New Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn Trailer

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It’s a new year and while the our posts have been scarce our goal is to be more proactive about the blog this year. And what better way to start things out with more Final Fantasy XIV news! Today we got a new trailer as well as beta applications which you can find here.

Much of the trailer is the same 5 minutes we saw from the original A Realm Reborn trailer but has an additional 3 minutes that continues from where the first trailer leaves off. It’s pretty exciting now that the beta should be starting soon and it’ll be interesting to see how things develop leading up to the relaunch later this year. Lastly, while the beta application is standard, the one thing I thought was odd was that they expected people to keep their Final Fantasy XIII codes from two years ago to get priority access to the PS3 beta test to be a little silly. That said, don’t forget to register!

Final Fantasy XIV Questing!

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We now have a glimpse of how the questing and combat is shaping up in the alpha stages of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about their questing system, pretty standard fare. But after playing a game like Guild Wars 2, will this be enough? I personally found it hard to get into that type of leveling system of grinding out quests that didn’t particularly mean anything in Mists of Pandaria after playing Guild Wars 2 and I’m not sure I’ll enjoy this type of questing in Final Fantasy XIV either. While an argument can be made about meaningfulness of hearts, the equivalent of quests in Guild Wars 2, the driving force here is the linear nature of a quest based leveling system. The freedom of leveling in Guild Wars 2 has spoiled me so I’ll be very interested to see how the questing develops as we get closer to the relaunch of Final Fantasy XIV.

This is probably the next big MMO title I’ll be rooting for even though I have serious doubts it’ll draw me back in as a serious player. But all we can do is hope as Square Enix has shown they are serious about making this game work. The next few months should be exciting as more information gets released.

That said, the game still looks great and the UI is quite sharp and pleasant on the eyes.

My Guild Wars 2 Legendary Guide and Thoughts

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Although a bit late I decided to write up my own legendary guide, hints & tips, and thoughts on my journey of making Twilight. I finally made my great sword last week. While the majority of work was done mostly by me I had some last minute help from Niwaar and his generous loan of the last 54 gold I needed to buy icy runestones and another friend who helped with a bunch of mystic coins and assorted rares to salvage for ectoplasms. By no means was I the fastest but for being a mostly solo effort I thought I did pretty well. For this guide I’ll be using Twilight as the guideline but the bulk of making a legendary is pretty much the same across the board no matter which one you personally go for, but for more information on your specific precursor and it’s matching gift please refer to the official wiki.

First let’s go over what you’ll need: Your precursor weapon, a Gift of Fortune, a Gift of Mastery, and your weapon specific gift. Although just four items, each are broken down into quite a few parts. A legendary has a long list of things to collect and I feel this is best organized through my simple yet helpful Legendary Spreadsheet.

After looking at the long shopping list of things you’ll need to acquire for your legendary there are a few items that stand out and will take the bulk of your time to obtain. First and foremost you’re going to need karma, lots of it. Thankfully with the recent Halloween event patch the daily and monthly achievements now rewards Jugs of Liquid Karma, 1 and 10 jugs respectively. These reward 4,500 karma and up to 7.650 karma with guild boosts, shop boosters, and karma banners. In total you will need 525,000 karma to buy the 250 obsidian shards for the gift of mastery, but that’s only the beginning. On top of the base 250 shards you will also need them to get the mystic clovers.

This is where you will need some luck. In total you will need 77 mystic clovers which are made in a couple of ways. There is a single clover recipe which requires 1 obsidian shard, 1 mystic coin, 1 glob of ectoplasm, and 6 philosopher stones (1 skill point per 10). There is also the 10 clover recipe which requires 10 obsidian shards, 10 mystic coins, 10 globs of ectoplasms, and 10 crystals (3 skill points per 5). And a reminder, all of these skill point items are sold by Miyani near the Mystic Forge in Lion’s Arch. The most important thing to remember is that mystic clovers are not 100% guaranteed so you will need to make a decision on which recipe to use. Both clover recipes have a one in three chance to produce clovers; but will come down to how many materials at a time you’re willing to gamble with. Personally I had much better luck with the ten clover recipe with around a 50% chance of success when I made mine.

