My Life As A Gamer: Final Fantasy XIV-A Realm Reviewed (Part Two)

A Slow Start

I repeat what I said yesterday: FF14 is a Final Fantasy game first and a MMORPG second.

This means that the game presumes that you have never played a MMORPG before, as many Final Fantasy fans did not. It also presumes that you do not have a problem with JRPGs, so the first 15 levels are not only a tutorial of both core gameplay conceits but also of foundational world-building. In order to merge both narrative and gameplay together, the game uses a gatekeeping scheme to lock features and content away until your narrative progress reaches a given point.

This is the Main Scenario Quest system ("MSQ"), and in the default User Interface it will always appear in the upper left corner of your screen. Similar to this is the current Class or Job quest, which will appear underneath the MSQ, and these gatekeep key Class or Job abilities away until completed. Do these first and foremost, and focusing on these will be plenty sufficient to get to the level cap.

You will find the content unlock schedule for ARR here. You will also find that some side content is locked away by sidequests. You do not need to do sidequests at all on your first time through, so avoid them unless strictly necessary. As the ARR schedule reveals, some dungeons--and some higher-difficulty versions thereof--are so locked away. If you want a video guide, Work To Game has a series of them by level band; 1-15 is here, and you can find the rest on WTG's channel.

During this early phase, you will find your gameplay to be very slow in combat because the Global Cooldown (GCD) is at 2.5 seconds and you have few abilities to work with, all of them being on the GCD. My experience at this point is that I was glad to be playing an Archer so I could just kite my target around with auto-attacks instead of having to stutter-step due to cast times or play race-to-bottom with my target due to being in melee. This starts to fade at Level 15, when my later Archer abilities start to appear; other Classes will have similar breakpoints around this level, all due to off-GCD (OGCD) abilities appearing and thus giving you something to weave between GCD abilities.

At level 10 you will unlock access to the random group finder tool, the Duty Finder, with the unlocking of Guildheists; at Level 15, with unlocking the first dungeon, you will be directed to the Hall of the Novice.

The Hall is a basic training course in group play, focused on the group role that your Class has in dungeon or raid gameplay; I recommend that you do this even if you have extensive experience for two reasons. The first is that you get very good gear for the level out of it, including a ring that grants +30% XP up to Level 30. The second is to become familar with common mechanic conventions in group content, something that will be expected of you as you level up.

The MSQ will direct you through some very basic dungeons. The hostile NPCs have few, if any mechanics, and the gameplay flow is very linear. However, it is also at this point that another feature of the game first appears: Level Synch. Higher-level characters, often via random Duty Roulettes, will queue into your group and will have plenty of experience in running these dungeons. If you are polite, and you say you are new and don't know what to do, most veterans will tell you what you need to know. Keep that up as you level up; the later dungeons, raids, etc. get increasingly complex so you can get lost without a heads-up.

It is after this point, between 15 and 20, that both the ARR narrative and the gameplay experience begin to pick up the pace and become more engaging. The key element connecting this is that you get involved in slaying a false god with brainfucking powers called a "Primal" by your allies and "eikons" by the Evil Empire, which puts you on the map and thus to the attention of the power-players of the three city-states as well as your chief allies: The Scions of the Seventh Dawn ("Scions" hence).

More tomorrow.