2107: Dark Knight Chronicles

Continuing to level Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV, and I’m having a lot of fun with it. I wasn’t quite prepared for how much more powerful it feels than Paladin, but I’m really enjoying the overall feel of it a whole lot — much more than Warrior, which seemed enjoyable enough, but didn’t quite “click” with me for some reason.

I think the reason I like Dark Knight so much is that it appears to be a little less dependent on strict rotations to perform its job most effectively — or, rather, there’s more than one rotation to play around with. I particularly enjoy the fact that when playing Dark Knight it’s absolutely okay — even encouraged — to drop out of Grit, the main “tank stance”, in order to do some additional damage. This appears to be of particular benefit when fighting single-target bosses, since taking fewer overall hits means that Blood Weapon (increase attack speed, drain MP from enemy with every hit, only available when not in Grit) becomes a more efficient means of restoring MP than Blood Price (gain MP when taking damage).

Even though many of the abilities are somewhat similar in function to those found in Paladin, they somehow feel more satisfying to use. Dark Knight has an area-of-effect damage over time skill called Salted Earth, for example, that bathes an area in black and red lightning, whereas Paladin’s nearest equivalent is Circle of Scorn, which has its own little pyrotechnics display but somehow doesn’t feel quite as enjoyable to use. Dark Knight also has Scourge, which is a damage over time that can be immediately applied rather than only used at the end of a three-hit combo like Paladin’s Goring Blade. When everything lines up nicely and you can apply Scourge and Salted Earth to an enemy before letting rip with a non-Grit Dark Arts Souleater combo for a significant amount of damage, it’s a great deal of fun.

Learning my way around Dark Knight has been enjoyable, and it’s helping me rediscover my respect for Final Fantasy XIV’s combat system. People who come to FFXIV from more traditional, customisable role-playing games are sometimes a bit put out at the relative lack of personalisation FFXIV offers in terms of abilities — everyone gets the same abilities at the same levels, and the only real flexibility is in any cross-class skills you choose to use, but even here there are only certain ones that are particularly useful — but in practice it works enormously well, behaving, of all things, more like a fighting game than anything else. A slow-paced fighting game, admittedly, but a fighting game nonetheless.

Allow me to clarify. Modern fighting games demand that players learn specific button and directional inputs to perform various special moves. In order to get good at a fighting game, you need to develop a certain degree of muscle memory to be able to pull these moves off automatically. Once you’ve done that, you need to master the timing of these moves to chain them together into effective combos, and then you need to understand what the most appropriate situations to use these individual combos are.

Final Fantasy XIV is exactly the same, just at a fraction of the pace of your average fighting game. Positioning is important; responding to your enemy’s moves is important; using the right ability at the right time is important. Even muscle memory is important, particularly if you’re playing on controller — while you’re not doing Hadoken button inputs to throw a fireball at someone, you do need to be able to remember where you put all your most important abilities and be able to practically automatically perform combos with no gaps for the most efficient possible damage output. For example, on Dark Knight, my average combo runs something along the lines of LT+Y, RT+Y, LT+A, LT+RT+X, A, LT+RT+B, LT+X, RT+B, RT+X, RT+A, RT+LT+B, RT+LT+X, RT+LT+up, RT+LT+A. This pulls an enemy with Unmend, cements aggro with Unleash, kicks them in the bollocks to stun them for a few seconds, drops a Salted Earth on the ground, applies Scourge, blasts them and anything near them with Dark Passenger, does my three-hit aggro combo then my three-hit, Dark Arts-buffed Souleater combo for a nice chunk of damage. And this isn’t even getting into the situational weaving in of various defensive cooldowns to ensure that I don’t take too much damage, or other skills to support the battle.

That may all sound exceedingly complicated, but I’ve done it so many times now that it feels “automatic” to be able to perform these abilities in the order that seems to work most effectively at my level. I’m sure I’ll have to shake things up a bit as I get closer to 60 and challenging more difficult content, but for now it’s extremely satisfying to nimbly pull off these combos without breaking a sweat.

Onwards to 60 then… I should hit 54 tonight, all being well.

2105: Into Darkness

The official trailer for Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.1 came out recently, and it’s looking simply marvellous. I am happy about this, because although I feel like I’ve got over my “rut” with the game, I’d still love to see something new at last. It’s been a long time coming, after all.

My initial reaction to the announcement of 3.1 was slight disappointment, but in retrospect this was rather silly. I’ll tell you my thinking, though: previous content patches for the game tended to include three new dungeons, a new raid (either a 24-player casual raid of the Crystal Tower ilk, or an 8-player hardcore raid of the Coil ilk) and maybe some new quests and minor mechanics here and there. And gear, of course. 3.1, meanwhile, only includes two new dungeons, one of which is a “Hard Mode” version of an existing dungeon — Pharos Sirius — which immediately made me feel a bit let down that we weren’t getting as much new stuff as we had in the past.

But then I considered things a bit more, and there are plenty of interesting things happening outside the dungeons, because dungeons aren’t the only interesting thing you can do in the game. They’re cool, sure, but I get the impression that Yoshi-P and the FFXIV team very much want to try and shake up the basic formula of the game a little bit having got it where they want to be over the course of A Realm Reborn and vanilla Heavensward. In other words, that means getting people out of the “grind the same thing over and over” mentality and into doing more varied things.

