I've played a lot of MMO betas. This has to be up there among the worst games I have ever played, and if you've even read this blog, you can probably see I've played a LOT of bad games. This game has a connection problem, but it's not related to the Internet. Square Enix has yet again failed to connect with its core audience and delivered a virtually unplayable hodgepodge of nothingness to rival Star Trek Online.

So what's so bad about FFXIV??

* First and most important: combat is SOOOO slow and boring!! I swear I could engage a mob in combat, swing my main hand weapon, go downstairs to make a sandwich, and come back upstairs just in time to see my second swing. Basically, Mario looked more stressed jumping over a Goomba in Super Mario Bros. than your character will look in FFXIV combat. Would the game be awesome if they sped up combat and made it more interesting? No. Would it help a lot? YES!

* The leveing system in this game is so jacked up that I can't begin to make sense of it. Apparently you can do 4 leveling quests every 48 hours. If you're in a group you can choose a higher difficulty and share it with teammates. Still... 4 quests every 48 hours?! WTF are you going to do in the meantime, enjoy the graphical detail?? They've also promised (at last check) that your experience with each class is reduced if you don't rest and/or play other classes. Why can't I just play what I want?? Why can't I do more than 4 quests every 48 hours?? This is the same time wasting mentality the FFXI devs had and I wasn't impressed with it in that game either! Can't I just have a good time?? Jesus you want $60 and $15 per month to play. If I order a pizza I have to pay, too, but at least I can have what I want on it.

* This "class" system they've created is so bizarre. You have a "physical level" and then a "weapon level." Nobody I talked to in game had any idea if your physical level even mattered. Your weapon level is what most people would recognize since your abilities scale with that weapon's level. Once you achieve a particular level on a particular weapon, you can then use abilities from that weapon while playing other weapons to sort of customize the gameplay. It's funny to me how complicated they made this and yet combat is the most boring combat I've ever seen!

* You need one beast of a computer to run this game. Sure, the graphics look great! It's just amazing to me that they went into so much detail on the graphics when combat is less exciting than going to your grandma's birthday party.

* I mentioned FFXI a couple of times here. Is this FFXI with better graphics? No. Is this a revolutionary game compared to FFXI? No. They switched some stuff up, but if you didn't like FFXI, you're not going to like FFXIV. It's sad for those of us who used to enjoy the Final Fantasy franchise.

All in all, the game blows. This is the fifth major Final Fantasy installment in a row to suck. Will it ever get any better? Maybe, but I'm done hoping for it. Goodbye Final Fantasy, I'll always have fond memories of the good ol' days.

I'm pretty disinterested in this game overall from the videos I've seen on YouTube, but others say FFXIV is good, so I figured I'd give it a whirl.

I've been attempting for two days to play and I've been on for all of about 30 seconds. It took me FOR-EVER to install and patch the game. Their installation & patching needs a LOT of attention! First off, I tried to download the game off of their official site, which maxxed out at a whopping 15.6 kbps. Isn't that dial-up speed? So for the nearly 9 GB I needed to download, it didn't go so well.

After almost 48 hours, I had 50% of the game downloaded. Not cool! When I realized beta would be over by the time I downloaded the client, I searched for other means. Eventually I learned that you can torrent all of the files you need, go through some crazy procedure, and finally be able to play. Last night I torrented all of the files (which downloaded MUCH faster) and followed the directions. This morning, I was able to log in for about 30 seconds and the servers went down for maintenance. When they were back up, there was a patch that stalled at 94.6%. I think I've finally got that fixed and may be able to log in later this afternoon to actually play.

What? A four day installation process isn't what you expected?!

So I stumbled across this blog entry from the Star Trek Online Executive Producer (link). I couldn't help but comment because it is sooooo loaded with BS...

Other than some server issues, the release of Star Trek: Online went well, according to Zinkievich. "We were just blown away," he said. "Aside from some server stuff, and I think we handled that extremely well, launch was just great. The amount of people interested in the game was staggering and humbling, and we're really dedicated to keeping those people happy for the long-term."

