I feel like I'm at the doorway of a burning building, trying to get out, even as others, oblivious to the danger, are crowding around the entrance trying to get in. I've just spent a few days playing FFXIV and it's been pretty miserable.
As a former Final Fantasy XI player, I was hoping XIV would be worth a try, or at the very least, fun for my harder-core friends. But I can't see the game working very long at all the way I saw it. I would, in fact, call FFXI the superior game in every way.
Ironically, even though I was admittedly lukewarm about it, I got into the open beta before most of my more devoted friends, even many of the closed beta testers (who had to reapply for the open beta).
Even after struggling through the choked application process, I find that most of the tester materials, including almost all the documentation and worse yet, the bug reporting system, are off-limits to open beta testers. That's when alarm bells went off. I knew that this test is for pretty much one thing and one thing only: stress-testing the servers. They might fix a bug here and there, but they are not interested in further bug reports and they are not interested in us playing effectively or directedly. The game is, for most intents and purposes, the one they intend to ship.
And believe me, I found plenty of bugs that could use reporting. When the client wasn't crashing, or I wasn't being disconnected, there were any number of flaws that suggested a rushed and haphazard development process, and many other design decisions that make it difficult to play at all.
I won't rehash the complaints people have made about the fatigue system. I'll just say that I believe they're probably short on content and that's why they've implemented these limitations. It has little to do with being casual-friendly. It's nothing new, either. FFXI has what are known as the "genkai" quests, artificial level caps that require difficult quests to be completed before you can unlock the next few levels. These were originally made to slow progress when FFXI shipped with incomplete content, but were left in after the fact, creating a bizarre series of hurdles halfway through the level progression. Anyhow, my main complaint isn't about the fatigue system, but it is related...
The number one decision they made that seems to destroy playability is to make the timed quests known as guildleves fail instantly if the client crashes or you become disconnected. That, coupled with the decision to limit the number you can do in any 48-hour period (to eight, I believe), means you can fail every single quest due to factors beyond your control and end up waiting two days to reattempt them. This is such an insane limitation, it trumps any other disagreement I might have had with them on any other progress limitation they made. Guildleve quests also fail without warning if you go beyond some unspecified distance from the target (which I swore was necessary to reach one of them once, as their locations are randomly generated and can appear on some pretty far-flung portions of the map which are difficult to access). Additionally, if you have partied with additional players and upped the selected difficulty for a quest for higher rewards, then if one or more of you disconnects, they lose the quest, and the remaining players are stuck with the higher difficulty quest and the disconnected players appear to be actually prohibited from cooperating.
The lag is pretty atrocious. I've never seen a game this bad aside from Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, in its original "MMO" form. I've been in MMO stress tests of all sorts, but the FFXIV platform seems woefully underoptimized. There seemed to be a fairly low number of players on the server, by MMO standards, my ping was actually fairly low, and yet the server was virtually unresponsive, made worse by an interface that clearly transmitted more than necessary to the server side. Yes, I know that lag I experience during the stress test does not necessarily reflect lag I might experience during retail, but unless they can beef up the hardware quickly, I can't see any server supporting more than 250 players (split across three cities, even) for even halfway tolerable lag.
Never mind that it took 26 seconds between starting a quest and it becoming active in my log. Never mind that, after fighting a mob, I stood there for 12 seconds being told that it was dead, before it finally got in one last attack and died. Never mind that it took 74 seconds of a loading screen between character creation and the opening cutscene. Never mind that vendor inventory windows took 8 seconds to open. The really insane one is that it took ten seconds to place a new ability on my action bar. Something which, by most rights, should be a client-side decision...or maybe one with a simple veto from the server if it's truly an invalid action.
And my complaints about lag are not so much about the lag but about lag-proof UI design. There are many things one can do in high latency situations to reassure the player, and FFXIV does none of them. There is very little indication if an action has been queued, accepted, or if you successfully issued the command at all. In fact, it often does the wrong thing. Interface feedback is strangely broken. For example, if you issue a command bound to the 1 key, then change your mind and begin hammering the 2 key for a different ability, each time you press the 2 key, the action bound to the 1 key flashes again, as if you had pressed the 1 key. And when the UI does respond with a color change to the stamina gauge for example, it does so seemingly belatedly. I took more damage and waited far longer between attacks if I waited for UI confirmation than if I just hammered the action keys over and over, ignoring the errors if I hit it too soon.