Perhaps the thing I’m most intrigued by — and most mystified by — is the new Exploratory Missions system, whereby individual players, parties, alliances and Free Companies can fly off into the Sea of Clouds with their airship(s), explore a region for 90 minutes, kick the shit out of some monsters, find treasure, complete objectives and gather stuff. This has the most potential to shake up the basic structure of the game, and I really hope it turns out well.

Details are still a bit thin on the ground as yet, but it seems like there will be three difficulty levels for these exploratory missions, with the hardest level being pitched towards Free Companies with their own airships. Monsters will have difficulty ranks between 1 and 6 instead of conventional levels, and there are apparently Hunt-esque “marks” to defeat as well as regular monsters. There will be objectives to complete that will allow players to earn the all-important Tomestones to upgrade their equipment, and treasure chests that contain new Aetherial equipment with randomised stats.

The randomised element of the Exploratory missions is the thing I’m looking forward to the most, to be honest. Exactly how random it is I’m not entirely sure as yet, but I know at the very least there will be several different areas that you can fly to when you start one of these missions — it seems you won’t be able to explicitly pick where you want to go and will instead be assigned a random landing point in a random region. The equipment you can find will be scattered in bronze, silver and gold chests, and presumably tracking these chests down will involve actual exploration of the area rather than the current situation in dungeons, where equipment can be found in boss chests and stuff in all the other chests is fairly underwhelming in its awesomeness, usually consisting of either potions or crafting materials.

Aside from the Exploratory Missions, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is the new Minstrel’s Ballad trial, which is a considerably expanded version of the final boss fight from the Heavensward story quests. This was an absolutely spectacular fight, albeit not particularly difficult, so it will be exciting to have the opportunity to see this realised as something closer to what the creators apparently originally intended. It will be a ten-phase fight — they stopped short of going for thirteen phases to match the thirteen Knights of the Round — and will apparently be on par difficulty-wise with Extreme-level primal fights and the first area of Alexander (Savage). Hopefully this doesn’t mean it will be a glorified DPS check like Alexander is, but from the little I’ve seen of it so far, it looks like there’s going to be some interesting mechanics at play.

Anyway. Patch 3.1 is coming in early November, which isn’t far away now. I’m really looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, and actually a little bit thankful that the new Relic weapons — which are apparently known as “Anima Weapons” — aren’t coming immediately, instead inviting us to grind ourselves into oblivion from patch 3.15 onwards.

In the meantime, I’ve got Dark Knight to level 50 today, so only ten levels to go before I can officially retire Paladin for the most part and start playing a tank class with a bit more damage output at high level! Darksiiiiiiide!

2092: I Can Have a Darkside If You Want Me To

I decided that I was going to get over my “rut” with Final Fantasy XIV today and get my mojo back, so I booted it up and decided to try something I hadn’t done before: give Dark Knight a go.

Dark Knight is the new tanking class that was added in the Heavensward expansion. So far, I’ve levelled Paladin (the main “defense tank”) to 60 as my main, and I have Warrior (the main “wallopy tank”) at 50, so I have a reasonable understanding of it. Dark Knight was a bit of a mystery, though; although I’d read a bit about it, I didn’t really have a bead on how it might actually feel to play it.

Turns out it feels like a hell of a lot of fun — far more so than the rather weedy-but-graceful-feeling Paladin, and, for my money, also more so than the cumbersome swings and heavy hits of Warrior.

I’ve only levelled fro 30-34 so far (you start Dark Knight at 30, unlike pre-expansion classes, which start at 1) so I don’t have a huge amount of experience as yet, but I’ve enjoyed what I’ve done. The class feels like a good balance between the relatively straightforward, set combos and defense of Paladin and the more intricate combos and damage-buffing of Warrior. There also seems to be a bit more in the way of “stance-dancing”, since there are a number of abilities that only work when you have a specific status effect active — or in some cases, if you don’t have it active. The skill “Blood Weapon”, for example, which increases your attack speed and allows you to drain MP from enemies, will not work if you’re in the defensive “Grit” stance, but that’s fine, since Blood Weapon is an offensive skill and Grit carries a hefty damage penalty, so the two aren’t really compatible.

I like this way of playing; rather than Paladin’s approach of sticking with Shield Oath most of the time and giving it a bit of Sword Oath only when you have a hefty aggro lead on the rest of your party, Dark Knight allows you to switch back and forth a lot more freely, giving combat a much more dynamic feel. The rhythm I was getting into by the end of tonight’s session saw me doing my basic aggro combo, weaving in the “Low Blow” stunning kick (which is off the global cooldown) and also dropping in the off-GCD “Reprisal” proc to reduce enemy damage after a successful parry. Then, when Blood Weapon was up — it actually has a pretty short cooldown — I’d drop Grit, hit Blood Weapon, unleash as many attacks as I could manage — including DRK’s DoT, which, unlike PLD’s, isn’t part of a combo, so can be applied immediately — before switching back into Grit again once Blood Weapon dropped. The timing of Blood Weapon’s cooldown usually meant that I could rotate defensive cooldowns at the same time as throwing up Blood Weapon, too, so I could mitigate at least some of the increased damage I’d be taking by dropping Grit’s considerable (20%) reduction in incoming damage.

