Starza's Fandom Blog

Okay, we're back with a full review of this game. Now take this with a grain of salt. I leveled a CON/WHM with THM/BLM secondary, because I played THM in 1.0, so it was starting out fairly high level.

Title: Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Rating: T, rating changes in game
Genre: MMORPG

Graphics: 7/10 - I'm just gonna repeat what I said under beta impressions: Probably the most beautiful game I've ever played. There's really nothing else to say about this, because it's the god to honest truth. It's also a number on graphic cards, because it basically means you need a high end graphic card to play this game.

Also, I discovered, this game doesn't have very good optionization. Meaning when you turn down something, you experience no increase or decrease in FPS and you barely notice the difference in game on top of it. This basically forces you to have a high end computer.

Plot: 7/10 - This gets a little bit of a lower score because while it does feel like Final Fantasy, it's really predictable. And granted, while the other jobs have their own little subplot, the two I did were.... okay. I wasn't really 'wowed' at the end of the story, because it basically continues into your relic weapon quest, and at that point I stopped. Why? Because the part I stopped at, to me, was where the credits rolled and that's it for me.

Music/sound: 9/10 - Again, just gonna repat what I said before: Familiar themes and new themes. I liked the original soundtrack to the game, and I like the newer music, especially the battle theme. And of course, epic fucking Chocobo music when you ride one. You're just riding a chocobo, but they manage to make it sound epic. :D

The one flaw is that the music sometimes doesn't play in certain zones, but I'm guessing that's a bug.

Gameplay: This is divided into 6 sub-categories since MMOs are different.

Combat 5/10 - The combat is slow, period. When you play a game with mechanics that require you to get out of crap fast, the last thing you want is slow combat. It doesn't help the global cooldown is 2.5 seconds. Also, instant spells/skills aren't exactly instant. Basically, you'll be mashing buttons, praying that your skill fires off.

There is some lag between special attacks firing off and movement too. I'm gonna leave this here, because this thread demostrates the problem far better than I can.

Dungeons start out easy and then start to get harder. On top of the combat and it's problems, it really makes the game stressful on tanks and healers. Which is a big no-no. Mechanics are basic if you raided in WoW, but due to the slow combat and the problems highlighted in the thread, it makes the game a lot more difficult than it should be.

Crafting 6/10 - Crafting is beyond boring and tedious, it feels like a class all on it's own, but not very fun, time consuming, and not very rewarding in the end. Granted, I did only get 28 of alchemy up, but it felt like a chore and it didn't help I was always having to stop and go gathering. Not to mention, a lot of mats you need are cross class. For example, you'll be leveling weaving and opps, you now need leather for something. So it's either level up leatherworking or go buy stuff.

Did I mention money is a problem in the game? Yes, money is easy to come by while leveling, but when you have a 50 and those repair bills and teleport bills start to pile up, you'll find your money going down the drain.

PvE (Questing, exploring) 5/10 - Again, your options for leveling are as follows:

1. Killing monsters. Tedious, I don't advice doing it unless you're farming for something.
2. Killing monsters via your class 'hunt' quest. You get bonus exp for killing a certain amount and the game will put something over a monster's head if you need to kill it if you're the right class.
3. Story quest. You need to progress through the 'main' story regardless, so always keep up to date on this. It unlocks different things in the game as well, so you have to do it.
4. Class Quests. EVERY class has class quests, which all have their own story. While they can be tedious at times, the story makes up for it.
5. Regular Quests. There's NPCs all over the place that offer quests. You can also skip them and come back to them with another class later, which I think is good.
6. Leves. This was the main method of leveling in 1.0, but now, it's basically optional. I only really did them when I felt myself getting behind. A good method of catch up if you run out of regular quests!
7. Fate. This is like Guild Wars 2 random events. Basically, random events happen around the world and the objective is different for every one, like collect items and give to a NPC, kill a boss mob, kill an army of invading mobs, etc etc. Nice way to pick up some quick exp while going to different places.
8. Duty Finder/Dungeon Finder. I have to say I'm not impressed with this so far, but it makes for really easy and quick exp. They don't even have to be dungeons, it could be a quick monster survival type of deal or just killing. Hoping the later Dungeons get harder or a 'heroic' mode for those of us who like challenges.
9. Exploration. Like WoW and most games, you find a new area, you get some exp. It's minor, but it does encourage to look and explore the entire map.