Well it would've been a better start if you could've kept those people happy in the short-term. I couldn't even make it through open beta.

The server issue was a problem though, that had to be addressed right away, and was a result of the popularity of the MMORPG. "A big [hurdle] was improving our server infrastructure after the large influx of players that came to the game," said Zinkievich. "That required a lot of coordination between not just the STO team, but the network operations and production teams to get everything working quickly and securely."

One thing that probably helped the server issues was the outflux of players who gave up cause the game is terrible.

Regarding the future, expect improvements and new additions. "We'll have more Special Task Force missions available soon, and our major content update, Season One: Common Ground, is due to release this month.

WTF is a special task force mission and how is that going to fix the boring, repetitive gameplay combined with the bugs and unfinished content?

As we get more feedback from players, we can definitely work on different ways to add variety to missions. If you look at the latest Special Task Forces, which are our most challenging endgame encounters, the gameplay is much more varied. That's just stuff we've been working on at the end of the development cycle. As we add more missions into all areas of the game, I'd expect some more surprises along the way."

Well remember what STO means by "varied gameplay" is a combination of boring, broken ground combat and space-bar-mashing space combat. Also, what he means by "adding more missions into all areas of the game," he probably means making an effort at adding content to the completely bare Klingon side of the game. At this point, a surprise would be pretty much what the super predictable game needs.

Other possible future addition might be ship interiors. "We've already got bridges available in-game," said Zinkievich. "We want to get those perfect, and then look into expanding beyond them. Ship interiors themselves are something that will take a lot of time to create, just due to the size of the ships we're talking about. Some of the larger ones are the size of small cities. There's a lot to consider there, but it is something we want to accomplish if we can make it interesting and worth the player's time."

LOL "We've already got bridges available in-game." Yeah, sure you do. You can go on a bridge that doesn't look different no matter what type of ship you're on. He forgets to mention that there is absolutely nothing to do on the bridge either. You can't customize it, you can't do anything on it -- wow, can we get some more of that content?! Please, nothing having to do with ship interiors is anywhere near the top of the priority list when the game is half broken and missing about 60% of the content it should have.

Community input is important when it comes to tweaking the game, fixing problems or adding new features. "We've been keeping an open dialogue with our community, both those that are happy with how things are and those that aren't," said Zinkievich. "It's shaping the decisions we make in a very positive way."

Well someone forward this community input to Cryptic. They haven't made a good game yet and they had a huge opportunity with the Star Trek franchise. This is what happens when you give a major league license to a little league company. Oh well, Star Trek has a history of terrible video games. The legacy continues...

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/startrekonline/review.html

They give it a 5.5. That might be generous. Oh well, I'm glad I got a beta key so I didn't have to pay to find out the game is full of fail.

Sigh, yet another Star Trek game to add to the long list of crappy Star Trek games. Where's Bridge Commander 2??

Eurogamer just posted their review of Star Trek Online, which appears to be the first "professional" review available. They're pretty much right on the money, and rated it a 6.0. STO is a mess! Like almost all Star Trek games before it, STO sucks. Oh well, it had a lot of promise ...until Cryptic got a hold of it.

Well today was the end of the Cryptic's Star Trek Online Open Beta event. Launch is planned for February 2, 2010 and, from everything I'm reading, will be going ahead as planned. It actually took some hard work for me to get a hold of a beta key. I didn't want to pre-order the game because I did that with Aion and the game ended up being a near total fail. (Read my Aion review here.) That being the case, I kept checking on the Star Trek Online website and finally they announced that they sent 10,000 open beta keys to NVIDIA. With them, all you had to do was sign up for an email newsletter. Other sites that Cryptic sent keys to required you to have a paid subscription for an open beta key. No way I'm paying for some crappy gaming site just to get a beta key. Anyways, so thanks to NVIDIA, I was able to play open beta for a week.

If you don't want to read the details, the bottom line of my thoughts is the game has potential. I decided not to purchase the game or subscribe because I just don't think there's enough there to hold my interest $50 worth plus $15 per month. That being said, once improvements are made, it's possible the game could be a lot of fun.

