Should be playing: Final Fantasy Realm Reborn

I was on the ground floor of the MMO, first playing NeverWinter over the AOL network back in ’91 and shared adventures made in “Unlimited Adventures” over telnet and various BBSs. I played the crap out of The Realm, the often overlooked progenitor of the MMO, and jumped on Ultima Online the minute I heard about it. It wasn’t until Everquest however that I truly fell in love. Everquest was the first game to not just be massively multiplayer, but to define the MMO with conventions like unbearable travel and down time, huge quests to uncover with no aid, pop ups or help, camping, death crawls, and large raids that were impossible to co-ordinate and would cause most people to disconnect. You might notice that everything I just talked about is horrible; that didn’t matter. At the time, we didn’t know any better and the joy came from being part of something truly exclusive and rewarding. We now have Steam and Xbox achievements or PlayStation trophies to mark the gamification of gaming, but in Everquest my reward for being one of a few people who could run safely from Guk to the Common Lands was an opportunity to sell non-local items at a marked up price, and to talk in group chat about zones other people had never seen. It was a real, and as rewarding as any other real thing. We always remember the bad; camping for days to get some item or spending hours just buffing a raid to die within the first 5 seconds, but we forget the implied truth; something about the game was so fantastic it motivated us to continue to do this. This “feel” has never been recreated in any other MMO. In fact the entire evolution of MMOs can pretty much be traced to “not being like Everquest”.

It made sense; churn for EQ was pretty high (the rate at which people would quit) as there were barriers to entry at every level. Trying to make a game that would appeal to this mass of people exposed to MMO but turned off by EQ's systems would turn out the be a licence to print money, as it spawned a little game called World of Warcraft. Everything about WoW was simpler than EQ. It came out 5 years after EQ (1999 and 2004, respectively) yet had almost the same recommended system specs. You couldn’t lose levels by dying. The world was much smaller and condensed, and travel options like flying stations and mounts were easy to come by. It introduced instanced gaming, where you didn’t have to fight other players for the majority of spawns. In short, it dumbed down the MMO into two tiers; the n00b and the hard-core, and let them play beside each other for the first time. Unfortunately for the industry it worked very well, and every MMO since then in the US has focused on making things even simpler, even more accessible, and even more newbie friendly. In almost 9 years, no MMO has been able to recreate the blockbuster success of these two pioneers. Although EQ lost the number one spot to WoW in a big way (Everquest had in its prime no more than 4 million subscribers, while WoW has topped 10 million) EQ has consistently remained the number two MMO aside from a few months here and there as new games launch, for most of its ridiculous 14 year (and counting!) life span. It has 13 expansion packs costing $29.99 each, and they sell about as well as most MMO launches nowadays; in the 400,000k units range. This is why the head of Epic Games said at this year's E3 that anyone developing an MMO for North America is just stupid. Hundreds of games have tried and only two have ever seen real success.

Over in the Asian market, it’s another story. Sparked by the breakout success of Lineage, the Asian market has pushed to create MMOs that are harder, more complex, more elitist and more grind-tastic then their competitors, driving an economy based on truly addictive and engaging game play. Rather than say people are complaining that it takes two weeks to gain a second level let’s make it take less time, they have focused on how to make that two weeks fun, and once they have done that they stretch the two weeks to three. The result has been that while the US market sees stagnation and decline, the Asian market has exploded. Be it Maple Story, Runescape, or Ragranok, to name only the heavily westernized ones, the Asian market sees a game hit WoW-like success once or twice every year. As a LARP owner, I’m uniquely qualified to comment on why; Western MMOs try to give players what they want and ask for, while Asian games just focus on hitting design goals and building what they envision, ignoring what players tell them they want with good reason: players have no flipping idea what they want and are often happiest while doing things they just told you they hate.

