Beta FFXIV: A Look At Gridania

The Final Fantasy XIV Open Beta test is finally here.  If you can get in, more power to you.  The test application site along with the game and the overall Square-Enix ID site has been extremely congested since the launch of the test last night.  They are continually giving out beta keys and then ceasing to do so every few hours now, so keep trying over at entry.ffxiv.com if you want to experience what the game has to offer for yourself.

If you can’t get your own key, here is the place to be to see the sites and sounds of Eorzea.

A good friend of mine made this hi-res video of the opening sequence of the forest stronghold of Gridania.  Unlike Limsa Lominsa, you do not start being asleep on a boat you start out on a…  well just watch the video.  In my person opinion it is better than its sea fairing counterpart.  Even if SE likes to be a little pervy with its female characters.

As you can no doubt see the world around Gridania is a very different place than Limsa Lominsa.  The stronghold is found at the center of a lush green forest. The forest setting is used everywhere in the city.  We are surrounded by a very similar feeling as we once had in Windurst back in the games predecessor.  Like Windurst, it has many flowing streams and fresh water is a main theme of the area.  Along with the woody forest atmosphere we are taken away by a city that is ever so much like a cross between Windurst and something from another Final Fantasy game, Guadosalam from FFX.

City Layout -

A New Windurst Walls?

While it is a wonderful thing to mimic the look and feel of a modern Windurst, it is an entirely different thing to want to mimic its layout.  Unfortunately, Gridania is laid out very similar to a modern Windurst Walls.  The stronghold is basically a large circle with most of the needed areas inhabiting the outer edge of the circle.  While the exits of the city are long Windurst Canopied paths and tunnels that take a decent amount of time to traverse to reach the outer forest.

In the outer lying areas of the stronghold you will find such things as the Conjurer’s guild deep in a cave to the north.  Or deep to the southeast you will find the Archer’s guild.  The one bright spot of this particular city is that there is not nearly as many elevations and stairs to navigate to get from one point to another.  It is perhaps the most straight forwards of the three cities in that regard.  You may have to spend some time running between place to place, but in the end it is far more easy to navigate for a new player than Limsa Lominsa is.

Benches we can sit on!

The Market Wards are located in the “Lotus Gardens and are much more aesthetically pleasing that LL’s as well.  Complete with built-in benches where you can actually choose to sit.  (This in and of itself is a HUGE step forward from FFXI.  We can only hope that SE has a few more tricks up its sleeve for the launch in several weeks.)  Not only do they feel more like the zone they belong in, they are infinitely easier to get to.

Besides the actual duration it takes to get from point to point, the biggest downside of the city has to be the location of the Adventurer’s Guild (AG).  Now if you are new to FFXIV, the Adventurer’s Guild in any of the three cities is the key hub to the location.  It is the place where you hire and fire retainers, create linkshells, and obtain guildleves for both crafting and adventuring.  Gridania’s AG is located in the far southeastern portion of the town.  It is a hop skip and a jump from the outer gates of the stronghold, but is nowhere near centrally located like its Uldah and Limsa Lominsa counterparts.  Making it a very long treck to go from the AG to any other portion of the city.

This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it.  If you are a Conjurer or Lancer, this becomes a fair bit of a problem, but if you are a member of one of the guilds located only steps from the AG, then you are loving life.

Conveniently Located Airship Dock

The biggest perk of Gridania’s AG is the fact that the Airship Dock is situated inside the AG itself.  If you want to head on out to a different city (something that is not currently available in the beta) you will be able to take mere steps downstairs and hop on the most conveniently placed transportation hub in the game.

Conclusion -

The town of Gridania may not be for everyone.  Yet in my personal opinion the entire experience so far in the zone has been a leap beyond what Limsa Lominsa offered us in the Closed Alpha & Beta testing period.  The overall feel of the zone is only multiplied by the wonderful town and city music that is dominant in the area.  This is the closest to a Sanctuary of Zitah feeling I have had in this game at this point.

Check beyond the break for a more extensive gallery of screenshots from the Opening Cutscene, a little battle and a look at a few of the sites of the city of Gridania.

Beta Cataclysm: A Speedy Look At Tol Barad Peninsula

Thanks to a huge bug in the current version of the Cataclysm Beta, I thought I would highlight the bug by taking a quick jaunt around the new Tol Barad Peninsula area.  This is the Daily Quest area and it is now complete.  All enemies are now implemented.  The only thing that is currently not implemented are the actual Daily Quests themselves, some generic friendly NPCs on both sides.

