FFXIV: The next game to ruin my life and yours.

Hey everyone. This blog is going to be focused on the analysis and discussion of the new MMORPG, Final Fantasy XIV. I'm going to assume that readers and followers know the basics of an MMORPG and, to an extent, FFXIV. I'm not going to explain every minor thing as if I'm giving a guide to the game; I'm just doing an analysis and writing about how I feel about the game. To tell you a little about myself, I played Final Fantasy XI, the other Final Fantasy MMO, for about 6 years. This game had a lot of potential to be great, and it was great in some aspects, but there were a lot of things that Square Enix could have done better. I don't want to delve too deep into FFXI as this blog is going to be about FFXIV, but there are some things that SE could improve on with the release of FFXIV.

The biggest concern that I had with FFXI was the customer service (or lack thereof) that SE provided. Getting any support from the staff was like pulling teeth, except it was a lot harder.You would call a GM about a problem in the game and not only would it take an hour or more for a response, you probably wouldn't get any help when you did eventually hear from someone. Another thing that sort of ties in with this is the fact that SE has always been persistent in making their games seem "mysterious," and not explaining anything. There are things that should most definitely be explained to the players, as opposed to leaving them in the dark. I'm not saying that it's not good for the community to get together and collaborate about strategy and damage formulas, but there's certain things that are just stupid to be secretive about.

I was always a hardcore player when I played FFXI, playing about 16 hours a day when I didn't have anything to do (which was often). I was addicted. I'm busy now though, so I'm going to be playing FFXIV a little (a lot) more casual. I feel like this game is going to be more directed at the casual player than FFXIV was. I think SE realized that in FFXI a lot of things were just too time-consuming. It's a lot better to be able to just jump on for an hour or two and actually feel like you accomplished something.

There's a lot of things that I'm looking forward to in FFXIV. I'm not going to talk about anything specific in this introductory post though, I'll get started on that in my next post. The open beta has started already, but I haven't played yet because I need to get a new computer still to run it. I'm not sure if I'll get in before the beta ends; if not, I'll just start when it's actually released, which isn't too far away. I've heard mixed opinions on how the beta is going, but a lot of what I've heard has been good. So we're not too far away from release, and I hope everyone else is as pumped as I am to play it.

I'm going to leave you with this video that I'll probably talk about in my next post.