So why did I lower this? Because after you hit 50 on your main and want to level another class, your choices suddenly become very limited. Heck, you'll start to see that in your 40's, when your story requires you to be a certain level and you suddenly are out of quests and leve allowances. Your only options are doing dungeons, Fates, or grinding on mobs. And lemme say, the dungeons in this game are very unforgiving. Unforgiving dungeons + PuGs = terrible combination

The game has a duty finder, or basically a system that will auto sort you into a group automatically. The main dungeons consist of 4 people. Later, you'll see 8 man groups too. The queue times for dps are awful, ranging from 30 minutes to well over a hour. And later on down the line, especially the level 50 dungeons, Square decided to make limits on how many instanced dungeons can be open. So that means you can have a group of 4 actual people queueing up, but waiting over a hour because there's too many people queueing for this place. Did I also mention this is the best dungeon to farm end game tomes?

The bosses in this game are very unforgiving, and like I said with the combat system, you really don't want to mix unforgiving mechanics with pick-up groups. Story dungeons should be easier and there needs to be less trash in them, especially since you're on a time limit. Yep, dungeons in this game have a time limit, and while I've never failed to meet a time limit (I did come close in Cutter's, had a minute left), it's beyond stupid to have one. Raids even have one, which blows my mind!

PvP NA - No pvp yet, but if the combat doesn't improve, I don't see pvp happening in this game.

End game (50 only content) N/A - I'm not going to score end game because I didn't try hardmodes or the raids, but I will say farming tomes is not what I want to do. I did enough of that crap in wow, I really don't want to do it again on top of people being nasty in the duty finder, which I'll get to below.

Misc (Latency. bugs, configuration, community) 2/10 - Let me say this game had one of the worst launches I've ever seen. This includes vanilla WoW. The servers were so boggled down, that it fucked with the duty finder the first few days, mostly because everyone was trying to do the story quest and it required you to use the duty finder (Which is a VERY BIG NO NO! Lesson: Don't do a single player story mode alongside something like a Looking for Dungeon type feature). Then we had limited log ins and the dreaded 1017 issues. Basically, for a time, Square limited how many people could get onto a server. The only problem is there was no active working queue finder (Some people say the queue could only support 250 people at a time, who knows). So the only way to get into the game was spamming the 0 key on your number pad. What freaking game does NOT have a queue system in place!?

Now this was cleared up after 2-3 weeks, but it's still unacceptable. Not to mention Fates like Odin and Behemut would crash servers because everyone and their mom would go to them.

The community in this game is probably the worst I've ever seen it, coming close to how people are in LFR in WoW. From people yelling and screaming at each other and calling people newbs (Don't people realize that most people playing this freaking game are new at it!?) from racist and disgusting remarks in shout chat to people screaming and yelling at people to skip the cutscenes in a story dungeon... Not to mention gold spammers on top of it. And if you say one negative thing about the game, people will call for your head to be chopped off on top of it...

This does not bode well for this game.

Final Score 4.5/10 - Not off to a very smooth start at all.

Overall: 6.8/10 - An average MMO that's in a very rocky place and greatly hindered by it's slow combat and bad community. If you like pretty MMOs and your machine can handle it, try it out. Though imo, there's better options out there that won't cost you 15 bucks a month.

And now since the game is out of beta, it's time for a full review! Also, my guild is composed of a lot of Star Wars fanboys and Bioware fanboys, so if they ever saw this review... I am much harsher beyond impressions because the game is officially launched and I really can't believe how unpolished it is.

Also, I played a Sith Inquistor that leans toward the Light side, so this is based on that.