Oh and there is no flight path or portal that connects the zone to the outside world.  The current thought is that this area is a glorified instanced zone.  This is more than likely the methodology that Blizzard is using to prevent any more large scale server lag issues that Wintergrasp caused for the first year of Wrath of the Lich King’s tenure.  By making this zone unflyable and only accessible through portals from Stormwind and Orgrimmar or through the Battlegrounds queue menu, they eliminate this lag.  The only problem is, that this now does not have the feel that Wintergrasp had, being a large part of the actual game world.

Is this a bad thing?  Would Northrend have been a better continent if Wintergrasp was on some island that was on a different server?

Beta Cataclysm: A Look at Tol Barad [Updated]

The Addition of Tol Barad…

The latest Beta Patch has brought us the islands of Tol Barad.  What is Tol Barad you ask?  To put it simply, it is Cataclysm’s cross between Wintergrasp and Sunwell Island.  It offers two separate experiences, an Open style Player vs Player interactive zone with set objectives and a Daily Quest Hub when your faction controls the PvP zone.  Both of which are in extremely early phases.  You are only able to test the Pseudo-Wintergrasp timed PvP battle system at the moment.

Wintergrasp 2.0?

The encounter is a cross between Isle of Conquest and Wintergrasp.  The goal is to capture the island by taking control of the three “flag buildings”.  These buildings seem not unlike Isle of Conquest’s areas where eventually each one will give a specific buff to the controlling team.  However, this portion of the encounter is not yet functioning.  It is obvious from the lay of each Flag building that one will definitely involve added siege engine usage.

The second objective is to destroy the three “Guard Spires” situated around the prison island.  In order to do this you need to accomplish two things.  Just like Wintergrasp you need a “Pilot’s License” to gain access to Vehicles on the battlefield.  So get to killing those Horde (or Alliance if you swing that way.)  Then you must successfully pilot a Siege Tank from the center area of the Map to one of the towers and “transform” the vehicle into an Auto-Turret.  At which time the vehicle will continually fire on the tower eventually destroying it.

Pretty simple concept at the moment.  The battle system is far from complete.  It is beginning testing purely for a feedback as they develop it standpoint.  Right now each battle lasts 30 minutes and you control it for a specific amount of time afterward.  While these are obviously placeholder numbers, the current time you possess the zone after successfully completing either the Attack or Defense goal varies depending on how many successive times a faction has owned the island.   During the time you possess the zone the daily questing hub that is made available

A Sunwell Island without the Naruu.

The island is pretty well populated for the advent of its Daily Quests.  Whether or not this is going to match Sunwell Island and its slowly phasing motif is yet to be seen, but its an eclectic selection of smaller subareas all packed right on top of one island.  It has both a feel of all fitting together and not meshing well at the same time.

Because the Daily Quests are not available until 85, this area is currently untestable.  Well, if you really want to jump in the water and get eaten by the huge elite Shark with a wooden harpoon in its side and call that testing, go for it.

Otherwise, we can see that the island is a haunted one.  Everything from ghosts ready to jump out at you and say “Boo!” on a creepy mountain overlook, to the overly common graveyard with zombies and ghouls and one big Elite in the middle.  The area is entirely too cliche for its own good.  Right down to the entirely overused mechanic of the two factions fighting in a central area.

You also have the cursed living in several areas of the island just to even out the monster types that can be found here.  The only disappointment was there were no murlocs to be found.  I honestly was hoping for some Murlocs or Naga on the island.  It would only be fitting that they would be around.  It’s a damn island after all and it’s not far north of Vashj’ir.  At the very list some Kvaldir would have been a really nice touch here as it is an “undead island” after all.  They are much more interesting than the same ghosts and ghouls we’ve been seeing since the first time we happened across Darkshire.

The the biggest thing you will notice, is there is no return to the Vault of Archavon model here.  The draw here is to gain access to the daily quests so you may purchase the first tier epic rewards.  While they are nice epics, time will only tell if its enough of an incentive to keep people competing for control over the course of the expansion.  VoA was a wonderful idea, even if it did fail in terms of execution.  One can only hope that Blizzard learned from it and improve on the formula this time.

The island itself has some potential.  I am not a huge PvP guy though and if the Daily Quest Hub area retains the Open PvP of the Wintergrasp section, this place can go die in a very big fire.

