1318: Cooperative Collective

I probably don't need to tell you this by now, but Final Fantasy XIV is really great, predictable MMO launch issues aside.

One thing I've been very pleasantly surprised with is how well it handles group cooperative content. This is something that its predecessor, Final Fantasy XI, did not handle as well as it could — which was unfortunate, since progression in Final Fantasy XI was pretty much dependent on you being able to reliably get into a group of other players.

Final Fantasy XIV has a nifty system called the Duty Finder, which is essentially a cross-server matchmaking system that picks up players who are looking to play a specific part of the game, groups them together in an appropriately balanced party, then sends you on your way to do the thing you said you wanted to do. It's a good system, though you can sometimes be waiting for up to half an hour or more depending on what type of character you play.

If you're unfamiliar with the way massively multiplayer online RPGs tend to do things, there's a fairly standard setup for a productive, cooperative party to complete cooperative content, and that is this: at least one "tank", who is designed to take the brunt of the damage from enemies and protect the other party members; at least one healer, whose role is self-explanatory; and the rest of the slots taken up by damage dealers, whose role is also self-explanatory. In Final Fantasy XIV, you'll either be in a "Light Party," which is made up of four members (one tank, one healer, two damage dealers) or a "Full Party," which is, I believe, eight people — though I'm yet to encounter anything that requires that many people.

Early to mid-level content is based on playing in a Light Party which has a few benefits: firstly, it's easier to gather four people together than eight; secondly, it helps everyone in the party understand what their role is and see how they're contributing to the group effort. In larger parties, it can sometimes be difficult to understand exactly what you're actually doing. If you're one of just four people, each of whom has a clearly defined role, however, you can see the effect you're having.

The established party structure has one unfortunate side-effect, though, and that is the fact that it's easy to assume that completing challenges will be impossible if you don't have all the requisite members. This isn't always true, as my experiences this evening proved.

A group of us — three "Free Company" (guild) members and a random fourth person — had entered the dungeon Halatali using the Duty Finder. All was going reasonably well until I had an unfortunate crash, and it took me a few minutes to get back into the game. When I returned, the random fourth person had vanished, apparently having tried to get the rest of the party killed before leaving. Dick. The three of us fought our way through a few enemies while waiting for a fourth member to come and join up. When they eventually arrived, we were good to go.

Unfortunately, our tank had a connection problem towards the end of the dungeon, leaving me, the other damage dealer and the healer stranded wondering what to do next. Eventually, we decided to charge forwards anyway and see if we could survive the dungeon's main boss — and you know what? We did, thanks to some excellent teamwork, and everyone doing their job properly. Sure, we probably could have done it a bit easier if we actually had our tank with us, but it was a fun challenge to do it without someone drawing the boss monster's attention away from me flinging fiery death at all and sundry.

We all had a good laugh about it afterwards — particularly at the fact that we finally managed to get a new tank to join us just as we were whittling down the boss' last 15% of health. By the time he'd run through the dungeon and met up with us, the boss was lying defeated on the floor. Immensely satisfying — and very amusing.

Anyway. Yeah. FFXIV is great — even for someone like me who is normally quite uncomfortable playing with strangers. I'm having a blast. And when the servers calm down, you should totally give it a chance, too.

1317: Never Gonna Dance Again

We went to a wedding today — that of our friends George and Mitu — and it was a pretty spectacular affair. Given their respective families' diverse cultural and religious backgrounds (civil ceremony, followed by Islamic blessing, plus traditional Bengali and Ukrainian ceremonies, plus some Greek dancing somewhere along the way), there was a hell of a lot going on all day. I wouldn't expect anything less from this particular couple; one of many complimentary things I can say about them is that they certainly don't do things by halves.

As the evening session got underway, though, I found myself becoming contemplative, specifically with regard to the matter of dancing. I have never been a particularly good dancer, though when I first started university all it generally took to actually get me on the dance floor was a few vodka and Red Bulls. These days, though… I just can't do it. I can't bring myself to do it at all, and I find that fact a little distressing.

It's not that I particularly want to dance, see — I think dancing is, on the whole, one of the more ridiculous things the human race has decided is a good way to spend its time — but it's more the wider picture: over the last few years I've become very conscious of the fact that I find it very difficult to outwardly express joy in any form, whether that's simply through saying something positive, "acting" excited or doing something typically associated with joyfulness like, say, dancing.