The interface is clearly meant for a game controller, as FFXI was. Intuitive actions that a PC user might expect like dragging or clicking buttons are out of the question because of the cross-platform focus. So everything is an exercise in navigating nested menus, which causes any given action to take several times as long to make.
Even before the game started, Square-Enix's lack of programming sense appalled me. Apparently FFXIV for the PS3 is delayed because developing for the PS3 is hard, but they're apparently no good at Windows development either. Their downloader/updater is based on BitTorrent, which I approve of. It's a far better method than the one FFXI was forced to use. But-- the updater is so broken, it uses ridiculous amounts of CPU, even when minimized, due to not being frame-limited, even though all it does is display a progress bar and a cursor while it plays some music. On top of being a CPU hog, it neglects to service system messages often enough, and so every 5 seconds, it freezes for several more seconds as Windows marks it as "not responding". Should you manage to start downloading a patch, it'll be difficult to do anything else, since in addition to using huge amounts of unnecessary CPU, it has no setting to limit the amount of upstream it uses to seed with. Plus, when the download reaches 90-some percent, it'll stop intentionally to extend your seeding time. At peak times, this trick might benefit the system. But it appears that it does so even if there is nobody else who needs a part. I've watched it sitting there for 10 minutes, waiting to grab the last segment, with zero peers downloading from me (nope, it's not my firewall, on larger patches during peak times, I've gotten plenty of peers).
(Edit: Since I wrote the below paragraph, they've fixed the settings application. Now, however, if you choose full screen and later attempt to Alt-Tab from within the game, it forces a disconnect from the game...just as the original FFXI application did.)
The game has no option to configure resolution or choose full-screen vs. windowed mode. In fact, the application that seems like it would do that (separate from the main game, it should be mentioned, a clear sign of console-itis) simply displays an error message in Japanese. Then again, this is the same company that, for years, denied that PC players of FFXI should have the ability to run the game in a window or use Alt-Tab. Square-Enix seems not to understand the PC. But then, if they don't understand the PC, what do they understand? Because, upon hearing that the PS3 version of FFXIV was delayed, I had to look back to see what successes they'd had on consoles lately. And I couldn't believe it. It's probably been six years since they got their hands on a PS3 devkit, and their first and only internally developed, successfully released game for the platform was Final Fantasy XIII? Everything else was merely published by them. But maybe that's a problem with the PS3. I've heard plenty of other developers complain that it's challenging to develop for. Let's see how they fared on the Xbox 360...wait, their only successful releases have been FFXIII and The Last Remnant. And The Last Remnant was famously panned for horrible frame-rates and pop-in.
Some people have told me to be patient. They've suggested that the problems I've encountered are something particular to beta or are easily fixed. Have patience, the true fans urge. But I think something far more fundamental than FFXIV is broken: Square-Enix themselves. This is what a company looks like after a massive flight of talent from the company. It is very easy to get the sense that the programmers there are quite simply in over their heads when it comes to modern consoles and modern computers. It's even more obvious when you listen to ill-advised remarks their developers have been quoted making, such as that FFXIII lacked cities because they were unable to do them justice on modern systems (certainly didn't seem to stop their competitors), or that an FFVII remake would take more than a decade to make. This is a company full of people who are making excuses for their own technical inadequacy. The only people who are still making acclaimed quality games there, it seems, are their portable platform developers. Which is interesting. Perhaps SE's salvation lies with that group. In the meantime, I see SE's acquisition of Eidos as nothing more than a smokescreen, a way of covering up their shame by slapping their names on the products of a company that still seems more than capable of making games for modern consoles.
So, this has turned into a long rant against Square-Enix, and a comments thread on The Escapist seems an odd venue to air such a thing on. But I sincerely believe that, between the technical problems FFXIV has, the internal problems Square-Enix has, and the poor PR skills they've shown in the recent past both surrounding FFXIV and in general, that this game is headed for a bad end, and may end up being another Asheron's Call 2, a game that actually fails before its predecessor.
