1538: Loot Whore

Playing both Final Fantasy XIV and Diablo III — two fundamentally similar but also quite different games — this weekend has got me thinking about loot. Yes, this is a very specific thing to be thinking about, but I find the two games' differing approaches to providing the player with new equipment to be quite interesting.

At heart, the difference between the two games is in whether gear acquisition is purely vertical (Final Fantasy XIV) or whether there's a degree of horizontal… ness about it, too.

What do I mean? Well, in Final Fantasy XIV, the equipment you put on your character is largely determined by your level. And when you hit the level cap, you then work your way up through several "tiers" of equipment that are increasingly challenging to acquire. Item Level 50 items are provided to you as the final stages of your class' quest; Item Level 60 items come from entry-level endgame dungeons; Item Level 70 items used to come from endgame currency and now come from more challenging endgame dungeons; Item Level 80 items come from Crystal Tower; Item Level 90 items… you get the idea. Everything comes from a specific place, and you generally have to "work" for it — items you purchase require grinding out the requisite amount of currency before you can afford them by running dungeons and other content, while items you acquire as loot from dungeons are random drops that, in many cases, will require a large number of runs of the same dungeon to acquire a complete set of.

In Diablo III, conversely, you are constantly thrown new gear. Every other fight you get into, a monster drops something. And with the recent Patch 2.0, it's usually something interesting that has an impact on your stats, damage, healing potential or other stuff. You'll be swapping out equipment very regularly as you find new bits of gear; consequently, equipment starts to feel a lot more "disposable" than it does in something like Final Fantasy XIV. Diablo certainly has an element of vertical progression, too, as items get gradually better over the course of the whole game and have minimum level requirements to use, but when you strap on a new piece of armour it's on the understanding that you might not be holding onto it for very long, unlike, say, my Sorcerer's Coat that my Final Fantasy XIV Black Mage has now been wearing for a number of months now. (That thing must reek.)

There are other ways to handle it, too. Japanese role-playing games tend to take a vertical approach, with new "tiers" of equipment presenting themselves as you progress through the linear storyline, with the "ultimate" equipment usually either tucked away in a secret place or secreted behind a significant challenge. Western role-playing games tend to allow pretty much any character to strap on anything at all, though if your class isn't proficient in it you can expect penalties to your performance. Western role-playing games also tend to festoon their worlds and dungeons with hundreds of the same shitty pieces of armour and weaponry, and then hide a few good bits and pieces in the deepest darkest dungeons. And then you have weird hybrid games like The Witch and the Hundred Knight, which is a Japanese role-playing game that takes heavy cues from loot-whoring role-playing games like Diablo, which combine a toned-down degree of player choice/horizontal progression with vertical advancement as the game goes on.

It must be a really tricky balance to get right, and I don't envy the people who have to design all that gear and ensure it's reasonably well-balanced for the game. (Although unbalanced super-gear can be a lot of fun, too, so it's not unusual to find at least one massively overpowered piece of gear in many games — at least in the single-player sphere.) I'm not sure, on the whole, which system I prefer — if indeed any — because they each have their pros and cons. I really like the sense of achievement that acquiring a new piece of equipment in Final Fantasy XIV brings, for example — it feels like you've done something major. Conversely, I like that the sheer volume of loot in stuff like Diablo allows you to tweak and tailor your character a lot more to your liking — but it is a faff to have to keep comparing stats every few minutes.

There you go. One of the nichiest posts I've ever done. It's late. I'm going to bed.

1535: El Psy Kongroo

I've already written on the subject at some length over on USgamer, but on the offchance you haven't paid us a visit recently, I thought I'd wax lyrical about my initial experiences with Steins;Gate here, too.

Steins;Gate, for the unfamiliar, is a visual novel from popular developer Nitroplus, whose name you may remember from the excellent "giant robots fight Cthulhu" visual novel Deus Machina Demonbane that I played a while back. Unlike Demonbane, it's not an eroge — though Demonbane's sex scenes were, for the most part, more horrifying and uncomfortable than anything else — but it's still an unabashedly adult affair, just one without any graphic uglies-bumping. It's an enormously well-respected title, known better to most people in the West through its apparently excellent anime adaptation, and an official English localisation has been a long time coming. But come it finally has, thanks to localisation and visual novel specialists JAST USA — one of my favourite publishers in the world for the last few years — and finally everyone can get in on the action.