The final but perhaps most painful part of the process will be getting the precursor to the legendary you want. After the patch that reduced the chance to roll a precursor weapon through the forge I was fortunate to get extremely lucky. In about ten gold worth of rare great sword rolls in the forge I managed to get Dusk. While this is not normal by any means Arenanet has come out and said they will be making changes to how you acquire your precursor with the patch coming this Thursday, 11-16. With this in mind I would stay away from attempting to roll precursors in the mystic forge until the patch. The other, yet undesirable, method would be to simply buy your precursor outright if you have that kind of money.

On that note, another item that will take significant money is the lodestones. Onyx lodestones, along with every other lodestone, has gone up in price considerably. When I was buying my cores and lodestones almost 3 weeks ago they were over 50% cheaper than what they are currently priced as of writing this. The worst of these is charged cores and lodestones if your goal is Sunrise. My word of advice here would be to buy cores and convert them up, never buy lodestones. The recipe is the same no matter which type of core you are converting: 2 cores + 1 bottle of Elonian wine + 1 crystal + 1 pile of crystalline dust. While the savings per lodestone may not be huge it most definitely adds up when you need 100 of them for your gift.

In the end, I enjoyed the process of obtaining my legendary. While it was a large time and gold sink, amplified by the fact that the vast majority of it was done solo, I felt rewarded for my efforts. Although it was more of an exercise in luck and gold acquisition I would have appreciated it more if it was accompanied by some sort of story or mission set. Especially with the karma changes it is definitely more of an exercise in how much wealth a person can accrue.

I’d like to end that with as much drama, speculation, and anger that today’s announcement of a new tier of items being added Arenanet has also confirmed that all current and additional legendary weapons that are added will always remain top tier and will be upgraded with time. While I’m personally not as concerned with these new items, it is comforting to know that my work to obtain my legendary will never be for nothing and that it will never be a waste of time to go out of your way to acquire them and will still be vanity based.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Worthy End?

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You can say a lot of things about Square Enix’s misadventure that was Final Fantasy XIV, but the one thing you do have to admit is they sure do understand how to end something well.

Final Fantasy XIV had large issues from the word go. While its graphics were a huge step forward for its time, two years ago, it had major issues with the clarity of the world as a whole. Character models and animations were far above what we had seen in previous games in the genre. The rest of the game… just did not match up to the promise of the graphics. You may say that it was “just another asian mmo” in that regard. Splash, beautiful graphics with little substance and otherwise reasons to play the game long term.

The game had issues with its Combat systems, its UI and its questing/leveling systems. It had more issues with its Armory system. The new system that Tanakasan in his infinite wisdom replaced the Job system that had been loved by so many in many other Final Fantasy incarnations (including the 10+ year old predecessor, FFXI). The Armory systems issues branched out into issues with Crafting Systems and there were so many issues with it in terms of Class balance and design that the developers released FFXIV’s own version of Advanced Jobs to try and make the system just a little bit better.

All of this was for naught and tonight we celebrate the end of this sad era for the Final Fantasy brand. As Final Fantasy XIV closes its doors and enters its second incubation period, we stand here only with the hope that Yoshida and his staff can fix enough of what Tanaka and his staff got wrong.

The event to close the servers may have been an out and out debacle. From the server connectivity issues that had Square Enix close access to their highly touted “Free Weekend” and only allow the paying customers the opportunity to experience the final moments of the dying game. To the sheer difficulty level of the enemies that made up most of the mediocrity that was the final event. The game was set to come into this world just as it had come into it. A kicking and screaming, good intentioned but badly implemented stain on Square Enix and the Final Fantasy brand.

Until, the last moment. When those players lucky enough to be connected were given a gift. A gift that reminds those of us who wanted the game to be as good as we remember all the Final Fantasy games of the past to have been. A gift that gave us something we had long been missing since our final days of playing Final Fantasy XI. A gift of hope and remembrance and sheer emotion in the form of the final cutscene for a game that can not be easily matched.

Now we can only continue to hope that Yoshida lives up to his promise and gives us a game worth of this end and rebirth. A game that lives up to its Final Fantasy pedigree.

Final Fantasy XIV: Gridania Reborn?

