1468: Magick and Mend

I’m just shy of level 49 on the White Mage class in Final Fantasy XIV, which means I’ll more than likely hit 50 tomorrow, which in turn makes Final Fantasy XIV the first MMO that I’ve not only reached the level cap and done some endgame stuff, but also the first MMO in which I’ve reached the level cap more than once. Granted, once you’ve done it once, subsequent levelling is significantly quicker thanks to the “Armoury Bonus” mechanic — bonus experience points based on the difference between your current class’ level and your highest class’ level — but it still demands a significant amount of commitment and, as the complete-once quests around the world dry up, creativity and flexibility in terms of how you’re going to level up 49 times.

This second run to 50 has been interesting for a number of reasons, firstly because it’s involved playing the game in a completely different way. During my first runthrough, in which I took the Thaumaturgist/Black Mage class up to 50, I was following the game’s “Main Scenario” questline, which takes you through a complete, authentically Final Fantasy story in the purest sense. And it’s a resolutely old-school Final Fantasy, too, all about crystal-related mysticism, powerful ancient forces stirring to cause chaos and, of course, a cast of villains in memorable-looking but impractical armour that probably makes it impossible for them to go to the toilet without lacerating their genitals. It’s also paced in such a way that aside from a slight “dry spell” in the mid-40s, it’s always taking you to new places in the world and providing you with a bunch of sidequests to do — by the time you reach the grand finale, you’ll be level 50 and have a thorough understanding of how your class works, and consequently should have little difficulty challenging the “final” eight-player dungeons and obliterating the Big Bad from the face of Eorzea.

Conversely, once you’re done with all that, there’s not quite the same narrative push to keep you earning XP and progressing — the game switches, for the most part, from being all about following a linear storyline to “living” in the game world and making your own fun to a certain extent. It takes on a much more freeform feeling — though there’s still something of an “optimal” route to level up as quickly as possible — and provides fun of a different sort. There’s also a lot more flexibility to take on your own personal challenges — I’m hoping to eventually collect all the unique sets of equipment from the various dungeons, for example, but this will require me to be a bit more organised than I currently am, clear out my bulging Armoury Chest and make some checklists. Soon. Soon.

As well as this shift in play style, playing a completely different type of class has been interesting, too. Ever since my first serious attempt at playing an MMO — World of Warcraft — I’ve largely focused on playing heavy damage dealers, usually mages or the local equivalent. While these roles are demanding in their own right — particularly later in the games, there’s an expectation that you have a thorough understanding of your abilities and how to use them efficiently to inflict as much damage as possible in as short a time as possible — there’s often not as much “responsibility” as comes with the other two important roles in a typical MMO party: the “tank” and the “healer”. Consequently, when I came to Final Fantasy XIV, I wanted to start with something I was familiar with — and while Black Mage comes with its own unique mechanics that I haven’t seen in an MMO before, it was still largely about flinging flamey things at bad things until they fall over.

Switching to Conjurer/White Mage, though, was truly interesting, and it becomes particularly clear how different it is to play a healer the moment you step into a dungeon. No longer are you concentrating on the enemies and queueing up devastating attacks; instead, you’re focusing your attention for the most part on the little party window in the upper-left corner of the screen, and making use of your restorative abilities to ensure none of those numbers reach zero as much as you can. This is very easy early in the game — a lot easier than I was expecting, in fact — but becomes more challenging the more abilities you have available to you. By the time you’re healing later dungeons, you’re having to content with status effects (dispatched with a swift cast of the “Esuna” spell) and bosses that inflict damage on the whole party at once. You start having to prioritise your actions carefully — can the tank take a few more hits while you buff up the armour of the more squishy party members, or should you fling him a heal or two first? — and the responsibility of knowing that the fate of the party largely (though not completely in many cases) lies with you becomes more obvious.