DRK’s AoE aggro move is also a bit more intuitive than PLD’s Flash, whose radius I’m still not entirely 100% sure of. Unleash, meanwhile, displays a very clear area of effect when you use it, making it extremely apparent whether your positioning is right or not. It’s not quite as satisfying as WAR’s cone-area Overpower, being a weird-looking spell with an annoying sound effect rather than a distinctly HULK SMASH-style swing of your axe, but I’ve also found so far that DRK appears to be able to hold aggro pretty well even with only a couple of Unleashes at the start of the fight — perhaps a side-effect of its increased damage when compared to something like PLD.

I’m digging DRK so far, then, and although it’s another tank class like my main, it feels different enough from PLD already that I feel like it’s going to be enjoyable to level. And who knows? I might even end up maining it if and when I get it to 60.

2078: Two FFXIV Ideas That Will Never Get Implemented (Probably)

I haven’t been playing Final Fantasy XIV all that much recently. This is partly down to the fact that I’ve been really enjoying the other stuff I’ve been playing, and also due to the fact that the current content is feeling a bit stale and stagnant; Heavensward came out quite a long time ago now, and aside from the introduction of raid dungeon Alexander (which proved to be a little underwhelming after the dramatic insanity of The Binding Coil of Bahamut) there hasn’t been much new stuff introduced. Consequently, the grind to get other classes to level 60 — or to gear up my main class, for that matter — isn’t feeling all that appealing right now, particularly as there really isn’t a huge amount to do at level 60 at the moment: two dungeons, two Extreme boss fights, and Alexander in its Normal and Savage incarnations.

This, along with some of the other stuff I’ve been playing recently, got me thinking about ways the formula could be shaken up a little — partly to make the grind a bit more bearable, partly to make replays of old content a more attractive option, and partly to address some common complaints of certain aspects of the player base, specifically the lack of challenge in dungeons and the desire to show off your skills a bit more outside of the tippest-toppest highest-level content.

Final Fantasy XIV is heavily based on instanced content such as dungeons and boss fights, so I had an idle thought that the addition of two optional ways of playing this content would make the game interesting: specifically a Time Attack mode, which would reward those who can slice through a dungeon at high speed, and a Score Attack mode, which will encourage “full clears” of dungeons as well as skilful play.

I’m no game designer and I am under no illusions that these ideas would ever be implemented into the game, but I’ll share my thinking for each mode, anyway.

Queueing

Added to the existing Duty Finder options — Undersized/Unsynced Party and Minimum Item Level — would be the options for Score Attack and Time Attack. You would only be able to challenge one or the other at a time, but there could potentially be some additional options such as difficulties, whether to run it with level/item level sync or not and so forth. (There could also perhaps be an additional option for a “Story” run, for those who want to enjoy dungeons for the first time as originally intended, which could perhaps make cutscenes unskippable, bosses untargetable until everyone is out of cutscenes and perhaps even force a minimum iLevel sync. Alternatively, not selecting Score or Time Attack could simply assume that the run is for “story” purposes, without the restrictions suggested above.)

Time Attack

There are a few ways this could work. The simplest means would be for the party’s clear time to be recorded, starting from when the barrier comes down at the outset of the dungeon and stopping when the dungeon’s final boss is defeated. The final time would give the party as a whole a letter grade between, say, D and S — D being the worst, S being the best — and the rewards for the dungeon would be adjusted accordingly based on the grade attained.

Each player’s best time is recorded, and this could provide additional incentives: perhaps a small extra reward if you beat your previous best, or leaderboards showing which players/parties/Free Companies/servers have cleared content most efficiently.

A second means of approaching this could be to give the party a fairly strict time limit countdown from when the dungeon starts, with time being extended by reaching checkpoints or defeating particular enemies. This provides the opportunity for failure — something which the game as a whole is lacking a bit, particularly in dungeons, where you can just respawn until the currently implemented and overly generous total time limit expires — as well as the chance to reward efficient play; again, the run should be concluded with some sort of rating system or bonus based on time remaining to encourage speedy runs.

My thinking behind this system is that there are already people who like to rush through dungeons as quickly as possible, and this often leads to conflict with people who aren’t as confident or simply prefer to take things slowly. Providing a separate “mode” for those who like to speedrun — as well as incentives for everyone in the party to be on board with speedrunning the dungeon — would, I feel, alleviate at least a certain amount of this tension. Plus trying to beat your best times makes for an inherently satisfying means of rewarding replays of old content.

Score Attack

This would be a little more complex, but the basic principle is the same as outlined above: clear a dungeon, get a grade, adjust the rewards according to how good the grade was.

