If you haven’t heard, FF14 has been universally panned as a piece of garbage to the point that they’ve given an additional free month to everyone who bought it in the hope they won’t leave. They’ve also published a long list of expected fixes planned prior to the end of the year, which may possibly be too late.
The entire game is designed to make everything take as long as humanly (or not) possible and nothing whatsoever is explained. You can only do 8 quests of any kind (except the main story quest) every 36 hours. Teleporting anywhere you’ve been costs anima, which replenishes slowly over a 48 hour period, so you’ll spend a lot of time walking. Did I mention everything in the world is really far away?
Going anywhere starts with the problem of not only figuring out where you have to go, but also where exactly that is. There are two maps in the game. One shows where quests are and nothing else (including your character), the other everything else but nothing about quests. You can’t view both at the same time. You can’t scroll/zoom the map using the mouse. Apparently you can scroll the map using the keyboard but I’ve never been able to figure out how to do it.
The class you select in the beginning of the game only determines your initial equipment because the game is surprisingly flexible in that equipping different weapons/tools changes your class. You can and will be every class there is to allow the ability to get better gear and such.
Crafting/Gathering is incredibly obfuscated. Don’t know how to fish? Too bad, figure it out. What? You don’t have any bait? Idiot, back to town to get some. You’re going to mine now? Good luck figuring that one out! Trying your hand at cooking? You idiot.
Crafting also has the added benefit of there being no record anywhere in the game of recipes so make sure you have a notepad handy while doing quests because this is the primary method of learning new recipes. The other way is through experimentation. Oh, and don’t think you can be clever and have a document you can alt-tab to because FF14 will crash if you try.
The game lacks visual indicators of pretty much any kind. You won’t know who is a vendor, who gives quests, if a mob is too hard or easy for you. Actually, there are some areas where vendors are located but the signs at their shop provide no means to determine exactly what they sell without manually looking.
The interface is incredibly backwards. There is no key to open your inventory, skills, character sheet, quests, etc. You must navigate the menu to get at those.
While the graphics are pretty, the entire game has a noticeable lag between you initiating an action and the action being performed. This includes battle where you’ll find that you’ve killed enemies prior to the killing blow being dealt.
I’m still giving it a go, but I don’t think I will stick with it.
That sounds horrendous. Like they deserve whatever failure comes their way.