So, my plan’s not going so well- i didn’t have time to play on any day this week. Well, i managed to get a story mission in Guild Wars 2 in, but that’s all i got. I really need to get going in Final Fantasy XIV, though. In light of my obsession to play every MMO out there, i mapped out a series, of sorts- telling some reasons why i like the games i do or don’t play at any given moment. I’ll try and make it a list of 5, every time. So let’s begin with Final Fantasy XIV
Why Final Fantasy XIV is a great MMO
1. The crafting
In many games, crafting is little more than a useless hobby someone might enjoy who likes the idea of “downtime”. In Final Fantasy XIV, crafting is quite involved- it’s not just a queue where you put items in that you want to craft- you have to participate in the progress, raising your chances to get a high quality item (and experience), research where to gather stuff you need, playing the market and there’s even quests to do for crafting. Also, you can follow any crafting job you want with one character, while the process still is quite social in the sense that you’ll have to buy materials off the market- at least when you don’t have much free time, because raising every gathering/crafting profession is quite time-consuming. There’s a lot of interdependancy involved- you’ll need your leatherworkers for tailoring, for example. The crafting in Final Fantasy XIV is a levelling and gameplay experience all by itself.
2. The community
Final Fantasy XIV’s community is one of the nicest places i’ve seen in MMOs. Chat is generally quite polite and helpful and at least i haven’t run into many unfriendly PUGs (there was just one guy), although i’ve heard the dungeon finder groups can be quite elitist, as well. Still, what i found, was very friendly indeed.
3. No Alts necessary
If you provide me with options, i’m going to make use of them. If there are 8 classes in an MMO, chances are that i have one character in all of them while the highest character still is under level 30. In Final Fantasy XIV, changing classes is as easy as changing equipment, and you can do everything with just one character. So while the outcome might be the same in short term, no progress will ever be “wasted” because i’ll somehow never get back to a class. It will be there, waiting for the next time i want Deidra to be something else or want to change up my game experience.
4. A lot of options in levelling content
I know many will see this as the opposite, because you are only able to do each quest once, but as of now, i feel there are a lot of options to level your character in Final Fantasy XIV. There’s the normal questing, of course, and then there are repeatable tasks that are called leves- you’ll get an allowance of doing 8 per day which stacks up to 100, and this is sometimes too low if you play a lot, but for me- i’m almost always at 100 when logging in. Then you have FATEs, which are basically Rifts of Rift or Anchors of TESO, the Dungeons, of course, and Scenarios, which are quite short, instanced, group fights. And that’s just for the adventuring classes. The gathering and crafting jobs have their own quests and leves. There really is a lot of variety.
5. Updates
I feel Final Fantasy XIV deserves the subscription money they get- they’ll release new content in a three-month-cadence and there’ll be an expansion, soon. While most of the updates are not meant for me, since i’m still quite early in the game, i watch from afar, but still, there aren’t a lot of MMOs who put out that much content in the same timeframe.
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