Title: Star Wars: The Old Republic
Rating: T, rating changes in game
Genre: MMORPG

Graphics: 6/10 - Like I said before, the same problems exist, every race is a humanoid, the UI is still crappy (And if you tweak the settings, you can get a UI that looks similiar to WoW), not too many customazations, etc etc.

The big problem is the settings now. I can barely run this game with 20 fps on low, which is WORSE than in the beta, and after some research, I found the game doesn't really like AMD/ATI cards, so I had to tweak something outside the game. Besides, putting everything on low/medium/high didn't seem to do much, if anything at all. I could put textures on high and get the same fps than if I put them on low, even though it says in game lowering this option will improve preformance. If I lower settings in WoW and Rift, I get better performance. Try it in Star Wars, nothing happens. The only thing that matters is shadows and 'bloom'. Also, no AA for those who were waiting for it.

It's funny, because Rift's graphics are so much better than both SW and WoW, and yet, I can get better framerate in Rift on high resolution than on SW with the lowest possible settings.

No excuse for this.

The graphics themselves outside of cutscenes, which is what we will see 75% of the time, are kinda crappy. The environment is lifeless and dull, it lacks a real spark of life in some areas. It's also too dark in a lot of the places. Half the time when I want to take a picture of my character, I can barely see her cause it's too dark. I was more impressed with Rift's graphics than Star War's. Some areas lighten up, like Nar Shaddaa, but the world itself is lifeless and npcs just walk around and... nothing.

Also, no day and night cycles and no weather. Come on, it's 2012 now....

Plot: 6/10 - Not gonna lie, I was falling asleep when it came to quests and character quest. Character quest is just me running around fetching artifacts for my master who is obviously going to betray me sometime down the line. Oh, and I'm a desendant of a powerful sith. And what eventually happens... is exactly how I was warned about. And now, I apparently am one of those 'rare' souls that can communicate with ghosts well and I'm so 'talented', that I can absorb those ghost's power as my own. So in essence, my character is now a Mary Sue. /facepalm It does get interesting as time moves on, but the conclusion is pretty cliche and furthers me being a Mary Sue. Also that Sith Inquistor standing next to me? Same conclusion to his story.

Every other quest is basically the same you can find in any genric MMORPG nowadays. If you've done questing in one, you've done it in all. But this time, the quests just seem... boring, even with the VAing. Too many times I just found myself hitting spacebar when I was done reading the subs instead of watching it play out. Most of the characters save my own companions I could really care less about.

Most of the plotlines to the planets is that Republic is trying to get a foothold or already has a foothold, and you have to prevent it or increase the gain for the Empire on the foothold. Or there's a war going on and you have to stop it. That's the basic plotline of every planet I visited, and it's... really boring. You'll sometimes get a side plot and sometimes you'll get a reaccuring character appearing (Thana on Taris appears in many of the quests), but other than that, it's just stop the Republic from getting strength.

Not to mention, most of your decisions have no real impact on the world around you. There's a choice to keep Thana alive or kill her, and no matter what you choose, you NEVER see her again. So what's the point of keeping her alive now? Oh yeah, I want those light points...

Also, when you finally complete your story line, you're basically done with the plot. You can do like the 'final battle' on Ilum, but after that, it's basically 'The End' till Bioware adds in more content.

The only interesting things are your companions. I really love companions, even though their AI is questionable. Companions will give you quests if their affection is high enough. And so far out of the 5 minus the droid (*stabs it to death*), all of them are likable, even Khem, the poor bastard. :D Xalek sadly does not get enough development, but he's such a badass, it doesn't matter.

You can also romance certain companions, which is very similiar to DA. If they like you enough, it unlocks more quests. Of course, you have to progress into your character questline in order to get certain options.

Music/sound: 9/10 - Music is still awesome, but not played enough or repeats in areas when it shouldn't. Like it's kinda weird on the ears to hear the shooter rail music in a combat situation. We need some music in cities and the main hangout (Imperial Fleet). The tunes you do hear are really good and give an epic feeling to whatever you're fighting. You'll also hear some familiar themes if you watched the movies so many years ago. Also, the Voice Acting is very good for the most part, very rarely I cringed when I heard someone speak, and that one time, it was a pig-like creature making weird oinking noises at me. Also, fuck the droid.

