1309: Dress-Up

A guilty pleasure of mine that I've always had is playing dress-up. It doesn't matter if it's in reality or in some sort of virtual world (more commonly the latter these days, to be honest) — I love picking out outfits and accessories and attempting to coordinate and/or clash them horribly. It's ironic, really, given my own complete lack of interest in fashion — though this comes about more from being a big guy who can't get any decent clothes that fit than anything else.

A number of different interactive experiences have scratched my dress-up itch over the years. Most recently, I've been having fun with the "attachments" feature in Namco Bandai's Tales of Xillia, which allows you to deface all of your party members with various accessories, extra bits of hair and glasses, then enjoy your monstrous creations in battle, in the field and in cutscenes. Despite the potential for mischief, though, I've stayed largely restrained and sensible: protagonist Milla is sporting a pair of elf ears (that really suit both her looks and personality); "childhood friend" character Leia is sporting some adorable pigtails and half-rim glasses; young girl Eliza has her adorability factor amped up to 11 with the addition of wiggly rabbit ears and a fluffy tail.

Final Fantasy XIV has its share of amusement value from clothing and appearance options, too. I spent quite a long time on creating the look of my character this time around, eventually settling on a Hyur (human) female with red hair (of course) with some bright highlights giving her a slightly "frosted" look — very Final Fantasy. XIV's character creation tools give you a wealth of options to play with, some of which you'll only ever see in cutscenes, but it's nice to be able to take advantage of them. My character, for example, has a small heart-shaped tattoo on her cheek that is all but invisible unless you look closely, and also has odd-coloured eyes. No-one I'm playing the game with will notice those things as, generally speaking, you don't get close enough to other players to see that much detail. But when I see her doing her thing in cutscenes, I'll see those little details I added and she'll feel like my avatar, rather than something arbitrarily chosen for me.

I used to play on a roleplaying server for World of Warcraft, which meant a significant proportion of my time in the game was spent sitting around talking to other players and pretending to actually be our characters. It was a lot of fun, particularly as WoW offered you a few "non-combat" outfits that you could dress in. Since my character was a skilled tailor, she'd managed to make herself a nice array of different dresses to suit various occasions, and it was always fun to show up in a new outfit and have it acknowledged.

This particular guilty pleasure of mine means that there's one type of DLC I have a total weakness for, even with my general like of nickel-and-dime pointless DLC that doesn't add anything to the experience, and that's costume DLC. If I have the option to customise my characters' appearances further with new downloadable costumes, chances are I will take that opportunity. This likewise means that if a game provides the opportunity to earn a new costume by completing various challenges, I will generally drop everything I'm doing to try and earn that costume. I recall a ridiculous amount of grinding in Dark Chronicle (aka Dark Cloud 2 to earn a leopard-print bikini, but man, it felt good to finally earn it and subsequently take on the final boss in a woefully underdressed state.

Anyway. I digress, before I start getting into a lengthy discussion of how immensely fashionable my Second Life avatars were in their heyday…

1308: Adventurer's Guild

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.

1307: Thaumaturgist

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!

1293: [Incredibly tough][Miq'ote][rod]

I'm getting a bit antsy for Final Fantasy XIV. I haven't felt genuinely excited about an MMO for a while — the last one I played, which was The Secret World, was something I picked up more out of idle interest than anything else. Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, is something I'm really looking forward to.

While I'm waiting for the announcement that the open beta has started and I can finally start building what will become my "permanent" character in the game, I've been reading back over some of the forum posts, and particularly about people who once played Final Fantasy XI and ended up leaving.

I enjoyed Final Fantasy XI a lot. I didn't play it for anywhere near long enough to reach the level cap or anything like that, but I enjoyed the experience of what I played. It helped that I had some good friends who played regularly, but it was also just an experience that I found enjoyable. I'm hoping Final Fantasy XIV recreates that kind of feeling, though I'm already aware it's a very different game — and I'm glad about that.

Final Fantasy XI was hard. Really hard. This was the kind of game where if you inadvertently got a monster chasing you that was too strong for you to beat, you'd better outwit them and run away as fast as possible, because they would chase you across the whole map, and they would kill you. To add insult to injury, Final Fantasy XI also penalised your experience each time you died, meaning that dying too much could actually result in you losing levels if you weren't careful — something I haven't seen in any MMO since. This gave the game a real feeling of consequence — if you got yourself into a situation you couldn't handle, you had better either figure out how you were going to deal with it, or accept your fate.

This sort of "penalty" thing is something that people praise Demon's Souls and Dark Souls for, because it makes death meaningful. And that's good. In World of Warcraft, death just means your equipment gets a bit damaged and you have a bit of a run back to your corpse, but otherwise there aren't really any major penalties you have to deal with. This means that in many cases, challenges can be brute-forced by simply chipping away, dying, running back, repeating. This isn't really possible when you're by yourself, as monsters who aren't being actively attacked tend to run back to their spawn point and heal fully, but if you're in a party it was most certainly possible.

In Final Fantasy XI, meanwhile, you had to work together. It was one of the most intensely cooperative games I've ever played, and while this sometimes led to player tempers flaring, I was fortunate enough for the most part to group with people who both knew what they were doing and were patient with newbies.

Getting into a fight in Final Fantasy XI was a big deal. It wasn't a hack-and-slash game; it was something where, when you saw an enemy, you had to carefully weigh up your chances of victory as a group. Once the battle began, everyone had to play their part and know what they were doing — even in combat against non-boss enemies. Battle was an intricate dance led by the Warrior, who maintained the enemy's attention while other classes dealt damage or healed the party. It was stressful, but in a good way; as I say, it was intensely cooperative, and the knowledge that what you were doing was important felt great. Contrast this with something like World of Warcraft, where I often felt rather detached in party play, particularly playing as a Mage. Combat often boiled down to little more than standing back and spamming the same few attacks over and over again while other people did their thing independently.

(Aside: I have no idea what "Abyssea" is, but people who stuck with Final Fantasy XI longer than me seem to complain about it an awful lot.)

I'm not yet sure how Final Fantasy XIV's cooperative play will work as I didn't get a chance to try it during closed beta. I am curious to see, though, since from what I've heard from other people, each class plays noticeably differently from the others. The Pugilist class that I experimented with had a strong focus on quickly triggering attacks in a specific order to form combos, and this was probably most like what I was doing as a Mage in World of Warcraft. You had to memorise the combination of buttons that was most effective, then repeatedly trigger them as appropriate. Final Fantasy XIV added a bit of extra depth, though; positioning is important, as you can dodge area-of-effect attacks and do extra damage from certain angles.

Party play in Final Fantasy XIV also features the return of the Limit Break gauge from Final Fantasy VII, which I'm interested to see — in this particular incarnation, it's a meter shared between the whole party which any member can use when it's charged. The exact effect it has is determined by who triggered it. I'm wondering how sensible and restrained people will be with this feature, or if it will end up getting spammed by people. We'll see.

With the recent announcement of Everquest Next and its impressive dynamic quests and terrain deformation, attention seems to have swung off Final Fantasy XIV a bit, but I'm still intending to give it a good shot. I really liked what I played in open beta, and I anticipate it's something that I'll enjoy sticking with — particularly if I get the opportunity to play with some people on a regular basis, which is looking likely.

Hopefully not too long to wait until open beta. Count on some enthusing on these very pages when it does arrive.

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.