This brings us to Final Fantasy 14, the Japanese game that wasn’t. Following the EQ to WoW model, SquareEnix realised they already had a very successful Japanese MMO with FF11 and they should appeal to the gamers who left that game because it was too Asian. They put together an innovative new type of game with active combat and many of the conventions now commonplace to MMOs here in the West, without the trapping of redundant activity common to games from the East. The result was shockingly bad (which is saying a lot for a franchise that just set the bad standard with FF13). So bad that after issuing several apologies they stopped charging for the game and let everyone play for free until they could “get it right”. 2 years later they decided that wasn’t going to work; launched on September 2010, FF14 was taken offline on November 11 2012, making it among the shortest lived MMOs in history. The game will return with a complete remake called “A Realm Reborn” on August 27th of this year. I have been playing Realm Reborn beta on and off (mostly off to be honest) for almost a year now and I’m extremely excited about the direction they have taken. Gone is the Western MMO with an Asian flair and in its place is a game that manages to deliver on everything that made EverQuest great while hitting most of what made WoW accessible, while being unapologetically Asian.

FF11 was the “Crysis” of MMOs, pushing the limits of what a system can put out, and FF14 is worse in a good way. The official benchmark looked at my overclocked 3930K with two $700 video cards and said “HA, white boy thinks he’s got a good computer” before setting everything to medium. Even at that level, the game blows away any other MMO and could hold its own against anything you’ve seen in this generation of single player. In fact the popular rumor is that the minimal specs were reduced so that the game could run on the PS3; the original build being too graphics heavy to even run at 30fps on the console. Seeing the staples of Final Fantasy realized in such high fidelity is a true treat, and this mix of awe and nostalgia continues thought out the experience from the attention to detail you see in the face of a moogle to the familiar fanfare that plays when you complete a quest. Half my motivation to level up was the promise of riding a chocobo at higher levels, and the experience didn’t disappoint!

Gameplay feels a decade out of place but is perfect; you press a button that starts a cast bar, which eventually translates into some damage being done or healed. You stand there, unmoving, while the monster beats on you with attacks you can do nothing to mitigate. There is no active combat, no blocks, no quick time events, and no circles to move out of; this is old-school. Driving this however is one of the most complete and satisfying class systems I have ever seem. Your progression is divided into base classes and jobs and you can switch between any number of them on the fly by simply changing your primary weapon. The game takes care of the rest of the gear change; for example, when I equip my sword the game puts on my plate armour and when I equip my wand it goes to PJs and a pointy hat without me needing to handle that. The gear used in these transitions doesn’t even take up space in my bags, which is good, given the number of jobs and classes I have to choose from. Adding to the complexity, classes allow you to mix and match skills from another classes you have levels in and focus on general things like DPS and healing, while Jobs offer inflexible skill sets that focus on more complex roles like tanking or buffing. From what I’ve seen (admittedly I have not done raiding) there is no clear “best” way to go, leaving you free to play to your style.

The game steals everything good from the last few years of MMO development without giving up its roots. Public quests frequently spawn while you’re out adventuring and story zones are instanced so that other players don’t distract from the experience. There is also a lot of voice work and full cut scenes, a personal plot line, and a class plot line for every one of the classes, jobs, and crafting classes. Drop in any time PvP and raids round out the systems we have grown to expect. For the less combat focused, collection, exploration, and crafting all benefit from the systems and styles in place in most Asian MMOs, but not common here in the West. You have challenges to find every area on a map, kill a given number of every type of monster including some rare and some super powerful spawns, and crafting focuses on mini-game driven systems with a lot of depth. The first time I approached a node and saw a list of the items I could try and mine from it beside a chance of success I knew this was going to be something I hadn’t seen before. And although not in game yet, FF14 promises the same plethora of diversions and non-combat activities that we’ve seen in other single player FF games as well as FF11.

Sony has also made some very smart decisions with servers and versions. Unlike FF11, where all servers were hosted in Japan at launch, FF14 will launch with NA, EU, and JP servers, and PS3 and PC owners will play beside each other on the same servers. Best of all, buying the game on the PC gives you a digital download on PlayStation Network, and buying the game for PS3 gives you a CD code for the PC game (account linked so you can’t sell it, obviously).

All in all, A Realm Reborn makes me feel like I’m playing an MMO from 10 years ago with better graphics and slightly better quality of life, and I couldn’t be happier. The simple combat system means that while playing with friends I can focus on socialization and the almost overwhelming quantity of systems means I’ll never been lacking for things to do solo. 2013 promises to be an exciting year for gaming with new consoles and ton of new games, but this is one of the games I find myself the most excited about. The box plus subscription model might be off-putting for some, but if you have $29.99 to spend you should defiantly come to a Raven day event. But if you have $29.99 to spare AFTER paying for Raven, this is the game to spend it on.