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Livejournal Podcast #2
Oct. 9th, 2010 12:52 pmLadies and Gentlemen my name is Shaun of the Gamer Podcast This is my Gaming Life WTF coming to you live on livejournal dot com with another ranty rant disguised as a tldr short.
After some deliberation I got my brother to install Final Fantasy 14 onto his computer, and had him play it for a while. He rolled a big burly warrior, no big surprise there and decided to give it a whirl.
Starting up was a bit choppy, he tried watching the video which is easily found on youtube. You know, those fancy intro movies that Square likes to put in front of everything they create. Some things that comes to mind while watching him play last night brings a few valid points.
1) They need to really port this to the consoles. I don't care how LONG it takes, this is a ruddy console game, there's no doubt about that. While the layout is inherently meant for the PC, there is no big surprise that they included an option to play it on a PC-based controller. This tells me that they are bringing it over. But if it's just going to be the PS3 or the 360, well time will tell.
2) Awkward, awkward, awkward. The quests get you off to an extremely jumpy start. You're plopped right in the middle of action from the get go, and here's where things get a little jumpy to say the least. The controls are not that intuitive, and can't be fixed with a little button mashing. Attacking an opponent means you have to be face on towards them, you can't just sit around and sort of glance, no it doesn't work that way. You must be facing them with your torso presented to the opponent in order to even ENGAGE the enemy. It's not like WoW where you run in and attack them from any direction.
Now I might be a little unfair comparing FF14 and WoW together, but the functionality of this game really needs a tune up. Not only you are fumbling around like a sightless kitten for the first part of the game, but you are ALSO aimless as you move along the story which so far, seems to be slightly linear in nature which means Square intends you to follow up whatever cosmic bollucks that happened.
Take the Port city for example, a fancy name I don't remember right now. You would think for a game modeled as a MMORPG that there would be clearly marked quest hubs everywhere, big glowing question marks and blinking turn in points on your map. No that's not really the case here. For one thing, you're trying to find the quest objectives with not-exactly-clear goals in mind. Sure they go tell you to attune yourself to a crystal, but Kyle spent about twenty minutes trying to find out where he could exit the goddamn city. No Square, it doesn't WORK like that. Games like this you have to hold the players hand in this sort of context. You need to make clearly marked NPCs with big bubbles over their heads in order to show them where to turn in. You can't just expect us to go "hey look at that, it's a NPC maybe I should talk to them on the off chance that it's my questgiver's target."
Another flaw in the game is the lack of levels being displayed on opponents, and yes, even on your own character. You have your own interface and all, but it's not really there, just a couple of bars at the bottom indicating HP, MP and something called TP which I doubt means Toilet Paper. The indication of how badly a mob is about to hand you your ass is directly proportional to how BIG it is. We fought a rat, no big deal, it took some damage off us. We can live with that. Killed two more. Fantastic now we're cooking.
And then we attacked some kind of knee-high thing that completely and utterly subjugated our backsides. That probably was the icing on the cake that was piled high with Square's ineptness to have a smooth launch. For goddsake Square a few marked levels would be NICE. Maybe some kind of buffer? Mark too high mobs in RED for all we care, just let us know that going over and saying hello will get us a nice teeth-shaped mark carved out of our asses.
All these problems and I haven't even gotten to the good part of it. The loading times. I don't know if its a streaming issue with their servers or whatever, but when you walk around, you shouldn't be all alone for about twenty minutes and not see a single soul for twice that long. No, fix it. FIX IT. There needs to be faster loading times because the sheer volume of ridiculous from walking around in a deserted city causes me to froth something fierce.
All this being said, while the PC experience has been less than stellar, so much so that I'm canceling my account for now, I will LOVE to see this on a console. This is inherently a console game, Square is a console DEVELOPER. Even with less buttons and bells and whistles, this game is meant for the sheer raw power of a 360 or a PS3. If it's just for PS3 fine I'll save my cash and buy it then and a machine just to play this game. That's how much I like this game despite it's incredible flaws.
I can say with certainty that if you are going to buy this game for the PC, make sure you have MORE than the minimum 4 Gigs of RAM recommended to run it. It's choppy even at 6 which is my brother's laptop. I swear to god. It's not as bad as Crysis but then again Crysis requires materials bought from a inter-dimensional shop that involves Talking Sentient Aluminum. Graphical quality is fantastic but needs to be toned down for the gamers who are running older machines. And the options interface NEEDS to be adjusted. Really, give us a more friendly adjustment from beautiful to crap.