In this case, the grade would come from the total score the party attains in the dungeon. The score could change via any or all of the following possible events:

Dealing damage/overall DPS
Defeating an enemy
Overkilling an enemy (dealing more damage than necessary to knock its HP to 0)
Landing hits in rapid succession (skillchains)
Hitting multiple enemies at once with AoE skills
Tanks maintaining aggro
Losing points for non-tanks taking aggro
Clutch healing (i.e. the same circumstances where a well-timed heal increases the Limit gauge)
Using limit breaks
Finding treasures
Defeating bosses quickly

There could then be a number of point bonuses awarded, either at the end of the dungeon or at checkpoints (likely the bosses):

Time bonus according to how quickly the section/dungeon was cleared
Bonus according to the percentage of all enemies in the section/dungeon defeated (encouraging full clears)
Penalties for party KO’s or failing to deal with boss mechanics properly
Bonuses for achieving specific goals such as overkills, enemies simultaneously defeated and the like

At the conclusion of the dungeon, the party receives a letter grade between D and S, with rewards increasing for better grades.

My thinking behind this mode is that it would force players to play in a slightly different way; it would require cooperation, players playing their job well and being more willing to be thorough about clearing a dungeon. Because well-geared players are less inclined to do full clears of dungeons, the rewards for performing well in Score Attack should provide sufficient incentive for them to play in this mode, since better gear will inevitably allow for the attainment of higher scores.

Someone out there doubtless has a compelling argument as to why both of these are stupid ideas — off the top of my head, perhaps the strongest argument against would be making something so “gamey” fit into the overall lore, though FFXIV isn’t above a transparently shoehorned explanation or two here and there. (See: anything PvP; the Crystal Tower weekly quest; anything involving the Wandering Minstrel; the recent seasonal event in which you could meet the developers) To be clear, these are not by any means serious suggestions in the slightest. I do think they’d both be pretty fun, though — and they’d certainly get me pumped up to chase some high scores and best times.

2062: By Request: 100 Reasons You Should Play Metal Gear Solid V

Continuing with my exercise from the last few days in which I take “requests” from my Twitter followers, today I follow the suggestion of Josh “Musubi Azeyma” Major, a friend whom I originally met through Final Fantasy XIV. Josh requested that I present a hundred reasons why people should play Metal Gear Solid V, because he’s obsessed with it right now and thinks everyone else should be too. So, who am I to argue with that logic?

DISCLAIMER: The only real potential issue with this task is that I haven’t actually played Metal Gear Solid V, nor do I own a copy. Since we have, however, established that it is acceptable for professional journalists to comment negatively about things without putting in a substantial amount of time with them — or in some cases, without even playing them at all — it’s surely fine for some nobody blogger in the wilds of the Internet (albeit one who used to be a professional games journalist) to speak positively about something he has absolutely no experience with whatsoever. So, without further ado, let’s begin.