Steins;Gate is a science fiction tale that, for the few hours I've played so far, centres largely around the concept of time travel and parallel worlds. The main character is a gloriously chaotic individual afflicted with chuunibyou ("middle school second-grade syndrome") — he's utterly convinced that he's a mad scientist and that he's being pursued by a shadowy group called The Organization. Whether or not his delusions turn out to be true or not remains to be seen, but it's certainly an interesting setup; much like Demonbane put the player in the shoes of a protagonist that was a character in their own right rather than an obvious blank-slate cipher, so too does Steins;Gate.

This time around, the narrative influences aren't drawn from Lovecraft, but instead from popular science and science fiction, both Eastern and Western. The game makes frequent references to real-life concepts, particularly with regard to topics like time travel and parallel world theories as well as the real-life modern-day myth of time traveller John Titor. The game makes unsubtle changes to things it mentions throughout (Jojo's Bizarre Adventure becomes Juju's Bizarre Adventure, for example, while the IBM 5100 computer Titor supposedly travelled back in time to retrieve becomes an IBN 5100), presumably to avoid breaching about a bajillion copyrights, but it's always clear what it really means. There's a constantly updated glossary you can refer to as you play, too, that gradually fills up with a wealth of information ranging from Japanese cultural tidbits to scientific and technology history.

It's clearly a setting that has had a lot of thought poured into it. In many ways, although the premise, style and genre are completely different, Steins;Gate reminds me of Aselia the Eternal in the sense that the writers obviously had a very clear vision of how their version of the world worked and how the various characters fit into it all. This was very true in the case of Aselia the Eternal, which I maintain has one of the most well-realised, well-depicted fantasy worlds of any game I've ever played, despite the inherent restrictiveness of the visual novel genre, and is already shaping up to be very true in the case of Steins;Gate. Nitroplus' title goes a step further with all the supplementary information you can refer to as you play — not to mention the fact that clicking the "Internet" option on your in-game phone opens an actual website for the main character's "Future Gadget Lab".

And speaking of the phone, the means through which you interact with Steins;Gate is bizarre and intriguing. Rather than making the usual binary choices that visual novels tend to present you with, Steins;Gate instead makes use of the protagonist's phone as its main means of interaction. As you progress, you'll receive email messages from characters and have the option to respond to them or not; you'll also receive phone calls and have the option of answering them or not answering them, and various other things will happen in and around your phone. The choices you make as to whether or not you engage with these various distractions determine the paths down which the plot proceeds, giving the flow of the story a much more "natural" feel than some visual novels with extremely obvious decision points. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Anyway. I'm but a short way into the overall plot as a whole as I type this and thus there's not a lot more I can say thus far save for the fact that I'm really enjoying it and looking forward to seeing where it goes. It's an immediately intriguing, compelling tale with some fascinating, unconventional characters and an utterly gorgeous art style, so if you're looking for a new interactive story to delve into, I'd encourage you to check it out and grab a copy as soon as you can.

1490: Bros Before Titans

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been playing a bunch of Atelier Rorona this weekend, but tonight I decided to play through something a few people have been bugging me to try: Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. And it proved to be the perfect antidote to the endless Titanfall chatter there's been on social media all weekend.

For those unfamiliar, Brothers, as I shall refer to it hereafter, is a game about the titular brothers going on a quest to find the cure for their sick father. It sells itself as a "single-player cooperative game" and that's not actually a bad description in mechanical terms — using both thumbsticks on a controller, you control both brothers, and use the triggers to make each of them interact with things. Big Brother is stronger, taller and older; Little Brother is more agile, smaller and more childish. Most of the game's puzzles revolve around working out which brother is the most appropriate one to use in a situation, and whether or not they need to work together, which they usually do.

But mechanics are probably the least interesting thing about Brothers. Where the game really shines is in telling a compact, emotional story whose characters are introduced, undergo some serious, well-paced growth and bring the story to a fitting conclusion… all without saying a word. Or not a word in English, anyway; I'm not entirely sure if the language the characters speak in the game is real or just a Simlish-style made up language, but it doesn't matter — the meaning is got across through a combination of context, body language, facial expressions plus other presentational elements such as music. The game packs a seriously powerful emotional punch by slowly building up these characters and giving you a chance to get to know them before throwing them into harrowing situations that will tax the emotional constitution of even the most hard-hearted soul.

I cried three times over the course of the game, but as we've probably established in a number of posts over the last 1,490 days, I am somewhat susceptible to this sort of thing, not to mention a lot more willing to allow my emotions to leak out through my eyes if something affects me strongly. I'm not actually sure if game makers have genuinely got better at emotional storytelling over the past years, whether I've become more susceptible to emotional manipulation, or something in between. It doesn't really matter too much, I suppose; the fact that a game like Brothers can have a legitimately emotional impact is something that's worth celebrating and praising in itself — it doesn't necessarily need to be compared to anything else.