The precise reasons for this state of mind elude me somewhat, though I have more than a few suspicions that it's something to do with either or both of the two related issues that are depression and self-esteem. Whenever I feel like I'm being "pressured" to act excited or joyful, I just clam up and feel horribly embarrassed; like if I do outwardly display some form of excitement or joy, people will immediately call it out for being "fake" or something. Perhaps "fake" isn't the right word; it just doesn't feel "right" to do or express these things. I can't quite pin down if it's a sense of feeling like I don't "deserve" to feel these things — I don't think it's that — or whether it's just a sense of embarrassment at being anything other than the stony-faced dude in the corner of the room.

I think it's also something to do with social pressure. I have no problem with being excited when I'm by myself (ooer) and, as regular readers will note, I also have no problem with expressing excitement for something via the medium of the written word. But place me in a situation where I'm supposed to be acting excited? I can't do it. I feel like people are judging me and will somehow not believe that I'm happy or excited if I don't do it "enough" — ironically, though, this often makes me do some sort of half-hearted Fluttershy-style "yay" rather than genuinely act excited, which probably leads to the exact issue I'm afraid of.

(Incidentally, that whole "yay" scene with Fluttershy is absolutely, positively, 100% the reason why I love that show so much. I absolutely am her, in more ways than one.)

Sooooo. Yeah. If something cool happens to you, that's great. I really am happy for you. If I don't appear to be showing it on my face, however, it's nothing personal. It's just the way I am.

Yay.

1316: Get Hype

I've written about this on at least one occasion before, but the fact that Breaking Bad is on television again has reminded me of the curiously inverted effect that hyperbole has on me. In other words, the more people waffle on about how amazing something is, the less I want to pay any attention to it whatsoever. I've long since muted everything to do with Breaking Bad for this reason, as it's completely dulled any enthusiasm I might have once had for something that is — by most accounts — very good.

Breaking Bad is a curiously extreme example of what I'm talking about. It's doubly infuriating because everyone posting about it on social media is also being incredibly conscious of spoilers — Breaking Bad fans hate spoilers — and thus what we end up with at the time a Breaking Bad episode is broadcast is a string of tweets that say absolutely nothing. To be more precise, they tend to be nothing but a string of tweets of people going things like "OH MY GOD" and "WOW" which has absolutely no meaning whatsoever to those who aren't watching the show.

Now, I'll grant that Twitter provides a reasonably practical means for Breaking Bad fans to get together and discuss the show — or, more accurately, "react" to it in real-time — but it really doesn't inspire anything like in-depth discussion, and thus I have to question the value of doing this, particularly as it has several knock-on effects: 1) people who don't like Breaking Bad get pissed off 2) people who might have wanted to watch Breaking Bad at some point get fed up and decide they don't really want to watch it until everyone shuts the fuck up about it and 3) the people who are actually watching Breaking Bad are only giving the show half their attention because they're flip-flopping back and forth between the TV screen and their phone.

I tried the "livetweeting" experience a couple of years back when I got vaguely into The Apprentice. I picked up a few followers in the process and found some entertaining people, too, but it really wasn't worth it; the number of people who got irritated at it didn't really make up for the people I "met" in the process, and the interactions I was having with others who were "reacting" to the show in real time were superficial at best. I didn't find it particularly valuable, in other words; certainly no more so than sitting around watching a show with friends in the same room, which is something I don't tend to do — TV, for me, tends to be an accompaniment to something else (like eating dinner) rather than an activity in itself.

More than the fact I didn't find it particularly valuable socially, though, I just found it frustrating to do — if I was tweeting while watching, I found myself unable to concentrate on what was going on on the screen, so eventually I gave up, much to the relief of my Twitter followers.

Ultimately, it's your Internet; if you want to "ooh" and "aah" at Breaking Bad while it's on, feel free — I simply reserve the right to mute your ass if you do it too much!

Grump over. Time to go to a pre-wedding celebration.

1315: Twitchy

I'm still thoroughly baffled by the phenomena that are Let's Play videos and livestreaming of video games.

In the latter case, I sort of get why it would be useful for e-sports — it allows audiences to watch matchups between skilled players, just like real-world sports — but in the former case… hmm.

The argument tends to run that Let's Play videos and livestreaming allow people to get a feel for games they might not have tried. And that's a fair point, with one fairly major-ish issue: the popular Let's Play and livestream feeds are all for the same games all the time… and they're popular games that people already know all about. ("Hey guys, DarkPhantom123 here; welcome to part 527 of my Let's Play Minecraft video!")

The current trend is for people to post videos of them taking on Spelunky's Daily Challenge, a randomly-generated level that is the same for all players worldwide. This can occasionally be amusing, but when there are hundreds of people all posting these same videos, I have to confess I find myself feeling like I'd just rather play the game for myself. Perhaps you can learn something from watching someone else's run, but in my experience, most of these videos tend to be characterised by blind luck and fluke, with genuine skill only entering the picture relatively occasionally. It might just be the people I've watched videos of though.