I actually thought this experience would be terrifying — to be frank, I was worried I’d fuck it up and get yelled at by people who died as a result of my incompetent healing — but I’ve found myself enjoying the experience a great deal, and seemingly being quite good at it. I haven’t yet been thrown into an eight-player dungeon — the first of those don’t show up until you reach level 50 — and I’m a little nervous at the prospect since I’m not quite sure how two healers divide up the workload of healing a much larger party, but I’m sure I’ll figure it out. Plus it’s always nice to be useful, and healers are certainly that.

Anyway. Time for bed. It’s been a pleasantly peaceful day today, and I can feel my head gradually getting back to whatever passes for “normal”. Not quite perfect yet, but getting there.

1451: Learning to be a Better Virtual Person

Contemplating my time in the virtual realm of Eorzea so far, I feel that Final Fantasy XIV has had something of a positive effect on my mental wellbeing in a number of ways. I also acknowledge that it brings with it its own problems and considerations — primarily the fact that what is one of its best qualities — its inherently social nature — is also something that makes it compelling and addictive, and consequently distracts from other things. As with anything, it’s all about finding a good balance.

But I don’t want to focus too much on the less positive aspects of the experience because they’re all things that can be solved with a degree of self-control and discipline. What I instead want to focus on is, as I mentioned at the beginning, the positive impact it’s had on me.

I started playing Final Fantasy XIV’s new version A Realm Reborn for several reasons: I’d been curious about it for a while, but had never played the much-maligned version 1.0; I’d enjoyed my time in Final Fantasy XI, but had never got that far; and someone I knew via a combination of Twitter, 1up and possibly some other places around the Web too invited me to come and play with a group of like-minded somewhat casual players who were in it to have fun rather than become the sort of people who run tightly-regimented raids and complain about “noobs”.

When I fired up the closed beta version of the game, I was instantly smitten, and my love for the game only continued to deepen as the closed beta became open beta, and open beta became live service — with significant, noticeable improvements along the way. But what keeps me playing day after day is the fact that the people whom my friend invited me to come and play with have turned out to also be extremely pleasant virtual company — and while I don’t know very much (or indeed anything) about their real-life selves in many cases, in the land of Eorzea I most certainly consider them to be friends.

The growth of these friendships has not only helped me from the simple perspective of making friends and having a reliable group of people to interact and play with every time I log on, but it’s also helped me to build up my own confidence slowly and gradually.

As longtime readers will know, I struggle somewhat with social anxiety, particularly from an assertiveness perspective. Even when I’m among friends, family or other people I trust, I find it difficult to be truly assertive and say what I’m thinking or what I want. And indeed I often find myself acting the same way in online games — I find myself apologising in advance for messing things up, or not knowing how something works, or not being as familiar with the challenges ahead as more experienced players.

Over time with FFXIV, however, I’ve noticed myself changing somewhat. Whereas a month or two ago I’d respond to a guildmate’s request for companions to take on a dungeon or boss fight with an “I’ll come if you’ve got room for me” or “I’ll come if you don’t mind a newbie coming along” whereas now I feel a lot more confident in stepping forward right away without qualifiers. I’ve even stepped up and led my own expeditions into particular dungeons, or helped provide the impetus for a group excursion into more challenging content by expressing my desire to see it.

There was still the question of strangers to conquer, though. Final Fantasy XIV features a system called the Duty Finder whereby you can queue up to play the multiplayer content by yourself or with friends, then get matched up with other people to fill the spare slots in your party. For someone with anxiety issues about meeting new people and disappointing them, this is a daunting prospect, but again over time I’ve noticed myself changing. I’ve not only been happy to queue for the level 50 dungeons I now know quite well by myself, I’ve become more confident at stepping into the “Duty Roulette” option to challenge a random dungeon with a group of random strangers.

