Character Creator Benchmark: Otherwise known as "The only methadone tablet you're gonna get for now until Phase 4."

The benchmark came out on the first.


Every time I think I go on there and I have to keep tweaking and messing around with Oriza's live look until I know I'm happy, but end up reverting back to the same settings as before. I think I should just be happy with how she looks because I think she's just lovely personally...

eeeeee so cuuuuuute

So as I had mentioned, Faiyt had also tinkered around with their live character and I decided to feature Faiyt in all her Paladiny Artifacty glory:

she'll kick ur butt, tenderly

Plus I wanna include this shot which I think is the tits:

faiyt ready to tackle some tentacles tbh

Speaking of tits, I also heard of people already breaking the CC and making giant tittayed characters. I wish I had screens of this on hand, but I assure you, they are as hilarious as they are soft and cushy looking.

I also messed around and made some other characters with the character creator simply because damnit, it's something, SOMETHING, til phase 4:

she kinda looks like sandra bullock a bit to me. also, wtb butt slider. admit it, you want it too.

sigh. if you only lived to see this.

yes i made a femroe too. I THINK SHE'S PRETTY.

Personally I love how everyone's been making everything. My friends are on the same boat as I am, still tweaking (still twerkin'), making final, final, final, decisions, then going back and making more final choices. 

We'll have to lock it in soon though.

It's Enough to Make You Want to Rock Yourself Sitting on The Floor, Smacking Your Arm

when is release again?

It's time to play the waiting game. Tick tock, tick tock.

So apparently there's been a huge content leak. LET'S GAB ABOUT THAT IN A BIT. First off an explanation on an update delay:

Comic Con 2013:

Faiyt and I went to Comic Con this year. Anyone who knows me in my personal life know that I used to attend this schindig every year up until about a few years ago when it was Twilight-Con (why anyone is a fan of that series is beyond me) for a while. What a hot mess.

In any case we made a visit to Square Enix's booth and tried out the new Lightning game. It certainly looks cool, and the battle system is similar(ish) to that of FFXI-2's. But that's neither here nor there. I was hoping to glean some new information of FFXIV: ARR by the team that happened to man the booths at Square Enix, but honestly it seemed like their team consisted of slighly cringeworthy fanbois gone intern from the SE offices. Awkward didn't even begin to cover Team Squeenix Redshirt Brigade. It seemed doubtful they knew much if at all. The most I could really hope to get is information I hadn't heard already. But... there was a nice printed banner? And a rather large campaign to sign up for the last phase of beta? Yay.

Grab Yourself Some Depends or Taco Sauce:

either way you're gonna need a box o' these.

Yes. Tons of content was datamined and leaked. Though I haven't gauged the response from the development team, I would not be surprised if internally they are acting super shocked that this would happen. I would HOPE THEY ARE NOT though (it seems like no maybe, especially after reading a certain quip in this most recent iteration of LftP). Usually you could roll with leaks one of two routes, by either going nuclear or just letting it go and continuing. Secrecy is hard to maintain nowadays, especially with a smarter, older MMO crowd so I'd hope that some of them realized it would only be a matter of time and wear the shock better. I like to think that while they're upset they can't reveal it like how they wanted to, it just makes some of our FFXIV-starved audience hungry for more at this point really. 

PHAZU NO JUTSU:

Everyone is looking forward to learning exactly when Phase 4 will begin. There's been lots of speculation as to the exact date, and apparently it was enough for the JP development team to sort of respond by musing and chuckling about themselves about how we Americans are just so silly, taking words that they throw out there and somehow come up with a date and time of the actual start of P4. While I think it's ok to speculate, the response from the dev team over this imo wafted traces of dismissive amusement reminiscent of when I was back in the audience during the "QnA" (moar like Q n' gay amirite?) session of the FFXI Fan Fest. Maybe it's a Japanese thing and we just don't understand, but it's 2013, not 2003, and this kind of "Maybe if you believe in the heart of the cards it's true!" bullshit won't fly anymore. I'm hoping that the development team is in a position to ditch that mindset quickly if remnants of that attitude remain and keep an open transparent humbleness if they want to make FFXIV a successful MMO not just in Asia. Just super saiyan.