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Square Enix is ramping up for the release of Final Fantasy XIV-2 more and more these days. Today, not only did they announce that the game will have a free weekend this weekend for all existing players, but they dropped this video tour of the new version of Gridania for us to drool over.

Well drool over may be a little hyperbolic, but you can be the judge. I myself can not help but to wonder if one can actually jump in the water and swim. Unfortunately, I am going to just go out on this short, and very sturdy, limb here and say, “No, swimming is against the rules of Final Fantasy (unless you are playing Blitz Ball.”

The town looks a LOT like the original version of the town just with a small facelift. But you be the judge. Take a gander at the old city below.

The Mad King’s Clocktower (+Walkthrough)

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If this Halloween event of Arena.net’s hasn’t had enough public backlash… They went and added an actually challenging holiday challenge to the festival. Now we have a heck of a lot of people complaining on how difficult the puzzle is. People are even posting on forums and complaining that they have been trying to complete the event for 9 to 12 hours and still have failed to progress to the top of the clock.

I am completely embarassed to be a gamer. At this point we have obviously been pandered to with such easy and often down right unchallenging festival content over the years that we as a group just decided that we deserved to see everything and do everything with ease or its badly designed. One poster on the official forums went so far as to demand that Arena.net remove the “video games” out of his MMORPG. Even the MMO/Gaming blogosphere is calling it “a new contender for the worst piece of content ever put into a game“.


I will freely admit that there are issues with the implementation. They could have made the playing field a bit more level. Norn and Charr players are at a distinct disadvantage. They also cause issues for other players. Players aren’t on the same playing field with movement speed either. Warriors and Elementalists have distinct advantages in terms of movement speeds, thanks to the “bug” that allows Warriors to bring in their banners and Air Elementalist talents that give them a speed boost. Even if I did not have or need either of these “advantages” in completing the puzzle on my two level 80 characters (a warrior and an elementalist.)

When I first saw the clocktower was going to be a puzzle, I immediately thought of this years freaky relationship/puzzle game Catherine. I truly wish they had come up with a plan closer to that game. If only to alleviate the “size” disparity. Arena.net could have cut off the “But the Norn and Charr are too big” arguments at the pass if they had just transformed every player into a sheep (or a more appropriate “Mad King” or ghost) in order to complete the puzzle. Doing this would also have eliminated the issue with “weapons” as it would give you a transformation weapon bar.

Alas Arena.net gave us one of the most compelling holiday festival events with Act II and its jumping puzzle. When you think about the new MOBA style game and the riff on their previous Hunger Games and Invasion of the Crystal Dragon beta weekend events they have hit it out of the park.

A few tips for the jumping puzzle:

1) Dye your armor a bright and garish color.
This will allow you to always see yourself in the crowd.

2) If you have “large” armor or a skirt, go naked.
Being able to see your feet on screen and not under a skirt makes hitting your mark just that much easier.

3) Change the Camera Position all the way to the left.
You are turning right the entire time. By moving the camera all the way to the left in the options screen, this gives you a lot more leeway on how much camera turning that is required.

4) Strafe Jumping is the only way to go.
Strafe while jumping will allow you to move around while you are in the air so you can hit the mark you want to hit.

5) Camera Shake is your friend.
Time the camera shake while waiting at the “stall” point. When the shake occurs, jump. The platforms below will show up before you land. It will take a few attempts to get the timing down, but once you do, you will be out in front of everyone. Being the frontrunner provides the best chance for success.

6) Stay in the overflow.
Overflows tend to actually decrease in population overtime. As people finish the puzzle and leave your “opponents” will gradually decrease, making it easier to navigate the puzzle.

7) The new FoV beta can help.
Arena.net are beta testing a new wider FoV that makes the game look a lot better. Check the official post to learn how to try it out.

8) Do not get discouraged.
Muscle Memory is your friend. The more you complete each jump the better you will be in the future.

9) Take a break.
Do not be the fool that stays for 9+ hours trying it over and over. Your eyes and hands will get tired and you will get worse and worse. Take a break and come back fresh.

