Looking For Party – Beta the second time round

The embargo on the Final Fantasy XIV beta has been lifted and I can talk about it at long last!

But you may be wondering what has happened to Final Fantasy XI? Well, to be frank, we burnt ourselves out.

This is the danger of an MMO, you become so highly involved that it starts taking over other elements of your life and that is when you know you have to call time.

It was getting to the stage where we got home from work and headed straight onto the PCs just to get the necessary tasks completed in two hours. Its a bit like playing with a scab: you know you’re only going to do more damage but you just can’t leave it alone.

It was becoming extremely stressful, so after a long discussion we decided to step away from it. I cannot say for how long simply because I do not know.

Probably well timed, as we jumped over to the FFXIV beta. From the frying pan to the flames you might think, but the good thing about the beta it that its all highly limited. Only in the last release have we been able to access our old characters (Ten and Paru making a return!) but prior to this we got to play the magical adventure of character creation and play what little amount they had available for server stress testing.

Previous players can have a free ‘re-roll’ of their present character, as there are many new features to add such as hairstyles, odd eye colours, and tattoos. This allows players to keep the stats and gear they have but change the appearance and even the race of their character. Character creation really makes the game for me. I’m not even joking. I could have spent HOURS making variations of Paru and other avatars for the sheer hell of it. New additions such as the male Miqo’te and female Roegadyn have at last been rolled out and such a detailed character builder is just the first of many fantastic things they have brought into the re-release of this game.

The build up to the release has been pretty fun too, Naoki Yoshida (known as Yoshi-P) has been very open with the development to the fans and regularly has ‘Producer’s Live Letters’ videos keeping gamers up to date with the game prior to August 27^th – world wide release date for PC and PS3.

So how has the game been? So far so good. I have only been messing about in the story missions within Ul’Dah and I have rolled an additional few characters to see the storylines in the other two cities but I haven’t done much within the game with my friends yet. This is a big selling point for this game – content can be done playing solo. Now understandably not ALL content can be done alone otherwise that would be a pointless venture for an MMO, but you can start off your new character and not have to rely on others. End game content and primal bosses will have to be tackled with a group of people but the Duty Finder makes this a lot easier. The video below explains and demonstrates this new feature which spans across servers, not just on your individual server!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIBPqZ0rNQ8[/youtube]

We have been reunited with good friends from games gone past and made lovely additions to our Linkshell and Free Company (you can be a member of multiple Linkshells but can only belong to one Free Company along with other additional benefits what will roll out with the full release) and started to form a happy little troupe once more. Ul’Dah feels familiar yet I still find myself staring at some of the amazing areas I have come across when messing about on the Chocobo. The world looks simply beautiful.

To ask me if I am excited of the full release of the game is an understatement. I have booked release week off from work and have already started planning what things I want to have achieved in that week!

Hopefully this Realm Reborn will expand on the game that never really was with 1.0, and I think it is safe to say the team have learned from their predecessor’s mistakes.