It’s part of the Metal Gear Solid series, which people have heard of.
Hideo Kojima is a cool dude who posts pictures of Eggs Benedict on Twitter and makes jokes about them jiggling like boobs.
Konami fucked Hideo Kojima up the ass pretty royally towards the end of Metal Gear Solid V’s development, so while buying a copy and enjoying it may support Konami to a certain degree, it also shows your support for Hideo Kojima’s creation.
The graphics are quite pretty.
It’s available on Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, so unless you’re a weirdo who only has a Wii U in the house, you can almost certainly play it.
Quiet has nice tits.
Quiet is pretty badass.
Appreciating Quiet’s feminine wiles pisses off the outrage brigade.
There are guns in this game.
And dogs.
And a horse that you can command to shit whenever you want.
You can attach balloons to bears and send them flying off into the sky.
You can do the same with enemy guards.
There’s apparently some sort of story that’s pretty good.
Something interesting happens in the medical bay or something, everyone keeps yammering on about it without actually saying what it is because spoilers.
Something about cassette tapes.
METAL GEAR?!
It is, I am assured, open world without being directionless.
It does that thing I like where it presents each mission as its own self-contained “episode”, complete with intro and outro credits sequences.
Each mission is apparently pretty tightly focused rather than making use of the open world unnecessarily.
It’s not Splinter Cell.
Revolver Ocelot.
Metal Gear is a Japanese series that it’s apparently still acceptable to like without people calling you a paedophile.
There are achievements and trophies in the game.
If you’re really good at a mission, you get an S-rank and feel all happy.
You can tranquilise people.
You can kill people.
You can sneak up on people.
You can charge in the front door of an enemy base brandishing an assortment of improbable military hardware, then blow everything up with reckless disregard for the “Tactical Espionage” part of the game’s subtitle.
Something about tanks.
Anita Sarkeesian’s puppetmaster Jonathan McIntosh doesn’t like Hideo Kojima for the jokes he makes on Twitter (see #2).
Posting things about Metal Gear Solid online at the time of writing is a sure-fire means of getting those sweet-ass clicks.
There’s a Mother Base that you manage or something.
You can get soldiers and dogs and stuff for your base or something.
Some of it’s a bit like Peace Walker, which I also haven’t played but people seemed to like.
Kojima has dialled back the “I’M MAKING A MOVIE!!” chaos. A bit.
Kiefer Sutherland is like a proper famous actor, innit.
The probably-vain hope that David Hayter will show up at some point in the same, growl “SURPRISE”, snap the neck of KieferSnake, forcing you to play the rest of the game as Snake with his proper voice.
Lid from Hyperdevotion Noire was pretty fit.
You can hide in cardboard boxes.
You can play as people who aren’t Snake if you so desire.
Including women. SHOCK
But Snake has a robot arm or something, so he’s clearly the best.
If you’re playing this game, you are contractually obliged to put the word “Punished” in front of your Twitter name, because it makes you at least 20% cooler to do so.
This coolness quotient increases to 30% if you also scrawl an eyepatch on your avatar using Microsoft Paint.
Hurt me more, Snake
There’s a sweet-ass limited edition PlayStation 4 to tie in with the game’s release, because we all know Metal Gear is a series that belongs on PlayStation.
There’s some sort of online feature, I think.
You’re banned from soliciting relationships with other people through Metal Gear Solid V’s online features, which means you can protect yourself against people who are on the pull through Metal Gear Solid V’s online features.
Who does that?
I anticipate it will be less than a week before someone recreates a scene from this using nothing but Super Mario Maker.
Someone already did the microwave tunnel scene from Metal Gear Solid IV.
This game is longer than Ground Zeroes.
It is also a lot longer than previous Metal Gear games.
My friend Josh claims to have spent over a hundred hours on this game so far.
A lot of stuff is optional, so you can probably whizz through it a bit quicker if you want to.
Something about vagina bombs. (I didn’t play Ground Zeroes either.)
You like Castlevania, don’t you?
There are no navel-gazing codec conversations between Raiden and Rose.
There are, instead, navel-gazing cassette tapes, but you can listen to these while you’re attaching helium balloons to bears.
Metal Gear games usually have good villains. (I have absolutely no idea who the villains are in this.)
Ditto boss fights. (Likewise.)
The old games had good music. This one probably maybe does too.
Ditto voice acting.
You can level up Snake or something.
I think you can possibly maybe level up the other soldiers you collect too.
If Quiet’s boobylicious outfit bothers you that much, she has numerous other costumes, including being completely covered in blood and Sniper Wolf’s somewhat more conservative but still boobylicious outfit.
Apparently there’s some explanation for why Quiet dresses the way she does.
Something about photosynthesis.
Or possibly nanomachines. Son.
That big speech at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2 was kind of cool in how eerily prescient it was.
That means that in roughly ten years’ time, something in Metal Gear Solid V will probably be looked back on and numerous chins stroked thoughtfully.
This installment uses a Roman numeral V instead of the Arabic digit 5, because Roman numerals are, as everyone knows, inherently classier.
The Phantom Pain sounds kind of cool as a subtitle.
Although it’s a bit close to The Phantom Menace for my liking.
Although it looks as if Metal Gear Solid V may well be reclaiming the subtitle structure The Phantom [x] from the damage that Star Wars did to it.
George Lucas had nothing to do with this game.
This game does not feature, at any point, in Disney Infinity.
If you play this game, you can talk about it with your friends rather than just nodding and smiling and pretending to know what they’re blathering on about.
The Steam version might have trading cards or something, I don’t know because the Steam store isn’t working for me right now.
The PC port has to be better than that dogshit effort with the last Batman game.
Hey, it’s a Metal Gear Solid game that you can actually play on PC without dicking around with emulators!
You should still probably play it on PlayStation, preferably on that sweet-ass limited edition console.
If you buy one of those sweet-ass limited edition consoles from me when I’m working, do me a solid and also buy the extended warranty coverage and preorder some other stuff.
The person who hired me for my part-time seasonal retail job is a huuuuge fan of Metal Gear Solid.
I was hired for said job partly because I included the words “nanomachines, son” under the “Skills” section on my CV.
I’m running out of things to write here.
I’m honestly impressed that I’ve made it to 88 without much padding.
If you buy a physical copy of the game you can put it on your shelf alongside all the previous Metal Gear Solid games for a cool display of the series over time.
The uneven sizes of the boxes for Metal Gear Solid over the years — CD-sized PSone cases, DVD-sized PS2 cases, slightly-smaller-than-DVD-sized PS3, PS4 and Xbox One cases — makes for an attractively wibbly-wobbly effect on your shelf.
The hardback strategy guide for Metal Gear Solid V is very pretty indeed, and if you can still find a copy anywhere you often get a free poster with it.
The softback one is still pretty meaty and can probably do some damage to an assailant if you have it to hand when you come under attack.
Even if you have no intention of playing Metal Gear Solid V, tossing the disc case out in front of a passing guard will distract them long enough for you to sneak up behind them and snap their neck.
You probably shouldn’t do that.
Instead, you can indulge such fantasies in the new video game from Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
There’s some sort of kawaii idol girl posters scattered around the place in the game.
Have you considered trying Mad Max as well, which came out the same day? Polygon hated it, which is reason enough to try it.
You should probably also give Until Dawn a go if you have a PlayStation 4, because Sony idiotically released it last week and not at, I don’t know, Halloween.
You can probably edit together some entertaining and silly videos using the next-gen consoles’ video capture facilities and software such as the PS4’s ShareFactory.
If you bugger off and play Metal Gear Solid V, I don’t have to keep writing this, and I can get on with playing Super Mario Maker instead.

