{"id":1074,"date":"2013-07-07T16:49:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-07T21:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/?p=1074"},"modified":"2013-07-07T20:41:18","modified_gmt":"2013-07-08T01:41:18","slug":"approaching-the-ffxiv-arr-beta-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/?p=1074","title":{"rendered":"Approaching the FFXIV-ARR Beta 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Final_Fantasy_XIV_box_art\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I spent a bunch of time over my 4th of July holiday weekend playing the Final Fantasy – A Realm Reborn phase 3 beta. \u00a0Wow that is a mouthful. \u00a0Though before I make my traditional post of thoughts I felt my experience with this game deserved a bit of background.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I played maybe ten hours total in the beta for the 1.0 version of FFXIV over the course of a month, and zero of retail. \u00a0My opinion of that experience was; \u00a0It was poorly translated. Ran terrible. Had non standard MMO game systems, that were explained in zero fashion. \u00a0A difficult to navigate UI. \u00a0Very little story guidance, heck very little guidance at all. \u00a0A terrible map, with crazy twisty maps. \u00a0(see example below) It felt like a beta.<\/p>\n

\"FFXIV<\/a>
FFXIV 1.0 North Forest<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Apparently I was not the only one that had issues with the game, and it launched to a lot of moans from players around the world. \u00a0It was such a mess, that Square\/Enix did not even charge owners a subscription fee for several months; all while promising to fix it. \u00a0 Ultimately it appears that their solution to fixing it, was to start over while finding a way to carry old characters over in some fashion. \u00a0\u00a0I applaud them for not only making such a tough decision, but building this rebirth into the lore for the new version.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to this summer. \u00a0I had long since written the game off, so when I started seeing rumblings about the 2.0 version of the game from people in my gaming social networks. \u00a0Enough rumblings to make me wonder if they could really be talking about FFXIV or simply a game like FFXIV. \u00a0Then a beta invite popped into my email, odd since I don’t recall signing up for it, \u00a0I figured sure why not. \u00a0Sadly it was a weekend only beta and by the time I got it installed the servers were down.<\/p>\n

Hmmm, I had the client installed, my interested peeked, but nothing to play. So instead I spent some time actively searching out and reading various forum threads and social media posts about the beta. \u00a0To my surprise much of what I read was positive. \u00a0 I looked ahead to the next weekend test which happened to be (here in the U.S.) a long four day 4th of July weekend, and decided I would set aside a few large blocks to time to dive in and see what the rebirth of a game I had written off had to offer.<\/p>\n

How did it go? \u00a0More on that in my next post.<\/p>\n

Spoilers: \u00a0\u00a0I guess I’m a sucker because I just pre-ordered a copy, and am actually feeling ok about paying a subscription fee.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent a bunch of time over my 4th of July holiday weekend playing the Final Fantasy – A Realm Reborn phase 3 beta. \u00a0Wow that is a mouthful. \u00a0Though before I make my traditional post of thoughts I felt my experience with this game deserved a bit of background.   I played maybe ten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,89,9,55],"tags":[90,101,111,113],"class_list":["post-1074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ffxiv-arr","category-final-fantasy","category-games","category-musings","tag-ffxiv","tag-ffxivarr","tag-games","tag-mmo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1074"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1074\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xenopulse.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}