lemme work mah mighty prowers, plaes peoples, plaes

I foresee problems in the future with that attitude of the dev team knowing what's better, and in the end they just might be right. Only time can tell really at this point, but I'm just not convinced that this slow unearthing of reasoning really is the right answer at this point. Ultimately the MMO audience of 2003 doesn't exist anymore. I do believe FFXI only got as far as it did because as I had mentioned in a previous post, it was a lot of people's first times with lots of MMO's. Even the game itself was one of the first really populated MMO's out there, pre-dating World of Warcraft and like myself, only stuck around because we just didn't know any better. Today's audience is smarter, older, jaded, bitter, and most likely won't suffer "g'hohoho well aren't you amusing" giggle fests. Which brings me to another topic...

Bubble-Boy Vets versus Jaded Asshat Vets:

This to me has always been an interesting topic, especially regarding the players of FFXIV on a purely social level. Personally I could clearly tell some player types apart just by attitude who had stuck around 1.0 and/or FFXI, and those who ventured onward into other games, especially WoW.

this particular lalafel has managed the dismissive sneer to a precise science of fluid motion.

Because the FF MMO's heavily relied on community to get anything done in this game, it was imperative to retain a certain reputation within your server. This was exceptionally true of FFXI, at least from what I could remember, and it had always been that way since I played up until I quit in '06. If you were a complete peehole, you could expect to become an outcast of your server or forced to join other peeholes in their Peehole Linkshell until it imploded and re-collect into another Peehole Linkshell until that would eventually self destruct later or shuffle on despite their collective peeholeness (I am liking this word too much right now). Some of these Linkshells ran on their collective being hated on, working out simply just to spite their haters. It was a sad state of affairs when it didn't work out for the most part, but it strengthened the amount of reputation maintenance every player felt obligated to maintain if they had hoped to attempt greater milestones within their FFXI careers.

It made those who made the move to WoW from FFXI a bit of a jarring experience because as one would expect, "they all" were peeholes. While in the past the community may have existed more or less in WoW back then, it most certainly became a non issue when LFR/D went live, thus seemingly aggrivating the problem. Players from FFXI realized very early on that their ignore list would fill up rather fast, and when that option ran out, either stuck it out earning their thick skin, or peacing out. Sticking it out would change some though, I know I've seen it happen to myself and other friends who made the jump to Warcraft. It becomes that much more apparent when you're put back in an MMO where these FF only MMO players seem on a hairtrigger snootfest when/if you do something by mistake or don't act polite enough... I've seen it during the beta a lot. Like, what? It's easy to want to be as dismissive as they percieve to be, but of course one will always think they are more right than the other. You get boogers, and YOU get boogers, and YOU get boogers! 

Honestly though it's probably going to be a good idea to just accept the fact that there will Always be Peeholes. Anywhere. Here's some pics!

Faiyt and I decided to go through the character creator one last couple of times. Inebriating substances (not really?) may or may not have been involved in choices and reasoning behind why we chose the things we did. Pervy cat girls gotta keep pervyin'. Ain't even mayad.

Edit: Eugh, Blogger's photo uploading service is being a dink right now, I'll put up more screenshots later on tonight. Mayhaps a drawing too!

Test Your Might - BETA WOMBAAAAAATS!

Howdy again folks. Introducting Faiyt:

So while we are on the topic of the remade Final Fantasy XIV, I figured I should write something, because I have many feelings, and that’s apparently what people do when they have feels.  For all intents and purposes, you can refer to me as Faiyt, because I’m a real creative guy and make the best handle names.  I’ve been a pretty avid MMO player for the past decade, but as with any personal exposition, there’s going to be some pretty heavily opinionated views, so feel free to disagree with my own experiences.  So sit a while and listen, and let’s explore this interesting remix of a game together.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane and figure out how we got here in the first place.  When I was just a young lad, I was a huge JRPG fan.  A bit late to Sony party, who was undoubtedly the console RPG king, I picked up a PS2 a while after its release and immediately began working on expanding my RPG collection.  I started with the basics: anything Squaresoft was a must have.  And thus began my connection to the Final Fantasy series. 