The Halloween Dilemma

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October 22nd has come and gone and The Shadow of the Mad King has fallen across Tyria. The event is in full swing and let me just say, it is phenomenal. There is a lot to do and people are finding more and more ways to enjoy the hidden aspects of the festival. Yet, more people seem to be complaining about the one thing that we all had known was coming since they announced the particulars of the festival a week ago. Namely, the Black Lion Chests.

Before I get into the meat of how I personally feel of how Black Lion Chests are being used, let me first acknowledge that this is not the first, nor the last time we have seen an MMO use RNG bags for loot. Nor is it in the case of using them as the major source of Holiday Festival loot. These bags have been used by many games for just this reason. There are two key differences in how we have been trained to look at these types of loot boxes versus how Arena.Net has seen fit to implement in Guild Wars 2.

1) Loot Bags in most MMOs are not unlocked with Real Life Money.

This is true and not true at the same time. While if we look at the elephant in the room (World of Warcraft) and its RNG based loot bags, we all know that these are “free”. We pay a 14.99$ monthly fee and part of that money goes towards logging into Azeroth everyday during an event, queing up for the event boss and getting that daily bag on each of our many characters. We get from 1-9 loot bags for “free” with our paid subscription per day.

In many Asian games, we see different. Even before Aion’s free to play transition there was the opportunity to purchase RNG loot from their cash shop. Many other Asian MMOs use the RNG festival (and not festival) loot boxes to drive cash shop sales. Bluehole Studio’s Tera has done the same recently with their very own Halloween holiday themed “Trick-or Treat Mystery Boxes”. Their boxes are slightly different and are on the cash shop for the low low price of 2 for 4.99$.

Chilling With Altair Charr in the Witch Costume in Lion's Arch

The is a major difference between Tera’s RNG boxes and GW2′s Black Lion Chests. Which brings me the the other key difference.

2) There should always be something to look forward to in an RNG loot box.

I am going to speak about how the elephant does their loot bags again. I do not mean to keep harping on how big bad Blizzard has methodically polished certain aspects of the MMO genre, but lets be honest. They do know some of the correct things to do and festival loot bags are a shining example of this. They understand completely that RNG loot bags have the potential to piss off more players than they make happy. They know more about how to keep the players who come out on the “losing” end of the RNG at least semi-content. Maybe not happy, but at least not pissed off and ranting on the forums en mass.

The key thing is they have tiers of rewards. A common tier of goods, an uncommon, a rare and an uber rare “big daddy” grand prize tier. We completely lack this set up in Guild Wars 2. At least from the looks and sounds of it. What it seems like we have is a common good tier of “what normally comes out of chests”. Which is simply not ok for a holiday event. People are purchasing these keys for 125 gems for ~1.50$ US and expect to get, at the very least, something festive and useful.

What should Arena.Net have done? Simply put, they should have tiered the items available and made sure every single Black Lion Chest came with at the very least 5-10 Trick or Treat Bags.

I am not going to say that this holiday is a bust. It is far far from it. I am completely enjoying the holiday events. Costume Brawl is perhaps the most innovative thing I have seen in a AAA MMO for a holiday event in years. The music is awesome, the 2 store Halloween outfits are pure awesome. Its just sad to see a single miscalculation on Arena.Net’s part mar the festival so completely for a heck of a lot of people.

There are definitely other issues with the event. But the event will go on and on Friday when we get to see Act II, I will be completely excited to see whats coming.

Oh and on another note. Just to clarify statements on the Tera 2 for 4.99$ boxes. Well… they have a larger chance to give you less useful items than the Black Lion Chests. So once again I reiterate the previous “RNG boxes is an Asian MMO trope” and ask the question, “Was this pushed for by NCSoft/Nexon? Or was this all Arena.Net’s idea and they just botched the semantics of it?

Personally, I have not purchased any Black Lion Keys and I do not intend to do so. I did purchase the Witches outfit and the (on sale) Pirate Outfit and do not regret either purchase in the least. I am looking forward to seeing some more holiday items ready for purchase in the gem store. Edit: I used a free key from 100% completion of a zone on my level 23 Thief and was rewarded with Avian Shoulders.