Not only that, but I’ve started experimenting with party roles other than my traditionally-held post of black mage — a damage-dealing class that specialises in standing back from the main melee, flinging spells, killing monsters and trying not to draw the attention of the more powerful enemies. No, while I still consider Black Mage to be my “main” class — largely because it’s the one I’ve spent most time with, feel most attached to and have consequently kitted out the best — I’ve been having a lot of fun with playing as a healer, though I haven’t yet got to the dungeons where it’s a significant challenge to be the healer, and this evening I tried tanking for the first time.

Tanking is a particularly daunting prospect in a game like this because you become the de facto leader of the party. You’re the one who goes up front; you’re the one who starts fights; you’re the one who’s supposed to protect everyone else. The tank has important responsibilities — ensure you maintain the attention of the monsters, and don’t die. A tank is generally expected to know what they’re doing but, of course, everyone has to begin somewhere.

I’d levelled Final Fantasy XIV’s “Gladiator” class to level 15 previously, which is the earliest point at which you can take on the game’s multiplayer dungeons. But I’d never yet had the courage to step into a dungeon and lead one like a proper tank. The prospect was scary; I was worried about doing a bad job and getting yelled at by my fellow party members. And as such, I’d put it off.

This evening, however, I formed a party with my “real life” friend and board-gaming buddy James, who’s recently started playing, and another guildmate who agreed to come along. That only left one slot for strangers, and that helped me feel a bit more confident about using our run through the game’s first dungeon as a learning experience.

It didn’t start well; I died at the first monster, but that was because James was busy figuring out important healer things like how to target me and how to cast curative magic on me, not himself. As we progressed through the dungeon, I felt myself getting the hang of what was expected of me — still hesitant and keen to get the advice of my comrades, but more confident about being the one standing at the front. By the time we reached the end and successfully beat the boss, I felt like I’d happily take on that challenge again — though I couldn’t resist a quick apology to the lone stranger in our party — who was also something of a newbie, as it happened — for my “incompetence”.

“It’s cool,” she said. “We made it through, and that’s all that matters.”

As any social anxiety sufferer will tell you, the reality of a situation that’s been a considerable source of anxiety to you is rarely anything even a little bit like what you’ve built it up to be in your head. And that’s something that Final Fantasy XIV is helping me remember more regularly.

1443: Death to the Chimera

It’s another Final Fantasy XIV post, I’m afraid, but I feel compelled to share the experience I just had, as I think it’s something that’s going to stick with me for some time.

A bit of context, first, for those who don’t play. My character is primarily a Black Mage, which is part of the group known as “DPS” (damage per second” or damage dealers. I don’t have a lot of health, but my spells do hit hard and do a considerable amount of damage. When playing as a member of a party, I rely on the “tank” character to keep the enemies’ attention off me, and occasionally the assistance of a healer to keep my health topped up if I do happen to get hit by something. For the most part, my responsibility is to avoid getting hit as much as possible, and to simultaneously ensure that I’m doing as much damage as possible.

I’m at level 50 on my Black Mage, which means I’m no longer gaining experience and have instead been gathering better and better equipment. My average item level is now 71, which is significantly stronger than where you are when you first hit 50 — though the effectiveness of all said equipment is scaled down accordingly if you happen to run a dungeon that’s lower than level 50.

Which, as it happens, is exactly what I was doing earlier. I decided to run the dungeon Cutter’s Cry, because I was well behind on my “Hunting Log” for the Immortal Flames Grand Company, and wanted to actually polish it off and make some progress. (In the game, your Hunting Log is a checklist of specific monsters to defeat, with rewards on offer for completing items on the list, and larger rewards on offer for completing a complete difficulty rank. The Grand Company is an organisation tied to one of the three main city-states in the game, and is effectively where your character pledges their allegiance to.)

Our run through Cutter’s Cry didn’t go as smoothly as it could have done. Our tank — the guy who stands at the front and gets hit, as well as the guy who generally leads jaunts through dungeons — wasn’t especially skilled, and was having trouble maintaining the attention of monsters that really wanted to chomp on our healer’s testicles. I spent a lot of the dungeon casting my Sleep spell to take a bit of the heat off the party and allow us to concentrate on a single monster at a time, and it overall seemed to work pretty well, with a few minor mishaps along the way.