This is Shaun and I'm signing off. Maybe sometime later I'll actually post something that ISN'T a Totalbiscuit monologue in my head review of a game I shouldn't play because of money issues.
After some deliberation I got my brother to install Final Fantasy 14 onto his computer, and had him play it for a while. He rolled a big burly warrior, no big surprise there and decided to give it a whirl.
Starting up was a bit choppy, he tried watching the video which is easily found on youtube. You know, those fancy intro movies that Square likes to put in front of everything they create. Some things that comes to mind while watching him play last night brings a few valid points.
1) They need to really port this to the consoles. I don't care how LONG it takes, this is a ruddy console game, there's no doubt about that. While the layout is inherently meant for the PC, there is no big surprise that they included an option to play it on a PC-based controller. This tells me that they are bringing it over. But if it's just going to be the PS3 or the 360, well time will tell.
2) Awkward, awkward, awkward. The quests get you off to an extremely jumpy start. You're plopped right in the middle of action from the get go, and here's where things get a little jumpy to say the least. The controls are not that intuitive, and can't be fixed with a little button mashing. Attacking an opponent means you have to be face on towards them, you can't just sit around and sort of glance, no it doesn't work that way. You must be facing them with your torso presented to the opponent in order to even ENGAGE the enemy. It's not like WoW where you run in and attack them from any direction.
Now I might be a little unfair comparing FF14 and WoW together, but the functionality of this game really needs a tune up. Not only you are fumbling around like a sightless kitten for the first part of the game, but you are ALSO aimless as you move along the story which so far, seems to be slightly linear in nature which means Square intends you to follow up whatever cosmic bollucks that happened.
Take the Port city for example, a fancy name I don't remember right now. You would think for a game modeled as a MMORPG that there would be clearly marked quest hubs everywhere, big glowing question marks and blinking turn in points on your map. No that's not really the case here. For one thing, you're trying to find the quest objectives with not-exactly-clear goals in mind. Sure they go tell you to attune yourself to a crystal, but Kyle spent about twenty minutes trying to find out where he could exit the goddamn city. No Square, it doesn't WORK like that. Games like this you have to hold the players hand in this sort of context. You need to make clearly marked NPCs with big bubbles over their heads in order to show them where to turn in. You can't just expect us to go "hey look at that, it's a NPC maybe I should talk to them on the off chance that it's my questgiver's target."
Another flaw in the game is the lack of levels being displayed on opponents, and yes, even on your own character. You have your own interface and all, but it's not really there, just a couple of bars at the bottom indicating HP, MP and something called TP which I doubt means Toilet Paper. The indication of how badly a mob is about to hand you your ass is directly proportional to how BIG it is. We fought a rat, no big deal, it took some damage off us. We can live with that. Killed two more. Fantastic now we're cooking.
And then we attacked some kind of knee-high thing that completely and utterly subjugated our backsides. That probably was the icing on the cake that was piled high with Square's ineptness to have a smooth launch. For goddsake Square a few marked levels would be NICE. Maybe some kind of buffer? Mark too high mobs in RED for all we care, just let us know that going over and saying hello will get us a nice teeth-shaped mark carved out of our asses.
All these problems and I haven't even gotten to the good part of it. The loading times. I don't know if its a streaming issue with their servers or whatever, but when you walk around, you shouldn't be all alone for about twenty minutes and not see a single soul for twice that long. No, fix it. FIX IT. There needs to be faster loading times because the sheer volume of ridiculous from walking around in a deserted city causes me to froth something fierce.
All this being said, while the PC experience has been less than stellar, so much so that I'm canceling my account for now, I will LOVE to see this on a console. This is inherently a console game, Square is a console DEVELOPER. Even with less buttons and bells and whistles, this game is meant for the sheer raw power of a 360 or a PS3. If it's just for PS3 fine I'll save my cash and buy it then and a machine just to play this game. That's how much I like this game despite it's incredible flaws.
I can say with certainty that if you are going to buy this game for the PC, make sure you have MORE than the minimum 4 Gigs of RAM recommended to run it. It's choppy even at 6 which is my brother's laptop. I swear to god. It's not as bad as Crysis but then again Crysis requires materials bought from a inter-dimensional shop that involves Talking Sentient Aluminum. Graphical quality is fantastic but needs to be toned down for the gamers who are running older machines. And the options interface NEEDS to be adjusted. Really, give us a more friendly adjustment from beautiful to crap.
This is Shaun and I'm signing off. Maybe sometime later I'll actually post something that ISN'T a Totalbiscuit monologue in my head review of a game I shouldn't play because of money issues.
