Final Rage XIV - first impressions

Thought I give it a try because of all the hype around it, despite being 10 years old? Got a free trial, hit almost 30 over the weekend and here's what I got to say. Why here? Because trials can't post on their forums. And reddit would probably instaban me for "bad langauge waah waah" or being "toxic"...

But this has to be said:

The interface is absolute DOG SHIT.
There's nothing user friendly about anything. Nothing makes sense. Everything is done to TORTURE YOU. You all played wow, so keep that in mind as comparison. And I only played this a few days and already got hours of rage to report.

Everything I did, everywhere I went, nothing but suggestions fuming down like "this is wrong, they did that wrong too, this doesn't work, that's bad, this sucks, wtf is this even?"...

I don't even know where to start.
First of all, afaik they made it for consoles, so every pc master race quality of life standard feature expectations you might have: give it up.

Visuals really don't matter that much. It has that odd high fidelity crisp look like GW2, in a bad way, with everything just looking like you're playing a custom counter-strike map from 1990. Okay, so what?

The zones too are like GW2: enclosed tunnel areas, with magic invisible walls stopping you everywhere from even entering water that's deeper than knee high.
Feels like you're in some theme park, everywhere just a handful of type X monsters to kill between roads and lamps, nothing natural, no npc population going about their business, just a all around static lifeless artificial "world". Keep in mind this was 2010, just 3 years before GtaV came out, which in comparison to open world sandbox scale and animation feeling alone delivers on another dimension... Really dissappointing, but no biggie.

The cutscene animations, the acting, dialogue, all cringe and poorly executed.
Like watching a fan project middle school stage play, in digital form.
Still not a problem, "it's a FF thing". Aquired taste.


But here are the things I just couldn't stand:


The locked ui.
Everything you want to adjust: Go fuck yourself.
Any hotkeys for toggling target names, life bars, positions, conditions? Nope.
A tiny quick info popup at the bottom corner maybe when hovering the mouse over targets or items? Nope.

Sure you do have stuff to adjust in the settings but nothing that you want or need: because there was never mouse support in a original console game!
Everything is designed for console users; look around toggle target buttons and navigate the drop menus. It's like a straight jacket for anyone with any sort of standards of having control over their game...

The map.
PLEASE KILL ME!
Why couldn't you make it like wow? Left click in, right click out... drag the map, move it all around? Every map is a limited box with sub regions, which you toggle between by either a drop menu or finding the connecting joint, those "magic instance walls, because we had to optimise it for console" stupid loading areas, and click that...

AND EVEN THEN YOU HAVE NO CLUE WHERE THE FUCK YOU ARE IN RESPECT TO THE ENTIRE WORLD because you can only view the main mega world map by pressing a button on the medium area maps, that takes you to the main map, which is A PAINTED PIECE OF SHIT, with town names, or what you wanna call them, capital cities or regions? And this still doesn't tell you jack shit where you are or how to actually get anywhere! This map system design is the most rage inducing piece of fucking dogshit garbage that makes you wanna roundhouse kick a dozen babies after setting them on fire first...
it's absolute FUCKING CANCER!!

Waypoints... crystal teleport stones or whatever dingdongs.
All drop menus. Enjoy memorising every name in relation to quest locations.
When using smaller stones to teleport around a city, you got to click the quest on the side, see where to go, look for a stone near that spot on the map, look at the stone name, memorise it, click the stone you're next to, select the name of that stone you want to go to.

They just couldn't add a normal design like POE has it, very basic:
Click the stone to pop up a map with all the waypoint stones that you've unlocked being displayed in a slight glowing state, and the locked stones in a non glowing grayed out state. You instantly see where you're going, the place name, possible quests and other stuff nearby, with a instant sense of where or why. SO HOW FUCKING HARD IS THAT?? Did any of these designers have two fucking braincells?! You get a fucking plain drop text menu... ENJOY!


Here's the best and worst part:
It's cool how you can off spec any class or role on one char, and activate that by simply equipping a main hand item of said role.
BUT THEY INCLUDED PROFESSIONS IN THIS!!!
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!?

