[Gogan]

I've secretly been playing FFXIV -- a lot -- for the last 2 months. There's something about it that has me hooked.

It's true that the questing is not great. It's not even good. What it does do well, however, is weave the main story through all of its content. Several dungeons, "trials", and raids are a part of the main story questline and done so quite well. It really makes the fights feel more epic and impactful -- and all the cutscenes throughout the raid make you the hero, so it has a pretty personal feel even if you're one of 4, 8, or 24 people.

The story isn't spectacular as far as FF games go, but it definitely has its moments -- and those moments are glorious when they happen. It's not until 2.0 that it really picks up though.

But I think it's a lot of little things that FFXIV does so well that are just absent in other MMOs.

Crafting and gathering are shockingly fun compared to every other MMO out right now. You level them from 1-50 just like every other class/job, complete with their own gear, quests, actions, skill rotations, and even end-game content. There's lots of synergy with the other crafting/gathering classes. It's all very deep and very rewarding. You could play the game solely as a crafter if you wanted. And with the xpac coming in less than a month, I'm debating whether I want to level my mage, healer, or crafter first. It's that good.

The game does a really good job of not just tolerating new players, but incentivizing you to help new people through content. When you run a dungeon with someone who is doing it for their first time, everyone gets bonus xp/tokens. When world "bosses" spawn, you'll only get max credit if you're in a full group, so its in your best interest to invite people to your group. All dungeons and fates (randomly spawned world events) are level-sync'd so you can always run with your friends regardless of your level difference without worrying about completely overpowering the content. Rewards are scaled accordingly, so you'll actually get comparable xp even if you're running a low-level dungeon as a high-level player. As a result, I find the community in general to be surprisingly nice and helpful. The toxic and hostile cretins you find in WoW are a really rare exception in FFXIV.

And of course there's the job system. Being able to level all classes/jobs on the same character is amazing. No more worrying about inviting alts to guilds and re-logging to switch between dps/heals/tanking. There are so many reasons why doing everything on one character is amazing -- and this is coming from someone who loved to make alts in other games. This is just a better system.

Hunts. Hunts are just great. They're basically world bosses. Some are tougher than others. None of them are "hard" because so many people swarm them that they're basically all zerged down. Since they spawn relatively frequently and there are many different bosses, it keeps people going to all the different zones and interacting with each other. It's not uncommon to see 100 people all traveling to fight the latest S-Rank mob that spawned. The fights never last long -- just a few minutes -- so it's always a rush to get to the location and group up for the kill.

I could go on... customizable player/guild housing, better hard/expert mode dungeons/trials, long-running "relic" quests for end-game weapons, triple triad card game from FF9(!), a casino full of mini-games, etc. It's just a good MMO. It's hard to justify a subscription these days when you're competing against other solid F2P MMOs like Tera, SWTOR, and GW2. But between WoW and FFXIV, I actually think FFXIV might be the better game.

The current story ended on an epic cliffhanger and will be continued in the new xpac coming on June 19, Heavensward, along with 3 new classes. FFXIV's launch may have been a colossal failure, but they've really turned it around and built an MMO that I think could have real staying power.