Picked up Final Fantasy 14 and started playing. Goodbye, free time...

The game has some rough edges on it. Some of it's the inevitable stuff that happens when an MMO launches, but honestly, I think it's a little more stable than I remember WOW being on that first week. Its shortcomings are mainly in the design phase.

Specifically, the players don't really have the tools to set up a player economy. There's no auction house, no interchange where people can put items up for sale. You can hire a retainer to vendor your stuff (and incidentally to serve as a mule character), and there are dedicated "market wards" where the retainers can hang out and vend goods to players. All the market wards are identical, so of course there are a tremendous number of retainers packed into the first one and the rest are deserted. (Nobody ever named their business B-Affordable, after all...)

Trying to actually shop in the market wards is an exercise in frustration, mostly because there's a tremendous variety of stuff in the game and no way to tell what any particular vendor has on hand without opening up their menu (about five seconds of time, maybe ten). You can't really go in there with something in mind - you're highly unlikely to find it.

Square's figured out that what they have isn't going to work (or more accurately, must have known what was coming, since FF11 had some of the same problems). However, they're married to the retainer concept by now, by their business plan if nothing else; it's quite likely that extra retainers will become available for a monthly charge at some point.

Their current idea is to remove the (meaningless) names from the market wards and to organize them by type of merchandise - boots go here, pants go there, shields go here, food there, crystals over there, etc. Not a bad plan! A little harsh if you've got a wide variety of merchandise that you wanted to hawk, but you can still do that if you want to. Square's idea is to offer a lower tax on merchandise that's sold in the appropriate ward, so you can have your vendor with half a dozen stacks of bronze ingots in the metalworker's ward, and still sell a cotton doublet on the same guy - you pay the current tax on the doublet and enjoy the lower tax on the bronze. The capitalist in me likes this plan; why couldn't they have implemented it before launch?

(Eventually they plan to have a system where you can search bazaars without accessing them individually, which would be fantastic.)

I'll talk (plenty) more about the game later. It's got some warts on it, but it also has a really nice crafting engine - even deeper than the one in FF11, without some of the frustrations, more accessible to casual players, and at the same time avoiding the spreadsheet-wars feel of EVE. I'm really enjoying that aspect of the game so far. The combat's not terrible either, though I'll probably enjoy THAT more once I've got something better than the starter knuckle-dusters...

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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