Gameplay: This is divided into 6 sub-categories since MMOs are different.

Combat 5/10 - Combat is still clunky and clumsy here, but what pisses me off the most is healing delays. I will cast my heal, the bar hitting 2.5/2.5 and then... nothing, 1-2 seconds pass, and my character finally gets her heal off. This means I have to basically predict when damage will happen and cast spells early, which could cost me much needed force power that I would later need in the fight. It's really annoying, and it only happens in combat, outside of combat, there is no delay. Instant heals have no delays either from what I've seen.

From what I've read on forums, this is an animation problem. Star Wars favors realistic animation over smooth combat. Games like WoW sacrifice realistic animation in favor of a smoother combat system, which is why you sometimes find yourself running forward after mounting up but no mount on for a second or two. And really, I'd rather have a smooth combat than 'realistic animations' fucking up my rotations.

I've also had a few problems laying down my AoE spell a few times, from where the circle disappears to where it says I'm moving when I lay it when I clearly am not.

There's also WAY too many abilities to keep track of. This goes back to old style WoW, but the problem is setting up a good rotation to use them. Healing wise, it's disappointing, because over 50% of those abilities are useless, which surprises me as I thought I would've had more heals to work with. A knockback could be useful, but it also could be a double edge sword, as a guildmate and I were doing quests, and he would constantly use overload just as I laid my AoE down.

Also, companion AI isn't too well done. I'll CC a pat that came to me, and stupidly, my companion will shoot it and break it. Too bad my only CC is on a freaking 1 minute cooldown. That's going to be a big problem come later, when it's pretty common in flashpoints for people to break CC.

Crafting 7/10 - Same old here, cept there seems to be one profession that really ranks in money over others (Slicing). This will probably be changed in the future.

One big problem will be the fact that your companions make the stuff. At first, it's not too bad, but when you're waiting close to a hour for one of your characters to make you stuff when in normal games, you can do it instantly, it could piss you off. And not to mention, this is most likely going to be your credit and time sink. I guess the sacrifice to this was you don't have to do a damn thing when it comes to crafting if you don't want to farm nodes. But you still need to send companions out, because they can get things you cannot, like cloth and metals for blue/epic recipes.

Also, in order to learn blue and epic patterns, you have to craft the green or blue below it and pray that you get lucky when you reverse engineer it and get the pattern. I must've blown a lot of mats already on trying to discover epic patterns. You could conversely get recipes through 'gathering' professions as well. I've receieved a few recipes through Underground trading.

Other than that, there's no problems with crafting.

PvE (Questing, exploring, dungeons) 6/10 - Questing is boring. I'm sorry, but even with the story, I can't seem to get into the game like I did when WoW came out. Maybe it's because I've been playing MMOs with this formula for so long, but Star Wars has really failed to engage me. The quests are the same quests you've always done, get these items, loot these items from these mobs, kill x enemies. It also doesn't help that bad plot-twists could ruin quests, aka Sith Inquistor storyplot.

The biggest problem though is that you don't feel like you're playing a MMO at all. Save for flashpoints and heroics I did with my guildmates, I feel like I'm playing a single player RPG with coop rather than a MMO. Maybe it's because I leveled way too fast, but I rarely see anyone on the planet I'm on, and I'm on a full server. Sometimes I forget until I see someone in chat speak and I'm like 'Oh yeah...' You know a game isn't worth a sub fee if it takes general/guild chat to wake you up out of it.

People can argue about they don't see people in WoW, but the majority of people in WoW are at the level cap. Very few are at the level cap in SW when I was leveling, isn't it like impossible not to come across several players while on one planet???

There are phased quests and phased parts of the map too, so if you're doing certain quests, you don't have to worry about someone stealing your kills. Too bad I rarely, if ever, see people where I'm questing...