We eventually reached the dungeon’s boss monster Chimera, albeit with a different healer to the one we started with, who disconnected. Our first attempt failed miserably in a matter of seconds. The second, however, is where things got interesting and exciting.

It was going reasonably well for a while. We were doing decent damage to the Chimera, and the tank was successfully maintaining the attention of the enemy, allowing the party’s Bard and I to pelt it from a distance with arrows and fireballs respectively.

Then something went horribly wrong. The tank didn’t quite move far enough to get out of the path of one of the Chimera’s special attacks, and hit the deck. The Bard followed shortly afterwards, leaving just me and the party’s healer to deal with a by now very pissed off Chimera.

I thought this would almost inevitably be the end, but on a slightly selfish whim I decided to see what I could do. We’d already whittled the beast’s health down to an amount that certainly looked doable, so I started alternating running away from it and flinging a few spells at it whenever it stopped to try and do one of its special attacks. The healer cottoned on quickly to what I was doing, and supported my efforts while the tank and Bard lay on the floor — the fight’s too hectic to make raising party members practical, particularly if the tank’s down.

The Chimera’s health bar continued to deplete, and I somehow remained standing, successfully dodging each and every one of his special attacks and only occasionally taking damage from an occasional claw swipe. Meanwhile, I’d continue to electrocute him with my Thunder spells — which causes him to continually take small amounts of damage over a short period of time — and pelt him with fireballs whenever I had enough distance between us to make casting practical and safe-ish.

Finally, his health was into the “holy shit, are we actually going to pull this off?” territory — and conveniently, the party’s Limit Break bar was fully charged at this point. (The Limit Break bar builds up gradually through combat, and any one party member can trigger it once it’s charged high enough for a powerful special ability according to what class they are — in the case of Black Mage, it summons, as you might expect, a devastatingly destructive spell.)

“Limit Break!” called the party members. I was skeptical as to whether or not it would do enough damage, but I put some distance between the Chimera and I, waited for the perfect moment and then began casting.

The screen exploded in fire and my speakers erupted with the sounds of falling meteorites… and then there was a deafening screech as the beast collapsed to the floor and dissipated into a cloud of aether. The Chimera was down!

“Holy shit,” said the fallen Bard afterwards as the healer helped him to his feet. “Good job.”

I don’t often like to toot my own horn, but in this case? Yeah, I have to agree.

1314: Day One in Eorzea

So it’s finally here: Final Fantasy XIV. Of course, this isn’t the first time I’ve played, as well you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention to my enthusing, but we’re at last at the stage where the game won’t be “turned off” for significant periods of time (maintenance periods aside), and all characters people are playing as now are for keeps. (Here’s mine, if you happened to be curious.)

While I’m not exactly what I’d call a hardcore MMO player, I have been present at the launch of a number of reasonably-to-large-sized MMOs, including World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online and a few others I’ve doubtless forgotten. And I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how well things have been going for Final Fantasy XIV so far — more often than not, an MMO’s launch is a complete disaster, with servers going down, significant gameplay problems and at least one Legendary Error that becomes a meme before the first day is out.

Today’s experience on Final Fantasy XIV hasn’t been completely flawless — on more than one occasion, there has been problems with the instance servers, for example. For those not au fait with MMO lingo, an “instance” is a private copy of part of the game world specifically for your character and, in some cases, your party. Final Fantasy XIV makes extensive use of instances not just for multiplayer dungeons, which is how World of Warcraft popularised their use to the world, but also to keep significant “story events” for your character private and free of naked catgirls wandering around ruining the atmosphere (or enhancing it, depending on your view on naked catgirls).