The thing that strikes me the most about all this, though, is that it feels like such a massive waste of time. I love games; they're my go-to form of entertainment, and I'm fortunate enough to be able to call playing the games I like my job, too. However much I love games, though, whenever I look at, say, the Twitch front page, I feel no desire whatsoever to watch other people playing games; I would rather just get on and play myself. I have lots of games I want to play; it simply, as I say, feels like a massive waste of time to watch other people doing so, particularly when a lot of these streams appear to be nothing more than vanity projects.

I clicked on a few streams on Twitch the other day out of curiosity and felt no desire to keep watching. The first was a guy playing Blizzard's new World of Warcraft-themed card game Hearthstone, and featured a picture-in-picture webcam view of him playing — hardly the most interesting thing to watch, since he wasn't talking or looking at the camera; all you saw was him looking engrossed in the game. The second was someone playing the free-to-play MMO Ragnarok Online 2, which featured some dreadful backing music and footage of someone apparently just running around doing random solo quests. Again, why would I watch that? Particularly when Ragnarok Online 2 is free-to-play, even, meaning that if I was genuinely curious about it I could just, you know, download it and actually try it out for myself?

Perhaps this is a generation gap thing; maybe I'm just too old to understand why people would want to treat games as a spectator sport when they're not designed to be — e-sports excluded, obviously. If I have some free time to devote to games, I want to spend it playing games, not watching other people doing so. Other people apparently disagree, and that's cool — I just wish I understood the phenomenon a bit better. Can anyone explain it to me?

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.

1313: Whew

That's what's felt like a very long week over and done with. And I'm happy to see the back of it. It's been tiring and stressful, though I'm not entirely sure why; nothing really specifically stressful or distressing has happened as such, it's just been… bleh.

I haven't had particularly restful sleep all week; that's part of the problem, I think. We appear to be bang in the middle of Flying Things That Like to Bite You About the Arse, Legs and Arms season. I'm not sure exactly what form said Flying Things That etc. are taking this particular year, but I'm pretty sure I've heard mosquitoes at the very least. Bastard things.

Trouble is, it's at that frustrating sort of temperature where if you shut the windows it's too warm, open the windows and it's slightly too cold (plus Flying Things That etc. come in uninvited), put a fan on and you wake up with a mouth like a badger's been sticking its arse in it all night long.

I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this. I think my brain has just plain shut down for the weekend, suggesting that I should attempt to get some sleep and hopefully feel a bit fresher in the morning. After all, it is Final Fantasy day tomorrow — Early Access for Final Fantasy XIV starts tomorrow, which I've been looking forward to a lot.

I levelled my Thaumaturgist class to 20 — the level cap for the recent open beta — and made a start on the Weaver crafting class. I'm torn as to what to do when I get back in, though; should I start a new class, or carry on developing the ones I've already been working on? I haven't tried a "Disciple of the Land" gathering class at all yet, and I've been curious to.

I guess I don't even have to decide if I don't want to. That's one of the nice things about the new game; once you've reached level 10 in your starting class and completed the appropriate quest, you can then switch classes whenever you want simply by swapping out your weapon. This is absolutely ideal for situations where you want to play with friends who are perhaps just starting out in the game — I'd be able to swap to a class I haven't levelled at all and help them out from the very beginning. For situations where that isn't practical, the Level Sync function artificially limits your level in situations like dungeons and boss battles to ensure you're never overpowered and that you always have a decent challenge to take on.

Incidentally, if any of you reading this are planning on playing the game and want to meet up with me, my character's name is Amarysse Jerhynsson (naturally) and she calls the Ultros server home. Depending on how many of my colleagues at USgamer I manage to rope into joining me, I may start an official USgamer Linkshell on that server; in the meantime, I'm part of the Giant Bomb Linkshell and will continue to be part of that once the game goes live. (A Linkshell is basically a global chat channel; not quite a guild, but a means of a group of people to communicate with one another. FFXIV does have "guilds" in the form of Free Companies, too; a single character can be in one Free Company and, I think, eight Linkshells at once.)

I'm just rambling now. I'm off. Good night all.

1312: Hoarding

Occasionally I look around and wonder why I keep some of the crap I do.

I'm actually not that much of a hoarder — I've been fairly ruthless about throwing useless crap out on several occasions, usually when moving house — but there are some thing that, over the years, I just haven't been able to bring myself to part with.