I'm being deliberately vague about details of the plot here because I believe that if you're reading this and have access to some sort of gaming device on which you can play Brothers, you should definitely give it a go. It's a short game — it took me just under 3 hours to get all the way through — and not a particularly challenging one either, but it's not about challenging the player (in mechanical terms, anyway — it's definitely emotionally challenging). Rather, it's about telling an interesting, compelling story in a somewhat unconventional and interactive way. It's the kind of story that might work as an animated movie, but which has a whole lot more power added to it by virtue of the fact that you're the one in control.

Grab a copy for PC here. And if you're planning on playing it, I recommend not reading up on it at all beforehand. It's an experience best had with beginner's mind, and one best had in a single sitting. So set aside a few hours, grab a controller, turn out the lights and enjoy a fantastic story.

1439: Titanic

Been making good progress with Final Fantasy XIV over the last few days and once again I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I've taken to the multiplayer-centric endgame content.

Tonight's job — the last-but-one step in the quest to acquire the almost-but-not-quite-ultimate weapon for my level 50 Black Mage class — was to fell Titan in his "Hard Mode" fight, a notoriously difficult boss battle that I had a considerable degree of uneasiness about going into — and which I was terrified of the prospect of jumping into with strangers.

As it happens, the fight wasn't all that scary if you know what you're doing — much like every other fight in the game. You'd think I'd have learned that by now.

Titan, like Ifrit and Garuda before him, is one of the "Primals" — major bosses that crop up over the course of Final Fantasy XIV's main story, and a good opportunity to test your party's skills against one very strong opponent without having to run through a long dungeon first. The battles against them — known as "trials" in game parlance — tend to be unfold in deceptively simple boss-fighting arenas, but the simplicity of the environment is to ensure there's nothing to distract you from the important thing: paying attention to what your opponent is doing.

Ifrit, Garuda and Titan all have abilities that are far beyond almost anything else you fight in the game, and a party that doesn't know what it's doing can wipe out very quickly if they're not careful. They're highly mobile fights that demand you recognise your opponent's attack patterns and know how to counter them — and how to avoid them. Titan in particular is highly dependent on the party being able to avoid a relentless string of devastating attacks — and the healers being able to deal with the few, less-damaging attacks that are unavoidable for the whole party.

Aside from Titan, I spent a bit of time playing with the Conjurer class earlier — this is the healing class that later becomes White Mage, but also has a few offensive skills, too. It's an interestingly distinctive class to play when compared to Black Mage, and a good demonstration of how Final Fantasy XIV makes even ostensibly similar classes play markedly differently from one another.

Black Mage and its predecessor Thaumaturgist involve highly destructive spells that cost large amounts of magic points to cast. The key mechanic to get your head around with Black Mage is the balance between "Umbral Ice" and "Astral Fire" — the former causes your ice-based spells to cost more to cast, but increases your magic points regeneration enormously, while the latter causes fire-based spells to cost more to cast and deal considerably more damage, and also stops all magic points regeneration. Essentially, Black Mages have a limitless pool of magic points that mean they can continue casting indefinitely, so long as they make the switch between Umbral Ice and Astral Fire at appropriate junctures — and, at higher levels, make good use of the MP-free, instant-cast spells that occasionally trigger.

White Mage and its predecessor Conjurer, meanwhile, are very different. Spells are considerably cheaper to cast, but there's no Umbral Ice mechanic to quickly regenerate magic points in a hurry — so you have to manage your spellcasting a little more carefully. The class also has an interesting "stance switch" option, allowing the white mage to swap their Intelligence (determines spell damage) and Mind (determines healing power) stats around, effectively making them either damage- or healing-focused at the touch of a button. And then, of course, there's the fact that white mages are mainly regarded as healers rather than damage dealers, and as such you have to be a lot more aware of people around you so you can heal them. The tradeoff for this, of course, is that people tend to like you because you can stop them from dying — and, once you reach a high enough level, you can even bring them back from the dead.

I jumped into one of the short party-based "Guildhests" earlier on to have a go at healing as part of a group with a relatively straightforward challenge. The party I was with was clearly very inexperienced — the fighter charged ahead without waiting for me to cast protection spells on him, and the damage-dealing mage seemed to take as much damage as he inflicted. I managed to keep everyone alive, though, and my reward from these random strangers whom I'll probably never see again was three "Player Commendations" — a new system introduced in the latest patch which allows players to show their appreciation for random teammates they were matched up with through the Duty Finder system. It's a very nice, friendly addition to the game, and I can't deny feeling a pleasantly warm and fuzzy feeling inside after a successful dungeon run when I see that little "You have received a player commendation" message in my chat window. Even better when there's more than one.

