After two weekends with A Realm Reborn, Ragar gives his thoughts on the remade MMO

Conclusion

While I didn’t get the chance to try everything in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn during the two weekends, I do feel that I’ve experienced enough of the game that I’m far more interested in the game than I was before and am considering putting in a preorder. With that said, there are still a lot of questions I have about the game I’m hoping to have answered in the next few months between now and the August 27th release. What’s the plan for future content additions? What’s the small group content like? Is their tanking fun? Is endgame primarily raiding-based or is there a true endgame model for all of the players?

That last one’s especially important given the inclusion of gatherers and crafters as true professions. If the game turns out to be mostly raiding at the end, how do you keep those classes relevant? If you make raid drops that dwarf crafted pieces, then you risk destroying the market for most professions and driving those players away. If you include raid-quality crafting recipes but make them bind-on-pickup and lock them behind boss loot tables like we’re accustomed to seeing, then crafters feel like they’re obligated to raid for those recipes even if they’d rather just make things, again risking that you drive those players away. Gatherers have a similar problem: even if you do provide raid-quality crafting recipes, how do you handle the materials? Do you stick with regular materials and just require HQ pieces? Do you make certain components only come from those raid zones? If this is the case, then you either risk driving away the gatherers or you force raids to bring along gatherers or to make members level a gathering class during their downtime.

Given how well the ARR remake of FFXIV has done so far, I have hopes that these issues will be addressed, but we’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime though, I plan on spending more time in Eorzea when the servers open back up again. I still have plenty of recipes to learn as a Culinarian and Armorer as well as a variety of other classes I haven’t tried like Blacksmith, Fisher, Carpenter, etc… Well, that and finish seeing the story, but you can tell where my heart lies.

Michael “Ragar” Branham