First impressions of FFXIV closed beta

"All the combat Guildleves so far involve finding and killing a handful of monsters: adorable sheep, tiny bats, and butt-faced molerats."

:(

Kill ten rats.

Really?

From 1up I was expecting to brace myself against all the critique but hey he just talked about how things work for now.

Will look forwards to their coverage, I am curious to see what their post launch articles will be like too. ;P

AWESOME!!! Looking forward to the game!

From all the footage I've seen, the combat seems really slow.

This is awesome. I'm definitely getting this the first day it comes out.

Those combat guildleves are kind of like the Fields of Valor that are in the current FFXI... you can do them solo or in group, you can still grind XP or do the quests to get more, I'm assuming. For the good groups grinding might be faster, but for those who can only play 1-2 hours a day and don't want to spend 45 minutes searching for group, or join a group and have to disband in 1 hour, this seems perfect.

Also the whole job system is a really good idea, takes all the benefits of FFXI (multiple jobs per character, sub jobs to add extra abilities, etc.) but increases the customization. In FFXI this was done by means of subjob, but in the end only a handful of job combinations are useful, and your character stats increases constantly save for some racial traits (galka HP inreases higher per level than tarutaru, etc..).

Hopefully this customization will allow all races to be adjusted as they require (so that your galka RDM doesn't have less MP than a taru paladin lol). Also allows you to change your stats depending on your situation for whatever boss you're fighting or event you are doing. It removes that "best build for class" idea and lets you modify your character with much more flexibility. There will still be ideal setups for most damage, but now you get more options for building a character that can multitask better, all instantly and without having to spend anything to modify.

This could be big :)

From the outside looking in it seems that most folks are forgetting that this is an FF title... It falls in line with the if you didn't play FFXI you don't understand mentality in my mind. Not to say that you won't get it as a newbie. Just saying you can't hold it up to all the quest based WoW types and say "this is broken". Just my 2 cents from what I've seen, the article is a good read and it sounds like the mechanics are much akin to FFXI.

From the outside looking in it seems that most folks are forgetting that this is an FF title... It falls in line with the if you didn't play FFXI you don't understand mentality in my mind. Not to say that you won't get it as a newbie. Just saying you can't hold it up to all the quest based WoW types and say "this is broken". Just my 2 cents from what I've seen, the article is a good read and it sounds like the mechanics are much akin to FFXI.

It still sounds really good but I'm still really disappointed by the "three guildleves every two days" thing. I get what they're going for with the limit but two days seems a little over the top.