FF14 first impression/initial experience as a GW2 veteran.

[DaniTheHero]

This isn't supposed to be an actual rant, nor am i intending to offend anyone who plays either game.
I felt like i should share my experience as a new player in this now increasingly popular MMORPG.


Note this is going to be VERY long.



First i'll tell about why i chose to be playing GW2 up until now to reflect on my latest experience with FF14.
I am not trying to sell the game to you, nor to "take away players" from here, as i barely play GW2 myself now.

I have been playing GW2 for a very long time, and although i have been taking breaks from time to time (as GW2 is known to having content droughts between Living world/Expansion periods) i always come back to it eventually.

GW2 has many things going for it.:

It has a completely free Base game with no time limit, so you can get any friend to try it out and not be restricted to pretty much any content from the Original/Vanilla game pre expansions other than some Spam avoidance and trading/mail system restrictions to avoid botting.

If you decide to pay, you get the entire game, including previous expansions at the price of one, with no monthly subscription, i repeat no monthly subbing.
You pay once, and hop on whenever you want, FOREVER.
No need to cancel every time you take a break and pay again when you return and if you play long term, no large stacked up sum. Just play when you want.

GW2 has no gear chase/treadmill. From the release of the game, the highest tier of gear has been something called "Ascended" and it always remains relevant as the best Tier of gear even a decade later. Meaning even if you take long breaks, you don't need to chase a new ceiling just to enjoy new content properly, and you can hop rightinto it as the same End game character you were before.
The only time that you'll need to get new gear, is if you want a different sort of build for your character, so you'll need a different set of ascended gear for those stats (This can be negated by Legendary armor, that has the same stats as ascended but you can change it's stats whenever you want. This however requires a huge grind to get).

The game has no Mana/Stamina system, nor do you use potions to even heal yourself.
Your attacking is only depended on your cooldown managements and your healing depends on your global class heal (That is by default your 6 key) that varies between classes. No annoying potion usage and purchase management. There is food, but it's used for self buffing.
This system complimented the game well, as the game, at least initially didn't have the concept of holy Trinity. Everyone mostly did everything, or more specifically, everyone was DPS who was capable, and accepted to heal themselves.
Later on as end game raids were introduced more properly, some sub-classes have emerged to sort of fill that old gap, Druid being an old school healer sort, and Chronomancer being a more traditional tank among others, but the mentality of everyone technically being DPS still exists. Some just serve side roles, such as DPS's that can also do useful Squad/party buffs.

The game has a dodge/roll system sort of like in Dark souls, that is limited by a cooldown. This makes the gameplay more mobile and dynamic, and instead of just standing still most of the combat,you dodge and rotate a lot to avoid damage that isn't just enemy AOE.

The combat is very fluid and action-y. Fast. You are constantly on the move, and at times even 'Spamming' moves as cooldowns are short and most classes don't really have more than 5ish damage dealing attacks, unless you weapon swap mid fight. There isn't really a time when you aren't attacking.

Mounts are fairly a new concept in GW2, but instead of having many of them, there's only one of each "type" of mount that serves a purpose(One for dashing, one for jumping, one for flying and so on), and you can change it's appearance with paid skins if you wish to do so.

Questing, although sort of only existing in the base game, is managed through heart areas, meaning you reach an area where the certain quest exists, and you are meant to to tasks around this same area to complete it. There's no fetch quests, no backtracking, no unneeded walls of text just for killing 3 rats.

in GW2 there is no "EXP" grind from killing mobs. You level up near exclusively from doing world events, quests on the map and map exploration. As you you reach the level cap in the base game, the EXP you gain in the expansion zones is used for gaining different sort of mini abilities, passive buffs or unlocking sort of mechanics or merchants that exist in these new zones. No boring hours of fighting the same batch of mobs to level, at ANY point of the game.

Structured PVP works well in theory, the action combat, the fairly decent balancing and the fact that most classes can technically do anything works well. SPVP is also separate from the "main"/PVE game. You can hop into SPVP from level 2, and inside there, gear doesn't matter, you are max level and all your abilities are unlocked. The only thing that counts is your skill as a player, your teammates performance and of course what you pick for your SPVP 'build' (The builds are instantly changable in SPVP). Sadly SPVP and WvW(World vs World) is mostly abandoned by the devs for quite a long time, so you won't really be experiencing anything new there after a while.