There's like 10 professions, mining, lumber, fishing, cooking, weaving, leatherwork, smithing, goldsmith, armorsmith, weaponsmith, alchemy, carpentry, alchemy, surely forgot something... and they all require you to FUCKING EQUIP THE APPROPRIATE TOOL whenever you want to craft or gather anything related!
And there's main hand and off hand tools!!!
AND LVL 1-5-8 and maybe even higher tools!!!

And I almost forgot why I started even doing this post:
You need to buy at least 20-30 tools and keep them in your inventory bag,
and then there's this seperate armoury inventory... which I didn't know how it worked.



So I thought I'm gonna think ahead. I bought all the tools I could find, cover every base, learn the professions later on my travels because I was missing a few, right? RIGHT???

The fun part about your inventory is, you can't do SHIT ABOUT IT!
You can "sort" it and watch items shuffle willy nilly.
You can't sort them by X filter. You can't lock them in place. You can't assign different bags to different item types, like "all my tools in here".
NOTHING! YOU CAN DO NOTHING! Every item has to be manually moved.

You can however save gear profiles. So in order to do that I thought I'm gonna be a good boy and put all my tools from my bag slots 1, 2 and 3 into 4, the blue area. So I equipped my smith hammer (green), saved the gear profile as smith, dragged the profile icon into my action bar next to my mining profile, which would allow me to quickly activate any profession or combat class.

The red circle is my main weapon and spec: gladiator.
I activated it to update my action bars and move the new profession profile icons into their place: purple area.
I tried adding just the tools: pink area, but that did nothing. What a shocker. So I noticed my smith hammer did not go back into the bag slot 4 to all his buddies where I just manually placed them all, but into my ARMOURY BAG which I don't know, should be reserved for WEAPONS AND GEAR ONLY, not profession tools?! And there's nothing you can do about it (afaik)!

So you will have any loot, gear and weapons overflowing into your bags from the armoury, because it will be filled with all the tools you equip/unequip while switching around working on your professions!
WHO!!! THE FUCK!!! THOUGHT!!! THIS WOULD BE!!! A FUCKING GOOD IDEA!!!
WHO????? YOU FUCKING PIECE OF HUMAN GARBAGE!!!!!!

So the next 10 hours or so I probably spend equipping all my tools, making profiles, dragging icons on my action bars over and over again, because it appears to save only the right side action bars while swapping specs, so I have to drag all my combat specs to the bottom action bars, for every profession I activate...

I got standards okay?
This type of shit should not sandbag a player, especially a NEW PLAYER, who gets totally turned off, just after playing for a few hours a few days...

So many issues in such a short time, and I didn't even mention everything on my mind! THIS SHOULD NEVER BE THE CASE IN A 2020 game, even if it was made in 2010 and EVEN IF IT WAS MADE FOR CONSOLE IN THE FIRST PLACE!
This is unacceptable, ENFURIATING, ENRAGING, FRUSTRATING, MOOD KILLING, UTTER DOG SHIT!!!

I will not pay $10 for this, speak a monthly sub fee, or more for expansions.
I'm trying to get a mount, unlock my materia socket crafting, and most likely quit after that. Pushing myself just to train my irl will power.

If you're into self torture, you should 100% play this game.
Can't recommend it enough.

Had to bash this game some more after dipping into the macro design...

The game basically runs all attack skills on a 2.5 second global cooldown,
with a combo system. No combo in order = no bonus dmg, which is almost the same 100% for every class. So the combo system basically kills all freestyle options. It forces the player to do nothing but spam ABCD all day long for optimised dps.
Who wants their rotation to be 100+ 100+ 100+ 100 dmg
when you can do 100+ 200+ 200+ 300??

