Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta!

[treemonster]

Or videos to help sell me.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ff14+gameplay&aq=0

[Xilo]

Or videos to help sell me.

Trust me. You want to stay far away from this pile of donky poop.

[spaceelf]

If by 'something new' you mean 'the worst MMO beta I've ever seen' then yes. It is something new.

Why you feel the need to add the lame and unnecessary insult I don't know.

[Grinch]

You all realize it is a BETA right? It is an unfinished product. Square Enix has 16 days until release of the game to fix anything and anything that is not fixed they can push into later updates.

The point of beta testing is to help Square Enix find bugs and get rid of them. Not to whine and moan about it!

[treemonster]

you must be new to mmo betas/launches.

[trag3dy]

You all realize it is a BETA right? It is an unfinished product. Square Enix has 16 days until release of the game to fix anything and anything that is not fixed they can push into later updates.

The point of beta testing is to help Square Enix find bugs and get rid of them. Not to whine and moan about it!

We said the same thing about Warhammer Online, and Aion. While Aion is still going somewhat strong Warhammer is all but dead...

The bottom line is, if game can't compete with the polish that WoW has now, then there is no point in it even being released because it will fail. Don't try to use the excuse that WoW was full of bugs when it came out because this isn't 2004.

[Farchord]

Okay, look, here's my take on FF14.

I will throw on the side any thoughts of bugs and such as most of them will be smashed by release.

1- They need to guide people through the leveling curve better. Show people where to go. FFXI was a pain to level as you just had to grind til you got in Valkurm, and FFXIV looks to be pretty darn similar.

2- The delayed PS3 release will hurt them....

3- Graphics look amazing, but.... cities are so huge, you get totally lost....

But I don't say no to FFXIV just yet. A MMO is like a fruit, it takes a while to get ripe.

[spaceelf]

You all realize it is a BETA right? It is an unfinished product. Square Enix has 16 days until release of the game to fix anything and anything that is not fixed they can push into later updates.

The point of beta testing is to help Square Enix find bugs and get rid of them. Not to whine and moan about it!

Yes, 16 days to completely change the game from a pile of steaming crap into a fun game. That is not enough time.

Open betas have a much broader purpose, they serve to get people to buy the game as well.

It failed at that.

We said the same thing about Warhammer Online, and Aion. While Aion is still going somewhat strong Warhammer is all but dead...

The bottom line is, if game can't compete with the polish that WoW has now, then there is no point in it even being released because it will fail. Don't try to use the excuse that WoW was full of bugs when it came out because this isn't 2004.

The sad thing about that is once I finally tried Warhammer I found it to be fairly entertaining, and the same couldn't be said for Aion. (Tried them about the same time, a couple months ago.)

[trag3dy]

Yeah, Warhammer is still my favorite mmo, they did so many things right. It's just the things they did wrong over shadowed them.

[Xilo]

You all realize it is a BETA right? It is an unfinished product. Square Enix has 16 days until release of the game to fix anything and anything that is not fixed they can push into later updates.

The point of beta testing is to help Square Enix find bugs and get rid of them. Not to whine and moan about it!

Most of the main complaints have been there since the beginning of Alpha and SE hasn't even fixed those issues.

With release being less than a month away, there's no way they are going to fix them. A lot of the problems are actual design decisions which have little chance of changing.

[Grinch]

Most of the main complaints have been there since the beginning of Alpha and SE hasn't even fixed those issues.

With release being less than a month away, there's no way they are going to fix them. A lot of the problems are actual design decisions which have little chance of changing.

Laggyness in the game is a design decision?

Regardless of what you say this is still a beta test; in which Square Enix hopes to fix the bugs in a timely manner.

[Xilo]

Laggyness in the game is a design decision?

Regardless of what you say this is still a beta test; in which Square Enix hopes to fix the bugs in a timely manner.

Timely manner? There was an ability timer bug since Alpha. It was there in Beta 3 (don't know if it's still there in Open Beta). That was several months span for a very obvious bug.

[Grinch]

Timely manner? There was an ability timer bug since Alpha. It was there in Beta 3 (don't know if it's still there in Open Beta). That was several months span for a very obvious bug.

Ever hear of priority? Perhaps is wasn't EXTREMELY important so it was set to a low priority bug.

I'm sure there were plenty of more important bugs, even if they were 'obvious'.

[Emn1ty]

Ever hear of priority? Perhaps is wasn't EXTREMELY important so it was set to a low priority bug.

I'm sure there were plenty of more important bugs, even if they were 'obvious'.

3 months is still a long time. Priority or not, they should be fixing bugs as they come as well. There should be very few bugs come open beta.

[Grinch]

3 months is still a long time. Priority or not, they should be fixing bugs as they come as well. There should be very few bugs come open beta.

I see someone has never developed an application before. There is a reason why it is only an Open Beta and not the retail release.

Perhaps you should take a look at this page, to help you learn a bit today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_software#Beta

[George P Global Moderator]

I see someone has never developed an application before. There is a reason why it is only an Open Beta and not the retail release.

Perhaps you should take a look at this page, to help you learn a bit today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_software#Beta

I think you're full of false expectations in Squares ability to fix all the bad things with FF14 in 3 months. I think it's time everyone faced reality and became prepared for the next big MMO flop in a long line of them.

[Emn1ty]

I see someone has never developed an application before. There is a reason why it is only an Open Beta and not the retail release.

Perhaps you should take a look at this page, to help you learn a bit today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_software#Beta

Someone doesn't know the game developement pipeline.

