With 1.19 dropping soon, but the one year mark almost three weeks behind us, I felt it was time to showcase a few more cases of FFXIV lacking very, very basic features. One or two of these will finally be changed with 1.19, but most will not - and keep in mind, we're well beyond a year into the game's lifecycle, having released September 21st, 2010.
- Can't abandon guildleves from the Journal menu. Even more peculiar, the function is there: you can abandon other quests from the same menu, but move down a space to Guildleves, and it disappears.
- Drag and drop functionality. We still can't drag and drop actions. Changing an action's location requires going Menu > Actions and Traits, then manually clicking a spot, then clicking each individual action to place it.
- Saved action bars for each job. And in a similar vein, your action bar for a given job is not saved. In other words, switching to a new job (one of the most touted features of FFXIV) requires you to manually redo your actions bars every single time. The only solution is to make a macro, and it requires four or five full, ten line macros just to change. And that brings us to...
- Instant macro commands. Made a full macro to change jobs? It'll still take you close to a full minute as you wait for each individual line to be executed.
Buttkick set to action slot 1. (two second pause)
Facepunch set action slot 2. (two second pause)
Etcetera.
It gets better. If you're switching to a job with fewer actions, you need another set of macros to wipe the previous set of actions. For example, your L50 Pugilist might have actions on action bar 3, but your L20 Lancer doesn't need that many, so you make a Lancer macro that only fills the first bar.
The problem is that your Lancer macro can't switch actions in the first line, because you have far less action points. Since you have two more bars as Pugilist, and the game randomly decides to save actions from those lines, you need another set of equal macros to remove *the entire bar* first, pushing the process well past a minute long, just to change jobs.
And keep in mind you have to do this for everything, even crafting jobs.
- No /assist command, or any way to target someone else's target. Want to figure out what mob is hitting your healer? Want to assist someone in trouble with their mob? No can do, buddy!
- No way to adjust how widgets react. The number of bars and widgets you can adjust is very small. You can't adjust anything that not standard (for example, you can't permanently move the "sell" menu that comes up after selecting an item to vendor to somewhere more convenient, it automatically resets), firstoff.
But it gets worse. Say you like having your party menu in the upper left corner, as is standard for MMOs (WoW, PSU, Rift, so forth). You can move the box up there, but the problem is, it scrolls *up*, with no way to change it so it scrolls downward. What that means is, if it's too high up, you can't see the members of your party beyond the first one as it scrolls offscreen, with the only alternative being to move the box to the middle of a 1080p resolution.
Basically, if you only have one or two party members, instead of the upper left, their HP box is in the middle!
- No mouseover tooltips. They finally added more icons to the minimap, but the problem is, there's no indicator of what's-what, and you can't mouseover to figure it out.
- No adjusting chat tabs without digging through menus. Most MMOs allow a simply right-click on a chat tab to change how it functions. Not FFXIV: you must go Menu > Configuration > Chat Tab to change things. And better yet, you can't add your own customized tabs, you're limited to four pre-defined tabs, and you can't even attach all four to the same bar.
- Disconnecting still causes you to be removed from and fail various quests. I mean, really?
- No mouseover info, for anything, be it tooltips or map information. Similarly, no right-click functionality for things like buying and selling.
- Almost zero in-game configuration options. You can't adjust your controller in game, and graphic settings are almost non-existent outside of the "Final Fantasy XIV Config" program. Basically, to change even the smallest settings, you need to log out and quit the FFXIV program entirely (you can't even run the two programs simultaneously), boot Config, fix your settings, quit Config, then reboot FFXIV and see if the settings are now as desired. If not, the process repeats!
- And finally, another big one: no overlapping menus. Want your inventory open while you search for items and make purchases, so you can compare? No can do. Want your action palette up while you do your macros so you can match it up? No dice there, either. Want your retainer's bazaar window open (bazaaring being a function for buying and selling with the retainer) while your inventory and their's is open, so you can track, compare, and price items? Nothing.
Of all these issues, the only one 1.19 will fix is the guildleve abandoning aspect. Yes, as of 1.19, we'll be able to use a feature that's already existed in-game for months on the other half of the questlog, because that's the kind of change that should take months, to apply existing code to existing quests.
Is this acceptable a year into the lifecycle of a game that was started in 2005 from a team of highly skilled professionals working for one of the most lauded companies of the gaming world? Absolutely not. Better games made in a shorter span than a year have had these features, and better yet, Square Enix is working from an *existing base*, none of this is ground up, it's body work on a vehicle that already runs.
