I’ve mentioned in the past that sometimes plans get changed dramatically between when I plan my next column and when I actually write it. This week, it turned out that I could stop being mum about the Final Fantasy XIV beta. So that meant throwing out plans and starting back over. In fact, it meant starting way over, since I found myself with so many things that I wanted to talk about it was difficult to figure out where to start.

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So I’m starting with the obvious. I’m going to talk about aspects of the first two beta phases in as much detail as I can realistically fit into a column starting with one of those obvious cornerstones of video games: combat. This isn’t meant to be about impressions so much as dissecting and analyzing what I’ve played to this point, what is working, and what isn’t. If you want to know my more in-depth impressions of killing things in Final Fantasy XIV’s early test version, read on.

General combat impressions

These early beta phases are not indicative of the game’s entire combat setup. Marauder, Pugilist, Thaumaturge, and Arcanist are all unavailable due to the way the Armoury System works, which means that it’s hard to get a clear grasp on how all of the classes will interact in the end. But even here there are some obvious differences, starting with the fact that some standby abilities just don’t matter any more.

Case in point: Cure. Cure has gone from being madly useful for every class to being borderline useless on most classes. I even went for broke on Lancer and pumped up my Mind only to find that it still healed for paltry amounts, meaning that I would need to look in other directions to avoid my health being whittled down in larger fights. This may have been neutered to make potions a more attractive consumable option.

This is not exactly a bad thing. It’s frustrating in places, but it does mean that certain abilities are no longer automatic additions to your skill bar. For the record, while Cure is pretty useless, Protect remains an excellent option.

Actual combat is mostly a matter of managing your cooldowns, resources, and combo attacks. At lower levels in solo combat, this is fairly brainless; since TP starts full and refreshes quickly, the first several levels require you mostly to just hammer out your weapon skills as quickly as possible. Once you get into the mid-teens, however, you have more activated abilities to manage to momentarily boost attack power or add an effect or whatever, and you probably have your first combo attack to spice things up.

The further along you get, the more it becomes clear that your TP is not nearly as unlimited as it looks. It does regenerate fairly quickly even in combat, but as you get out your higher-level abilities, you can also burn through it very quickly. Tanking in particular often forced me to be careful about which skills I used and when because I just didn’t have enough TP or MP to blast out with guns blazing at all times.

Having a global cooldown set for 2.5s seems a bit slow at first, but in practice it allows just enough time between abilities that your individual choices are a bit more significant. It doesn’t really have an impact on battle pacing overall; a normal fight was over about as quickly as a fight with a single enemy in World of Warcraft, for example. At higher levels, combat felt methodical but not slow — cripple the first target instead of using high-damage abilities to reduce incoming damage, set up a combo, then buff my attack power and finish that combo on the second target. It was strategic rather than frantic, if you will.

Class by class

Gladiator: The class I played most in the original version of Final Fantasy XIV and also my preferred class in the beta phases, the Gladiator has taken its nature as a tank and run with it. The net result is a class that feels more cohesive but still has a few options for dealing damage, mostly for porting over to other classes or using while solo. It’s also got both a healing buff and the ability to use Cure with some utility, making it resilient even while solo.

Lancer: Of all the classes in 1.0, Lancer seemed to have the most issue with its overall identity; despite its unique Surge mechanics, it struggled to make a niche for itself. Here, as one of the two pure DPS classes, it’s taking the role of heavy burst damage to heart, inheriting traits from Final Fantasy XI‘s Dragoon. It also lacks much in the way of defenses, having grown a little more fragile than before even with a more reliable self-heal option. But at least you don’t have to worry about your wyvern dying.

Archer: At low levels, Archer is simply unbelievable. Ranged attacks, plenty of TP, and the ability to chain out weapon skills means you kill things very quickly. At higher levels, the class seems to be more about being the utility sort of DPS class, something that matches the fact that its associated Job is Bard. The change from “crazy fast killing” to “buff, debuff, and harm” is going to throw some people off, but the actual mechanics are still fun, and they give Archers a unique niche compared to Lancers.

Conjurers: Clearly slotted into the healing role now, Conjurers do get a self-buff that allows them to increase magic damage and decrease healing done when they’re out and leveling solo. That having been said, most of the class’s really neat abilities now are focused toward heals and buffs, getting most of the usual White Mage tools along with the lesser-used elemental magics. Those who have played similar classes will feel right at home.

Overall feelings

The biggest weakness of FFXIV’s combat in the beta is that it doesn’t come out of the gate at its full strength. You have to level and explore the game for a while before you can really start to feel what the designers were going for. This isn’t to say that the system is bad, but it means that your first impressions might not line up with what you’ll actually be playing.

Once you get past that hump, though, the combat system is a joy to play. It feels very similar to games like World of W

arcraft without quite falling into the trap of being identical. Some people will call it a thinly veiled clone, but some people will call Defiance a thinly veiled clone of WoW, so that isn’t entirely indicative. It takes pages from WoW’s playbook while remaining distinct.