I don’t remember what exactly initially drew me to into purchasing FFXI, I just remember seeing it at my local game store and thinking it would be another FF to conquest.    Looking back at it, I’m glad I decided to buy the game for PC instead of shelling out the additional $100 or whatever it cost to install the game on PS2, because I’ve grown into such an endearing and refined upper class PC gamer. *adjusts monocle*

Having never been a PC gamer aside from the occasional Starcraft of Warcraft III match, I skipped over the Everquest fad years prior.  This meant that my young mind barely had the notion of what an MMO was, which, in hindsight, is probably the only reason I stuck with XI for two or so years.  I’ll lay this out first and foremost: I was a terrible XI player.  Part of this had to do with the fact I was still using my mother’s tiny Dell desktop that I was forced to boot the game through a German hardware emulation program to force load texture and lighting settings, but hey, the game ran, even if it was sub 5 fps at all times.  The other part was just environmental factors on my part.  I was young and certainly more socially active than I have been in recent years.  I’d quit for months at a time, come back and level a new job, and repeat.  In fact, I never actually level capped a single job, so I wouldn’t be able to give you a legitimate opinion of anything end game.  I did however, still put plenty of man hours into the game, so if I can say anything about it now with all the years of experience in other departments under my belt, it would be this: that game really sucked.  Controls were awful on the PC, you needed to hook up a ps2 controller via USB port to even play properly.  There were no action bars like traditional MMOs, everything was handled through macros.  Almost all loot leveling up was not bound so the only way to get gear was to just use the auction house as people resold their old crap.  Quests were random and there was no real (good) tracker, you just kind of had to know where you were going beforehand.  And don’t get me started on leveling.  Being unable to kill a dune bunny at level 12 without a full 5 man group was just painful and slow.  I could go on and on about the technical and design flaws that made the game not nearly as enjoyable as it could have been, but we might need a whole dedicated blog entry for that.  (For what it’s worth, I’ve heard the game has undergone dramatic changes since I stopped in 2005.)

So why did I play a game for so long that I said was terrible?  Well, the easiest explanation I have for this is simply that I didn’t know any better.  The game came out almost 10 years ago, I took a lot more for granted in games back then because games were made with a lot tighter restrictions on what could be done.  I also had no idea on how an MMO should play.  So I blindly logged on every day, made an effort to level up and to keep going forward, pushing out to the next grinding area or new zone.  The time investment didn’t bother me.  I traditionally enjoyed RPGs that gave me 60+ hours so having a lot of gameplay was something I enjoyed.  After another one of my longer breaks from the game, I finally scrounged together enough cash as a poor high school student to build my own first gaming computer.  This is what led to either the best or worst decision I’ve ever made in my life: buying World of Warcraft.

I don’t want to say too much about WoW.  Only that I raided HEAVILY from Vanilla until the end of Cataclysm.  Over my years, I was the GM and raid leader of multiple top US guilds.  There was a time when you could probably only find a few dozen other people who were as dedicated to the game as I was.  I went hard.

I actually still play WoW, although not on nearly such grand scale, having “graduated” into the real world, my priorities and desires with WoW have shifted.  I currently raid with the original Elitist Jerks on Mal’ganis, which allows me to still experience the endgame, which is what arguably sets WoW apart from all other MMOs, on my own schedule. –end guild plug-

her eyes are closed because the green is so terrible

So what about the game that this blog is actually about?  Is this not why you are here?  Well, in the effort not making the first post some ridiculous standard to always live up to, I’ll just leave it with my precursor story.  Guess you’ll just have to wait until next time to find out about the game.

 (Spoilers: it will be worth it)

All that trip and for what?

I'll admit I am a person who admires and appreciates the quality of work required to make such a massive game. So when it all "hits" for me it's awesome.

The first part of the beta phase I was a bit late getting into... I had just finished my finals before my official summer break and I was ready to just dig in.

