FF14 will be celebrating its first year in a few days on september 30th. A few months back, I jumped on the FF14 ship out of pure nostalgia and love for the Final Fantasy series. Like many, I’ve grown up with these games and my current passion for MMOs and even gaming in general is certainly linked in some way to the old games on the Nes and Snes.
Sadly, it did not go as planned and I quickly went from loving FF14 to hating it in the space of a few days. The launch was so bad and the game so broken that for the first three months of its life FF14 was actually completely free to play. A new director for the game was hired, promess were made to fix the game and since then I’ve been looking from afar to see how the game would progress.
So what happened in the end? Well, FF14 is still alive despite being still in disaster recovery mode. The game has it devoted fans but for the most part the situation is not rosy with the director still swearing up and down they’ll get their shit fixed. However, it would be unfair to say nothing has been done… in fact a lot has… but I guess there’s simply too much to fix in there. You can read this review from a devoted fan who did a good job at trying to review the game in an honest way.
For my part I think it’s sad to see a great franchise butchered once more. Final Fantasy as a series is the poster boy for over explotation and cashing in on a name in the gaming world. The series does have it moment of brilliance even today but for the most part they keep remaking the classic games and milking them for all their worth. Square Enix knows that if they slap Final Fantasy on something they’re going to make money and they’re not afraid to abuse this fact.
If anything, the life of the Final Fantasy series should be a warning about what happens when you milk a series for all it’s worth. Sure the company is still making money but for us, the fans, it’s disheartening to see a series that marked our childhood descend ever further into mediocrity.
FFXIV is still free-to-play, so not just for the first 3 months.
I can’t even *begin* to tell you how disappointed I was at launch. Not only am I a staunch FF fan, but I cut my MMO teeth on FFXI. I think most of the FFXI vets were looking for exactly one thing from FFXIV: an improved FFXI. What did we get? A bastardized version of an MMO that missed the mark on so many levels it wasn’t even funny. Opening without an Auction House? In a game predicated on crafting? Unforgivable. The market system was a train wreck.
Gear repair was tedious beyond belief.
The leves being on a 48-hour timer? Idiotic.
Part of the joy of FFXI was needing only one character (plus inventory mules). Same idea applied in FFXIV except you had a *physical* level to boot that you had to allocate stats for. Kinda hard to be a jack-of-all-trades when you’re having to decide where to put your stats.
And the invetory. Oh my word, the inventory. Four levels of items (normal, +1, +2, and +3 ingredients)? Smack whomever came up with that.
The UI was laggy, slow, and convoluted. The crafting process tedious, at best.
It was a big “F-U” to the FFXI playerbase, to be honest, it was THAT BAD.
Now, in fairness, they’ve fixed a lot of stuff. There are some GIANT updates coming in the near future, and I’m just about over the bitterness that I may reinstall it and check it out once those go in.
Maybe.
/sigh
I know I saw somewhere a paying option?… just unclear on what more you get out of it.
You may have seen the news on Massively (or somewhere else) about FFXI (11, not 14) moving away from PlayOnline and taking on the payment system that was created for FFXIV? But last time I checked, FFXIV was still available F2P. Of course, that’s been awhile, and is otherwise coming mainly from comments on the article in question.
This is why well-established single-player series should not be transformed into an MMO. You can argue that about WoW, since the basis was the Warcraft series, but come on. Warcraft 3 was not popular because of the single-player campaign (the only thing I remember is that Arthas killed his daddy-o), but because of the multilayer component, an MMO was a logical process in the evolution of that universe.
FF though, sheesh.
I’ll disagree with you here, Bronte. FFXI was quite successful at the time, and is still going (and if I had to venture a guess, probably with MORE subs than 14). The problem isn’t transforming a single-player franchise, it’s more about Square trying so hard to be “different” that they just utterly failed.