Beta FFXIV: Gathering Impressions

I had intended to make two follow-up posts on the other gathering professions after my examination of the Botanist class.  However, as I thought more about it, all three classes work exactly the same.  So instead of an in-depth look at the Fisherman and Miner classes in Final Fantasy XIV, I will give you my overall impressions of Gathering as a whole.

Everything has a Mini-Game

All three Disciplines of the Land are basically mirrors of each other.  They all have Main Hand weapon and Off Hand weapon based gathering nodes.  The only glaring difference is that Fishermen can use their Main Hand (MH) fishing skill  just about anywhere there is water deep enough to do so.

All MH gathering skills include the Chocobo Hot-n-Cold like mini-game that I described in The Botanist overview.  While the game takes slightly different forms for all three classes it is still there.  This is the biggest downside of gathering.  No gathering profession is all that unique from one another.  For a game where every skill set from Swordplay to Weaving to Fishing is a job class, this is a huge disappointment.  I can understand having crafting generally the same, but they could have created separate mini-games for each of the gathering professions in the game.  Our only hope is that the final Discipline of the Land, The Shepard class, has an entirely different outlook compared to the other three in the category.

I was most disappointed by the fishing.  After the great addition of the fishing mini-game in Final Fantasy XI, I had extremely high hopes that this time around we would see something active and engaging again.  What we ended up was a lackluster version of the Hot-n-Cold game where you need bait to catch certain fish instead of finding certain kinds of trees or rocks to hit.

The actual mini-games themselves can be a pain to play successfully.  Sometimes there is a large amount of room for error, sometimes there is not.  I am sure that these games are supposed to get simpler as you level up your skill in the profession but up until now, I have not seen it.  What makes this worse is that the game itself has so much input lag that you really have to time your hit of the Enter key at the exact moment you need to while taking into account the ever-changing amount of interface and server lag.  The game itself is not purely in the client which is a huge issue.  The client has to send the server your input and then the cursor stops.  This of course is probably an anti-RMT/bot countermeasure, but it creates a highly unresponsive system that is simply annoying and un-fun to play at times.

Beta FFXIV: Disciplines of the Land – The Botanist

Gathering in Eorzea –

In most games, gathering is a “profession” or a “craft”.  In World of Warcraft you have to make a decision on whether you want to gather a specific set of items.  Aion had another idea and let everyone gather, they just had to pay a great deal of money to keep doing it the higher level you became.  In Final Fantasy XI, the skill levels of Mining, Logging and Harvesting were all hidden, where Fishing was an actual Crafting Skill.  Now XI’s successor gives us 3 separate playing job classes that take up these skills.  As you gather you not only gain skill in your gathering class, but you gain experience points as well.

So what can you gather and what classes gather what?  How does the act of gathering work?