Repackaged Final Fantasy XI, but with fewer jobs and penalizes the player if they play too long. You have been warned!
Sure, FFXIV looks great and sounds great but that does not make a great game, and expect many negative reviews and indeed I'm expecting many canceled subscriptions come this time next month due to the titanic issues this game has, sure Square-Enix have openly admitted the game needs a lot of work, but honestly do you think the average gamer these days are forgiving of major issues at launch, especially on a scale of problems this game is facing?
1) Fatigue/Surplus XP system
All the closed beta testers warned SE that this system would generate a huge amount of negativity if they decided to launch with this in place, and they did ~ they just tried to hide it but its still there. For new players/customers who haven't researched what fatigue is.
Basically in Lehman terms, the more you play your chosen job the less XP you generate until you receive "zero" XP until the weekly reset, this can be fixed by changing your primary profession. The fatigue system, at least in beta was set at around 8 hours of full XP, so if your a pretty hardcore player, expect to run into this issue constantly.
2) Lack of content//Guild Leve system
Since the bulk of the quests in this game revolve around guild leves, you would expect to be a massive amount, you would be wrong ~ dead wrong. The player can take 8 guild leves per 36...yes I said it, 36 real time hours per reset, if you finish your leves you have two choices, craft or grind. The story quests are in increments of 10, so when you start you'll get the first story quests which will give your primary job a quick boost of XP, then after that the next story quests take place at job rank 10 and so forth, if your expecting to level via questing then this game definitely is not a game you should be buying, because there is no more content besides leves and grinding.
3) Repackaged FFXI
All the races from FFXI have just been renamed and touched up for this game, nothing new at all ~ even skill chains have essentially just be renamed to Battle Regimens, the only difference is they are much more difficult to pull off mostly due to the poor UI and control system. Everything you do requires far too many clicks, actions which slows up the game even more, SE have announced work to improve the UI and menu system, but the time frame was not announced so maybe...just maybe expect that within the next 6 months or first major patch, assuming most people will still be playing by then to even care.
4) Latency
Since the servers are located in Japan, any U.S players without extremely good connections will face all sorts of latency issues.
5) FFXI legacy issues
How many people have played FFXI? You all know about the epic boss fights such as Absolute Virtue etc, which is a boss the before it was nerfed could easily take 15+ hours of solid fighting to beat! Can we really trust SE to have evolved from such disastrous gameplay that FFXI offered? Forced/static grouping? For instance, SE openly stated that it wanted FFXIV to cater for solo play, however that seems to have totally disappeared, it is looking more and more likely the static grouping is back for FFXIV, meaning the solo player will be forced into doing guild leves every day and a half just to gain some XP..
I could go on and on stating every single issue from crafting problems through to the high system requirements this game has, but there really isn't any point. I canceled my pre-order like countless others did because of some of the major points I made in this review. Any potential customers/buyers need to be made away of the issues this game has, and it is highly unlikely they will be fixed anytime soon, but if you want to bravely more forward with this game, and indeed even enjoy yourself playing ~ then great! Have fun with it, myself~~~I wouldn't play this game in this state even if I was personally paid to play it.
In closing, this review will stand until SE seriously addresses the major problems with Final Fantasy 14 ~ I actually had some high expectations for this game, and during Closed Beta 1, thought this game did have great potential but unfortunately, I guess things never turn out the way you want them.