking for... okay, I'm getting carried away here. Let's just say I love being a paladin. On anything that isn't WoW.
When I say I came back to FFXVI to become a paladin, what I really mean is that I got the required class upgrade quest, but I couldn't do it, because it required a full group of players. And believe it or not - when I asked around for help, not only did I find a bunch of nice players to join me on my quest. When they realized I didn't have my own mount (which had not been implemented when I last played), they helped me obtain my very own goobbue:
This is my fucking mount! Rawr?
So after a fun little adventure I had a brand spanking new monster to ride around on and I was a real paladin! And when I got ready to part ways with my new friends, one of them sent me a trade request and without me asking for any help, I had an extra 200,000 gil (monies) and a link pearl (aka guild invitation) in my pocket.
During my absence, the guys at Squeenix have added quite a bit of new stuff to do. There are the new 'Grand Companies', which send you on quests around the globe. You get special class quests every five levels, on which you obtain class-specific gear and abilities. Resting at the brand new inns grants you experience bonuses for faster leveling rather than punishing you for excessive grinding. And while the game still only allows you to pick up a terribly restrictive 4 new quests every 12 hours, at least these new 'allowances' (that's what they're actually called!) stack over time for up to 99 consecutive quests.
Most of all, you actually have a motivation to do all the new stuff. You'll want to unlock the cool new classes. With the upgraded combat system, playing a paladin is actually fun! I won't lie to you - the UI, whilst somewhat improved, is still atrocious and borderline useless. Why do I have to switch back and forth between three individual hotbars instead of just displaying all three of them at the same time like on every other fucking game allowed me to do a decade ago?
And it's inconsistencies like that, which make Final Fantasy XIV a bad game today. Not the horrible, broken, abysmal game it was last year, but it's a far cry from being finished and enjoyable. Why can I stack up to 99 quests allowances, yet I only receive 4 of the stupid things every twelve fucking hours? One quest takes roughly 15 minutes and then there's no more questing to be done for the rest of the day. Why do I get rested XP bonuses to encourage killing mobs, when monster spawns feature enemies, which are nearly 20 levels apart from each other? When I'm level 35, I don't want to be in an area where half of the mobs are level 25 and the other half are level 39! On average, their level is just right. But most of them pose no challenge and yield no experience and the rest of them are almost impossible to kill. Which idiot came up with that shit?
Some of the new Grand Company quests (or 'leves' as they call them) are supposed to be quick and easy to get you right into the action: Activate them right at the quest area, jump right in, none of them take longer than 15 minutes. The bigger Grand Company quests are the exact opposite and are absolutely atrocious: The game will send you to the other end of the game world, forcing you to spend a full 10-15 minutes traveling to your quest destination. Once there, some other quest NPC will send you to yet another spot, which is yet another 5-10 minutes away. From there, you'll usually get into a small fight, which takes less than a minute to resolve, then you gotta run all the way back to the second quest NPC and THEN you're supposed to travel back to town to hand in your report. It's an easy 30+ minutes of walking around and boring, dumb cutscenes full of endlessly stupid, mindless drivel and shitty writing, half a minute of combat and zero sense of reward.
Just what the fuck are you talking about?
The really sad thing is how, as a fan of the first FF online game, I'm enjoying FFXIV now, lousy design and everything. Teaming up with my new linkshell, unlocking new pieces of set armors and getting new abilities, earning the right to own and name my own chocobo - it's actually fun, if just for nostalgic value.
He looks delicious!
The main problem with this game is that it's like a Final Fantasy XI inside joke. They're adding more and more references to the original Final Fantasy Online, from advanced jobs to artifact armors to summon-battles against Garuda and Ifrit. If you've experienced these things back in the day, they're more than likely to conjure some happy memories. In fact, these elements are good enough to be mildly enjoyable. But only if you understand the reference. Only if you've actually been there, if you're willing to relive some of those happy old days some of us had back on FFXI.
If you haven't played, maybe even disliked the spiritual predecessor of FFXIV, then I just don't see how you could possibly enjoy this game. Fancy graphics or not - would you enjoy playing a game, where doing boring run of the mill kill-quests is tied to a cooldown timer? Would you enjoy flicking back and forth between three different action bars, because you can't just display them all at the same time? Would you enjoy a game that considers pointless walking around for 20+ minutes actual content? Would you enjoy being sent to the asshole of the universe on a level 25 quest, with a level 25 character and aggressive level 45 monsters lurking along the way? And quest dialoge containing, "And lo how they quicken"?
Yes, this game has dungeons now. From what I've seen, they're a total of two. Two dungeons. Two 'raid' boss encounters for groups of eight players. And seven advanced classes, which you cannot unlock without the help of other players, whith abilities and gear you cannot unlock without teaming up. You may not mind if you're the social type. But if you like getting stuff done without depending on others, you're fucked.
