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The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV beta phase 1 and 2 - quests
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. 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.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV beta phase 1 and 2 - combat
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. 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.
The Mog Log: Pushing back on Final Fantasy XIV
Among the things I'm reluctant to talk about early when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV are the live letters from Naoki Yoshida. There's always a thread rapidly updating players on what is said during those letters, but that thread is filled with quick translations that may or may not be accurate, and I'd prefer not to analyze and speculate on information that may have been misconstrued. The man speaks in dense blocks of information. To my surprise, this week we got the full translation of the latest live letter, and something that struck me was how much of the game we're still being told is just over the horizon. This is not to say that I don't believe in Yoshi-P; Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 showed that if he promises something, it will be delivered. But there are a lot of things being held back for later, and honestly it's a little disconcerting for someone waiting eagerly for the game to come out.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV's magitek disassembled
I've done a couple of articles on reoccurring concepts in Final Fantasy games before, but this is an unusual one because it seems to barely qualify at times. Final Fantasy XIV has magitek, as did Final Fantasy VI, but those are the only games to refer to it as such. Sure, other games flirt with similar concepts (Final Fantasy XII, Final Fantasy XIII, and Final Fantasy VII most prominently), but none of them is outright called magitek. Bit there's still some interesting stuff to unpack when it comes to magitek, even if you don't consider the corner cases as you ought to. At a glance it might look like this is a simple manichean split between two factions, but there's a lot more going on and a lot of importance tied up with the term that can hint as to Final Fantasy XIV's future -- beyond the fact that we'll get to ride some magitek armor.
The Mog Log: Don't you want me, FFXI?
Final Fantasy XI has launched its fifth expansion, and yet I can't bring myself to be as excited as I should be. Longtime readers will recall that the account I've been playing on is younger and lacking in many of the higher-level conveniences such as airship passes and a white mage leveled enough to handle Sneak and Invisible. Put simply, I'm not in a place to just jump right into all of the content that Seekers of Adoulin has to offer right out of the gate. On the plus side, I do have several conveniences that completely new players wouldn't have, not the least of which is an extensive knowledge of the game as a whole. A new player coming in straight would look at the game and just wind up baffled, and I can't blame him in the least. If you're starting fresh, the game is not welcoming you. Longtime readers will also know that I've long been a proponent of making the game easier to get into. But is this even worth bothering with? Is the game for players starting at lower levels any more? Is there even a point to easing up the lower-level restrictions any longer?
The Mog Log: PAX East wasn't for us
Last week I promised to bring you all of the hard-hitting coverage of Square-Enix's presence at PAX East 2013 as it pertained to Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV. So here's that coverage: Both games still exist. We good? Great. I'll spend the next nine hundred words or so discussing cats, then. Seriously, if you've been following this site or this column, you know everything from PAX East already. Of course, all of this underscores what I see as a simple fact: PAX was not meant for fans of Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV. If you scan fansites and this site for coverage, you would not be blown away by any of this information, and that's fine. It's not actually for you, and I'm going to go ahead and say that it really shouldn't be for you because it would just be preaching to the converted.
Final Fantasy XI: Seekers of Adoulin goes live
Final Fantasy XI's fifth expansion, Seekers of Adoulin, is now running free in the video game wild. If you can catch the wily release, you'll be treated to a pair of new jobs, seven challenging bosses, and a new continent to explore. While Seekers of Adoulin isn't available for PlayStation 2 players, PC and Xbox 360 gamers are encouraged to hop on board the chocobo train. Players looking to purchase it on Steam may have a little bit of a wait, however. For more in-depth analysis and previews of the expansion, be sure to read up on the back issues of The Mog Log while FFXI updates.