2055: Adventures at Seal Rock

I’ve been playing some of Final Fantasy XIV’s player vs player mode recently, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised how much fun it is.

I’ve tried PvP in various other MMOs and never really got along with it. I never got far enough through Guild Wars for the PvP to be relevant outside of the single match you’re forced to play in the introductory chapter; Star Wars: The Old Republic’s PvP was unbalanced garbage; and The Secret World’s PvP just seemed too chaotic to be manageable.

The trouble with PvP in a game with RPG mechanics is that it often becomes nothing more than a numbers game rather than a test of skill. In other words, whoever has the best gear will almost definitely win every time. This is particularly apparent in games that make seemingly no effort whatsoever to balance things out for a fair competition, the most egregious example of this I can think of being Blizzard’s Diablo II. (To be far, PvP wasn’t really the point of that game at all, but the fact it was in there at all in such a gleefully unbalanced state was just baffling.)

One of the nice things about Final Fantasy XIV’s PvP is that it puts everyone on a pretty level playing field by syncing gear levels to a relatively low standard — iLevel 80 for level 50 PvP and iLevel 150 for level 60 PvP. This means that even if you haven’t spent months farming content for the very best gear, you can still be both competitive and an asset to your team, making PvP as a whole a lot more accessible to a wider bunch of people. Which is good, because it’s pretty large-scale, with 72 participants across three teams fighting it out all together in most cases.

Seal Rock is the newest addition to Final Fantasy XIV’s PvP lineup. The previous PvP matches on the Carteneau Flats saw you either capturing and defending points from enemy assault, or simply attempting to defeat as many of the enemy teams as possible. The “Seize” mode you play on Seal Rock, meanwhile, is a slightly more involved, dynamic affair that requires coordination and teamwork, challenging your team to activate and hold Allagan Tomeliths that activate at random at various points across the battlefield, with the ultimate goal being to score 800 points before the other teams.

Points are scored by holding onto the Tomeliths; when one is in your team’s possession, your Mammets gradually download data from it until it runs dry, at which point new Tomeliths will activate after a short period, and the process continues. The twist is that not all Tomeliths are created equal; there are B-, A- and S-rank varieties, with B-rank Tomeliths being worth the least potential number of points and S-rank Tomeliths being worth the most.

It’s not as simple as just charging for the most valuable Tomelith, though. At times, it can be more advantageous to watch the other two teams scrap over an S-rank while you sneak around behind their backs and capture all the other ones for a greater total number of points than the S-rank by itself is worth. Add to that the fact that every time one of your team members is knocked out, your team loses a few points, and you have a mode where confrontation is something you want to avoid as much as you can unless you have a significant numbers advantage, at which point it’s enormously satisfying to steamroller members of the enemy team.

What I think I like most about playing PvP is how different it feels from the PvE content. PvE can often feel quite “by rote” after a while, particularly in the more scripted encounters, and while this is satisfying in its own way at times — I’ve described the more intricate boss fights as being delightfully dance-like — PvP keeps you on your toes, challenging you to respond to new and unexpected situations as they crop up, and no two matches are ever quite alike. This makes it fun and enjoyable even if you’re on the losing side, particularly as matches are wrapped up within 20 minutes at the very most, usually less.

I haven’t quite figured out what the best strategies are quite yet, but I’ve been enjoying the experience a great deal so far, and I’m looking forward to battling those scoundrels of the Maelstrom and the Adders again soon.

2038: Vacation from Eorzea

Astute long-term readers will notice that I haven’t been talking much about Final Fantasy XIV recently. And the reason for that is simple: I just haven’t been playing it that much.

It’s not that I’ve gone off the game per se — I still see myself playing it for many years to come — it’s more that I’ve got out of it what I wanted to get out of it so far. The Heavensward storyline was exciting and dramatic — and, for my money, better than A Realm Reborn’s main quest — and the Alexander raid dungeon was an enjoyable challenge, though we’re still yet to clear its Savage incarnation.

Trouble is, outside of levelling alternate classes there’s not a huge amount to do at level cap right now.

This is the exact situation A Realm Reborn (and, I imagine, most MMOs) found itself in at launch, of course; the difference here, however, is that whereas it took me a good few weeks to make it to 50 in A Realm Reborn — I reached the level cap a while after the more dedicated players in my Free Company — I got through Heavensward pretty quickly. This was deliberate, of course; I binged on the new story content because it was enjoyable and interesting, and also because I wanted to see everything that the expansion pack had to offer. I also wanted to avoid inadvertently being spoiled on the storyline, since Final Fantasy XIV is that rare example of an MMO where the story is actually worth paying attention to and even told pretty well.

Consequently, I got to the “end” a lot more quickly than I did with A Realm Reborn, and consequently I’ve found myself with a lot more “dead time” with stagnant content. Sure, I could run Alexander over and over again to try and get some more gear sets. Sure, I could level other classes — I probably will do this at some point. Sure, I could run the current two level 60 dungeons over and over to get as many Tomestones of Esoterics as possible to gear up one or more classes.