Sunday afternoon was spent downloading the client. Evening time came, I finally booted it up and proceeded to create my very first toon through the start of the phase. But what to roll? In terms of race I knew there would be no question. I had originally wanted to roll a Mithra in XI but changed at the last second to Elvaan for some... odd reason I can't even remember now. I did ended up regretting it because I got the charming moniker of being the shell's "Chewbacca" being the only Elvaan female of note in the group.

Race was set but now was the dilemma of which class. 

Playing to Win vs. Playing for Fun

My sister is also a gamer, and while one day over discussing how I was unsatisfied with my lack of group participation in WoW, she summed it up for me. She told me that in all my play history I have always picked a class that I wanted to play rather than just think about what could be more useful. In the end she told me that perhaps I should look into playing to win because if I don't, I would end up not being able to participate in the content I wanted to and not having fun anyway. So the question after some re-evaluation is... which class... still?

Support vs. Damage

I never was one to roll a straight tank or healer. Dragoon/Lancer despite my extreme desire to play it still felt like it had a negative connotation due to it's lack of popularity and utility in XI, so Marauder, Conjurer and Lancer were choices I set aside for now. Immediately I stuck out between Thaumaturge and Archer. At the time I didn't know you'd have to roll an Archer to become a Bard which ultimately would later become my final choice to max out first. Bards no question I think would always be needed (being a support class) and that would help the final decision I would make later. Black Mages I knew seemed like the one I had a feeling would be desired at least one of the first choices in DPS. Thaumaturge being the only DPS casting starting class seemed like the way to go for this phase. I could be blamed for not doing my research but eh, better to learn now. I suppose I could say I wanted to enter the game "fresh" for the most part, but I had to keep my past mistakes in mind as well.

insert clever yule log pronunciation quip, g'hohoho

Opening Scene
While it's great the first time, it certainly wasn't for me afterwards (I would liked to have been able to skip it then). I got to see the texture mapping up close though and I could tell they made extensive use of Zbrush. And rather well I might add. The only criticism I have about these is that maybe I would (if I had the means to) adjust and tone down the specularity maps on leather and perhaps matte out the reflectivity of all the materials (except on metal) overall more.

In other words, sometimes the look of everything seems "too shiny". Maybe it's a light adjustment, or maybe it's textures on the materials. Did it mar my overall experience? No, it's just personal adjustments I would make.

gworl even dem choneys be zbrushed.

Thaumaturgy - Astral Fire/Ice
So I went caster for this phase. Certainly it was out of my comfort zone but I was definitely willing to see how a caster DPS would feel playing. Astral Fire/Ice was a big confusing to grapple at first but after understanding the dual buff role, I managed to resort to a simple rotation that I thought would be effective, especially after gaining the ability to be able to switch between Ice/Fire buff on the press. I personally opened with Blizzard on mobs that tended to hit hard and then switch over to Astral Fire to stack on the damage, but for the most part, just spamming Fire would do the trick.

F.A.T.E.
This was super cool to participate in. I had never played an MMO that utilized a similar system but I was pleasantly surprised by this. Do I like that it weighs your overall contribution keeping in mind every level that participated? Absolutely. I especially enjoy the choice of being able to temporarily bear a level cap appropriate to the mission to get a bonus on the reward. You don't have to participate at all even. But you really should, especially if you're leveling. The rewards are great, and the experience is fun. Anyone can join, it's a matter of finding one and participating effectively. They reset after a while which is pretty awesome while leveling through the initial quests given to you at the start of the game.


There are more subjects I want to touch into but for now I think this will be ok. I'm trying not to upload every opinion on everything ever. What I would like to do is in the next post touch on immediate negative points and the character creation process.

Overall though I have to say that in my first initial thorough play through I was immediately enchanted by the amount of nostalgia generated by the overall ambiance of just first logging into the character selection screen. The music helped greatly. It just resonated all so nicely. I guess I am a total sucker for the nostalgia feels because I felt like I had  logged into something potentially special.

Until next time.