Where's My Team?

It has occurred to me of late, especially when watching television, that video games don’t do ‘the team’ very well. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that when a team is featured in a video game the game will suck; Binary Domain, Fuse, etc. and the list goes on. Go ahead, prove me wrong, with very few exceptions every single time a team was featured in a video game it was a pretty awful game.

Eorzea Journeys III

A little late this week with my Eorzea update, life has a way of wrecking your plans but it was a good week in Eorzea. I started unlocking my gathering classes as I picked up both mining and botanist. Gathering in Eorzea is almost Zen-like. After you get into the groove of things you can quite literally read a book or watch television at the same time. I spent three hours mining and reading a book at one time, multitasking in an MMO is so much fun. I leveled up a few classes this week but mostly I fixed on the Gladiator class pushing it up to level 31.

The Almost Sandpark

Eliot Lefebvre has a great article over on Massively on why he likes FFXIV. Check it out:

Eorzea Journeys II

It’s been an interesting week in Eorzea. In the real world A Realm Reborn has been a smashing success at least critically. Since SquareEnix still hasn’t opened digital sales, I’d assume they did alright on that front as well. On the personal side I had some internet issues. Sometimes I’m not quite sure if [Name withheld] is my internet provider or my bookie, considering how often they seem to take me to the cleaners. On the positive side I’m ramping up my experience gain as I grow more accustomed to FFXIV. I’ve put my race to 50 for my Monk on hold a bit to try to get more dungeons cleared in the main story. Playing the Marauder is a bit of a jump from the Monk but it’s similar enough to get me over the humps fairly easily.

For the Critics

We love to criticize. About anything and everything we possibly can. Politicians, bureaucrats, game developers, movie stars, authors, revenuers, journalists, lawyers, doctors; no one is spared from the all-seeing eye of the critic. ‘A generation of critics’, someone once wrote, instead of leaders. I think we’re afraid, afraid of our neighbors, countrymen, even the world. We’re afraid of losing what little we think we have left. And yet as often is the case, fear and the attitude it engenders only makes the reality more likely to appear. Journalists afraid of losing their audiences and their jobs and artificially creating controversy to bring gamers to their webpages, creating more and more distrust of anything printed for gamers to read. Publishers worried about the bottom line fall into the cycle of firing workers and killing their golden goose. Developers who are afraid to do new things in fear of not making massively successful games, thereby ensuring that the law of diminishing returns strikes back twice as hard. Gamers worried about the health of their industry are playing pirated copies of the games ‘not worth spending money on’. A critic is always right; after all if it didn’t happen today it will happen tomorrow. Perhaps, the problem is that we are looking at the situation the wrong side up. PC Gaming isn’t dead, Microsoft and Sony are about to launch new consoles, Nintendo still hasn’t made a good new AAA title so don’t count them out just yet, Free2Play hasn’t won, subscriptions aren’t the only way, and the Sun is still shining somewhere on Planet Earth. Maybe instead of criticizing we should just play video games, after all any day is a good day to play a video game.

Eorzea Journeys

What a last couple weeks we’ve had. A solid if unspectacular launch filled with overloaded servers and enthusiastic gamers; did you have as much fun as I did? Coming back to Eorzea has been a blast, when I could play, it was a ton of fun. A Realm Reborn is such classic Final Fantasy, but its also classic MMO gaming that manages to be surprisingly newbie friendly. I picked up my character from 1.0 and quickly got back into the swing of things. I’ve been tearing through the main story content as fast as I can. It’s fairly good right now, but I feel as if most of the real meat of the story is ahead of me, though the foundations have been laid out well.

Brandon Liao

Every now and then I see something so good I just have to put it here. Brandon Liao is an Entertainment Design student at Art Center College of Design. Note the influences of Halo 4 and Destiny. Here is some of his concept art: