Right let’s get to the positives about SB:
The story is pretty good with some interesting and fun
characters. A few of them you may just
fall in love with. This story has
everything you can expect from a typical Final Fantasy.
The new areas are very large and at times feel like a bit
too large but I would always choose large over small any day of the week. You will spend quite a bit of time getting
through the new content.
Abilities/Jobs have taken a large refresh with some being removed, some altered and some new ones. As a WHM and part time BRD during SB I have to say I can’t complain. I’m happy with these changes and I also the new jobs seems fun. RDM will be my choice of new one once I’ve finished BRD/PLD to 70.
I think that’s it for the positives…. That’s the sad part. This was always going to be compared to HeavensWard
(HW) which many reviews and even me had said that HW was one of the greatest
expansions made. Not only was it’s story
brilliant but the amount of content was unbelievable and its attention to
detail was just as good.
SB though severely lacks that attention to detail. You will find a lot of random buildings you
can’t enter. A lot of small villages
which seem to contain about 5 NPCs each and the amount of side quests in this
game is just insane. You will see
endless amount of !!!! all over your map.
Even the dungeons feel like something is missing.. what is it?
No new mid boss music, no new main boss music and even the main scenario
quests seem to be using same old music.
HW presented endless amount of new music – I’d love to know how much more
for those who want to do the comparison for me?
The detail attention is also shown in the new zones. Where everything feels as if it doesn’t
matter. You’ve got a few nice things to
look at but the detail of the zones seems as if they needed a polish. It almost feels like going back to expansion
packs on XI that were never finished.
You’d get some new content, new jobs but you wasn’t able to progress far
because SE had not finished none of it yet.
This was my biggest grumble of XI – never being able to finish anything
till years later. The expansions were
always missing something.
The usual run all over the map to earn the right to
fly. I sometimes enjoy this but some
areas require you to walk all over the map for a single aether. The worst part? The locater will not pick up the nearest
one. You could end up walking to the
other side just to find out one aether was right next to you – I did this
several times.
This time around it really feels like SE didn’t spend the
same amount of time working on SB like they did for HW. Perhaps it was because they spent more time
making general game changes like the jobs/abilities? Maybe it’s because they had to make changes
to co-inside with everything? Even the
Duty Finder had gone through a few changes.
Then we get to the release especially Early Access
(EA). Let me get started by saying this
isn’t testing BETA or ALPHA EA. This was
a reward for Pre-Ordering the game. The
idea is SE knows exactly how well SB has done before initial release. The sooner they have numbers the better. This was not “please test our game for us”.
So those problems:
- The server transfer to the new Omega EU server struggled after the first few hours of release
- Transfer system completely failed
- Two days wait time if you actually managed to transfer just before the system went down
- Everyone you know had already transferred
- Server you was on is a high busy/populated server
- The server transfer was made available during EA instead of two weeks prior to release
- Severe lag – after SE said it had implement solutions to cut this down
- Unable to proceed during it’s early single player instances – SE had implemented solutions to prevent this
- Random disconnections constantly
- Server queues going up to 6000 I think the highest I had spotted (that’s right queuing before you even start playing)
- High DPS queues of 30minutes – even after SE said this wouldn’t be an issue
You’d think in 2017 when servers are not as expensive as you
think (I can spend £10K on a single virtual server). SE said several times it had implemented a
lot to cut down all the above.
This was also during a time SE said they suffered a DDOS
attack which in all honesty is very possible.
It’s also possible that SE should have experience in prevention because
both XIV/XI has suffered this in the past.
Course I totally accept that nothing is 100% secure as the world finds
out daily.
I’ve not touched base on everything – I’ve not touched
crafting, not finished the MSQ but I’m very close to it. I’ve not done all the side quests – far too
many.
I believe I gave HW a strong 8/10 or even a 9/10 with little
room to improve. I would have to give SB
a weak 6/10 and feels a bit like XI days.
It seems SB has suffered a lack of attention to detail and certainly
feels like there’s a lot more that could have been done.
- Not enough new dungeons/trials
- Not enough attention to detail on the areas
- Huge lack of new music
- Lack of new characters
- Story was good but not great
- Bad state of connection/instance problems
The Technical
Problems
Read on if you care or ignore them if you don’t. One thing people will always know who work in
the IT profession. The developers are
not always the ones at fault but as long as they voice their concerns it’s no
longer their responsibility.
I manage a large IT network of almost 1000 PCs, 1800+ users
and my network must be online 24/7. We
are around 97% 1GB networking and around the same regarding decent PCs. We will stick SSDs in most of those machines
next year. So things are not 100%
perfect on the speed front.
We do how ever have the ability to increase our equipment
needs with no degradation of performance from the servers. Another words – we could handle another few
hundred users connecting up and using their data areas (we call them network
drives) with no performance impact. This
is VERY similar to SE and their servers connecting thousands of users
concurrently.
It is my job to ask my team to say “are our servers
currently stable”. They can lie to me
and say yes – in which case they’re no good to me and I don’t want them in my
team. They won’t do this.
They will instead tell me that the data storage server is
currently sitting at 35% remaining which is questionable. This means we are currently looking at Cloud
alternatives or purchasing a new SAN system with 4 times the current storage
capacity at least. We also purchased not
long ago a NAS server to deal with our film editing suites (around 100 students
doing film studies making large DVD/Blu Ray size videos).
So I say this:
Someone at SE didn’t anticipate this amount of traffic or perhaps
secured their system well enough. DDOS
attacks are usually halted by good IT staff in around 24-48 hours. I know this because I was once part of a
network that suffered this and it crippled our broadband connection. The problem was resolved in around 32 hours
suffering a day and a half of impacted lessons.
What SE should have done, is disconnected their system even
if it meant the rest of us couldn’t access XIV.
I’d rather have it shut down for a day to resolve the problem and drag
it on for a week
SE these are lessons to be learnt.
Update: So now I’ve
gone through the majority of SB and finished the story. I can’t help but feel unsatisfied. It’s
becoming very repetitive where a character never dies, always comes back and
never really feels threatening. Out of
all this content only two boss fights stand out. The final MSQ one – you will know what it is
and the ‘different’ boss that doesn’t require fighting. That’s it.
Also only one dungeon stood out again the last one for the MSQ. All the others felt disappointing. Even swimming feels almost
underwhelming. It’s brilliant to finally
be able to swim but…. Could have been used more even in dungeons to travel.
Now it’s time for me to cap my gear (which I’m doing quite
well on it – new AF is alright but already got about 4-5 pieces better
off). And do my next job and due to the
state of DPS queues I will be doing PLD next.
The positives:
- I’m happy with the state of job classes
- Swimming
- PVP has greatly improved with queue times very low
- Few good characters
- A huge new City
- Possible known story for 5.0 which I hope see’s the end of… certain type of characters (all the main bad guys appearing since 1.0) and the empire.
- Improved chocobo speed
- General improvements to the game it self (from DF, jobs, menus etc)