Flashpoints are basically the same, except for one problem. Remember how I said how epic Black Talon is? Well, the next flashpoints are really dull with little to no story. You do the flashpoint, there's one light/dark side choice, and that's it. The Black Talon sets it up like that's how the other instances are. I was sadly mistaken. Highly disappointed. I've done most of the flashpoints (Skipped foundry and Directive 7 though), and have yet to be impressed by any of the flashpoints like I was with Black Talon. False Emperor was somewhat interesting, but the time to complete it reminded me of doing BlackRock Depths back in vanilla wow. It took us 2 hours, no joke.

Hardmode flashpoints are composed of bosses doing the SAME things except they have very tight enrage timers. Like 1-2 minutes into the fight, the boss will enrage. Otherwise, bosses don't do anything different. It's boring and once you outgear the hardmode, the enrage timers don't become a problem. Tight enrage timers =! hard boss. I did Black Talon on Heroic and beyond the tight enrage timers, it's pathetically easy.

Companions also give their own quests much like Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2, and besides them, they are really the only characters I care about. That random NPC on Taris? Don't know, don't care. Your decisions don't really impact the world around you when they should. The NPCs are dull and lifeless, the entire world feels lifeless. Ocassionally, I'll see NPCs conversing via the VAing, but other than that rare occassion, the environment itself is dull. You think with all that VAing they dumped into this game, they could at least voice some NPC if you click on them at the very least. Or fucking give VAing for emotes...

Like I said, you can romance your companions, but there's one big problem I have with it. You only have ONE option out of your 5 to romance. Don't like the romance companion for your class? Too bad, you're stuck with them. I mean, really? That stinks....

PvP 5/10 - This game's pvp is horrid. Honestly, I thought Rift was the worst pvp I played, but I was wrong.

A big problem is that level 10's can fight with level 50's, there's no bracket, which I understand why they wanted to do this, but it also backfires hardcore. And while they got giving everyone a buff correct, the big problem is a level 10 won't have the abilities a level 50 has, and stuns, cooldowns, and certain abilities are going to be a huge advantage over someone of much lower level. Rift came close to doing it right, buffing low levels in x0-x9 warfronts, but giving a bracket so people with the talents won't have an unfair advantage over another.

I also mentioned all the other problems like stuns/knockbacks/interrupts and all. Since every class has one, it can be a nightmare for casters, especially healers. Nothing like being knocked around, stunned, and then dead before you can get a castable heal off. Also, no dimishing returns. Yeah.... Resolve bar, which is a bar next to your portrait, is supposed to make you immune for a few seconds from being stunned, but from my experience, it either doesn't work, or it'll work whenever it wants to.

Also, world pvp? I decided to check out Ilum and went to the area. All you're doing is going to a point on your map and blowing up Republic carriers, and if you're lucky, kill any republic you see. I didn't see a single republic and couldn't even do my daily because the republic didn't fight back. Not to mention, those big walkers roaming around? Are only decoration. I litterally stood on a spot where the opposing faction fires in and guess what? Took 0 damage. You think an area that has all these walkers around would actually be used for maybe battle? Nope.

After about a day, I came back again and guess what? Republic and Empire people were just trading off nodes so they could get their daily/weekly done. Yeah, epic pvp...

I also went back to Tatoonie to check out it's pvp area too and same issue, no republic. All I did in these areas was farm nodes. Yeah great world pvp, this'll be a problem on an unbalanced server for sure.

End game (50 only content) 4/10 - This gets a lower score because of one reason. HALF the heroic flashpoints are bugged in some shape or form or not even avaiable (As of right now, only 6 are functioning), some of them bugged to the point in making the run impossible to finish or complete. Really? Because when WoW came out with cata, all the heroics were working.

Didn't people on the forums say that Bioware had 15 flashpoints in the game, way more than WoW had? So why the bloody hell are only SIX of them on hardmode??? WoW cata launched with more heroics than that!

Not to mention, there's no LFD group, so getting a group, if you're not a tank or healer, takes forever to do. And that's the staple at 50, farm heroic dungeons. When you don't have a server LFD system, it becomes a problem.