If you want to read the details, here are the pluses and minuses of my time playing Star Trek Online's Open Beta...

+ Lots of customization!! You can customize your character and his/her uniform. The customization is about as in-depth as Aion, but you also get to customize the uniform, which is beyond what Aion allowed. On top of that, you get to customize the look of your ship, which is really cool! I had a pretty awesome looking ship even though it is still somewhat limited by the type of ship you have access to based on your rank.

- Intro/tutorial mission is pretty mundane and fairly long. Yeah, I know these aren't meant to blow you away. They're supposed to teach you how to play the game. In comparison to other tutorial missions I've played in other games, though, I felt it was more boring than the average tutorial. The other problem it has is it doesn't give you enough information on how to effectively play the game. Based on reading tester feedback on the beta forums, I'm not the only person that wasn't clear on how everything works. In fact, now that beta is finished, I'm still not sure I completely understand how everything works.

+ Missions are fun! I enjoyed the missions I played and they had fairly good Trekky-type stories.

- Missions are long, which wouldn't be a problem by itself. However, it turns into a decent-sized problem. For example, I was given a mission to go to a particular star system and explore three different, unexplored planets. Searching for them takes time. Basically you fly around in a completely empty map and don't discover these planets until you are very close to them. Once you scan them and gain entry, you have some task to perform to complete your research of that unexplored planet. I completed the first one, but once I started the second one, I had to log off. When I picked up again the following day, I was kicked out of my newly discovered planet and had to find a different one. I discovered that you have to complete missions to get credit, otherwise, if you log off, you have to start all over again. Not cool!!

- The "world maps" in Star Trek Online are called "Sector Space" areas. I'm not impressed. Nothing cool happens when you're traveling at warp speed. There's no cool time spent on your bridge interacting with your ship. Nope, you watch your ship travel in the same way it looks while you're at impulse. Things can sort-of attack you, but they ask you to confirm whether or not you want to enter combat. I'm ok with that part, but to be truly Star Trek, there's a lot to change with this system.

+ Ship combat is a LOT of fun! There is technique to it, and PVP was enjoyable for me -- a person who normally hates PVP. Is ship combat realistic? No. It doesn't make it any less fun, though. Ideally, combat should be like it was in Star Trek Bridge Commander, in which you had the option to take control of the combat situation yourself, or delegate combat to your tactical officer. This would work nicely in the Cryptic design, since you have different officers on your ship. Unfortunately, nothing like that exists at this point in time.

- Finding your way around starbases is not particularly easy at first. The big problem is the lack of a usable map. Of course, once you spend some time looking around you can find stuff pretty easily in the future, but a map would be faster all around.

- You never see the bridge of your ship!! At least I didn't figure out how to see it. Others on the forums said there is a way, but that there's nothing to do on the bridge of your ship. Your bridge officers aren't even on the bridge! That's a serious problem in my book since most of Star Trek takes place on the bridge of a ship.

- Auto-grouping sounds like a great idea. It isn't! Let me explain. In some missions, you are ordered to a particular area to engage in combat. A few others are on the quest at the same time in the same area. The system will automatically group you with them. Does this help? Maybe. The difficulty of the mission depends on how many people are grouped to complete it. So the mission becomes harder the more help you get. The problem is your "help" doesn't always help. Sometimes they just sit there. So here you are engaged in combat with more ships than you would have had alone, and your teammate is afk. Or, even more annoying, is when you are halfway through your mission, and you get auto-grouped with someone who is just starting. You're off to your next objective only to find that it's more difficult than the earlier ones and your wingman is all the way on the other side of the map. Lame!

I could say a lot more, but these are the big ideas that occurred to me now that it's all over. If we could focus more of the game on my positives and make some of the negatives less negative, I would be interested in giving Star Trek Online another shot. Unfortunately, the negatives are a bit too weighty for me to pay $65 right now. Perhaps in a few months things will be better and I'll give it a chance.

