It’s Sunday, so you know what time it is! Yep, it’s round-up time. You may have noticed that the sub-title of this post is simply a number, and there’s a reason for that. It turns out that the post I put up yesterday was my 900th post, and this is of course, number 901. I have had a huge jump in the amount of posts I’ve written in the past year and a half or so, where all of the other years that I’ve run this blog were much more sporadic. It’s an achievement in my mind, though I know I would have a hell of a lot more written had I not gone stagnant at times. At this rate, I’ll hit 1000 blog posts within the first quarter of next year. Speaking of next year, in just over a month this blog will be celebrating 10 years of continuity. I’ve said it before, but I did have blogs before then, all the way back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, but this iteration has been around since 2005, and on WordPress since 2007. My how the time flies. You can read more about the history of things up there on the about page.

Moving on. I have spent this week with a few of my usual games, those being League of Legends and Awesomenauts. In League I’ve just been plugging away, having some good games with a few friends and earning 6300 IP that I used to pick up Gnar, whom I’m not sure I really like. I only played one game with him but I failed hard. I’ll have to play some more to determine if that buy was a bad choice or not, but my ultimate goal is to own them all, so no harm no foul. In Awesomenauts, a new ranked season started, and I’ve already worked my way back into league 2, but this time my rating is much higher than it was when I ended last season. Last season I was in the 3000’s, and I’ve actually broke into the 900 range recently, but a loss pushed me back up over 1000. Still, a big jump between then and now, in only about a week’s time. This will probably change though, as last season there were 150k people on the leaderboard, and we’re at about 25k right now. As the league 1 people start playing my rank will probably fall a bit, but as long as I stay in league 2 I’ll be alright.

I also played a little bit of Dark Souls, but haven’t really felt like diving into it whole-heartedly. The reason being, is that I just marathoned Demon’s Souls. This is one of the major disadvantages of being a budget gamer — you don’t buy games when they come out and then have the 2-3 year gap between sequels to take a break. Moving from one game to its sequel almost immediately is tough to do, at least for me. I like a little break between games that are so similar, because then I can play something else that’s maybe from a different genre or at least has different mechanics. I had fully intended on moving straight into Dark Souls and then taking that break between DS and DS2, but after creating a couple of characters and completing the tutorial section on both, I found that I didn’t have the motivation to move on. I’m craving something else right now. I will come back to Dark Souls soonish, but I think I might complete another game first, or just putz around.

Speaking of putzing, I downloaded the 14-day trial for FFXIV last night on a whim. Despite enjoying GW2 and Rift on some levels, I wasn’t really hooked enough to dedicate myself to one of them. FFXIV has been on my “to-try” list for a while now, so I just said fuck it and rolled with it. Downloading the client wasn’t an issue, but the sign up process was a little annoying, as they send you a code in your email that you need to enter before you can fully download the game, and it took a long ass time for me to receive said email. It did come through eventually and I got the download started. That took quite a while as well because the install happens as you download portions of the game, but once it was all said and done I got into the game. FFXIV is definitely and Eastern MMO, with stylings that remind of anime and older JRPGs, but I loved the sound effects and music right off the back, as they were reminiscent of every FF game I’ve ever played (thought it’s been a while).

Races have weird names, but are pretty much the standard Humans, Elves, Ogre?, weird small race and cat people. Each race is split up into two groups but that doesn’t seem to make a difference except with appearance. Perhaps there’s more to that later on. I picked the Cat people, and the moon subset cause it sounded better. Classes are split in to Disciple of War or Disciple of Magic, which as you can guess are the martial classes vs the magic wielders. There’s only one healer, a couple of DPS mages, a couple of tanks and a couple of melee DPS classes. I rolled with the Thurmaturge, which is basically a fire/ice mage, but I’m unsure if that’s the class I would stick with, were I to buy the box and subscribe to the game. I may just use the 14 days to level one character and see as much of the game and systems as I can, or maybe just try as many classes as possible. It was a little strange that there are 3 starting cities and yours is determined by your class and not your race. Unique. Here’s the character I ended up with:

Graphically the game is beautiful. Considering it released last year, it’s one of the better looking MMOs I’ve played. I figure ESO is probably the only one out that’s prettier, but I haven’t actually played that so I can’t comment. Despite having the Asian influence, the world still looks somewhat western, but I recall the older FF games being able to blend the two styles well.

My first complaint with the game came within the first ten minutes of character generation. You get a cut scene, and you get to do some dialogue choices, but for some reason they opted to have fully animated cutscenes with lips moving and all that, but no voice over. That seemed like a bad idea to me. The beginning cut scene and all the shit you have to read through before you can actually take control of your character and wander around to explore took far too long as well. I just wanted to play the game and I have to read all of this tutorial shit, or watch cut scenes I can’t skip. A minor complaint, but a complaint nonetheless. That seems to die down after the first 15 mins or so and then you get back to the more expected random quest grind and skippable quest text. Exploring the town didn’t take too long, and before long I had done a bunch of quests and leveled up a bit, and soon I was outside of the town fighting newbie mobs.

The combat system is less whack a mole and more of a focus on combos, or spellweaving in the case of this magic wielder. There aren’t a huge amount of abilities as you level to 50 from what research I’ve done, but it appears that the Job system is tied to the weapon you have equipped and you can switch jobs on the fly. I haven’t tested this but it does look that to get certain jobs towards the end game you have to have multiple classes built up to certain levels to do so. It’s an interesting concept and something that should be familiar to FF game veterans. So far I rather like the game, but it hasn’t been long enough yet for me to determine if I’ll drop the money for the box and sub to the game in the future. I should be able to tell once the trial period is over. I’ve made these types of choices on beta weekends with other games, so I have extra time going this route. I wish ESO would do a free trial period too so I could tick that one off the list.

#stateofthegame #ffxiv #roundup