Voice acting. Almost everything is voiced. Story missions, the NPC talking around you, world events and so on.

Most of the content encourages, almost demands cooperative play. Soloing is almost never recommended, sometimes may not even be possible. For people that play MMORPGs, for the actual MMO aspect rather than playing it as a singleplayer RPG that sometimes have real people walking around you, this is very nice.

Of course i can go on praising the game for a long time, but the elephant in the room is:

The biggest issue with the game is that due to lack of funding from NCSoft, and generally the huge loss of capital for being one of the only MMORPGs without monthly subbing, content gets added less often. And periods of content droughts are common. if you are a veteran player that plays a lot you run out things to do, unless you grind for fashion or Legendary equipment.
However as a new player, you still have A LOT of content to go through for months or even years before you reach that drought yourself.

A lot of the content, or pretty much all of it that isn't Raids or fractals(End game dungeons), can be summed up to "zerging". A huge amount of players stacking together spamming something until it dies. Can be fun when it's new content, but gets old REAL quick if repeated. Raids and Fractals do require a more old school approach though.




Now let's actually dive into my FF14 experience.


I've obviously known about this game for a long time, as FF14 pretty much is ( or was?) a direct competitor to GW2, but i never researched or bothered with it as i was content with GW2 and the idea of paying sub didn't appeal to me.
However after many many years in GW2, the recent Exodus of WoW players to FF14 and me dying inside from the anticipation for Ashes of creation, i have decided to finally try FF14.
The game stated to give a 30 day trial that is mostly not limited, which didn't sound bad at all.
I haven't done much research still, and decided to just sign up, install and hop on.

I was first greeted by a.. confusing server selection. As i'm European, Light or Chaos seemed to be the relevant options and Light, was highlighted for some reason, so i assumed it meant i'd have better ping there so i chose it. Inside the server i also needed to pick a World and most were already full apparently. I picked one of the open ones, Lich.

I was then greeted by a fairly robust character creator which was nice, however apparently most of the choices do have some sort of influence on different ingame stats, though upon googling the differences, they are pretty much negligible (I wonder if some people pick things they don't like, but have favorable stats for the job they want in order to minmax here. A bit of a shame if this is a thing).

I was then presented with 8 classes that seemed fairly traditional in nature.
I usually play Strong DPS melee dudes, but i wasn't exactly sure what each job does from the ingame descriptions so I have decided to research a tiny bit and learned that 2 of the melee ones are more focused on tanking, the other two are more DPS oriented.
I have decided to go for the Lancer, as not having an actual weapon and using my fists didn't appeal to me.
Upon further research i have learned there are a lot of more classes to unlock in the game, either by "upgrading" the current classes, or complete new ones you can switch into at around level 50.

The opening of the game was a terrible slog. A lot of conversations and wall of texts of things i don't care about (yet?), no voice acting, seemingly outdated animations and no combat involved.
You're then treated to a lot and i mean A LOT of text walls, dull fetch quests, backtracking, and once again none not even the main quest ones are voiced.

The game, also assumes you have never played an MMORPG, or any video game before.
I appreciate the effort to make this accessible for pretty much everyone, but as someone who isn't playing a video game for literally the first time, this was excruciating.

I was itching for some combat to actually experience the gameplay, and i assume that at some point i could have ignored most of these and go outside to fight, but i didn't want to miss vital information that i may need by not doing these starter quests.

Eventually i was finally sent out to kill some mobs ( Kill some squirls! yey ! ).
And the moment i hit my first enemy, it struck me.
GCD 2.5sec. The combat is very, very very slow.
Even with more moves unlocked later on, every move you make, gives you a near 3 second delay before you can do another move. This was devastating. I could feel literally my brain counting down the miliseconds of the delay between me chaining even something as basic as ability 1 and ability 2.
There's also no real way to avoid damage, enemies completely lock on you so unless you are ranged, you might as well seem to be standing still.
I assume later in the game, enemies will have AOE's that you will need to move away from, but still, this seems awfully static.