Trouble is, I simply don’t have a lot of motivation to do so right now. And that’s sort of fine by me, really; whenever I play an MMO I always find myself in a weird place where I’m really enjoying the experience of playing the game and getting good at it — I maintain that Final Fantasy XIV is one of the few games I genuinely consider myself to actually be pretty good at — but also feeling a strange sense of “guilt” that I’m not playing any of the other million and one games that have been staring at me from my shelves for the last few years. Conversely, I play a game that isn’t Final Fantasy XIV and I feel a similar sense of “guilt” that I’m not playing Final Fantasy XIV more. I can’t win. Stupid brain.

On balance, though, this “dead time” is actually proving to be rather welcome, as since I have little inclination to log in right now for anything other than my weekly raiding commitments — and the group as a whole is pretty half-hearted about the whole thing at the moment, to be honest — I am having plenty of time to delve into other experiences. I managed to get the Platinum trophy on Omega Quintet. I’m working on the Platinum trophy for Hyperdevotion Noire. I am loving the shit out of Sword Art Online on PS4. And I’m also really enjoying Splatoon, Heroes of the Storm and any number of other games right now.

The trouble with any hobby that has a lot of different elements to it — be it gaming, music, reading, movies or whatever — is finding that perfect balance where you can enjoy all those different elements at different times and not feel like you’re neglecting any of them. Right now, even though I know that I don’t have much motivation to play Final Fantasy XIV, I still feel like I’m neglecting it because I’m not logging in to talk to my friends. So perhaps I still haven’t quite found the right balance there. But eh. I’m not going to worry about it for the moment — a new content patch for the game might rekindle my interest for a while, but in the meantime I’m going to cut right back and enjoy the other experiences I have on the go right now.

1998: Fist of the Father

Final Fantasy XIV’s new raid dungeon Alexander launched earlier this week, and our regular raid group (with a few tweaks) took our first steps in there this evening.

I’d heard Alexander was significantly easier than The Binding Coil of Bahamut and was mildly concerned about this, but there are two things that set my mind at rest, having run through the first area now: 1) it’s not easy, though it’s straightforward enough once you know what to do, and 2) “Savage” mode is coming in a couple of weeks for the truly hardcore. (And it has different loot from the sound of things, too, unlike the Savage mode of Second Coil of Bahamut, which was largely a “bragging rights” sort of situation.)

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Alexander. The concept itself is pretty weird: an iron giant raises itself out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, but stops moving just as its hand grasps the bank. Through a convoluted series of interactions with the local goblins, you manage to find a way through the portal that is in its hand, and start working your way through in an attempt to find and destroy the core; the giant, it seems, is a Primal, and while it’s active, even if it’s not moving, it threatens to suck the very life out of the land.

Once inside you’re in a cool, mechanical and metal environment. It’s a big contrast from the previous raid dungeon, which made heavy use of the neon-glowing Allagan aesthetic, but since Heavensward as a whole has a lot of neon-glowing Allagan stuff just in its normal content, it seems the devs made the wise decision to not continue down this road with the new raid. Fine by me.

The bosses so far are appropriately steampunky in nature, and unlike Coil, which tends to be a short run to a single boss, the first level of Alexander features two bosses. The first is pretty much a pushover, but it’s fun that it’s more than just a single thing to fight. The main boss of the level, meanwhile, is a fairly involved fight that demands everyone knows what to do and performs their role appropriately. It’s a little more forgiving than Coil was — mistakes are less likely to immediately wipe the whole group, though they will put you all at a disadvantage — but still challenging. We managed to clear it within a couple of hours, though, and even went back in to go get some more loot for those who lost the rolls after we’d finished.

We’re hopefully going to jump in and see some more of it over in the weekend; I’m curious to see what mechanical mysteries the later levels have in store, and excited to be running with my regular group again.

1988: The End of Ascalon

Finished the Heavensward main story quest today. WOW.

Spoilers ahead!

I was pleased that the team went all-out and gave us a full-on Final Fantasy finale. The final dungeon, the Aetherochemical Research Facility, gradually gets weirder and weirder as you progress through it, until you eventually reach what is clearly The Final Boss Room, in which you’re set upon by not one but two Ascians, the dark-robed ne’er-do-wells whose evil machinations have been behind most of the Bad Things happening in Eorzea throughout the Final Fantasy XIV narrative.

Delightfully, this battle against the Ascians even does the typical Final Fantasy thing of unfolding across multiple forms, with the “merged” form of the two Ascians creating “Ascian Prime” and battering you with some of the most spectacular attacks in the entire game. Lest you thought that Final Fantasy XIV would lose some of the series’ trademark spectacle owing to the fact that its multiplayer nature makes cinematic camera angles and lengthy spell sequences impractical, this confrontation very much dispels that notion.

That’s not the end, though. The battle against Ascian Prime — the conclusion of which finally sees recurring villain Lahabrea apparently dealt with once and for all — is followed up by an eight-player Trial in the research facility’s Singularity Reactor, in which you face off against Ishgard’s Archibishop, Heavensward’s main villain.