Also, some of the flashpoints are very unforgiving, not because of new and amazing mechanics, but because bosses have 2 minute enrage timers. That means your dps has to be really good, otherwise you're dead. So if people were bitching about Dragon Soul in WoW being a massive gear check, hope you're ready for SW gear check.

If you think SW is going to be any different end game from WoW, think again. End game is the same wine and dine, farm dailies, farm heroics/hardmode dungeons for gear to set yourself up for raiding or farm pvp gear. The dailies are going to get old after doing them non-stop for like 2 weeks.

A big problem is that like Rift, pvp gear is about the same as pve gear. Which should NOT be the case, and this is where WoW does it right, it seperates pvp gear from pve, and you obviously won't be doing nearly as much dps or heals in your pvp gear than if you had pve gear. So lemme ask a perfect question: If pvp gear is no different from pve gear and there's a queue system for pvp, why in the holy mother of fuck would I farm normal dungeons for blue gear so I can do the hardmodes when I can get insta win epics eventually through pvp????

I also heard the normal raids are actually EASIER than the 5 man hardmode dungeons. What were they thinking!? I have yet to do any of these raids since my guild doesn't even know what it will do, so may update this section later.

Misc (Latency. bugs, configuration, community) 5/10 - This game seems really unpolished. I've come across bugs that I experienced in beta and there were quite a few times where mobs would 'evade bug' on us, making them unkillable. There's been issues from graphic issues (From purple flashing rocks to a bunch of white dots running across the floor of a cave), gameplay issues (Healing delays), light/dark points not taking effect even though they were supposed to occur (Had this happen on Hoth for me), sound randomly going out and in (More frequent when traveling indoors), coming across invisable walls when I shouldn't (doing /stuck, however, helped me get out), and a whole bunch of random things that should've been caught and fixed in beta (Cutscenes being blacked out, characters jittering a bit in cutscenes, characters turning their heads at odd angles in cutscenes, etc). I even fell through the world once on Ilum and I fell to my death on my Taxi. And in Alderaan, my companion fell over dead a few times too when I took a taxi in a character quest area.

I also don't like the fact that I get stuck in a 100 queue and when I finally get in, unless I'm on Dromund Kaas or Imperial Fleet, I'm really lucky to encounter someone. I mean, the first time I saw a republic, I was in my 40's (50 is the highest level). And I rarely see anyone else questing around me too, if I see a single soul where I am, I gasp in surprise. Where is everyone?? I thought the servers could hold thousands of people, but it seems like a lot less. The most I've seen was 150 people on the Imperial fleet according to the chat channel. Today though, I noticed my server is 'standard' most of the time, so either they upped the amount of people per server or people quit.

Community is about the same as WoW and if you honestly think that the community here will be any different than WoW, I have a bridge in NY I'd like to sell you. I really like the logic my fellow guild mates told me that it's okay to be an asshole since we're Sith and if I didn't like someone ninjaing my chest (Had this happen, gotta love when you're killing an elite, someone decides to take the chest where you were trying to clear, and no, you can't open it in combat), I should roll Jedi. Yeah, perfect example of what the community MAY be. Not to mention, anyone who critizes this game will get basically called a troll, no matter how weak or strong their arguements are.

Also, load times in general are horrid, and becomes really noticable on Alderaan, and from what people told me, it's because the game has to load 'a lot of flora life'. I could litterally get up and go to the bathroom, come back, and find the game still loading. I think the worst load times I had outside this game was a minute in WoW and that's cause I had so much going on in the background and got d/ced in a populated area. I turned off a lot of stuff hoping the load times would stop, no go.

Final Score 5.3/10 - Lot of features lack polish and the game offers nothing if you're a veteran player of WoW or other mmos like it.

Overall: 6.6/10 - A game that's not as solid as it could be and lacking features that should have been implimented at launch. If you're a Star Wars fan and are a hardcore fan of Bioware games in general, you'll enjoy the game, despite the flaws. But if you're a mmo veteran or someone who is tired of WoW and is looking for something different, I would not recommend ToR. ToR will not make you quit the game you're currently playing unless you're just sick of the environment itself and not the current mmo formula.