It seems that a lot of aspects of the game are slow upon further research. Traveling, moving around the map and although they are mounts, they seem to be restricted in a lot of ways.

I also have learned that as a free player, i can't even party anyone ( unless a paid player invites me himself) or add anyone to my friendlist. Why? What if i wanted to team up with other free players that are trying the game with me?

I continued trying to grind ( As this seems to be the most efficient way to gain exp, and because i was tired of meaningless tasks and endless text from the side quests) to see if something speeds up, but no.
Upon even further research, late in the game there are some abilities that aren't restricted by the GCD that you can weave in, but the combat itself doesn't REALLY speed up.

I also noticed, although the character models, when zoomed looked quite nice and rather fan service-y. The graphics and the engine itself seemed awfully outdated.
Sure GW2 isn't the biggest looker anymore, and the engine is quite dated as well as the game IS from 2012, but FF14 being a newer game, a bigger IP in general, and having far more income brought in and funding put into the game, it's a bit disheartining that the game.. doesn't look good.

At this point i've done further research. How late game works, how gear works, how many things that MMO's do, work here. and the more i read, the more disappointed i started feeling.

Now after having all these first impression thoughts and after learning a bit about the future, i had one final thought lingering on my mind.
Even if this DOES get better later on, do i really want to be buying the game all it's expansions AND be paying 13$ a month for this?


When this realization caught on to me, i swiftly exited, uninstalled and after some thought, came here for this post.

[Jeeralt of Tilberia]

引用自 Tombstone：

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

join novice network, most people talk in /say, which you have to be close to them to see, adds a sense of community instead of the same 20 spastics shouting the same stuff in trade or general chat over and over again, people stop to smell the roses and interact with people close to them in populated areas

Ahh so /say is only short range? Is there a zone wide channel? Like a normal General Chat ?

novice network, full of fresh players and mentors, ask for an invite in any city

[Tombstone]

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

引用自 Tombstone：

Ahh so /say is only short range? Is there a zone wide channel? Like a normal General Chat ?

novice network, full of fresh players and mentors, ask for an invite in any city

I'll give that a try, couple of questions, does being in that channel stick or do I need to be reinvited each time I log in and also, is that account wide or do I need to be added on each character?

[Jeeralt of Tilberia]

引用自 Tombstone：

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

novice network, full of fresh players and mentors, ask for an invite in any city

I'll give that a try, couple of questions, does being in that channel stick or do I need to be reinvited each time I log in and also, is that account wide or do I need to be added on each character?

if theres room when you get in you will be placed in to it, if not you need an invite again, but shouldnt be an issue, also only play one character, one character makes the game cheaper to sub if you ever decide to, and can learn every job and profession, no need for alts

[Tombstone]

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

引用自 Tombstone：

I'll give that a try, couple of questions, does being in that channel stick or do I need to be reinvited each time I log in and also, is that account wide or do I need to be added on each character?

if theres room when you get in you will be placed in to it, if not you need an invite again, but shouldnt be an issue, also only play one character, one character makes the game cheaper to sub if you ever decide to, and can learn every job and profession, no need for alts

Thing is, I want my healer as a lalafell and my tank as a different race, for RP reasons, so I have two characters at the moment, unless theres a way to change race at will

[Jeeralt of Tilberia]

引用自 Tombstone：

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

if theres room when you get in you will be placed in to it, if not you need an invite again, but shouldnt be an issue, also only play one character, one character makes the game cheaper to sub if you ever decide to, and can learn every job and profession, no need for alts

Thing is, I want my healer as a lalafell and my tank as a different race, for RP reasons, so I have two characters at the moment, unless theres a way to change race at will

costs dosh, you do get the potion at lvl 50 though but its your only one, and only works once, honestly the main story can get a little dull, especially pre 50, doing it twice is something I wouldnt wish on my worst enemy, but if its your thing go for it, one of the main draws of the game though is that one character can do anything, everything you get or unlock can be used by one character if you level the job for it

[Tombstone]

Ok, got joined to the novice network, hopefully that will be a bit more communal. I appreciate the pointers. Seems like we sussed out why I was finding no chat, so hopefully thats convinced you I wasnt lying and it was more about lack of knowledge of the novice network. Would certainly save me having to upload this hour long video when its finished.

