Final Fantasy XIV, Part 3

This is part 3 of my thoughts on Final Fantasy 14. This time, I will be focusing on gathering, crafting and other miscellaneous systems that happen to be in the game, including the user interface. You should read the previous parts if you haven’t.

You can find Final Fantasy 14 at their website.

Let’s start with gathering. Final Fantasy 14 tries to make it more interesting by giving you abilities and having gathering points with multiple possible items to gather. You can gather up to four times on a normal gathering point and each different item at that point has a different difficulty rating. You can increase your chances of getting items by equipping better gear.

Yes, you have gathering specific gear, and they actually look pretty good, too. Gathering is a full on class with abilities and more.

It’s more interesting, but it still does feel like just going through a menu and then watching your character do some animations. There are rarer gathering points that only appear during certain hours of the day, but that just means you need to wait for the thing you need. All gathering points are specific to the character, so other players can’t take from you and you don’t need to worry about taking from other players.

The main problem I have with gathering is that for a large, large majority of the items, they only exist in one specific part of the world. Oh, you want some copper? Better teleport across the world to the one place it spawns. It really makes the world of Final Fantasy XIV feel like it’s designed for constant teleporter use. It happens especially when you’re trying to craft something and need to gather stuff from five different zones. Or you could just pay money and buy it from other players.

At least you have a log that will tell you where everything is, so you always know where to find materials.

Now how about crafting?

There are many different crafting types, and each one is its own job. Functionally, though, they all work the same. You just have a different main weapon for them, like chef’s knife for Culinarians and hammers for Blacksmiths.

They have abilities, and you need to use them to fill up the item you want to craft’s progress bar. However, there’s more to it than that. You also have a quality bar that you want to fill up. High quality gives you a better chance of making a High Quality item with better stats and such. For most actions you do to the item, it will lose a bit of durability. If durability reaches 0, you fail the craft and might lose some of the materials.

So the goal is to try to get the quality bar as high as possible with enough durability remaining to fill up the progress bar. It is more involved and interesting than just pressing one button, until you have to craft a bunch of stuff at once. Then it quickly grows tedious. There is a quick craft but it likely won’t produce the High Quality items you want, only normal quality.

So while crafting feels more involved, it does still get tedious when you need to craft several intermediary items before getting to the one you actually want. Also, the game encourages you to go into every crafting job since a lot of the items use things from other professions. Otherwise, you’ll be buying a lot of stuff from the other players. That means going through the same leveling process up to 7 times just to craft what you want. The eighth crafting job, Culinarian, isn’t really used in other crafter jobs.

The UI (user interface) of crafting is annoying, though. It’s a fight just trying to get what you want to get sometimes. In general, the UI of the game feels old and like you’re battling with where you need to go. It feels like there are too many dialogue boxes or menus to go through to get to what you need to do. At times, I think it’s because this game is available on consoles as well, so the menus must be able to be navigated by a controller. It still feels simple and bad at times, though.

I’ll talk about some other parts of the game as well not having to do with crafting or combat. Mainly how it feels at times. There is a lot of jankiness to the game. For instance, you cannot repair everything at once. There is a repair all button, but it is only for each category, such as things you have equipped or things in your inventory. If you want to repair everything you own, you need to go down the list of 6 or so separate categories and click Repair All on all of them.

In another case, the glamour system is rough and pretty basic. Glamour is the ability to change a piece of equipment to look like another piece of equipment. In character creation, certain options are inexplicably tied together, such as the Au’ra horns and their face shape.

From what I know, most of the jankiness and odd choices in the game comes from poor decisions made during the initial 1.0 version. Even after turning the game into the 2.0 version, changing those would have been too hard to do, thus, they remain even to this day.

There are some thing that I think they can change but choose not to for some reason or another. For example, you do not auto-dismount your chocobo when you want to attack. You have to manually dismount in order to strike the enemy. I know you can auto-dismount because you do it when you talk to someone. Also, why do you auto-dismount to talk to someone? (Probably to prevent too many mounts taking up space near important NPCs when everyone is on that quest)

Also, you do not auto-target an enemy if you have no enemy selected. Trying to attack with no target will just have the game complain at you instead of picking a target. Either you must target something first or wait for the enemy to hit you before the game auto-targets them.

For as much as you’re fighting or getting on and off your chocobo, these two issues just grate sometimes.

Being a Final Fantasy game there is a lot of side activities to do. None of them are as involved as Blitzball, but you can play Triple Triad. There is also treasure digging. And more. They are mostly simple things, but they do break up the questing if you just want a break.

Next time, I’ll talk more about the plot of the game give my final thoughts on Final Fantasy XIV.

Find it at the official website.