I think I did a pretty good job of building up my expectations for Aion. I really wanted this game to be good! Here we are, almost two months after release, and I'm done playing.

Yes, I have a short attention span. When I pay $50 for a game plus $15 per month, it grabs me. It's the game's job to hold me. Aion did not accomplish this task. After thinking about it, I have some reasons why Aion missed the mark:

1.) Grinding - I'm not above grinding. I've had to do it enough over the years that I know how to do it. Pull up the game on the desktop, pop a DVD into the laptop, and you've got at least two hours of relatively painless grinding. However, the game has to have different aspects of the game I can do that do not require grinding. From crafting to leveling, everything in Aion requires grinding. It gets old. From what I understand from my brother, level 41 has about three quests for it and the rest of the 63 million exp is all grinding. Sorry, that's not my kind of game.

2.) Broker Limits - This is similar to one of the problems I had with Final Fantasy XI (my review of FFXI). I know it's used to control the gold spammers, but when you limit the number of auctions a player can post, you limit the amount of in-game money they can make. When training at level 31 costs over 100,000 Kinah (Aion's in-game money) and quests are becoming fewer and further between, people need to make money. Everything in Aion is expensive! The devs did a good job of making sure Kinah was not a problem early-on, but as I passed level 30, between buying spells, leveling trade skills, and gearing my character, money is tight.

3.) Expensive Mail - Sort of along the lines of #2, but holy god it is expensive to use in-game mail in Aion! To mail a piece of armor to a friend or legion-mate costs almost as much as it would to just buy it off of the Broker. That is completely ridiculous!

4.) Instance Lock-Outs - I thought locking people out of instances after achieving a certain level was pretty lame. There are some nice gear drops in some of these instances, but if you can't get it to drop in 5 or 6 runs, then you're SOL unless you buy it off of the Broker. I guess they figure they make up for the instance lock-outs by not having very many of them. Instead, they have large zones with elite mobs that you wouldn't enter without a group. Of course, since it's not instanced, you're probably going to find several other groups in the area.

5.) Legion Membership Limits - Huh? Who thought it would be a good idea to limit the number of people that can join a legion? It's already bad enough that you have to spend lots of Kinah to expand your legion to allow more people to join.

6.) PvPvE - This one is probably my fault. I'm not a big PvP fan, and I knew I was taking a chance by buying a game marketed as being heavy PvP. That being said, it was also marketed as being able to successfully bridge the gap between PvP and PvE so as to be enjoyable for fans of each type of play. I think they failed. The PvPvE portion of Aion is simply PvP. Yes, there are NPCs involved in the PvP combat, but I don't think that bridges the gap or makes me, a big PvE fan, enjoy Aion. In addition, there are no pure PvE zones after level 20 or so. In fact, if your faction is pwning the other faction in The Abyss (the huge PvPvE zone), you'll find the losing faction camping PvE areas in the winning faction's "PvE" zone. They wait for you to engage your quest mob in combat then come and gank you from behind. PvPvE is pretty lame in my opinion.

7.) Training - No, I'm not referring to education or learning. I'm talking about the game mechanics allowing some jerk to gather up a bunch of NPCs, run them over to you, and have the NPCs all aggro to you once the jerk is out of range or otherwise loses aggro. Any developer that makes this possible in their game needs to consider whether tweens will be allowed to play. If so, I would make training impossible.

8.) Trade Skills - This is love/hate for me. I like the fact that you get exp for leveling your trade skills. Also, it's ok for me that you can buy all of the materials you need to level your skills from an NPC in the crafting area. That being said, it is expensive! And it takes a whole lot of time to level your trade skills, which is incredibly dull. Add to that your chance to fail to craft, therefore losing your materials, and crafting can be very aggravating. There are so many trade skills you need to level just to craft self-sufficiently that it's a huge time sink or you're going to find yourself buying from the Broker again.

