The Final Fantasy XIV beta closes down early tomorrow morning, so I've been making the most of it this weekend. I've levelled my Thaumaturgist class all the way to 20 — the level cap for the beta — and had a play around with the Weaver crafting class for a bit, taking that up to level 11. This gives me a nice head start ready for when live service begins — though the nice thing about Final Fantasy XIV is that if at any point you fancy a change, just switch out your weapon and bam! You're another class.

This carries its own considerations however — the main one being that if you switch to a class based in a city you've already done all the low-level quests in, you might struggle to find things to do if you're not used to all the additional stuff the game offers. In that particular situation, you turn to any one of a number of different possibilities: the short, snappy, time-limited Levequests; your Hunting Log, which challenges you to hunt down specific monsters in set quantities in exchange for very generous experience point rewards; Guildhests, which are short, extremely fun co-op challenges you take on alongside other players; or simply grinding.

I wanted to give another shout-out to the amount of effort that's been put into the game's story. As well as the usual MMO-style "random people need you to do odd jobs" quests you get around the place, there's a "main quest" to follow, too. After a certain point, this quest tasks you with travelling to the other two capital cities in the world to meet their leaders and start making preparations for what is clearly going to be some sort of Epic Battle later in the plot. What was particularly great about this quest was the fact that it makes you feel super-important — you're sent off on an airship to the other cities, and as the ship leaves, the Final Fantasy prologue theme triumphantly blares out, as majestic as ever. Then you get some awesome "meanwhile" scenes — something that doesn't tend to happen in MMOs — that give you a real feeling of the plot unfolding even when you're not present. There's some characters who look a lot like FFXII's Judges in play, it seems, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable confrontation with them later in the story.

It's hard to pin down one thing that's quite so satisfying about FFXIV because it really is an example of lots of overlapping systems complementing each other very well. There are lots of different ways to play, and plenty of means to ensure that you shouldn't find yourself getting bored or with nothing to do — unless, of course, you don't enjoy the base mechanics, in which case there's probably not a lot that can be done for you. The final game's going to be great; I can't wait to see what the future holds in updates and expansions.

You'll have to excuse any typos in this post; I'm very tired due to having spent a significant proportion of the day/evening playing the Final Fantasy XIV beta. And I'm pleased to confirm that it's very much living up to my expectations.

I'm playing a Thaumaturgist this time around — in the last phase of beta I played a Pugilist. I was a little concerned that the game would fall into the usual MMO trap of all classes playing in a pretty similar manner — spamming the same combination of hotbar items over and over again, repeat until dead — but the Thaumaturgist plays noticeably differently to the Pugilist. As it should be.

While the Pugilist is a melee character that demands you get close in to — and preferably behind — your enemies, the Thaumaturgist is a ranged magic damage dealer. Unlike your common or garden usual MMO mage, though, the Thaumaturgist makes use of an interesting mechanic that, thematically, represents their "aetherial balance" between "Astral Fire" and "Umbral Ice". Essentially, what this means is one of two things: if you're in Astral Fire state, you do increased damage with your fire spells, but they also cost more magic points to cast; if you're in Umbral Ice state, your spells do less damage but your magic points regenerate a lot more rapidly than they would usually. Playing a Thaumaturgist effectively involves knowing how to use these two states effectively to ensure you have good damage output while also keeping your stock of magic points high.

That's not all, though. Each of the classes in FFXIV has its own unique questline to follow, with new "episodes" in the story coming every five levels or so. The nice thing about these is that they have their own storyline to follow, but also they help teach you things about your class you might not have realised. The level 15 quest for the Thaumaturgist, for example, is essentially a stealth mission that teaches you about the effectiveness of your Sleep spell: you're tasked with sneaking in to retrieve an artifact, and rather than fighting the strong enemies who are between you and it, you simply put them all to sleep and prance through singing "trollolololol" or something.

What I've really been surprised about is how much effort's been put into the narrative side of things — something that's often neglected in MMOs. The genre giant World of Warcraft, for example, has an enormously rich and detailed setting to draw on, and yet — at least in its early incarnations, I haven't been back since Catacylsm — this storytelling potential was utterly squandered in boring quests that were given to you in the form of dull text readouts.

Final Fantasy XI, XIV's predecessor, was somewhat better in that there were "missions" as well as "quests" to do — these often incorporated cutscenes, story progression and even boss fights at times, but XI's difficulty and painfully slow progression meant that a lot of people might not have got very far.

XIV nails the balance. There's a ton of solo content you can do, with a storyline to follow that makes your character feel important. There are recognisable non-player characters whom you come to have various feelings about, and events occur that actually have some sort of meaning. There's also a lot of instanced battles where you get your own private special event without other players interrupting — proper boss battles. And these aren't just like fighting any other monster — sometimes you'll be battling alongside other non-player characters in a huge skirmish, other times you'll have to hold out against seemingly overwhelming odds until an NPC shows up to tip the balance in your favour.

It all feels like an actual Final Fantasy, in short, rather than an MMO with a Final Fantasy skin atop it. Your incentive for progression comes as much from the unfolding story and the cool setpieces as it does from gaining yet another level.

I haven't done a lot of group stuff yet, but I did try a Guildhest earlier. This also gave me the opportunity to try the Duty Finder system, whereby you mark yourself as wanting to do a specific multiplayer "thing" — be it a Guildhest, a dungeon or something else — and then let the game match you with other people looking to do the same thing automatically. Pleasantly, you can continue playing while you wait to find a party — it's a good time to take on the short, snappy, time-limited "levequests" for some pocket money and experience.

As for the Guildhest, it was short but very enjoyable. It was essentially a party-based arena battle intended to give players practice at working together and trying not to aggro multiple groups of enemies. Initially, you and your teammates must simply take out two parties of relatively easy monsters; then another set appears, accompanied by a huge boss monster. Inevitably, they all come charging towards you, so it becomes necessary to prioritise your targets — taking out the smaller things first before starting on the big boss. When you've successfully completed it, the iconic Final Fantasy fanfare plays as if you'd just completed a battle in a "normal" Final Fantasy game — a nice touch.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the game continues once it officially launches later this month — the current beta only allows you to progress up to level 20 and is still lacking a couple of features. The only real challenge is going to be — as ever — juggling both it and other games I want and/or need to play!