FFXIV isn’t completely reliant on these instances, thankfully, but the game’s main story quest and class-specific quests do make use of them quite frequently, so the fact that they haven’t been working properly for part of today has meant some people haven’t been able to make as much progress as they’d like to have done. Naturally, some players have expressed anger at this — this is the Internet, after all, where people start petitions to remove Ben Affleck as the next Batman, for fuck’s sake — but, as ever, this isn’t particularly reasonable. Sure, it’d be lovely to have the game working as intended from the moment it’s turned on, but we’re currently in an “Early Access” period, with official service not starting until Tuesday for players who didn’t preorder or play the previous incarnation of the game. As such, it’s a good opportunity for Square Enix to work out any last-minute kinks — like this instance issue — and ensure things are running as smoothly as possible when new, non-preorder players start to arrive.

I should also draw attention to the fact that Square Enix hasn’t just been sitting back and letting these problems go on; they’ve been investigating the causes and trying their best to fix them. There was a maintenance period earlier today that temporarily fixed the instance issues, but then they came back; as I type this, they think they’ve found the solution, but are testing it thoroughly before rolling it out to the game proper. By later tonight, it should hopefully be a lot more stable.

So far, then, FFXIV’s launch has been one of the smoother ones I’ve seen. It hasn’t been without issues, no, but at the same time they’ve been handled as well as can be expected — and things can only improve from here.

So here’s to many more adventures in Eorzea; I’ve had fun today, and I’m looking forward to the further adventures of my character Amarysse as she becomes an ever more skilled thaumaturgist.

1255: A Realm Reborn, Redux

I really, really like Final Fantasy XIV.

There, I said it.

It may not be fashionable to like a new (well, rebooted) MMORPG that steadfastly follows the old-school subscription model, but given the alternative is the inherent restrictions and inconveniences of the free-to-play model or the regular badgering to check out the “cash shop” in pay-once-play-forever games, I’ll take a few quid a month on the promise of gradually-evolving content.

I’m not going to rabbit on about the game itself here — I’ve already written two articles over at USgamer on that very subject — but I do want to talk about one thing I’m quite looking forward to: the game’s social aspect.

A touch of context here: I have a pretty wide circle of friends, but unfortunately the vast majority of them are scattered across the globe, from California to Japan and everywhere (well, not everywhere) in between. I get to see the friends I have in the local vicinity every so often and we have a good time, but 1) I don’t necessarily get to hang out with them as often as I’d like — none of us are in our twenties any more — and 2) not all of them are into the same things as me.

One thing I’m looking forward to with Final Fantasy XIV is the opportunity to make new friends. But I have some personal struggles to overcome in order to make that happen.

As longtime followers will know, I suffer from a degree of social anxiety, particularly when confronted with strangers. I worry a lot about what people will think of me, and my low self-esteem and low opinion of my physical appearance causes me to immediately believe people will think the worst of me.

So strong is this issue — and yes, I know I should do something about it; that’s not really the issue here — that I’ve been surprised to discover myself having the same feelings of anxiety when playing online games. I’m actively afraid of voice chat with strangers, for example — a hangover from when I was young and really, really hated the sound of my own voice — and I even find myself hesitant to do what I feel would be “butting in” to online conversations in virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. I haven’t hung out in Second Life for a very long time, but on more than one occasion I behaved in that virtual world’s virtual clubs exactly the same way as I did in real clubs; I’d sit or stand at the side of the room, watching everyone, and wondering what it would be like to talk to that person over there, who I found quite attractive, or that person over there, who was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a design based on something I found interesting.

Well, I feel like I need to take control of this somewhat. While my issues with interpersonal interactions with strangers in “reality” are a more deep-seated issue that probably requires a degree of professional help (or at least a lot of self-discipline), I can do more about the online thing. I chat with people with no problem on Twitter, for example, and pretty much every means of online communication has some form of “safety net” where you can either “escape” from an uncomfortable situation or “mute” people who are bothering you. Chances are I won’t need to use either of those things, but the knowledge that they’re there is comforting.