Beta for players is Delta for developers. Delta should be fairly solid with minor bugs and very few major bugs. The dev team has gone through alpha, internal beta test, friends and family beta testing, closed beta testing, moved to delta phase and started open beta. If they are still running into major and obvious UI/gameplay bugs then there is a problem. Even STO solidified itself considerably in the last few days before the changeover between Beta and Headstart.

[Lexcyn]

OK so I finally got into this beta and let me tell you ... they didn't do a very good job optimizing the graphics engine ... I don't have a crappy system by all means, and I am getting less than 30FPS on the default settings.

Also, it is a bit confusing on what you are supposed to be doing when you first get to your starting town. I attempted to get to the first spot outside of the city and eventually got there, but there were so many people I couldn't play due to lag (which isn't really a fault of Square, since starting area's are going to be packed no matter what).

In any case I hope they fix the issues before release, because the game does look promising if they can fix these before launch.

[treemonster]

anyone that has done 2 or more mmo beta tests, wether closed or open, will know thaat once a game hits beta, that's pretty much the state it will launch in.

sure there are bug fixes and tweaks done in betas, but essentially these days they are try before you buy trials to hype up the game for preorders for launch boxes to recoup the investment and mayb e make a little profit.

the idea being that if you sell a miillion boxes at launch, you can make your money back, and anyone who stays subbed after the first month is profit and pays teh dev expenses to fix the game to a proper state, which might take years to do.

a good indication of what will happen with ff14 is what we see today in ff11. so don't expect there to be major fixes before launch. don't expect the game to be properly optimized for pc hardware ever, and expect future hardware to run the game even worse than today's hardware.

westerners playing this game are a bonus. SE knows their customer base is japan, which is why the game is catered to their tastes and expectations. and the japaense will sub to and play absolutely horrible games for years on end. although , a high profile IP doesn't guarantee success if the game is particularly bad(i'mn looking at you UCGO)

imho this game is another aion, except with simultaneous global release and patches, because everyone plays on the same servers, which are based in japan. and the game speed is catered to that to eliminate the latency aspect.

[spaceelf]

Aion may not be spectacular but at least they have the basics right. I don't like Aion but I'd play it over this.

[treemonster]

Aion may not be spectacular but at least they have the basics right. I don't like Aion but I'd play it over this.

aion is compete garbage imho. why i think this is a topic of discussion for another thread. but to sum it up briefly, they took the worst parts of wow and lineage 2 and made it even more boring and heavy use of RNG.

sure ff14 makes aion looks fast and exciting and and good, but it's the different between feces from a healthy dog and a sick dog. which would you rather have your sandwhich?

most aion players hate aion, but are still playing despite all their friends having quit ages ago, it's pretty to them. and they can fly. they hate ncwest even more, but the OMG PRETTY GFX factor keeps them subbed.

[trag3dy]

RNG and the fact that I had to grind platinum coin quests for 100-200 hours (I never finished) just to get a non-end game weapon with an attack speed bonus that was going to get nerfed in a future patch is what drove me away from Aion. Still, though, the mass pvp was almost as fun as Warhammer Onlines so I wouldn't call it complete garbage. Flying added a whole new dimension to pvp that was both frustrating and fun at the same time, as well.

Anyways, the things I've heard about this game I don't think it will make it for very long. Especially with the fatigue system and badly optimized graphics for pcs.

[treemonster]

RNG and the fact that I had to grind platinum coin quests for 100-200 hours (I never finished) just to get a non-end game weapon with an attack speed bonus that was going to get nerfed in a future patch is what drove me away from Aion. Still, though, the mass pvp was almost as fun as Warhammer Onlines so I wouldn't call it complete garbage. Flying added a whole new dimension to pvp that was both frustrating and fun at the same time, as well.

Anyways, the things I've heard about this game I don't think it will make it for very long. Especially with the fatigue system and badly optimized graphics for pcs.

offtopic: coming from the mass pvp of l2, i found aion's blob vs blob tab target the nearest enemy and auto attack for instant gibs at a choke point to be super boring. along with other issues inherent in teh system such as kisks for sieges and the issues with flying and such. it was real let down for me who LOVES mass pvp.\\

on topic: i can see even teh japanese not liking this game, even though graphics seem to be a big factor in what games they do like, then again there are games they seem to love that have 90s style graphics.

[Joseph B]

I wanted XI, with better graphics. Instead, I am getting a stripped XI with all of XI's bad aspects.

I really, really, hope release makes this game seem more worthwhile. It seems more-so if I just renewed my XI subscription at this point... I've been trying really hard to like this XIV beta, and at least be a good beta tester-I can't. The game feels ****ty. There, I said it.

[spacer]

I received a beta key email last week, but I didn't have time to get around to it until last night. I tried to download the installer from Squeenix's beta website, and the speed was terrible. Like, unacceptably terrible for my connection.

So long story short, I ended up downloading the installer from file planet, the actual game files from rapidshare, and I grabbed all the updates using separate torrents and uTorrent. All in all it took about 2 hours to figure out what I needed to get, and to actually get it. After figuring out where to put all these files, I ran the updater...and that's as far as I got.

For some reason the second update, which is about 4gb, takes forever to install. Way longer than it should. By the time the 4gb update was installing it was late, and it was no where near finishing, so I just left it and went to bed.

Now, I know it's a beta and everything shouldn't be expected to work 100% correctly, but come on. There is no reason why it should be that difficult and time consuming to update a game. Squeenix was on thin ice to begin with in terms of my confidence and excitement level for this game, and this fiasco did not help matters.

I might get around to actually playing the game tonight. But, we'll see how it goes.