I will preface this with I have never been super into Final Fantasy games, played a couple but only ever beat the first one.
I have been super addicted to this lately, and wanted to see if anyone else had given it a try.
I'll go over the reasons I enjoy the game, and give a couple warnings of what to expect in a moment, but for anyone that does not know the origins of the "A Realm Reborn" part of the title I think it is very interesting, and while I was late to the party hearing it is what got me to try the game in the first place.
Basically, Final Fantasy XIV came out, a MMO, and people hated it for a number of reasons. It ended up being a flop as a result. The devs took all the criticism to heart, scrapped the ENTIRE game, story, everything, and rebuilt it from the ground up. They didnt just rebuild the game, they built a brand new custom ENGINE for the remaking of the failed game. That is a crazy amount of work for something that already failed. They kept the servers of the first try going for anyone who still wanted to play, and then when they were ready they advanced the timeline of the world forward 5 years, so story-wise all the stuff that was going on in the first game was completely derailed by a sudden cataclysmic event that left the world in turmoil that it is only now recovering from.
I really liked that the devs took that kind of feedback so well and were willing to go through all that. You don't hear things like that often, if ever to that extreme.
Things I like:
-Anybody can play any class at any time. My play style for RPGs was forever ruined by CoH, I like alts, I like playing tanks, healers, damage dealers, and whenever I play one role for too long I get bored. In this game you can play EVERY class simply by equipping the main weapon of that class. You start over at level 1 on that class, but you can switch back at pretty much any time except dungeons, and I assume the raids unlocked in high levels. There are even BENEFITS for doing so, some abilities/spells you gain in a class you can use in other classes. Generally MMOs loose me because it is hard to play multiple roles/characters, this game rewards me.
-While the combat does not bring a lot of new things to the table, it has a lot of things I like. Several classes use combo systems very similar to Dual Blades in CoH, there is a lot of staying mobile to get out of attacks, keep things in your attacks, ect.
-The game is pretty, and surprisingly not super heavy on computer resources. On this computer I played Neverwinter and The Old Republic on high but not Max settings and rarely saw any lag, this game I have on max settings, would say it looks FAR better than either of those games, and my computer barely seems to notice it is open.
-There is a feature called the Duty Finder, again not a unique concept, but I rather like how they did it. Basically you can use it to find a team to do any dungeon you have unlocked and your current class is high enough level for (too high and you will be scaled down but still get exp appropriate to your level). It pulls players from all servers that are looking for whatever you queue up for, and while a damage dealing class may have to wait a little while, a tank or healer can find something pretty quickly. If you use the "duty roulette" feature to do anything in your level range as a tank/healer class you will find something almost instantly and get really nice rewards for being a class in need.
-There are also things to queue up for in the duty finder called Guildhests that give you huge bonuses the first time you do them on each class, helping you level the different classes and make a good amount of money. These are basically super short dungeons, sometimes just doing a boss fight.
-The dungeons are fun.
-The community has been pretty good to me so far, but might just be my server (Faerie, let my girlfriend pick it, lol)
-I've mostly played melee classes so far, but most of the attacks have been fun and satisfying, even if I am using the same handful over and over. Few games have felt that way for me on melee toons since CoH.
-The main quest series that you have to do to unlock dungeons and other parts of the game has been very fun and interesting so far.
-There are multiple ways to level up:
1) The main quest along with a few side quests is a great way to do it solo
2) Areas appropriate to your level will provide repeatable quests with good rewards.
3) There are Fates, which are events that pop up that you can do with anyone else in the area that joins, I saw a similar system in Guild Wars 2, but I felt like GW2 kindof revolved around that system too much while this one I have been able to jump in when I felt like it, or hunt them when I wanted, but not feel like they were shoved in my face when I didnt want to do them.
4) The duty finder for dungeons and guildhests, which I described above
5) There are all kinds of challenges you can complete either as you are doing other things or by seeking them out, from "explore all of this map" to "hunt 4 of this enemy" to "do 5 unique dungeons" you will be constantly progressing on things that will give you random chunks of exp, money, even powerful end game items
-Content, content, content. There are 3 very different areas you can start in depending on your starting class, and each has zones with unique quests, fates, and repeatable quests to get you from 1 to 50 if you want to stay in that area (the main story will move you all over the place, which I like, and it is required to really progress the game and unlock things like your mount, but for other classes you have SO much else to do). I've also been told that when you hit 50 (the max level until the expansion is released in June) SO much is opened up to you it is like playing an entirely new game, and even if you want to stick with just one class you will have plenty to do and work on for a very long time.
-There is no pay 2 win style item store. To my knowledge you can buy things that let you redesign your character and maybe things like rename tokens and server transfers, but that is about it.
-I have enjoyed the crafting whenever I was watching TV and didnt want to really invest into the game, but it may not be for everyone as it is a little grindy.
Be warned of a couple things:
-This is a buy the game and pay a subscription style game. You can do a 14 day (or until level 20 on as many classes as you can do in 14 days) trial for completely free, and that was enough for me to decide I wanted to keep playing. You also get another 30 days when you buy the game ($20 for the standard edition, $40 for special which comes with some cosmetic things like alternative mounts, they still have to be unlocked at the same point in the main story as they otherwise would)
-Gold farmers are very...vocal here. The starting cities you will sometimes see chat spam, it's kindof rare, but you will get private messages with it on a regular basis, and if you dont block the person sending it they will do it over and over.
-I have felt some grind to the game, but honestly no more than running radio missions in CoH, overall I have rather enjoyed it.
