A couple of weeks ago I was craving a new MMO to play for some reason. This coincided with the mass exodus of players leaving World of Warcraft to try out Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV). After watching THIS great video from Jesse Cox as well as some of Zepla HQ's videos I decided to give FFXIV a go.
I've been playing it quite casually for about three weeks now and I feel like I finally have enough experience with it to write down some thoughts. This is not the kind of game that you can judge by the first 4-5 hours of gameplay. With eight years of quality content release it's grown quite huge.
US Gamer
Free Trial
This game offers a Free Trial for anyone who hasn't played the game before. This trial contains a massive amount of content for free, with a few limitations.
Most importantly it lets you play the base game (A Realm Reborn) and the first expansion (Heavensward) for free. Finishing the story and main quests of these two parts of the game should take around 200 hours. Apart from that you're capped at level 60 as long as you're on the free trial. That's 20 levels below the current maximum level in the game.
There's also some other limitations like not being able to join a Free Company (guild). create your own parties and a few other social restriction. My guess is that these restrictions are in place to battle bots and gold-sellers. Read more about the restrictions HERE.
All of this literally means that there is no excuse to give the game a chance if you're looking for a new MMO.
Square Enix
Character Creation
As in any ol' MMO the first thing to greet you is the character creation screen. It let's you choose from six races if you're on the free trial and eight races if you own the latest expansions. These range from the standard humans and elves to more interesting races like cat and bunny people. It's all quite Eastern. Full list of races HERE.
With my name being Pusen (Norwegian word for cat) I of course went with the cat race called Miqo'te. Not enough with that but I made myself a waifu. Check her out.
Because your characters need both first and last names in FFXIV I appropriately named her Puse Katten. That's Norwegian for Kitty Cat. I'm considering if I should change it to Katte Pusen, which basically means the same but has a better ring to it. That's worth 7€ to me.
You then choose your class and like the races all of them aren't available to choose. Some come with later expansions while some seem to be unlocked through gameplay. I wen't with the Lancer which I thought looked cool. I don't usually play a melee class in MMOs so I decided it was time to try one. It's fun so far!
I also had to make some choices as to my characters date of birth, star sign and some other stuff that I feel didn't really matter. I guess at most it might be used for role-playing or maybe it will become relevant to the story somehow. I just picked whatever resonated with me at the time.
First Glimpse of Aorzea
When we enter the world with our character we're riding in a carriage to a foresty place called Gridania. This has to do with our choice of class as the Lancer's Guild is located here. Had we gone with other classes we could have started out near the pirate capital of Limsa Lominsa or the desert city Ul'dah instead.
The first few hours are pretty straightforward and, honestly, not all that interesting. It's mostly quests where we deliver messages and beat up squirrels or ladybugs. I decided relatively early on to just leave the side quests behind and focus on the main- and class quests. There's just to many of them and if I want to stand a chance at finishing the huge main quest line (MSQ) in a reasonable time that was for the best. With my server having a double experience thing going on I'm outlevelling most of the content just by doing the MSQ anyways.
Progression
I quite like the progression in this game. As you rise in level and progress the MSQ you unlock several new activities and features. When you hit level 10 for instance you can start taking on crafting professions and even change your class. In fact, you can unlock and play all of the classes and crafting professions with just one character. No need to go creating several alts. This is a really cool feature.
Drawing a parallel to World of Warcraft where you need a new character to get extra crafting professions and to play other classes this was quite pleasing. It makes a lot of sense with how huge the MSQ is as well. The story might be great but who wants to sit through that for 500 hours several times? Not me. You just level your alt classes by doing side content instead which there is a ton of.
You eventually unlock dungeons as well. This comes a couple of hours into the MSQ. What I really liked here is that the game gives you a tutorial about how dungeons work. Instead of just throwing you into the fray you can enter a couple of single player scenarios that teach you the basics of the tanking, healer and damage dealer roles. Extremely helpful for newer MMO players.
Final (Fantasy) Words
My character is currently level 35 and I'm having a blast. The thing I perhaps like the most is that I don't feel like I have to play all the time. I don't feel that rush to get to max level as quickly as possible. As Jesse Cox said in the video I linked above; FFXIV is more about the journey than the destination and that's a true a statement as it gets.
The game has a somewhat slow start but you can easily tell that it's building up to something grand. The story starts out somewhat bland by merely teasing us about the stronger forces in the world and I'm now at a point where the plot is finally starting to get quite interesting. My next quest is to investigate some rumors about the primal Ifrit.
I won't go any deeper in on the story in this post as that would probably evolve this post into a 5000 word monster. It will have to wait.
If you're looking for a new MMO to try then I really recommend FFXIV. With the Free Trial that's available there's no excuse to not give it a go. Just be patience with it in the early beginnings!
All screenshots are taken by me.