Final Fantasy XIV Online

Simply put, FF14 is everything a modern MMORPG should be. Yoshida and his team played many other MMOs, both F2P and paid, like World of Warcraft and Yoshida avidly took down notes from his experiences (while he mostly admitted he played free trial periods for paid MMOs). He also did alot of reading on forums, blogs and other sources to assess why players play these games, what they like about them and what keeps them coming back -- and then he did his very best to apply everything he learned to FF14:ARR.

And in many ways, his research and effort paid off gloriously.

FF14:ARR offers a huge and immensely impressive world. Tons of quests. Lots of distinct classes with unique flavor to them. There are more than enough dungeons, and they add more regularly. FF14 has a ton of raid content, too, and again they add more all the time.

So please, sit back, relax and enjoy my in depth review on Final Fantasy XIV Online.

The Graphics:

For an MMORPG, this game has astounding graphics, and beautiful scenery to go with it. It doesn't even require that much computer power to run at high settings. Often were the times when I switched my Class to Fisherman and admired the scenery while I waited for the fish to bite. I'd be surprised to find an MMORPG with better graphics.

The Community:

The people in this game are marvelous. Generally, if you manage to screw something up in a dungeon, rare are the times where people get shitty at you. What often happens instead is that your party members stop for you and explain what you did wrong and help you make your life easier with helpful tips. It's also very easy to be accepted into a Free Company (Guilds in this game), making the social aspect of the game very easy to approach. And for those of you who don't like interacting with other players, the game accommodates you by implementing a system that pairs you up with other random people if you don't have a party of your own.

The Leveling

Getting to the end-game is the real challenge since very little has been done to remedy the leveling grind. Where it is literally a grind. You must complete over 500 quests (estimated, many of which are boring fetch quests), to complete the base game and Heavensward, this isn't counting Stormblood. To level, you either grind dungeons, palace of the dead, or do fates.
Where DPS are faced with queue times of up to 30 minutes (often depending on what you are wanting to do) for dungeons. Forcing many to go through palace of the dead, which is a RNG dungeon that gets repetitive since you will be doing this for many times to level as a DPS.

...or you can pay an extra $40 to skip the story to the start of the Stormblood expansion and boost a single class to 60 (ARR + HW jobs, can only be done once per account).
It's a matter of convenience but also effects the player base where you have way more people who do not understand basic game mechanics or rotation, which they would learn by just playing from the beginning before boosting.

The Jobs and Roles

In terms of each Job's identity outside of the holy trinity roles (DPS/TANK/HEAL), each do have a unique identity.

For example, in regards to the caster dps;
Summoner is a job focusing on pets, with heavy amounts of DoT and burst DPS management and middle-tier utility.
Black Mage is a wrecking machine that does ridiculous AoE and single target burst with the only downside being no utility, and moving at all is a DPS loss (you are basically a turret nuking****).
RDM is the highest utility, and lowest DPS, being the most mobile caster that uses a melee burst with their sword, making them a guaranteed job for progression groups since they are literal rez-dispensers - they have a thing called dual cast, basically it means if they hard cast they get an instant cast for the next spell so: Hard cast rez > Rez (instant) > swift cast rez (instant).

The 2.5s GCD Timer

An off putting thing though for every job, is that there is a large GCD time, this is a common complaint when people come over from different MMOs. The FFXIV default GCD is 2.5s, this is the reason is due to controller/console support, where 1.5 - 2s is incredibly fast for many users using a controller as far as I’m aware.

The solution to this is the excessive ability bloat.
Where you have baseline rotation of some actions, then a large line-up of oGCDs and cross-class skills for every job. This is more elegant for DPS since it is all damage oriented CDs that fit into the rotation. Less so for tanks and healers, since they will have more utility/role-based CDs with exceptions e.g. SCH chain stratagem (crit buff), AST buff cards.

End-Game Content

For the actual end game itself, the current content cycle is 4 savage raids, 2 or 3 trials every major patch, and a super savage fight for the patch after the next raid tier is released. As a result, if you clear content at a hardcore pace (farming all fights since week 1 or 2), it leads to early content drought where there isn't much to do besides farm weekly raids, farm mounts, do speed kills (if you are inclined to optimize runs), or do older fights at synced ilvl, or min-ilvl. Those are examples, that come to mind personally, the point is that you will find end-game quantity to be lacking compared to how much is in something like Warcraft's expansions.

It's end game instances at savage and extreme-mode trials are good, but suffer from two main problems, being heavily scripted (always the same), and more recently making the fights easier to appeal to casual players and abandoning the mechanic skip in fights, meaning you cannot push dps so hard that you are rewarded with skipping mechanics, causing the current tier (omega: deltascape savage), to be highly repetitive with no change to boss rotations. This is unlike older tiers, all fights are scripted but the added randomness to what is skipped due to raid performance allowed some interesting variety with how player rotations would need to adjust as a result.

The Positives:

• Long and extensive main plot line
• Accessible class system
• Cute characters!
• Process of leveling is as important as the endgame
• Steady content updates and recurring seasonal events
• Massive and in-depth crafting system is more like a secondary play style
• Big focus on challenging end-game raiding
• Very social and player interaction-oriented, mechanics foster contact, weebs are friendly
  

The Negatives:

• Repetitive
• Plot holds game play hostage, can't progress without doing main story
• Fresh game play elements are introduced very infrequently
• Repetitive
• Leveling up classes past your 2nd or 3rd is a chore
• Large amount of time-gated content
• Little to no solo content
• Very slow to react to player feedback
• Extremely repetitive
  

The Trailer:

My Honest Final Verdict

75/100

After several dozen rewrites all I can say is this: FF14 is a slow game for patient people. It's a game where you can slow down, relax and adjust yourself to its weekly rhythm. Everything here works on a schedule, surprises are few and far between. If you can find your comfort zone you won't leave this game ever. If you can't then you'll quickly grow bored. The tons of money Squenix threw at the game means that every part of it is at least decent. Whether you like FF14 or not depends on your attitude towards repetition. Grind is everywhere but it's always meaningful.

Thanks for Reading!

I hope you guys enjoyed the Review! It always means alot when I put so long into writing these and I get support!
If you did enjoy, please drop an Upvote, Follow and Resteem!