 

Mists of Pandaria Thoughts Part 3 of 3

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In my final installment of my Mists of Pandaria review I’ll discuss my overall feelings of the expansion over the past three weeks, what the future looks like, and ultimately where I stand with the game going forward. As with every expansion there is always the allure of the fresh coat of paint feeling, lots of stuff to do and new raids to conquer. I covered the good and the bad of the expansion so far in my previous posts, but of course an MMO is ever changing and this is only my initial feelings of the expansion and the beginning of its lifecycle.

To be blunt, this will probably be my final expansion of playing World of Warcraft. It was a game I enjoyed for many years but nothing lasts forever. There were a few neat things along the way on my journey to level 90; cool new vistas to see and amazing artwork. But in the end, the overall experience of getting there wasn’t fun and felt tiresome. And of course when I got to level 90 I was greeted with more or less the same end game we’ve always had, for better or worse.

So far in my review I’ve barely touched upon the dungeons and raids mostly because after playing the gear treadmill game for almost 8 years I haven’t been very motivated to get back on since hitting level 90. I’ve completed all of the scenarios and only a handle of heroics and have even done both of the world bosses. None of them felt compelling or enjoyable for the most part. The initial high of getting the next upgrade is satisfying at first but ultimately doesn’t make up for not having other non-gear progression paths.

Even though I complain about the obvious, the infinite gear grind simply doesn’t hold my interest like it has in the past. Even though this has been the core design feature since the beginning we were also promised other forms of progression and variety of activities. What these activities boil down to in their current form is the promise of variety disguised as a bunch of dailies.

In this expansion we got a ton of dailies. The problem with the dailies is that the reputation from them is tied to the valor gear. You have all these varieties of ways to earn valor in this expansion but at the end of the day if you want to get make use of them you have to do most every faction that has these reputation locked valor rewards. In the end the system has gone from freedom and variety to tedium that makes me want to stop before I start.

 

In closing, for as much as I have complained and haven’t enjoyed this expansion I still call it the best expansion to date. I say this because if you still enjoy the infinite gear grind then this expansion has definitely delivered. They have also tried to expand the activities and choices of secondary content, although they could have taken it farther in my opinion; but the most important thing going forward is their support of this secondary content post-launch. With the 5.1 patch always in the works it looks like they very well could be doing this but only time will tell, let alone how long this could be on the public test realms. While this game is no longer alluring or enjoyable for me for those players still content with more of the same then you’re in for a good time with this expansion.

SWTOR: F2P With A Subscription?!??

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I would not normally comment on Star Wars: The Old Republic. I honestly believe the game was horrible from the first time I was able to play the game way back in Alpha a few years ago. That opinion was never swayed throughout the entire testing process. I never paid for the game and apparently now I never will. Even if (god forbid), EA and Bioware can right the ship and fix the game to be what they had originally promised, I will never pay a dime to play it.

All that being said I had to laugh a large hearty laugh when I saw the newly revised “Free-to-Play Features” page BioWare posted last night. I won’t go into all of them because you can just head on over to the link and read them yourself. However, there are a few that really just jump right out at me.

A lot of things are going to be free when the transition eventually happens. You can level your character to 50 and experience all the story of the game for free. This is a huge plus, because if SWTOR did deliver on any of its promises, it was the story. (Even if it was a tad dry at times.) The problem is the majority of the other activities in the game are now more akin to “Free to Taste” and not truly F2P.

The game has the same 4 primary activities as some other major MMOs out there; Raiding, Dungeons, Instanced PvP and a single mini game. However, unlike other recently gone F2P games like Aion, we do not get “extended lockouts” from dungeons and pvp. We instead are presented with a free taste of Dungeons, PvP and the single mini-game of 3 times per week with unlimited access being presented by paying a fee per week. The raids do not even get a bite sized option. I do not know about you, but going from a monthly subscription model to a weekly split subscription model is asinine.

I can just imagine the conversation now…

EA Executive: So people do not want to pay for our lackluster title per month? What do you think about splitting all of our actual content and then charging weekly subscriptions for each individual activity?

Bioware Dev: That sounds like an awesome idea!

EA Exec: Yeah we can make them think the game is free by giving them a little taste to get them hooked too. It will be like we are selling coffee, or chocolate, or crack cocaine!