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Take special note of the new default raid UI.  With it you can quickly and easily dole out Raid Marks as well as handle your Healers, Tanks and DPS simply and effectively.  You can even hide and show individual groups with a push of a button.  The Raid UI is also detachable as well as lockable to any portion of the screen you desire.  Combine that with the Compact UI format and the default UI has come a very long way.

Edit: Looks like I was premature on the “no raid” part of Tol Barad.  New datamining has pulled a map of the Baradin Hold raid.  Which indicates that there will once again be a PvP based raid dungeon in Cataclysm.

Many more screenshots of Tol Barad after the break.

Mount Up and Ride!

The Miniature Bear.

The Reigns of the White Polar Bear mount itself is awesome.  I refer to it as a miniature bear because its just that.  After riding around on my Amani War Bear for so long, this mount feels down right dinky.

As a matter of fact, the first thing that came to my mind when I mounted up was, Sir Didymus.  If you can name that reference without clicking the link you own.

How do you get one?

Its surprising not that difficult.  I picked mine up after only a few days of doing the quests.  One of the officers in my guild picked his up on his first attempt.

The mount itself drops from a bag called Hyldnir Spoils.  These are a reward from several daily quests found in Brunnhildar Village in the Storm Peaks region of Northrend.  In order to gain access to the small quest hub you must complete a series of quests that begin in K3.  The quest starts with a goblin named Gretchen Fizzlespark by the name “They Took Our Men!“.  The quest line is also the Son’s of Hodir faction starter line so you are going to be going along a chain you must start in order to gain access to the WotLK version of Aldor/Scryer shoulder enchants.

The chain is long, you do not neccessarily need to finish the entire chain, but you do need to get all the way to the Son’s of Hodir “opening” quest before you get the chance to do dailies.  This is the biggest area of “phased content” in Storm Peaks, and you will need to phase yourself into the area where the dailies are active.

The Daily Quests…

All the Brunnhildar daily quests are given by Gretta the Arbiter.  She is located in the Northeast portion of the village near the protodrake “stables”.  She gives 2 daily quests per day, one always being a random of three choices, the second always being Aberrations Must Die.

The Aberrations Must Die:
You will complete this quest once already by the time you gain access to the daily quest giver.  You must fly over to Valkyrion in Northwest of Frosthold and kill the vyrkul there until you get Frost Oil to drop.  It takes about 5-6 of these to sufficiently destroy the 30 plagued proto-drake eggs that the quest requires.  The drop rate is about 50% from my experience.  But do beware, not only is this a popular area to quest, but there are multiple flying Valkyrie mobs that can and will attack you on your flying mount.

Defending Your Title:
Once again, you will have completed this quest early on in the chain to open the dailies.  You must return to the fighters of Brunnhildar and challenge the Victorious Challengers scattered watching the other women fight throughout the village.  Once you kill 6, head back to Gretta and pick up your spoils.

Maintaining Discipline:
The most common of the “randoms” on my server thus far.  This quest has you return to the mines with your Disciplinary Stick in hand to beat down those Exhausted Vrykul miners lallygagging around the mine.  Once you put 6 back to work or in the grave, its time to see Gretta once again.

Back to the Pit:
My personal favorite of the four quests.  It takes the most time of the three randoms, but its definately the most fun.  Gretta gives you the reigns of your own “vehicle” polar bear, and sends you to kill 6 of the polar bear riders down in the pit.  The strategy is simple here.  Charge in to stun, Mangle until your charge is back up.  Then use your knockback ability and start the cycle over again.  The quest is far from hard, and I have yet to fail it, even with 3 of the “enemy” bears on me.  What might cost you some extra time, is if others are doing the quest, or the inital version of it, leaving few bears for you to kill.  Once done, head back to Gretta.

The Drop Rate…

The drop rate is low, but do not be discouraged.  While I know there are a few on my server, there are truly not that many people that are doing these dailies.  With the exception of money, there is no real reason other than the mount to do these.  Wowhead lists the drop rate at .8% which seems a tad low to me.  I’d venture to say its more like 2-4%.  The numbers may seem small but they do drop.  Plus, its a heck of lot less time consuming to do 2 dailies a day in 20-30 minutes than spead a few hours chain running stratholme for a Baron Mount.  Hell, the bear looks cooler anyway, mostly cause its so darn small.