The Mog Log: On the eve of seeking Adoulin in Final Fantasy XI
A while back, I was upset that we hadn't gotten nearly enough information about Seekers of Adoulin. That's certainly not the case any more; we've gotten a fair bit of new information about the expansion, which is good considering that Final Fantasy XI players will be seeking the heck out of Adoulin on Tuesday. Of course, there's still some air of mystery about the expansion, which is appropriate. Final Fantasy XI's expansions always contain a few new wrinkles that aren't really previewed, and I think players prefer it that way. But there's a lot to talk about, starting with something that I find very interesting insofar as it's launching in the wake of a new philosophy for the game as a whole. Back in December I talked about how the game's future might be brighter than it has been for a long time. How Seekers of Adoulin works in practice will tell us a lot about whether or not that hopeful future will come to pass or not.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV declares open season on lore
Every so often, Final Fantasy XIV throws me a curveball. Case in point: the Lore forum. This was one of those things that was mentioned an eternity ago that I (and quite possibly everyone else) assumed would happen around the fifth of never. But it's a real thing, it exists now, and you can go over and get a lovely rundown of all that racial naming conventions, a primer on Roegadyn language, and assorted other threads detailing important lore tidbits. If you need more proof that things are different at Square-Enix these days, this would serve as exhibit A. This is the sort of thing that I love. But at the same time, it's something I'm not completely happy about. I should clarify; I'm entirely happy that it exists. But I'm a little perturbed regarding the timing, and I think there are ways in which its release now is kind of awkward. So rather than unmitigated gushing over the new forum, this week saw a lot of gushing and a lot of frustrated squinting.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV's buffet of foodstuffs
Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XI are the two games that make me hungrier than any other. It's not because I associate Final Fantasy XI with sitting in my dorm room and eating takeout, although that is also true. It's because these games are veritable buffets of in-game foods. Other games have stepped on the idea of buff food before and since, but in both Vana'diel and Eorzea, a cook can be the centerpiece of your character build. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Final Fantasy XIV had one of the best food systems I've ever seen at the time that its first version shut down. There was subtlety, there was grace, and above all else there was a lot of tasty stuff for everyone to eat. So let's talk about all of that wonderful food, from miq'abobs to bubble chocolate, and let's look back at the state of food from the game's beginning up until the fall of Dalamud. (Or the shutdown in November, if you have no poetry in your soul.)
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy XIV's five-year gap
Right now, the world of Final Fantasy XIV players is made up of two separate but equally important groups: the Legacy players who are doing secret things in a beta that they cannot talk about, and everyone else sitting on the sidelines and desperately hoping for an NDA breach that unveils huge amounts of information. (The second group also spends some time hating the Legacy players. It's a delicate balance.) As a result, it's even harder than usual to write something interesting about the game. So, as prompted by some discussions over on the RPC, let's talk a little bit about what we do know regarding the state of the world. It isn't great, but at the same time, it's better than it could be. There are three main time period to be concerned with, and when they're taken as a whole, there's a lot of opportunity for interesting conflict and storytelling as well as roleplaying if that's your cup of tea.
The Mog Log: Across the country for Final Fantasy XIV
On Wednesday last week, I got on an airplane to head across the United States, starting a long and grueling trip. I spent half of Wednesday in the air, half of Thursday either on a train or in a car, and more or less all of Friday in the air once again returning home. All of this for about two hours of playing Final Fantasy XIV and a couple of interviews, in case you missed everything going live on Thursday. Would I do it again? In an instant. There's no way that I can repeat the amount of information that was in the roundup in a single column, so I'm not going to try. What I am going to do is talk about some of the other assorted bits and pieces of my Final Fantasy XIV experience and the surrounding events because it was truly something to see. I've been fairly skeptical up until this point, but I'll say that after sitting down and playing the beta version for a little while, I'm now a believer.
The Mog Log: Chocobos run Final Fantasy
Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV do not take place in the same world. One is not a sequel or prequel to the other, neither game continues the same story themes, and indeed nothing connects them beyond the names and a set of thematic elements. So I enjoy looking at those thematic elements sometimes, for the same fundamental reason that when I was a little boy I occasionally liked to take apart toys just to see how they worked. You'll remember that I looked at moogles as they related to the Final Fantasy series as a whole a while back, with the ultimate conclusion that moogles exist to provide an in-universe explanation for mechanical conceits. Chocobos have got to be simpler, though. They're present in both Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV, and they're extremely straightforward in both: They're mounts. That's their purpose in the series, isn't it? You ride chocobos. Surely it can't be any more complicated than "fictional method of transportation". The answer is of course it can. But I think the first step is to look back at the series as a whole.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy and the case of the missing alts
As I've mentioned before, my first MMO was Final Fantasy XI, and I think I'd be remiss not to observe that a lot of my MMO habits came about as a direct reaction to that game. My love of soloing comes in no small part as a result of the misery of trying to get anything accomplished by myself in Vana'diel, for example. Alts appear to be more or less the same thing. Saying that having an alt in Final Fantasy XI was counterproductive is like saying that arsenic is unhealthy. This was one of the many traits that Final Fantasy XIV carried over from its predecessor, but it removed any real option of having a second character serving as your bag space expansion because there wasn't a proper mail system to facilitate it. So there was even less reason to pay for an extra character slot there. Alts were just as absent in Final Fantasy XIV's original incarnation. But this might be changing on both sides of the equation. FFXIV's Legacy players get extra slots for free, after all. Might there be some hope for alts in the future?
