Stormblood (SB) The SideQuest

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)

I've probably not covered everything but this will do.