Anyway. With Titan down, the only thing left for me to do to get my Black Mage relic weapon is to collect 400 more Allagan Tomestones of Philosophy by running dungeons — should be easy enough. Once I've done that, I'll be well on the way to being appropriately geared for the Binding Coil of Bahamut, the most difficult dungeon in the game… or I can just start working on one of the other classes, with the eventual goal of getting their Relic weapons, too.

This post was probably indecipherable to those of you who don't play Final Fantasy XIV but eh. Whatever. Tomorrow I'll write about kittens or something.

1380: Suffer Like QWERTY Did?

There's a new Typing of the Dead game out.

There's a sentence I never thought I'd have the opportunity to type truthfully, but here we are on October 29 in the year of Our Lord 2013, and there's a new Typing of the Dead game out.

Lest you're unfamiliar with Typing of the Dead, allow me to explain.

Sega have a franchise known as House of the Dead. Originally, it was one of those big-screen arcade machines that you and a friend point plastic guns at and pretend you're blasting zombies. House of the Dead and its various sequels were notorious for having some of the worst voice acting ever witnessed in a video game, but also for being fun light gun shooters that didn't take themselves too seriously.

The Typing of the Dead, which came out in arcades in 1999 and was followed a couple of years thereafter by Dreamcast and PC ports, was a… varation on House of the Dead 2. Specifically, it replaced the light-gun shooting aspect with what essentially amounted to a series of touch-typing challenges — zombies would shamble towards you with letters, words or phrases attached to them, and in order to defeat them you'd have to type out their letters, words or phrases before they reached you. As the game progressed, the things you had to type got increasingly complex and silly, culminating with a final boss fight in which the ending you got was determined by how honestly you typed out the answers to a series of questions you were presented with.

The Typing of the Dead Overkill, which came out today, does for House of the Dead Overkill what The Typing of the Dead did for House of the Dead 2. In other words, it's pretty much the same game, only you type things out instead of shooting them. And it's glorious.

I never played House of the Dead Overkill when it came out as a Wii and PlayStation Move-based shooter — lightguns have long gone the way of the dodo — but I was dimly aware of the fact that it was Sega taking the inherent silliness of House of the Dead and turning it up to the maximum, producing a game that is refreshingly unafraid to be completely offensive to absolutely anyone and everyone as often as possible, but which underneath its boobylicious, foul-mouthed exterior, is an immensely enjoyable arcade game of the old-school variety.

The comic juxtaposition between the amusingly mundane things you're typing and the profanity-laced dialogue going on the in the background is hilarious, plus I can't not like a game whose three difficulty levels are "Bitch", "Agent" and "Motherfucker". Aside from the humorous aspect, though, Typing of the Dead Overkill seems to be a solid game underneath, too; there's lots of secrets to find in each level, which you need to grab by hitting the Tab key when you see them on screen in the environment, and a combo-based scoring system rewards you for being as accurate, skilful and quick as possible, so there's plenty of potential for enjoyable high-score chasing.

The voice acting isn't quite as bad as that seen in the original House of the Dead games, but while the actors involved are now clearly professionals, it's pretty clear they've been told to ham it up as much as possible. The characters — including the original House of the Dead's hero G — are broadly-painted stereotypes who all call each other "bitch" and "motherfucker" all the time, and the whole thing just revels in its childishness. It's refreshing.

Also, I've just discovered that the game also includes all of House of the Dead Overkill for those who want to play a traditional lightgun-style shooter. Bargain.

1370: What's Up, Red?

As predicted, I completed Tales of Xillia (like, Platinum completed) earlier, but prior to jumping back into Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory I decided to give Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller a try.

I've had my eye on Cognition ever since it was a modest Kickstarter campaign from a group previously best-known for a(n admittedly very good) King's Quest spinoff. It sounded interesting for a number of reasons: firstly, that it was a modern adventure game — the supposed "death" of the point-and-click genre was somewhat exaggerated — and secondly, that Jane Jensen (of King's Quest VI and Gabriel Knight fame) was acting as "story consultant". While this isn't quite the same as having her actually write it, it would, I thought, at least provide a greater-than-average chance of the game having a decent, well-written story.

I played through the first of the game's four episodes earlier, and was not disappointed. Given that most people I know who have played it seem to think that the first episode is the weakest, I'm very excited to see what follows.

Cognition follows the adventures of FBI agent Erica Reed, a feisty redhead haunted by her inability to save her brother from a serial killer three years prior to the events of the main plot. Erica's a little unusual, however, in that she has a strange supernatural ability that enables her to relive and even manifest memories from the past simply by touching things. Initially, all she can do is touch an object or body and witness a short snippet of what happened, but as the game proceeds, she learns a couple of new abilities under the tutelage of the Wise Old Mystic Woman Who Runs the Antique Shop.