There is simply no way this game will ever succeed with anyone but the most die-hard fans of the series. And by series, I'm really referring to the 8bit games, 'Tactics' and the previous online game. This is a game made by people, who have never seen, let alone played a modern MMORPG. I refuse to believe that any of those guys know anything about WoW, Guild Wars, SW:ToR or any other online game people have talked or cared about, recently. It fails on even the most basic stuff. If I can't just log on, jump in, grab a few quests and start leveling, because everything feels tedious, complicated, like fucking science and full of artificial limitations, if you can't even get your fucking key elements straight, then you won't win any new players. Fancy new class armors or not.
And that's a damn shame. I mean, look at this:
Those are the characters Claire and I are playing. Yes, the tails, freaky haircuts and hair- and skintones may not be everyone's cup of tea. Freaky anime shit. But the level of detail, the animation, the way these two interact with each other is so impressive, life-like and unlike anything I've ever seen in any other game. That stuff looks really, seriously good! The first time I hopped on my massive goobbue it felt so strange, so surreal, the last time I've seen anything like it was in a Studio Ghibli movie.
I can't in my right conscience recommend this game to anybody. Because it's horrible. Because it feels like you have to do a college course on FFXIV before you even understand basic questing.
But if you do have friends who are seriously willing to help you through job quests, if you're dying to own a chocobo, if you're as stupid and naive as I was, getting tricked by the fancy graphics and the incredible soundtrack, well... let's just say they finally have airships travelling from town to town and repair NPCs, who sort you out all the way to 99% at reasonable prices. And a market search counter, which lets you buy your stuff straight away instead of forcing you to find a fucking retainer. They've started to add basic comfort features and common sense. But that's as good as it gets.
My job requires me to be an MMO whore. Play a game 12 hours a day, explore every single aspect of it, possibly including classes, features and content you personally don't care about, so you can write a fair review, create a helpful guide, or at the very least, come up with an article that somehow covers up the fact you're just stealing it all from Wikipedia. And before you know it, you're already supposed to check on the next big title. Ooookay, since 95% of the stuff I do is F2P, it's not that strict for me, but you get the idea. Play a lot of stuff all the time. Download and install game after game after game.
This behaviour will inevitably cause you to neglect and eventually forget about certain games you enjoy. Games you'd play for fun and not just because it's a job. From this blog's headline, you've already derived I'm talking about Age of Conan here.
Like most people who, at some point in their life, came out of a vagina, Claire happens to have a mother. And said mother was playing AoC the last time we visited the family, while I was sitting right next to her. And I was watching her for a while and asked myself, "Why the hell did I ever stop playing that?"
This is solo content.
Hyboria has always been one of my favourite virtual hangouts. Sure, four years after the launch of AoC, the game world isn't as stunning and breathtaking as it used to be, but it's still gorgeous enough to draw me in. There is this omnipresent contrast of sheer amazing beauty and rancid filth. You can watch the sunset at the docks in a fantastic, very realistic and life-like city, seagulls circling around, dockworkers unloading crates from the ships and what have you, only to be interrupted by a drunk pirate, who decides to take a massive piss right next to you. You get blazing deserts, snowy mountains and lush, green fields and forests as much as bloated corpses dangling from the trees, with crows pecking at their eyeballs. I like it, because it's plausible. It makes sense. Most games usually go for one extreme or the other: They try to impress players with massive, majestic cities and landscapes or they're over the top gory and dirty and depressing. But you can't have a nice, big metropolis without poverty, without dark, creepy corners, where the shit piles up in the streets, where people riot, where disease and decay spread. There is a constant sense of dread. There's probably something lurking around the next corner, waiting to jump you, wanting to kill you for a million reasons or just out of desperation and hunger.
The other day, one of my friends told me he has some level 80 toons on AoC, wanting to know whether or not there is any point in coming back. So I had a look around.
I suppose that for anyone enthusiastic about being part of a major guild and taking part in the raid content, the answer is pretty simple: The final Khitai raid encounters have only been implemented today and if you want to grind your way up the raid tiers for sexy and powerful gear, then that's the way to go. But maybe you're more like me, you're not the most social kinda guy and you just can't get yourself to ask around for endgame dungeon groups, let alone raids. AoC has no dungeon finder at the moment, people spam the global chat channels to find people and the abreviations alone are enough to drive away most fresh max level players. LFM HoX Khitai HMs AA EXP req pst!
Even if you can figure out what all of that means, people require you to be kitted out in gear ten times more powerful than what is actually needed to beat most dungeons, they expect you to know all the boss tactics and if you're a newcomer, you'll be in for a hard time. The game has been around for a while, the veterans have played most of the pre-raid and lower tier raid content to death and unless you're part of some big, helpful guild, which is willing to teach you the basics, trying to get into the whole thing might just be a bit too intimidating and overwhelming.
Feeling lonely? Steal a wolf pup and raise it to be your pet!
Seeing as AoC also features so-called pvp 'minigames', which work just like WoW's battlegrounds, you might get the idea to just get stronger by taking part in those. And in theory, that's entirely possible. Winning in pvp raises your pvp level and nets you tokens, tokens and pvp levels are required to purchase epic pvp gear, epic pvp gear makes you more powerful. So far, so good.