9.) Respawn - It happens. In all games there is a chance you could get screwed by respawn. In Aion, it's a guarantee! When mobs respawn in this game, if you're in their aggro range, they immediately aggro to you. There is no grace period or few seconds of immunity for you to move from a respawned mob. This becomes a huge issue in the large, elite PvE areas. If another group went through there before you, who knows when or where respawn will occur? Plan for some expensive deaths.

I haven't played for about two weeks now, so I'm sure there are other things I forgot to mention. The bottom line is this game did not turn out to be as fun as I'd hoped. There are some great MMOs scheduled for release next year. Unless you have an abundance of time to kill, I'd steer clear of Aion.

It was enjoyable doing something other than World of Warcraft for a week. I wanted to wait a few days before I posted my final review of the beta so that I'll be able to articulate the big take-aways and not focus so much on minutia. Let's get to what I have to say....

The chat for an entire week was filled with people talking about whether or not Aion would be the "WoW Killer." That was probably the most aggravating part of the week. Nothing but WoW chat and it got old before it started. That being said, my opinion is nothing will "kill" WoW. Over time, if companies can start developing enjoyable games, WoW players will migrate to other games (like Aion), which will eventually end the WoW monopoly.

The last game that pulled me away from WoW was Age of Conan. What a disaster! That game initially appeared to be well-designed and enjoyable. It had great graphics and all the other bells and whistles, including guild castles and a weird night/day thing. While the features appeared to be innovative and enjoyable, the game had absolutely no substance. They took too much time focusing on these new innovations and completely forgot to add the substance and foundation that makes a great MMORPG.

I've been asking myself "Could Aion turn into the next Age of Conan disaster?" I think it's possible. Having said that, there are differences. I didn't have a chance to test out Age of Conan before it came out, and I think I never would've left WoW for Conan had I been given that chance. Aion also offers the flight innovation and it works into the storyline. Speaking of storyline, Aion has a great one! Age of Conan? Non-existant. Also, Aion has a pretty big focus on group play, which is something I've always shied away from but always end up wanting to do. The bottom line for me is that Aion will not be the same Age of Conan disaster I experienced last year, but it is possible that it could suffer a similar fate.

Aion appears to have lots of people signed up for pre-order. I think this is going to be a big help when compared to other MMOs. Especially for a game focused on grouping, there had better be a lot of people there to group with -- and I think there will be. I think, with how crappy the new releases have been lately, it can't hurt to give Aion a try. The worst that can happen is you're out $65 and back to WoW in a couple weeks.

Well I decided to give up on the spirit master. I started up a scout that will turn into an assassin at level 10. The scout is fairly fun, but there is a lot of down time. In fact, my scout has more down time than my mage did at the same level. You continuously have to rest after every fight, which is a good thing since the cooldown on "Hide" (the scout's cloaking ability) is 1 minute. I tried several times and nearly died each time I attempted to take on a same-level mob without first hiding. To begin a battle, the scout MUST use Hide in combination with his back attack, which means you cannot engage in combat more often than every 1 minute. This SUCKS!! My hope is that Hide's cooldown will be reduced once my scout hits level 10 and specializes as an assassin, otherwise I will definitely NOT be playing a scout.

With that one (BIG) exception, playing the scout has been pretty enjoyable. When I had to go back and finish a quest that I missed a couple levels earlier, I hacked through those mobs like they were nothing. The thing I miss and that has me pretty confused is that I mowed down enemies much faster as a mage that were higher level and with less down time. I plan to get the assassin to level 10 this morning and see if things improve, but, if not, I'm going to give up on these guys and just focus on my cleric once the release hits.

So I'm updating on Thursday, but this is for Wednesday.

My mage hit 10 yesterday and is now a spiritmaster. I had stuff to do so I only got into 2 battles, but it was enough to find out that the fire pet that you get at level 10 is pretty weak. He's supposed to be melee, but I wouldn't advise it. My plan is to summon my wind pet, which is a caster, and continue ranged casting like I did from levels 1-10. After I play that for a bit, it's time to start my scout who will become an assassin. So far, I'm not thrilled with the spiritmaster.

More to come later....