So naturally I think hey, let me just try some of my godlike wow macros...
In wow, as a simple example, I could use something like this:

"

#showtooltip
/startattack
/castsequence reset=3 sinister strike, eviscerate

Compare to FFXIV (explained later):

"

/targetenemy
/ac "spinning edge"
/micon "spinning edge"
/wait 3
/ac "gust slash"
/micon "gust slash"
/wait 3
/ac "spinning edge"
/micon "spinning edge"
/wait 3
/ac "gust slash"
/micon "gust slash"
/wait 3

WOW:
As a macro icon I would select the red question mark, meaning it will always display the correct skill related icon, which is next in order.
What this basically does:
It targets the closest enemy straight up my camera(cone) and activates combat, uses sinister strike when I'm in range and have enough energy, then switches to eviscerate. If for some reason my target managed to block or evade my attack, I can't use eviscerate without a combo point. So I just wait 3 seconds (the reset=3 part). This switches the order back to sinister strike from eviscerate.

I got basically every skill as a macro sequence on every toon. 90% of my action bar buttons are custom macros, with on average 2-4 skills in one.
10/10 quality of life feature.
And a macro can be 255 characters long.


Now let's look at this fucking piece of XIV macro shit:



First of all, as I already mentioned, global cd is 2.5 sec.
The macro command for "wait" between skills is always rounded.
So you can either make it 2 or 3 seconds, and thus executing the next skill too soon, or 0.5 seconds too late, which in long fights will stretch out and will be... what's the opposite of optimised? Ah yes, fucking stupid as shit!

I'm a complete noob, but this is what I learned within researching for an hour. There are hardly any proper answers to any of my questions, since the FFXIV player mentality is "no such macro options, it is what it is" with a passive aggressive "fuck off back to wow with your macros if you don't like it here!" between the lines.

So this is the best "strike + eviscerate" equivelant macro I managed to make:
First of all, the character limit is 15 lines, not characters. You can force a ton of text further right by awkwardly stretching the text box. But you guessed it, doesn't work. Commands must start on their own line to some degree.

The second issue is that one button press just fires the entire macro in one go. And there's no reset to start the cycle over again. So you either fire all ABCD skills in one splurg resulting in nothing but A being used and BCD being skipped, the most useless macro you could make.
Or add a wait timer between A, B, C, D.

Which again is not what I or anyone wants.
We want a wow macro, to just do the thing we want, when we want, and reset the rotation when we want, by spamming said button or letting it reset. Very simple and very efficient.

But what do these XIV dev geniuses give us?
This piece of shit....

I copypaste my stab + kick combo, it autofires twice.
Stab kick stab kick with 3 sec wait times.
Feels bad, doesn't work, runs on 1 button press, you have no clue which skill is actually up, can't control the button to use a skill exactly when you want, and all 15 lines of macro space used.

GW2 had, if I remember correctly, skills that always rotated these built in combos automatically and you couldn't change them, adjust anything, and it sucked as much as this.
Wow just did it right. Gives you total control, everything about using skills in wow feels so much better than in any game I ever played.


It's fair to conclude that the XIV devs designed this system intentionally to force players into executing each combo manually; why else would they have gimped the macro design like this?? Wow was been out for 6 years before XIV came out and XIV has extremely many similarities with wow, down to quests.
There's no way they weren't aware of how superior wows macro system was.
They said "naah, fuck this, we gonna MAKE YOU spam these buttons".
But hey, I never player it on a console with a controller, for which it originally was made for, so I can't say how satisfying it might be for those players to just rub their thumbs in a circular motion over a controller.


10 years in, way too late, and they will hardly never change the system to give pc users a huge amount of control and such a quality of life feature.

At this point I have to almost applaude square enix for being able to get millions of users to pay for this, with a monthly sub fee on top.
Yes, I'm almost a week in, lvl 30, got a mount, but it's been hell.
Someone oughta pay me for the stress dmg I've taken from having to suffer from this games technical design aspect.

If I regain any energy I might post the last part,
about crafting and some misc stuff.

FF14 was a PC exclusive. :)

Tried Final Fantasy 4-5 years ago as it was mentioned by different sources at that time as one big WoW competitor.

I forgot what class i made but i think some small midget weeb character as meleee.

Have not played long as it was boring as hell. Maybe 1 week max.

World and environment feels static and lifeless even more than vanilla WoW from 2004 before it introduced phasing in 2007/8.

The lifelessness is more prevalent in big player hubs/cities where literally nothing moves except players doing posing/dancing or stockpiling at crafting spots.