Just a semi-review about my FFXIV experience.

I've played the game during the beta and gave it a shot on live.

This is my attempt to explain what kind of game it is or atleast how I look at it and why.

Final Fantasy XIV gives me the feeling like I am playing a game that has been created long ago when gaming design was still in their baby shoes.

The first problem I ran into after installing the game was patching it.
It does work but it is unbelievable slow which means 3 days for a download.
Now getting the patch from a torrent is no problem but I as a paying costumer I could expect a bit more.

After this I launched the game with it's recommend settings.
That is on a 260-216GTX over clocked,4gig ram, core2quad 3.2mhz.
Can say it runs decent but it requires lower settings for a decent FPS.
The game requires a good computer to run proper.

First thing I ran into was my GFX card running to hot for my liking,
I alt tab during the intro to push up the fan speed and the game crashes.
After trying this a few times out and reading up it seems this is normal.
Personally I consider this not to be normal but just like in FF11 SE prefers to keep some of the traditional nuisances.

You can play it on windowed mode but be prepared for a big performance hit.

After watching the gorgeous intro I started to look around in the menu's.
Bit of a surprise was how little you could adjust in the option screen.
Video/sound/gamepad settings can not be accessed while playing the game.
Keybinds cannot be adjusted either.

Next thing I noticed was the UI.
Now back in the old days horrible controls where common for PC games.
But for a new mmo this is just not acceptable, the controls are mutilated.
Instead of adjusting the game for PC controls SE is releasing a final fantasy game pad for PC.


The game is unplayable with out a game pad but even with a game pad it is still atrocious.
There are to many menu's the game-pad is slow.
I can describe this as trying to play a RTS with a game pad.


Now a lot of MMO's show how to optimize the PC's keyboard and mouse in a great way.
Allowing people to customize action bars/key-binds/menu's would have been a great idea.

The fact that the software was not replaced for the hardware one in beta showed how little effort they put into PC controls.


After adjusting settings and trying out different controls I started to pick up where I left in the beta.
What you will notice is FFXIV is not beginner friendly.
It takes time to figure out what to do and which npc does what.
NPC's do not got icons above them when you hover with your mouse/gamepad over them.
You can access the map to find a few things but you won't be able to zoom out as result you end up running around a lot.

Talking to npc's has it's charms but there are a few issues with this.
The majority has nothing interesting to tell and you run around with 1k MS if you play from EU/US/
This makes simple things like crafting/talking difficult.
Same problem while crafting/repairing the MS makes it take everything long.
Same goes for the UI everything has to many menu's.

This goes up for a lot of things.
FFXIV makes simple things overly complicated and simply not fun.
You can only invite people when you are next to them and the chat box is made poorly.
The list of small nuisances to simply big mistakes in game design goes on.

Now after some time I got used to all this and started to play the game.
I liked the atmosphere of it and tried to give it a chance.
FFXIV got 2 type of quests one is the story quest which is fun the other is a bit of a daily kind of quest which often involves kill 8 >inset random monster