So where does Final Fantasy XIV fit into all this, then? Well, once the current phase of the beta test ends and the characters everyone starts playing as become “permanent,” I intend on actually making some new friends. I want to play with other people; I want to enjoy the game together with people who like it as much as I do.

I’ve been hesitant to join “guilds” or equivalents in MMOs in the past because I fear not being able to commit to the regular play schedules that they often require. But the more I think about it, the more I think it might be something worth pursuing. After all, at present, I have no regular “social” event in my weekly calendar; my board gaming nights with my best “real-life” friends are sporadic and irregular, and hanging out with everyone else tends to be a more “spur of the moment” thing. Why shouldn’t playing Final Fantasy XIV be some sort of regular, albeit electronic, social event, in which I can get to know people and hopefully make some good friends? Stranger things have happened.

The reason I’m picking Final Fantasy XIV for this purpose? Because Final Fantasy XI is, out of all the MMOs I’ve tried over the years — and that’s quite a lot — the one in which I found people whom I most enjoyed hanging out with virtually. I have no idea where the delightfully entertaining “Bendix” and “Nefertari” are now, but I do quite often find myself missing them. Obviously having some friends a long time ago in a completely different game is no guarantee that the same thing will happen in Final Fantasy XIV, but it’s as good a starting point as any, I figure. I’ve long since abandoned all hope of getting existing friends to play with me in an MMO, because it’s impossible to coordinate.

It remains to be seen whether this plan is successful once the game enters open beta and rolls ever-onward towards its August launch. But I feel strangely optimistic about this coming opportunity to meet some new virtual people; I can represent myself however I want in the game, with no-one pre-judging anything about me besides my character’s name and their appearance. And since everyone in Final Fantasy land is impossibly attractive in that distinctively “Japanese video game” sort of way, I don’t even really have to worry about that, unless I accidentally call myself Pooface McScruntyflange. Which I probably won’t.

Anyway, in the meantime, rest assured that Final Fantasy XIV is shaping up to be something actually quite special, and I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into the game as a whole for realsies. Enthusiastic blog posts will undoubtedly follow once my “real” character is born.

1243: A Realm Reborn

I spent some time with the Final Fantasy XIV beta earlier. Since said beta is now in its third phase, Square-Enix has dropped all the non-disclosure agreements and has started to allow people to talk about it, which is nice, because I’d quite like to talk about it. I’ll add at this point that I’ve only just started participating in the beta, so my thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV are based purely on the hour or two I spent fiddling around with it earlier. But — spoiler alert — my thoughts are positive.

I’ll preface this by saying that I really enjoyed Final Fantasy XI, Square-Enix’s previous foray into the massively multiplayer online RPG market. Final Fantasy XI successfully managed to capture the feel of a Final Fantasy game while simultaneously transplanting it to a massively-multiplayer environment. It had its problems, sure — mainly a glacial rate of experience gain that didn’t accelerate in line with what level you were, meaning by the time you reached about level 20 or so it was taking weeks to gain a single level — but it was good fun, and I met some entertaining people during my time in that world. (Bendix and Nefertari, I often wonder where you are! I miss you! [Bendix pokes.])

Anyway, from what I can see, Final Fantasy XIV — in its new A Realm Reborn incarnation, at least — appears to fix most of the annoying things about Final Fantasy XI while keeping the things that were awesome.

One of my favourite things about Final Fantasy XI was character creation. It was a very simplistic character generation tool with very limited options, but the characters it created looked recognisably “Final Fantasy” in nature. They had the spiky hair and the obviously Japanese “look” about them (artistically as opposed to their physical characteristics), and I found them a lot more appealing to look at than, say, World of Warcraft’s heavily-exaggerated, low-poly physiques.

