Final Fantasy XIV – Beta Opinions

So today brought me some real good news with an email from Square Enix welcoming me to the PS3 Beta test, of course my PS3 was on and loading up quicker than you can say Hell Yea Baby, sadly it took almost 3 hours to download and set up, but that’s cool I don’t mind waiting for some things, seeing how I harp on about never paying to play a game I enjoy, so it’s quite unlikely that I’ll buy the game itself.

But that was before I began playing first thing I noticed is as always Squares affinity for breath-taking FMV sequences and the intro to A Realm Reborn is NO exception to that very rule. As the game kicks in your given the chance to craft your hero or heroine should you so choose. I always opt for the latter as female characters seem to have a better balance overall than clumsy male types.

Meet Ariel Azure a healer with an attitude, the game is much more structured like a traditional RPG so no more jumping vocations and equipping whatever weapons one so pleases, which kind of bites as I prefer my characters to have swords and cast magic than not.

You of course have race, class and deity, leading to slightly different attributes, the sound track is good to hear some old FF favourites returning like the Final Fantasy VII theme and the all amazing Victory theme on level up. It also seems to tap some of previous final fantasy titles lore.

Still something I’ll cope with, unfortunately the graphics are not so close to Final Fantasy XIV on the PC but that’s to be expected with the PS3’s severely limited memory capacity but that’s fine it still looks as good as Final Fantasy 12, with a little more class. But the game plays beautifully, it’s fun from the onset and you soon get quickly sucked in, I hadn’t even noticed I’d been playing for almost 2 hours before I realised it was almost time to go collect my daughter.

What I did quickly noticed is that it still suffers from one thing that drives me nuts and that’s bad collision models between hair and object on a characters back which end up with the hair bleeding through the object, it looks annoying and has plagued game engines since the PS1. But there is much to do plenty to chase and of course there’s a story to discover?

I wont share too much one for fear of getting into trouble with Square [Under the FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Beta Test Agreement, we asked you to keep confidential the features, information, and bugs related to the Beta Test as well as information shared on the Beta Tester Forum. As of June 13, 2013, we grant you permission to disclose information regarding the Beta Test.] and two for fear of spoiling it for you guys. I know I may be allowed to disclose some but I’d simply rather not, I will tell you of my personal experience with the game much as I did with Skyrim and Dark Souls, that is after all what this blog is for.

I will provide the odd screen shot but nothing too much more than that, keep checking back if you want to hear more or are just curious as to an honest opinion of the game. The only gripes I have thus far are it took FAR too long to install, the launcher seems buggy and took ages to initialize, the download is over 4Gb and is said to expand. [Mind the PC install is stated at a minimum of 20GB!] But for the moment that’s all I have so check the rest of the blog for more gaming insight.