[Tombstone]

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

引用自 Tombstone：

Thing is, I want my healer as a lalafell and my tank as a different race, for RP reasons, so I have two characters at the moment, unless theres a way to change race at will

costs dosh, you do get the potion at lvl 50 though but its your only one, and only works once, honestly the main story can get a little dull, especially pre 50, doing it twice is something I wouldnt wish on my worst enemy, but if its your thing go for it, one of the main draws of the game though is that one character can do anything, everything you get or unlock can be used by one character if you level the job for it

No worries, after 24 years , 100s of characters and 10s of 1000s of hours in MMOs, I'm used to running through things multiple times :)

[Jeeralt of Tilberia]

引用自 Tombstone：

Ok, got joined to the novice network, hopefully that will be a bit more communal. I appreciate the pointers. Seems like we sussed out why I was finding no chat, so hopefully thats convinced you I wasnt lying and it was more about lack of knowledge of the novice network. Would certainly save me having to upload this hour long video when its finished.

just thought you were bashing the game for no reason lel, not sure if you can join fc's (guilds) on a trial, but its worth it, eventually you have to leave novice network but thats at like at least lvl 60

[Jeeralt of Tilberia]

引用自 Tombstone：

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

costs dosh, you do get the potion at lvl 50 though but its your only one, and only works once, honestly the main story can get a little dull, especially pre 50, doing it twice is something I wouldnt wish on my worst enemy, but if its your thing go for it, one of the main draws of the game though is that one character can do anything, everything you get or unlock can be used by one character if you level the job for it

No worries, after 24 years , 100s of characters and 10s of 1000s of hours in MMOs, I'm used to running through things multiple times :)

game does pick up a lot by the way, Ive also played a ton of mmo's and the start of this is possibly the most boring, im mid 50s and its already my favorite mmo, it beats peak wow

[Tombstone]

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

引用自 Tombstone：

Ok, got joined to the novice network, hopefully that will be a bit more communal. I appreciate the pointers. Seems like we sussed out why I was finding no chat, so hopefully thats convinced you I wasnt lying and it was more about lack of knowledge of the novice network. Would certainly save me having to upload this hour long video when its finished.

just thought you were bashing the game for no reason lel, not sure if you can join fc's (guilds) on a trial, but its worth it, eventually you have to leave novice network but thats at like at least lvl 60

I never bash a game for no reason. No worries, I'm not on a trial, I bought the game a long while ago and just never got round to playing it.

[Jeeralt of Tilberia]

引用自 Tombstone：

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

just thought you were bashing the game for no reason lel, not sure if you can join fc's (guilds) on a trial, but its worth it, eventually you have to leave novice network but thats at like at least lvl 60

I never bash a game for no reason. No worries, I'm not on a trial, I bought the game a long while ago and just never got round to playing it.

I gots a helpful fc if you want to join, or I could show you some of the more popular areas

[tracksone]

I quit playing GW due to the lack of any kind of progression. You can play for 6 months and feel like you got nothing except some currency to trade in for a different currency... i also have the living world chapters, just release content normally

[Tombstone]

引用自 Jeeralt of Tilberia：

引用自 Tombstone：

I never bash a game for no reason. No worries, I'm not on a trial, I bought the game a long while ago and just never got round to playing it.

I gots a helpful fc if you want to join, or I could show you some of the more popular areas

I may take you up on that, first though I need to play more and see if its something I will stick with, I dont think its fair on guilds when people join and then leave the game 2 weeks later, so I like to be sure before planting down my roots :)

[weiss]

i still say, best part on FF14 is that you only need one character. thats it. after that can you do basicly EVERYTHING with that character.

[DaniTheHero]

引用自 Chiro：

i still say, best part on FF14 is that you only need one character. thats it. after that can you do basicly EVERYTHING with that character.

That is a huge plus quite honestly.
I heard ESO does that too, i think.

Sadly in terms of FF14 having one char have all jobs doesn’t mean much if you are bored of the combat in general.