As a former Final Fantasy XI player, I was hoping XIV would be worth a try, or at the very least, fun for my harder-core friends. But I can't see the game working very long at all the way I saw it. I would, in fact, call FFXI the superior game in every way.
Ironically, even though I was admittedly lukewarm about it, I got into the open beta before most of my more devoted friends, even many of the closed beta testers (who had to reapply for the open beta).
Even after struggling through the choked application process, I find that most of the tester materials, including almost all the documentation and worse yet, the bug reporting system, are off-limits to open beta testers. That's when alarm bells went off. I knew that this test is for pretty much one thing and one thing only: stress-testing the servers. They might fix a bug here and there, but they are not interested in further bug reports and they are not interested in us playing effectively or directedly. The game is, for most intents and purposes, the one they intend to ship.
And believe me, I found plenty of bugs that could use reporting. When the client wasn't crashing, or I wasn't being disconnected, there were any number of flaws that suggested a rushed and haphazard development process, and many other design decisions that make it difficult to play at all.
I won't rehash the complaints people have made about the fatigue system. I'll just say that I believe they're probably short on content and that's why they've implemented these limitations. It has little to do with being casual-friendly. It's nothing new, either. FFXI has what are known as the "genkai" quests, artificial level caps that require difficult quests to be completed before you can unlock the next few levels. These were originally made to slow progress when FFXI shipped with incomplete content, but were left in after the fact, creating a bizarre series of hurdles halfway through the level progression. Anyhow, my main complaint isn't about the fatigue system, but it is related...
The number one decision they made that seems to destroy playability is to make the timed quests known as guildleves fail instantly if the client crashes or you become disconnected. That, coupled with the decision to limit the number you can do in any 48-hour period (to eight, I believe), means you can fail every single quest due to factors beyond your control and end up waiting two days to reattempt them. This is such an insane limitation, it trumps any other disagreement I might have had with them on any other progress limitation they made. Guildleve quests also fail without warning if you go beyond some unspecified distance from the target (which I swore was necessary to reach one of them once, as their locations are randomly generated and can appear on some pretty far-flung portions of the map which are difficult to access). Additionally, if you have partied with additional players and upped the selected difficulty for a quest for higher rewards, then if one or more of you disconnects, they lose the quest, and the remaining players are stuck with the higher difficulty quest and the disconnected players appear to be actually prohibited from cooperating.
The lag is pretty atrocious. I've never seen a game this bad aside from Uru: Ages Beyond Myst, in its original "MMO" form. I've been in MMO stress tests of all sorts, but the FFXIV platform seems woefully underoptimized. There seemed to be a fairly low number of players on the server, by MMO standards, my ping was actually fairly low, and yet the server was virtually unresponsive, made worse by an interface that clearly transmitted more than necessary to the server side. Yes, I know that lag I experience during the stress test does not necessarily reflect lag I might experience during retail, but unless they can beef up the hardware quickly, I can't see any server supporting more than 250 players (split across three cities, even) for even halfway tolerable lag.
Never mind that it took 26 seconds between starting a quest and it becoming active in my log. Never mind that, after fighting a mob, I stood there for 12 seconds being told that it was dead, before it finally got in one last attack and died. Never mind that it took 74 seconds of a loading screen between character creation and the opening cutscene. Never mind that vendor inventory windows took 8 seconds to open. The really insane one is that it took ten seconds to place a new ability on my action bar. Something which, by most rights, should be a client-side decision...or maybe one with a simple veto from the server if it's truly an invalid action.
And my complaints about lag are not so much about the lag but about lag-proof UI design. There are many things one can do in high latency situations to reassure the player, and FFXIV does none of them. There is very little indication if an action has been queued, accepted, or if you successfully issued the command at all. In fact, it often does the wrong thing. Interface feedback is strangely broken. For example, if you issue a command bound to the 1 key, then change your mind and begin hammering the 2 key for a different ability, each time you press the 2 key, the action bound to the 1 key flashes again, as if you had pressed the 1 key. And when the UI does respond with a color change to the stamina gauge for example, it does so seemingly belatedly. I took more damage and waited far longer between attacks if I waited for UI confirmation than if I just hammered the action keys over and over, ignoring the errors if I hit it too soon.