Final Fantasy XIV takes the recognisably Japanese aesthetic of XI and provides you with a veritable wealth of options with which to customise your avatar. Consequently, you can take a much greater degree of control over how you represent yourself to the world, but you’ll still come out of the process looking like a Final Fantasy character. And the decisions you make about your character’s appearance aren’t just there to be forgotten, either; cutscenes in the game make a point of giving you a good look at the parts of your character you don’t normally see during regular gameplay — i.e. their face.

Once into the game proper, I was immediately struck by how much better than XI it looks. This isn’t altogether surprising, of course — XI was built on an engine designed to run on the PlayStation 2, while XIV was designed for the PlayStation 3 and beyond. There’s a high level of graphical detail, but the best thing about the way the game looks is the butter-smooth frame rate. XI was capped at somewhere around 25-30 frames per second regardless of how good your computer was; XIV, meanwhile, will happily glide along at 60+ frames per second, looking simply lovely in the process.

The sound is way better, too. Final Fantasy XI had a great soundtrack, but it sounded very synthesised. This was in keeping with the “sound” of the Final Fantasy series at the time — it wasn’t until Final Fantasy XIII that we’d finally get a fully-orchestrated soundtrack for the duration of the game rather than just in special cutscenes — but it sounds a little dated now. Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, has a simply gorgeous orchestral soundtrack that I’m going to have to score a copy of if and when it becomes available. It’s properly “cinematic” in nature, and is very much in keeping with the game’s style.

In terms of gameplay, your initial minutes and hours in the game are relatively business as usual for an MMO. You pick your class (which also determines your starting city) and set off to complete quests for random strangers all over town. These quests are generally either fetch quests of some description, or kill quests that demand you leave the safety of the city walls and start punching ladybirds in the face. Like Final Fantasy XI, however, a nice feeling of “context” is given to these quests through short dialogue sequences before and after them, which is much more immersive and interesting than World of Warcraft’s pop-up wall of text. The quests themselves generally aren’t all that interesting — yet, anyway — but promise to provide the main means through which the game’s story unfolds a little later.

The biggest and most welcome change from XI’s mechanics is in the way you gain experience. In XI, the maximum amount of experience you could gain from a single enemy was 200, and this was only if you took on something considerably stronger than yourself, preferably in a group. Since the amount of experience required to level up increased very rapidly, there was a lot of grinding involved. This improved significantly with subsequent updates, which added “hunt” quests with experience bonuses, but the quests you got from NPCs around town largely remained as a means of gaining cool items rather than experience.

In XIV, meanwhile, you get experience for all sorts of things. You get it for killing monsters, for completing quests and even for crafting items. This means that you don’t get the feeling you occasionally got in XI whereby you felt like you were “wasting your time” if you weren’t out in the fields killing monsters — you can be rewarded for non-combat activities, which is great.

There’s some neat little additions to the usual formula, too. As well as quests, you have Hunting, Crafting and Gathering logs, which challenge you to hunt specific creatures, craft specific items and gather specific raw materials respectively. Successfully completing challenges in these logs provides significant experience bonuses, so if you just want to spend a bit of time grinding rather than working on specific quests, this provides a degree of “direction” to what you’re doing by encouraging you to hunt down specific things.

I’m only level 5 so far, so that’s about all I can talk about as yet. I haven’t yet fiddled around with the strange class system, whereby you can change your class simply by changing your equipment, but I’m interested to see how it differs from XI’s excellent Job system. I also haven’t actually spoken to or teamed up with anyone yet, but the community speaking publicly seems to be very friendly and very positive about the game so far, which is nice to see. I’m sure it won’t last, but for now it’s nice to see people speaking politely and helpfully to one another.

Anyway. It’s nearly 4am because Ar Tonelico. I am, much to my chagrin, apparently chasing the Platinum trophy for that game, and one of the tasks required to attain said intangible reward is to locate all the treasure chests in the whole game. I am having some difficulty with said task, but I will return to that tomorrow, and perhaps even finally finish the damn thing.