Great Time to Start

Good Time to Return

This weekend is going to be a huge hyped filled occasion, and twitter will be full of news trickling out of Blizzcon from the stable of Blizzard games.  However if you are not enthralled by that I have something to entertain you as well.  With not surprising timing, Square Enix has announced that this weekend that officially started at midnight PST all players who have ever played Final Fantasy XIV will be able to return and play for free until midnight PST on the 10th.  This means if you have the client already you just have to patch it up, if you do not have the client however thankfully Square Enix makes that relatively easy to find as well.  I literally just typed in “Final Fantasy XIV Client” and was taken directly to the easy to find download link.  Additionally if you are a Steam user, you can download a “demo” of the game which should download the full client as well.

For the my own purposes and the purpose of linking to friends I have maintained a playlist on my youtube account that contains each of the major patch trailers.  Square does an amazing job of highlighting all of the content that they add into the game during these trailers, and some of them are over ten minutes long showing off new features.  It has been two weeks now since the release of the 2.4 patch that added in a round of new stuff including the brand new Rogue class and Ninja job.  This admittedly has thrown the world out of whack a bit, and be warned that DPS queues in the duty finder are a bit longer than normal…  however this appears to be coming down rapidly as folks finish leveling their rogues and start playing the endgame.  The positive is that this has been a slow trickle and the server is still super active with FATEs actually viable in practically every zone.  This is also booned a bit by the improved Atma drop rates, making folks willing to work on Atma weapons for alts.  If you haven’t played in awhile… none of what I just said probably made much sense…  but just know that these are good things.

Great Time To Start

ffxiv 2014-11-02 19-34-21-091 If you have never played Final Fantasy XIV before, it is now the perfect time to start as well.  For starters there has been a 14 day trial system in place for a few months now, allowing you to get in and play for free.  If you prefer to go through steam I believe clicking the demo option will do the same thing… but I am not sure how the billing works through steam.  In theory everything has to go through the Mogstation, which admittedly the worst part of playing any Square Enix game is dealing with their extremely confusing account management system.  The reason why it is such a great time to start is that right now until November 12th, Steam has the complete Final Fantasy XIV game for half off.  That means the normal version is only $12.49 and the Collectors Edition that comes with a bunch of spiffy stuff including the adorable Fat Chocobo mount among other things is only $22.49.  This seems like an absolutely insane deal, and I may have ninja gifted the game to a few people yesterday as a result.

ffxiv 2014-11-01 20-06-51-406 One thing of note, in the world gone mad with F2P games… this is a traditional subscription model.  One interesting twist however is that there is something called an “Entry” subscription that is $12.99 a month and allows you to play a single character per server.  In truth this tends to be the sweet spot for most people, as you really only need one character in the game period.  The job system allows you to swap back and forth between many roles at will, allowing that one character to do damned near everything there is in the game.  For example right now my character Belghast Sternblade is a 50 marauder, 50 gladiator, 50 archer, 50 lancer, 40 conjurer, 33 pugilist, 26 thaumaturge, 19 arcanist, 15 rogue and 35 miner.   So for awhile I have considered dialing back to the one character account because the likelihood that I will ever care about another character on my server is supremely unlikely.

Better For Not Being Free To Play

ffxiv 2014-10-31 20-03-13-582 Yesterday I had a bunch of folks say essentially the same thing. “I would be excited if this was free to play”, which frustrates me a little bit… but I can see saying it.  There are some games that free to play would ruin, because in truth the “free” aspect of that name is generally a bold faced lie.  Sure there is some stuff you can do for free, but at the end of the day everyone needs to make money to keep their doors open.  As I have watched games go f2p, I have watched two things happen.  Either they greatly slow down the pace of content releases, or they start erecting paid walls between you and that content.  In truth ONE of the two has to happen or quite frankly the companies end up going out of business.  The once lightning pace that content dropped for Rift players feels like it has slowed to a trickle.  Then you have games like Star Wars the Old Republic where each and every thing in the game has some price tag associated with it.

ffxiv 2014-11-05 22-00-23-313 The thing that has impressed me the most with Final Fantasy XIV is the pace at which they have released content over the last year, and more so than that the sheer volume of content that gets released.  Roughly once a quarter they release a new major patch, and roughly once a month they release a minor patch… that is not just bug fixes but serious new system improvements.  For example… these are the 2.35 patch notes…  that are several pages long full of new systems and usability improvements.  When they add content they add it not just for the highest end players, but they trickle it through all play styles.  There are new max level dungeons, new raids, new crafting recipes and materials to go find, as well as a continuation of the really awesome storyline that is woven through the game.  They seem to care about all of the different playstyles that make up their community, and are wanting to give each of them a reason to keep logging in and playing.  Quite frankly…  free to play and having to worry about getting enough money to survive would absolutely tarnish the spirit of this game and its community.

Cactuar Server Community

I figured this was a good bookend to the post I made above.  Today I am going to talk about something probably strange to be thankful for, but I am going to anyways.  I am extremely Thankful for the existence of the Cactuar Server community and how awesome the people there are.  Once upon a time I was deeply connected to most of the server communities I was part of when I played games.  I was a huge supporter of Gaheris in Dark Age of Camelot and Xegony in Everquest…  so it was not strange when I landed in World of Warcraft to get involved with the Argent Dawn community as well.  The problem is that Argent Dawn broke my heart, the longer I played on it.  During those heady days after release we had a vibrant and thriving community, full of lots of interesting groups of people more than willing to work together towards larger goals.  Argent Dawn was a hotbed of non-guild based raiding and it was awesome.  Over time, especially with the release of Cataclysm…  this all changed and the old guard of players that were community focused slowly drifted off into the nether.

It was hard to watch the Argent Dawn community fall apart, so as I played other games I really never took the time to dip my toes into the larger server.  I stayed fairly insular and only really cared about my own guild and its well being.  This changed this summer when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV.  I think in part it is because when I first renewed my account, I was the only one to do so for a few weeks.  This meant I no longer had my life support system of known good players to run dungeons with, and was forced to get out and meet people in the community.  I am so thankful that I did because I have met some amazing people on this server and found it to be a throwback to a simpler time when people generally were nice to each other.  I’ve embraced our community whole heartedly and while it is not terribly well used yet… I’ve built a nook for the community and will be trying to get folks using it over the coming weeks.  So today I am thankful for finding the Cactuar community, because it has revitalized my faith that servers are a thing that can be super important to my game playing experience.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #MonthOfThankfulness

6 thoughts on “Great Time to Start”

    • Honestly I am not sure… I believe it would. Your account still exists, it just doesn’t have a code associated with it. I would try logging in, the game should patch up just fine. Worse case scenario you could just sign up for another 14 day trial from a different email.

  1. Final Fantasy 14 is one of those “elite” games where the quality and polish are at a level that exceed most other games. It is therefore worthy of charging a subscription fee. Free to play would not do this game justice.

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