The interface is clearly meant for a game controller, as FFXI was. Intuitive actions that a PC user might expect like dragging or clicking buttons are out of the question because of the cross-platform focus. So everything is an exercise in navigating nested menus, which causes any given action to take several times as long to make.
Even before the game started, Square-Enix's lack of programming sense appalled me. Apparently FFXIV for the PS3 is delayed because developing for the PS3 is hard, but they're apparently no good at Windows development either. Their downloader/updater is based on BitTorrent, which I approve of. It's a far better method than the one FFXI was forced to use. But-- the updater is so broken, it uses ridiculous amounts of CPU, even when minimized, due to not being frame-limited, even though all it does is display a progress bar and a cursor while it plays some music. On top of being a CPU hog, it neglects to service system messages often enough, and so every 5 seconds, it freezes for several more seconds as Windows marks it as "not responding". Should you manage to start downloading a patch, it'll be difficult to do anything else, since in addition to using huge amounts of unnecessary CPU, it has no setting to limit the amount of upstream it uses to seed with. Plus, when the download reaches 90-some percent, it'll stop intentionally to extend your seeding time. At peak times, this trick might benefit the system. But it appears that it does so even if there is nobody else who needs a part. I've watched it sitting there for 10 minutes, waiting to grab the last segment, with zero peers downloading from me (nope, it's not my firewall, on larger patches during peak times, I've gotten plenty of peers).
(Edit: Since I wrote the below paragraph, they've fixed the settings application. Now, however, if you choose full screen and later attempt to Alt-Tab from within the game, it forces a disconnect from the game...just as the original FFXI application did.)
The game has no option to configure resolution or choose full-screen vs. windowed mode. In fact, the application that seems like it would do that (separate from the main game, it should be mentioned, a clear sign of console-itis) simply displays an error message in Japanese. Then again, this is the same company that, for years, denied that PC players of FFXI should have the ability to run the game in a window or use Alt-Tab. Square-Enix seems not to understand the PC. But then, if they don't understand the PC, what do they understand? Because, upon hearing that the PS3 version of FFXIV was delayed, I had to look back to see what successes they'd had on consoles lately. And I couldn't believe it. It's probably been six years since they got their hands on a PS3 devkit, and their first and only internally developed, successfully released game for the platform was Final Fantasy XIII? Everything else was merely published by them. But maybe that's a problem with the PS3. I've heard plenty of other developers complain that it's challenging to develop for. Let's see how they fared on the Xbox 360...wait, their only successful releases have been FFXIII and The Last Remnant. And The Last Remnant was famously panned for horrible frame-rates and pop-in.
Some people have told me to be patient. They've suggested that the problems I've encountered are something particular to beta or are easily fixed. Have patience, the true fans urge. But I think something far more fundamental than FFXIV is broken: Square-Enix themselves. This is what a company looks like after a massive flight of talent from the company. It is very easy to get the sense that the programmers there are quite simply in over their heads when it comes to modern consoles and modern computers. It's even more obvious when you listen to ill-advised remarks their developers have been quoted making, such as that FFXIII lacked cities because they were unable to do them justice on modern systems (certainly didn't seem to stop their competitors), or that an FFVII remake would take more than a decade to make. This is a company full of people who are making excuses for their own technical inadequacy. The only people who are still making acclaimed quality games there, it seems, are their portable platform developers. Which is interesting. Perhaps SE's salvation lies with that group. In the meantime, I see SE's acquisition of Eidos as nothing more than a smokescreen, a way of covering up their shame by slapping their names on the products of a company that still seems more than capable of making games for modern consoles.
So, this has turned into a long rant against Square-Enix, and a comments thread on The Escapist seems an odd venue to air such a thing on. But I sincerely believe that, between the technical problems FFXIV has, the internal problems Square-Enix has, and the poor PR skills they've shown in the recent past both surrounding FFXIV and in general, that this game is headed for a bad end, and may end up being another Asheron's Call 2, a game that actually fails before its predecessor.