I have no idea what EA and Bioware are thinking here. A free to play game is just that, free to play. Yes, they have some things you pay for. The usual trappings of buffs and reduced cooldowns on quality of life things like travel. But the vast majority of decent free to play games rely on vanity to pay the bottom line. They do not charge players what boils down to a weekly subscription in order to log in the game to play the “free to play” experience. I understand that SWTOR thinks its special because of its Star Warsian world, but that is ALL it ever had going for it. The stories that the world let Bioware tell were the only aspect of the game that has been worth the effort. The PvP had potential and was fun at times. The Dungeons were entertaining in the short term and, from what I am told by friends who did get to partake in the raiding endgame, well the Operations were just buggy, broken and not overall as entertaining as they needed to be. Now to charge individual subscriptions for differing game content instead of charging a full subscription for all of the game content is a novel idea. It may have actually had a place in the genre at some time. But it does not belong in a game that is marketing itself as “Free-to-Play”.

 

Mists of Pandaria Thoughts Part 2 of 3

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Now for the continuation of my first post, my complaints with the expansion. To explain the things I didn’t care for with this expansion I will use those comparisons I warned about in part one of my Mists of Pandaria review. Many of these comparisons and complaints and completely subjective and personal but had a huge impact on my enjoyment of the expansion these past three weeks since its launch.

Perhaps the most jarring thing I encountered when coming back to the game after a nearly 6 month hiatus was the questing system. This was only exacerbated from playing Guild Wars 2 for the month before this expansion’s release. And as always there will be differing views and by no means is Guild Wars 2 a perfect game, far from it, but the flexibility and variety of activities granted to you while playing through the game in Guild Wars 2 made it extremely hard for me to get back into the swing of things with World of Warcraft and really never got any better throughout the five levels of questing.

Sure you could say there are different types of quests and that’s fine but the system of accepting quests with walls of text only makes me not care for what’s going on and feel little to no connection to the game world. I honestly have never hated questing so much in all of my years of playing World of Warcraft as I did while leveling to 90 in this expansion.

I have a hard time putting my finger on it but I just couldn’t get interested in what I was doing. It took me almost the entire first week to get to level 90. I could only play for a couple of hours at a time before I would get bored and had to stop. What really made the quests stand out in a bad way was its combination  of combat and gameplay. Yes, I know it’s an old game but after playing Guild Wars 2 it really brought to light how dated a lot of these mechanics felt.

The mind numbing quests are only made that much more frustrating coming from a game where you want to see people, Guild Wars 2, to a game where you never want to see people, World of Warcraft. In Warcraft seeing other people in the area is a direct hindrance on my own progression and helping others does nothing for either party. And then we have the combat systems, not being able to use abilities because I have no targets and having no dodge to evade attacks made my first hours of the expansion really difficult to cope with.

I feel that the gap between Guild Wars 2 and World of Warcraft in this department is very similar to the gaps in player control we saw from Final Fantasy XI going into World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft really shows its age with this expansion because of this. Guild Wars 2 has brought it up a notch for freedom of character movement in an MMO in my opinion.

Questing, combat, and freedom of character movement aside another problem I had reaffirmed my suspicions with the pre-expansion level 85 scenario. Finally upon hitting level 90 I went and experienced all of the scenarios. To say the least I found them underwhelming. We were told these would be vehicles for story telling and I had a hard time finding anything I could care about. These scenarios certainly had themes but with little voice acting, no cut scenes, and just a list of objectives I found it hard to care about what I was doing let alone why I was doing it in these instances.

Lastly, my other real gripe with the game personally was with the story. I have read on other sites how the story is great in this expansion and I have a hard time agreeing with that. Yes there is lore, yes there is story; but at the end of the day I feel like I’m playing through a filler episode of an anime series. The lore doesn’t fit into the bigger picture of Warcraft’s lore in my opinion. There are moments of neat little vignettes but I don’t feel it adds to the depth of the overall experience.

In the final part of my Mists of Pandaria review I’ll give my final thoughts on the expansion as well as the game moving forward. There is lots to think about, especially when it comes to whether or not I will continue to play the game or not. This expansion has lots going for it but the sad reality is the game is getting old and some of its conventions are getting tiring. Only time will tell.