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy and sexism
Passive sexism is a big deal to me. If it isn't a big one for you, it should be, because at some point high heels and metal bikinis became something passively accepted in games as a whole and that's not all right. MMORPGs on a whole do better than single-player titles, but you still have games like TERA that stick every female character into gravity-defying heels and the legal minimum required for clothing, or Scarlet Blade and its outfits made entirely out of electrical tape and fishnet. Some games are better or worse about this than others. The Secret World allows you to dress up either gender to be as sexy or as casual as you like, and Guild Wars made a point of keeping skimpy armor as skimpy armor for both genders in most cases. (Although not hardly all.) But the question that's actually relevant to this column is how Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV stack up, and the answer is that they acquit themselves remarkably well. So much so that they're among the most even-handed games I've seen, if not at the top of the list.
The Mog Log: A year of columns in review
Three years is not a lot of time to do anything. I'm continually surprised by the fact that I've been writing about video games professionally for three years of my life, which is admittedly only 10% of my life to date but still seems astonishing. This also marks the start of the third year of The Mog Log, which means that I've been talking about moogles and cat-women professionally for a tenth of my life. I use thoughts like that to keep me warm at night. As always, the anniversary mark is about the time when I look back at the column thus far and see how well it's done as a whole. Last year I wanted to really switch up what I did with my coverage for Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XI, and I think that by and large it worked pretty well. So let's do the usual thing wherein I look back, you take a trip down memory lane with me, and we all walk away feeling smarter. Or, if that doesn't sound interesting, you could just go look at some cat pictures.
The Mog Log: Final Fantasy nostalgia
There's nothing quite like Final Fantasy XI. Nor is there anything quite like Final Fantasy XIV. The two are similar enough that you can use one as a substitute for the other in a pinch, but both possess a certain feel that just isn't found in any other game. That's neither good nor bad; it just is. Watching the trailer for Seekers of Adoulin gave me a powerful blast of Final Fantasy XI nostalgia, and while I could wax poetic about how the game I remember isn't the game that exists any longer, that's not really the point. The point is that for all the frustrations of the games, there's a lot of joy in both. So today I just plucked my top five memories from both FFXI and Final Fantasy XIV to share with you, since I bet that some of you have the same sort of glowing nostalgia. Even if you don't want the good old days to come back (I sure don't), you can still remember them with a smile.
The Mog Log: (Over)analyzing the Final Fantasy XIV trailer
Sadly, January 7th did not see the release of the new Final Fantasy XIV benchmark. It did, however, see the release of both the beta tester application and the full trailer for the new version, both of which are relevant to the interests of any Final Fantasy XIV fan. The trailer is likely of greater interest, seeing as how most current fans are likely already flagged as Legacy players and thus don't need to apply for testing, but the point is that both are out there. Of course, the new opening movie is the only piece of information we've had about the game for a little while, but it seems worth analyzing and examining even on its own merits. No, I'm not talking about speculating as to whether or not the guy on the horse who looks exactly like Odin is in fact Odin or not (spoiler, doy). I want to talk about what this means for the lore, what the overall effect is, and whether or not this monster of a trailer succeeds at what it's meant to do.
The Mog Log: 2013 for Final Fantasy XI and XIV
I'd like to say that 2012 started out with a lot of promise, but it really didn't. Looking back at my predictions for Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV a year ago, I see they weren't perfectly accurate, but they certainly fit well within the margin of error. Very little happened over in Final Fantasy XI's development, and Final Fantasy XIV managed to continue not wowing anyone, albeit partly because of the several delays to version 2.0 that now have it releasing around the middle of this year. If you haven't noticed a theme yet, here it is: I'm worried that by the time it does launch, no one will care any longer. But I'm getting ahead of myself. While I've split things up between recaps and forecasts in the past, in this case it's virtually impossible to do so. A lot of what has been done this year is banking entirely on the strength of what will be happening next, so Square was selling 2013 in the midst of 2012. So let's look at the past year for both games and the year to come, with an extra helping of hope and speculation for 2013.
The Mog Log: Parties and roles in Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV's party setup already makes a bold step away from normal conventions. Where most games these days top out with parties of four or five players, a full party in Eorzea is eight people with according benefits. It's definitely a game of numbers. This offers some unique drawbacks and advantages all at once. The drawbacks are implied just by the sheer size: It's harder to get three strangers to work with you as part of a team; it's harder still to gather up seven without one person dragging you down through a combination of cluelessness and hapless malice. But considering the pre-relaunch game offered a lot of content that could be done solo or in ad hoc groups of varying sides, perhaps this won't be such an issue in the long run. So let's talk about the potential advantages. I think the game is uniquely poised to deliver on this front simply because having more people in the party allows you to do things that more modern games don't have the space for -- things that Final Fantasy XI was quite good at doing in party composition, as it happens.