One of the things that's stayed with me for over half my life now — well, several things, really, if we're being picky — is my old school work. Not all of it — reading through old school books would make me cringe — but some of it. Most notably, I appear to still have most of my coursework assignments from A-Level Sociology (and possibly GCSE Integrated Humanities, too), all my course notes from A-Level English Language and I even found one of my GCSE (or possibly A-Level… I forget) Music compositions the other day — a piano piece called "The Storm" that I momentarily contemplated giving a French title ("L'Orage", which I'm not even sure is grammatically correct) before mentally punching myself in the face with a silent admonishment to not be so fucking pretentious.

The aforementioned English Language notes actually moved binders during the course of my studies, but I still have the previous ring binder they were in before they got a bit too… big. Said smaller binder was decorated on the inside covers by my friends and I (mostly me) with a series of fake classified advertisements, many of which are in-jokes that I can still remember but which, going by past experience attempting to resurrect them with my old school friends, are probably remembered by only me. For example, I can remember exactly whom the advert "Ninja Assassin Wanted to Eliminate Annoying Twat in English Class" refers to; likewise, I remember who the phone number for the adjacent "Ninja Assassin for Hire" panel belonged to. Other jokes are a little more obvious: an advert inviting people to acquire fake identification to get served in pubs by writing to the local police station (postcode PE19 999, obviously); an advert for a new book called "How to Use Windows 95 Without Getting in a Stress" (judged "indispensible" by the Daily Mail, apparently); Poppets offering a new "Rabbit Poo" flavour.

Interestingly, the inside cover of my English Language folder also marks an instance of Capitalising Things to Make Them Sound Like Official Things that predates TVTropes by a good few years, and also displays a convincingly large amount of evidence that I held some sort of deep-seated grudge towards Cambridgeshire Careers Guidance for some inexplicable reason. It's also quite magnificently dated by the references made throughout the adverts — the ad for the fictional PC product Mr Volpe's MATHS! Is Not Boring… Honest proudly boasts of "16-bit colour video starring Mark Hamill and Patrick Stewart" and "music by Oasis" along with the fact it's "powered by Id's Quake Engine"; meanwhile the Hanson Interactive CD-ROM apparently came with "tickets to see Hanson live, a working sniper rifle with live ammunition (for use at concert) and actual footage of band members being dismembered horribly" (with no apparent realisation that if they'd already been recorded being dismembered then there'd be no-one to shoot at the concert).

It is, in short, a rather eye-opening glimpse into my psyche from when I was around 15. I'm not sure it's a healthy image, but eh. It helped make me the person I am to– WAITAMINUTE

1310: Nice Job, Sony

It was a day of press conferences at Gamescom in Germany today — always a long, tiring day, so forgive me if tiredness gets the better of me and I either start making ridiculous typos or fall asleep on my keyboard.

Out of the three conferences we saw today (or heard about second-hand in the case of Microsoft, who weren't streaming their event), for my money, Sony's was clearly the best. For my particular tastes, anyway.

What's kind of cool, though, is that in each of the three cases — Microsoft, EA, Sony — there were clear target audiences, and while sometimes they overlapped, for most of the time they were very distinct from one another. This is good. This makes things exciting and interesting, and means we don't keep seeing the same things over and over again.

The big divide seen today came largely between Sony versus Microsoft and EA. The latter put out huge, dubstep-fuelled trailers featuring lots of shooting and sports and other manly pursuits. The former opened the show with Shuhei Yoshida quietly playing with the console live on stage, closely followed by one of its least exciting games (Gran Turismo) accompanied not by dubstep, but with some rather stirring orchestral/choral music.

Microsoft and EA have their audiences — the people who enjoy their triple-A blockbuster experiences; the people who enjoy playing sports games; the people who are happy to play nothing but games with Battlefield in their title — and that's cool. But it was even cooler to see Sony catering to its own niche rather than trying to emulate Microsoft. Some gorgeous looking independent titles; some solid support for the Vita; some intriguing looking exclusives — good stuff, and it got me far more excited than Microsoft and EA's stuff. And that's fine — I've long thought that various companies should specialise their output a little more rather than attempting to, as Jim Sterling so frequently mocks, "appeal to a wider audience".

Interestingly, opinions have been a little split today. For the most part, my Twitter feed was enthusiastic about Sony's conference while it was happening, but I've seen a few people expressing disappointment. Those who were particularly disappointed were either 1) in Microsoft and EA's target audience, which is understandable because Sony very obviously aimed in the opposite direction, or 2) fans of Japanese games, of which there weren't any on display. Still, there's always TGS for the latter, at least, so it's a little premature to worry about the PS4 — and I remain convinced that Sony platforms will remain the place to be for Japanese titles, especially if their publishing partners teased back when the PS4 was first announced are anything to go by.

Anyway. My eyelids are drooping so I'm off to sleep.

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.