This being Final Fantasy, however, you don’t just fight a doddering old man with an obscene amount of hit points. No; shortly before your battle with him, he draws upon the power of the Eyes of Nidhogg to channel the spirit of Ishgard’s legendary king Thorden — he who, with his knights twelve, originally laid Nidhogg low and took the great wyrm’s eyes — and become a Primal incarnation of the ancient king. Naturally, this involves him growing to approximately ten storeys in height in the process, and his bodyguards, the twelve knights of the Heaven’s Ward (do you see what they did there) undergo similar transformations prior to your final battle against the whole sorry lot of them.

The actual battle against Thorden and the knights is amazing. Final Fantasy veterans will doubtless recognise this setup as an excuse to bring in the notorious summon “Knights of the Round”, and indeed the final boss battle is effectively you fighting Knights of the Round, complete with ridiculously overblown attack animations — including, at one point, the reactor in which you’re fighting seemingly floating up into space, then your entire screen shattering to bring you back to reality. (This animation is pretty much a direct reference to Knights of the Round’s appearance in Final Fantasy VII, whose attack animation “Ultimate End” was the most powerful ability you could equip your characters with in the whole game.)

It’s a fitting end for Heavensward’s story, which has overall been a great addition to the ranks of Final Fantasy narratives throughout history. And it leaves some nice open teaser threads at the end ready for future content patches and the continuation of the story — most notably the character Estinien’s possession by the spirit of Nidhogg, the latter of whom is understandably pissed off at the world for numerous reasons, not least of which being the fact that he had his eyes scooped out, and some thousand years later, was killed by some young upstart claiming to represent the spirit of the planet itself.

Anyway. It was good stuff, and sets the scene nicely for the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, which must be due pretty soon now. (Indeed, the ending cutscene shows Alexander rising out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, though it is as yet impossible to enter the great iron giant.)

I’m glad I beat the story (and the two “post-ending” dungeons Neverreap and The Fractal Continuum, both of which are a lot of fun — and pleasingly challenging) and am looking forward to seeing what’s next. In the meantime, I have an official full-on review of the expansion to write for Gamespot, so watch out for that soon.

1987: At the Gates of Heaven

Back to “reality” for Andie and I now, and we’re both closing in on the finale of the main story quest in Heavensward. It’s been a pretty spectacular journey up until this point, which I shall endeavour not to spoil to a significant degree in this post, largely because I don’t yet know how it all ends.

Heavensward has achieved that which I wasn’t sure it would be able to do: it’s surpassed A Realm Reborn in almost every possible way, but particularly when it comes to the main story. While A Realm Reborn had a solid narrative that chronicled your character’s humble beginnings up to their awakening as the Warrior of Light and beyond, taking in their victories over the fierce Primals of Eorzea and the Empire’s ultimate weapon in the process, I found the Final Fantasy XII-style political manoeuvring that made up a significant part of the plot to be less interesting than something a bit more, for want of a better word, “JRPG”.

Heavensward, meanwhile, feels more like a “Final Fantasy“. This isn’t to say that A Realm Reborn didn’t feel like Final Fantasy at all — I described it as one of the best new Final Fantasies in recent years back when I reviewed it for USgamer, after all — but Heavensward feels more like a traditional Final Fantasy.

It achieves this in a number of different ways. For one, it tones down the political machinations that gradually built up over the course of A Realm Reborn, and which came to a rather shocking climax at the end of patch 2.55, Before the Fall, which acted as a prelude to Heavensward. These narrative threads are picked up and explored further — though some look as if they’re going to remain unresolved until a later content patch — but for the most part Heavensward is an all-original story.

For another, the narrative feels more like an epic journey. In A Realm Reborn, you spent a lot of your time going back and forth between the three main areas, and, aside from the initial quest where you leave your starting city to go and visit the other two, it didn’t really feel like the typical JRPG journey of gradually getting further and further away from your starting point, with more and more outlandish things happening as you go. Heavensward, meanwhile, does adopt this style of journey, beginning in the familiar snowy wastes of Coerthas, some of which we had the opportunity to explore in A Realm Reborn, but before long giving way to the lush forests and rocky mountains of the Dravanian Forelands, the otherworldly floating islands of the Churning Mists and the Sea of Clouds, the mysterious abandoned city of the Dravanian Hinterlands — an important location to Final Fantasy XIV lore as a whole, as it turns out — and, ultimately, a final region which doesn’t feel at all like a typical MMO field, instead very much feeling like an authentic JRPG The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

The journey you undertake throughout the narrative is emphasised by some lovely narration from David Warner upon your first entry to each area. A Realm Reborn had plenty of florid prose, but Heavensward refines this with some almost poetic writing that gives the game a very distinctive voice and tone throughout. It feels strange to compliment the writing in an MMO, a type of game not particularly known for stellar storytelling (Hi, World of Warcraft!) but Heavensward really doesn’t skimp on this front, and it’s all the stronger for it.

I’m really looking forward to seeing how the story ends — and, of course, getting involved with what comes after that. It can’t be long now until the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, and I’m very intrigued to see how all that fits in with the overall lore. Previous raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut turned out to be extremely relevant to the original game’s lore — and even more relevant to Heavensward, as it happens — so I’m looking forward to experiencing Alexander’s encounters and story to see what happens.

For now, though, I’m still flagging a bit after all the excitement of the weekend, so I think it’s time to get some sleep.