It's more that Final Fantasy XIV doesn't apologize for the kind of game that it is. No, it's not that the game is unwelcoming. Perhaps most impressive is the way the game's early quests start simple and escalate in complexity to avoid being overwhelming while also training you for later parts of the game. The game's pop-up tutorials tend to actually be helpful and come up at the right times. The presentation, especially the music, is charming, which provides a huge motivator to keep going. It doesn't reach the level of impenetrability of, say, Eve Online. I don't want to give the impression that FF XIV is deliberately inaccessible. I simultaneously disliked crafting and respected the system for fulfilling the rigid constraints and work/reward loop demanded by the genre. The crafting and gathering systems are incredibly boring, for instance, but they're well-integrated into the rest of the game, and it's possible to work around them by making connections and money. AdvertisementĪll that makes me far more willing to forgive FFXIV's relatively few sins. When tanking is at its best, I feel like a maestro, coordinating everyone to the right place at the right time, ensuring that they're safe and controlling the ebb and flow of the battle. The balance of skills, consistent variety in boss fights, and clarity about what's happening on-screen all work in harmony. But tanking is what I know best in these kinds of games-during my raiding period in World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade I played as a protection warrior, the purest of its three tanking classes.Īnd tanking feels fantastic in FFXIV. I'm playing as a tank class in Final Fantasy XIV almost by accident-I picked the Marauder with the big two-handed axe, but it turns out they're slotted in to absorb damage more than to deal it out. It's a small puzzle for the early dungeons (four-player groups in FFXIV), but it eventually leads to larger parties and raids composed of dozens of people with clearly defined roles: healing, dealing damage, or drawing and absorbing massive attacks (i.e. That's because, in an MMORPG, you play as a piece of a larger combat puzzle. In an MMORPG, combat for a single player with their single character should never be as simple or as smooth as that in a game designed for single-player combat. And of course, there's the ultimate attempt at accessibility used by an increasingly large number of games in the genre: switching to a free-to-play business model. Even the dominant force in the genre, World Of Warcraft, has aimed for increasing accessibility with each expansion, doing things like making switching class specialization easier, allowing any race to play any class, and blurring distinctions so that specific specs like Shadow Priest are no longer unique. The Secret World, like SWTOR, fell over backward trying to attach narrative weight to every quest it also had free-form class customization. Or there's Star Wars: The Old Republic, which seems to have been made under the quite wrong assumption that it was a good idea to attach a Knights Of The Old Republic-style single-player storyline to MMORPG gameplay. That made Guild Wars 2 easy to pick up, yes, but equally easy to put down. Guild Wars 2 is perhaps the most successful recent MMORPG, and it aimed for accessibility in gameplay, with every class able to both do damage and heal itself, avoiding more rigid distinctions. The drive for accessibility has led to a recent string of mild disappointments within the MMORPG genre.
The creators of FFXIV know that these are actually the trends making the genre bad, and by ignoring them, the game manages to be good.
That is, it's bad at following the conventional wisdom that says MMORPGs are bad when they're too much like work, when they're harder to play alone, and most of all, when they're not accessible enough. Here's the reason Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn ( FFXIV) is good: it's bad. Price: $40 (plus monthly fee of $12.99 or more)
#MORTAL KOMBAT REALMS MMORPG PS4#
Platform: PC (reviewed), PS3, PS4 (coming soon)
0 kommentar(er)