Unfortunately, the truth is a lot less fun than any of this. A vast amount of players taking part in the minigames have spent a massive amount of time getting all the epic pvp gear you're drooling over. They do more damage than you could ever dare dream about, their shiny armors prevent you from even putting a dent in their health bars and most of them are capped out on the dreaded AA-system. You see, once you reach the level cap on AoC, you get the possibility to make your character even more powerful by gaining so-called AA points. 'Alternative Advancement'. For the most part, it's a pretty cool feature. Instead of standing still and not getting any stronger and better, you may use AA points to raise your resistances, your overall DPS and unlock whole new special attacks and skills. And if somebody has been an active subscriber for the past 2 years and has gathered 700 AA points and you just dinged 80, well... you're fucked.
Basically, it's like this: Every other player has better gear than you do. Gaining ranks and tokens to obtain some of the weaker, first-tier pvp stuff requires hundreds of utterly frustrating, humiliating pvp matches, where you're little more than a walking free kill. Everyone will hate you. The enemy team will always attack you first, because every kill looks good on the scoreboard and you're the softest target. Your own team mates will tell you to fuck off and die, because your very presence most likely ruins their chances at winning the match. And even if you spend 20 Euros on the most basic cash shop pvp stuff to stand at least a small chance, the vast majority of players around you will still have better gear and a headstart of a couple years on farming AA points.
My pvp level is 4 right now, with the maximum being level 10. If I'm lucky, I can get about 5% of pvp experience per day. That's 20 days of getting my ass kicked and being insulted by everyone on the server to be allowed to buy some epic gloves and bracers. Then I gotta get to pvp level 6 to get my epic leg armor, which will require a little more experience and take a little more time. I will probably start self-harming somewhere halfway to pvp level 7.
If you're good, you can finish even the toughest solo dungeon without raid gear.
There are surveys and forum threads about this, people are trying to find a solution to make pvp more fun and less frustrating to newcomers, without alienating the veterans too much. Nobody is entirely sure how to fix this mess and until they come up with a working solution, I really wouldn't recommend pvp to anyone, unless you actually love getting hurt. And I'm talking one-shots, tea-bagging, people openly threatening to flay you, your dog and your entire family if you ever dare set foot into any pvp-related area again. You can grit your teeth, ignore it, hope for the next level up and gloat over the occasional kill you might get against some other unsuspecting noob, but for the most part, it's just cyber-mobbing.
So, would I recommend coming back if you're level 80, you're not into raids and you're not stupid enough to consider going for pvp gear? YES!
That is, of course, if you've actually stopped at the level cap and you haven't been around for Turan, the F2P transition and possibly even Khitai. And if you don't mind spending a bit of money, because in order to get anywhere at level 80, you won't get around a subscription and buying access to the areas of the expansion and the adventure pack.
One of AoC's biggest highlights are the level-scaling solo instances. Khitai comes with the Forgotten City and the Breach, the former of which had just been added an extra hard 'Unchained'-mode, where baddies are level 83 and drop tons of nice loot, if you can defeat them. In Turan you get to explore Dead Man's Hand and the Isle of the Iron Statues, the latter being an incredibly tough solo instance full of level 84 critters. If you want to see how good your gear and spec really are, this is the place to go. It's harder than any other solo content I have ever seen in this game, but if you try hard enough, it can be done without any raid gear.
If you haven't been to Khitai before, just getting there can be an adventure in itself. If you don't want to pay the fare to get there safe and sound, you will have to earn your spot in a caravan by fighting a giant kraken, diving for lost treasure or cleansing an undead-infested oasis. And even without the dungeons, Khitai is a wild and exciting place to explore. The four adventure-zones are chock-full of solo quests, most of which are repeatable, so you may raise your standing with certain factions and unlock sexy new armor or even a brand new battle pet or a mount. Stealing a tiger cub and teaching it how to hunt can be a lot more exciting than just clicking a tame hotkey on any random monster.
Of course none of this comes without a certain MMO-esque grind-factor and a certain amount of repetition. At some point you will know all of the solo dungeons, you will know all the quests around Khitai and you'll end up repeating them only for tokens to obtain better gear, that cool wolf pet or a big tiger to ride around on. But that will happen to you, no matter whether you're a pvp-nut, a raid fanatic or the proverbial lone wolf. At some point, you will end up repeating content in order to unlock some sexy new reward. The carrot on a stick.
The nice thing about AoC is that even as a solo player, you still get that carrot if you want it. If you don't want to do heroic dungeons, raids and pvp on WoW, the game ends at the level cap. On AoC, you become stronger and stronger by earning AA points, you get the fun, repeatable solo-dungeons, which also serve as a cool benchmark for testing new gear and specs and you get Khitai's epic adventure zones. And with a dungeon finder and a pvp revamp on the horizon, using all this content to warm up and relight the old flame a bit isn't such a bad idea. And if none of that works for you, there's always gratuitous violence and tits.