And it’s fun. The combat system had to try to retain the baroque sensibilities of its predecessor while being faster and more strategic, and it managed those changes quite well. Not perfectly, but the design document was pulling in a few dozen directions.

We know now that the next test phase for Final Fantasy XIV will not be until June. This is good insofar as the next test will contain a lot more stuff and bad insofar as I want to play. Those of you living vicariously through impressions articles such as this one probably have less of a struggle with this scenario. And there is still a chunk of the first two phases to be discussed, obviously.

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If combat is the usual “how” of MMOs, quests are the usual “what.” Final Fantasy XIV started out with a handful of quests and gained several more during Naoki Yoshida’s tenure, but quests still weren’t the main leveling content in version 1.0. That was a function reserved for guildleves, which have taken on a new role in the beta phases just as quests are enjoying an expanded importance. But it’s not as simple as that change might imply.

It’s a complicated scenario

Not all quests are created equal in FFXIV. This was true in the first version, as well. You had your main scenario quests, your grand company quests, your guild quests, and so forth. This has not changed in the beta, which still features main scenario quests, guild quests, and regular side quests. What has changed is the frequency and purpose of these quests.

In the launch version of FFXIV, there were three quests for each guild. Not three main quests — three quests, period. Each one covered a small amount of backstory for the guild, gave you a tiny bit of flavor, and then left you high and dry without further content. You couldn’t even join the guild until level 20 or so, by which point it was an amazing coincidence that you were up to the standards that a guild had set for membership.

By contrast, in the beta phases, you get your first guild quest at level 1. Literally one of the first quests you are given sends you to the headquarters for your guild to pick up the associated quests and hunting log entries. And the story unfolds from there in five-level intervals, with a new ability awarded for the level 15 quest and plenty of story development in each guild.

The main scenario quests are similar insofar as they are clearly handed to you with reliable frequency. You won’t always be on one, but you’re always given a sign of when you can pick up the next one, and there are no longer long stretches when you’re without any direction. Sidequests are more numerous and spaced to ensure that if you want to level your first class almost entirely through quests, you have more than enough options.

Not a revolution, not an evolution

So what are the actual quest mechanics like? For the most part, they’re like literally any other quests you have ever seen.

I’m not distraught about this fact, but there’s nothing to gush over when it comes to the raw mechanics of questing in FFXIV because it’s stuff that I’ve seen before. The quest dialogue is well-written and gives a good sense of the word; it’s helped along by the fact that you page through dialogue boxes instead of just having the text vomited at you in a single blurb, but… you know the deal. Go out and kill X number of Y and so forth.

The main scenario and class quests are frequently more inspired. There’s a Lancer quest in which you face a huge horde of wolves with a time limit; you can’t possibly kill them all by rushing in, so you have to pick off stragglers, thin the group, avoid links, and make strategic approaches to your target. But the core of the quest mechanics are going to be familiar to almost anyone who has played an MMO in the past five years.

They work, and for my money, the actual meat of the game is entertaining enough that I’m not bothered by the unoriginality of the mechanics. But the quests do work in a very pedestrian fashion, without a doubt. They scratched an itch, and I enjoyed them, and I’m not going to claim that they tap into some deep vein of novel design. It was the setting and the mechanics around the quests that impressed me.

Leve it all behind

Guildleves worked for their purpose in 1.0. They were meant to pad out the bulk of leveling content, and they did that. They did that over and over, as it happened, since leves stretched for 10-level bands and there were about six or seven in any given list. So bringing Lancer from 30 to 40 generally meant seeing the same handful of quests repeatedly, with a flow that looked something like this:

•     Go to a city.
•     Pick up leves appropriate to your level.
•     Travel to the Aetheryte.
•     Fight through those leves, traveling back to the aetheryte each time you clear one.
•     Repeat.

In the beta phases, the flow was slightly different.

•     Go to a level-appropriate levemete near the area of the leves.
•     Pick up your leves.
•     Travel to the area where those leves take place.
•     Clear the leves and then return to the levemete.
•     Repeat.

The shift is subtle but significant. Before, you would have to travel back and forth a lot to get even a quartet of leves done; here, you have a new set every five levels, and the travel time is not significant in any direction. You go to the relevant area, clear something, and then zap back to the same person who gave you the leve in the first place.

Again, the mechanics aren’t terribly different, so veterans of 1.0 will be very accustomed to the core concepts. (The betas did have several leves introducing more advanced concepts early on, rather than straight pursuit or engage leves until your 30s.) The difference is in the details of execution and the sidelining of leves as a whole. You can take part in several leves instead of quests, you can use them for classes after your first ones, and you can use them as sidelines instead of hunting log entries and the like.

Direction unknown

While neither guildleves nor quests have revolutionary mechanics, the layout of the content is refreshing because it’s not a straight line. There are loose pointers, but if you decide to strike off in a different direction, the game officially does not care. Want to just fill out your hunting log? Go nuts, man; you’ll know when there’s another main quest to do.

It’s refreshing. The seasonings of a quest-driven game are there, but it lacks the pressure.