It would have been easy for Cognition to play up its supernatural aspect and even rely on it too much to carry its mystery story, but Erica's abilities are used sparingly, subtly and effectively. It's rarely a "magic bullet" that allows her to do things a good forensics team wouldn't be able to do given enough time; it is, more often than not, used as a means of ushering the story along by providing clues.

It's much more complex than just flashbacks, though; in one of the best puzzles in the game, you're tasked with using your "regression" ability to reconstruct the memories of a key witness who can't remember some important information you need. By collecting information and using it to prompt the witness to remember things, you're able to manipulate the images of his memories to provide specific details — the colour of someone's dress, the time a photo was taken, what was written on a note — that ultimately lead you to the answers you seek. It's a clever system that works really well without resorting to mystical mumbo-jumbo — it's just something Erica can do and while it's clear that part of the plot is going to revolve around her struggling with these visions, for the most part she accepts it as just another tool in her arsenal.

Jensen's influence is apparent in the characters, all of whom are strongly defined. Erica herself initially appears to be somewhat "flat" personality-wise, but over time it becomes clear that she is, more often than not, being quite deadpan, and when she's around people she likes and trusts, she opens up and shows her more good-humoured side.

One of the things I'm particularly enamoured with is that I'm getting a slight "Dr. Naomi" vibe from Cognition. It's not quite the same, of course — Erica is an FBI field agent compared to Naomi's forensic investigator — but there are certain similarities. Most notably, on a number of occasions you're "quizzed" by characters on what you've learned from your investigations, with progression dependent on you giving the correct answers. The penalty for giving an incorrect answer isn't as harsh as in Trauma Team — there are relatively few moments in the game where you can die or "fail" — but it's nice to have a game check that you're paying attention in a suitable, plausible context.

I'm intrigued to try the subsequent episodes now. I have a feeling that four won't be enough!

1347: Om Nom Nom Nom (Plus)

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+ is a magnificent game, though I'm still at a loss as to whether or not Namco are taking the piss with that title or if they genuinely thought Pac-Man needed that many suffixes.

To be fair, though, Pac-Man CE DX+, as I shall refer to it from hereon, isn't actually all that unreasonable a title if you analyse it. It's a variation of Pac-Man (hence Pac-Man) that evolved into a version designed specifically for competitive play (hence Championship Edition) that subsequently evolved further into a considerably expanded version (hence DX, short for Deluxe) which was then expanded even further with some additional content for the new PC version (hence Plus).

If you haven't played Pac-Man CE DX+ yet, you'll be pleased to know that it's now available for PC via Steam as well as consoles, so you can play it pretty much regardless of whatever system you favour.

If you're a fan of the original Pac-Man, be warned, though; Pac-Man CE DX+ is a noticeably different game, though its ancestry is obvious.

While the original Pac-Man required you to repeatedly clear the same screen of dots over and over again while contending with the unwanted attentions of four ghosts, Pac-Man CE DX+ is a much faster-paced game. The maze is divided into two halves, each of which, when cleared, causes a piece of fruit to appear in the other half. Eating said fruit causes the empty maze to regenerate with a new layout, and thus the process repeats. In the main modes, you're against the clock, attempting to score as many points as possible in either five or ten minutes, so it's in your interest to find the quickest routes possible.

The twist on the formula that DX added was the ridiculous number of ghosts that can be involved. Rather than the four ghosts of the original Pac-Man, each maze half in Pac-Man CE DX+ has a number of sleeping ghosts who are disturbed if Pac-Man passes by them, at which point they form an increasingly long chain and chase him, following the same route he does. High scores are dependent on eating a power pill and then gobbling up a massive chain of ghosts, so as well as finding the best route through the dots, it's actually in your interests to attract as many ghosts in your wake as possible, too. There's very much an "optimum route" for each of the courses in the game, though human error means that, unless you've practiced enough to be literally perfect every time, there'll be slight variations in each run you make — usually costing you a few points or precious seconds in the process.

It's a really interesting game that maintains the basic mechanics of the original Pac-Man while simultaneously turning it into a kind of game that's hard to define. Is it a score attack game? Yes. Is it a puzzle game? Yes. Is it a racing game? Yes, kind of.

It's one of the most peculiar games I've ever played, and revisiting it thanks to the new PC version reminds me that it's also one of my favourite games of all time, and I highly recommend you give it a try if you've never had the pleasure. Enjoy, and I make absolutely no apologies if you end up addicted.

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.

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!