Kill Three Rats

It took me 45 minutes to actually get into a fight in Final Fantasy XIV.

Most MMOs don't waste any time when it comes to putting a mob in front of the player and telling them to have at it.  Indeed in most games it's basically the first thing a new character does.  Even Dungeons & Dragons Online, which spends longer than most setting the scene, had me stabbing an unsuspecting Sahuagin in the back inside of the first ten minutes.  The Secret World used to take a long time to get to any action, but since relaunching as Secret World Legends that game is now in such a hurry to get stuck in that the first combat encounter takes place during what used to be  the introductory cutscene.

Not so Final Fantasy XIV.  There actually is a fight only a few minutes into the game, but the character is no more than a spectator who sees only the start of the battle before being carried onward to Ul'dah.  There's a lot of scene setting to get through before I draw my sword in earnest.

My first kill quest sent me outside the city to kill three groups of mobs - three of each.  Yes, those numbers are correct.  Nine mobs in total.  This isn't unusual either - in this game these kind of quests only require a handful of kills, far less than in most MMOs.  Compared to the extinction level kill quotas asked for in the likes of Lord of the Rings Online I'm basically a pacifist in FFXIV.

The game really isn't about mob grinding, but if the player is looking for an excuse to do so then it is there to be found, in Hunt Logs and Fates.

Hunt Logs are lists of level appropriate mobs to be sought out and defeated as a kind of ongoing side quest.  The logs do tie into certain unlocks later on so they're worth doing for that, as well as being a good source of XP.  When I switched over to an alternate class I levelled that one to 10 with class quests, hunt mobs and a few Fates.

Each class has its own unique list of mobs - there's some overlap but the game is very specific that to complete a hunt objective the mob has to defeated as that class.  With how easy it is to switch classes - it's instantaneous and can be done anywhere in the open world and at any time unless actually in combat - I've been able to jump back and forth between Gladiator, Pugilist and Thuamaturge at will as I encounter the mobs on each of the hunt logs.

About the only place class switching cannot be done is in dungeons, trials or raids, which is very understandable.  Nobody wants to enter a dungeon only to find that the tank or the healer feels like being a DPS that day.

The logs also give an indication of the area in which each mob can be found, but this can still involve a lot of exploration. I ran around Central Thanalan for quite some time looking for spriggans before finally finding the valley I recalled seeing them in weeks ago on my other character.  It's actually very close to Ul'dah, but I'd read the map wrong and had been looking in entirely the wrong places.  Then, having finally met my quota of dead fuzzballs I went to pick up my next main story quest... which immediately sent me straight to the valley I'd just spent an inordinately long time failing to find.  Not the most efficient use of my time then, but I'm not looking to go fast during this run.  Quite the reverse.

As with the regular quests the number of kills required to complete entries in the Hunt Logs is very low.  If I want a reason to kill a lot of mobs I have to find that in the Fates.

Fates are like the open world events in Guild Wars 2, in that some start automatically while others need to be started by a player, and once they're running anyone is welcome to join in and reap the rewards once the objective is completed.  That objective is usually to kill monsters, or collect items by killing monsters, or escort an NPC while protecting them from monsters which need to be killed.  Whatever else happens in a Fate a whole bunch of monsters are going to get killed.  Or one big monster.

Fates are fun, and I've been diving into every one I've run across at least once.  They can be a challenge, either because it's already running and it's a race to finish before it times out, or because it's easy to get overrun by mobs, especially if there are no other players participating.  All of my early deaths on this character came from charging heedlessly into Fates.

So there are opportunities to advance through combat in this game, but how does that combat actually play?  Well it's... okay?

Final Fantasy XIV is a hotbar game in the style of World of Warcraft and LOTRO, though with extensive use of AOE danger zones that's more reminiscent of Neverwinter.  This leads to combat being a good deal more mobile than in many older MMOs, though it's still nowhere near as fast paced as those titles which lean closer to action combat.  The MMO it puts me most in mind of though is RIFT, because like that game FFXIV has a fairly long global cooldown that affects most attacks.

(Not all abilities though.  Reactive abilities like interrupts and stuns are mostly not on the global cooldown but have their own individual recharge times.)

This makes for a rather deliberate pace to the combat, and these are also very much battles of attrition - outside of group content it's unlikely a character is going to be taken down in one or two hits.  The speed with which said character defeats an enemy is of course highly dependent on which class they are, and I won't deny it's fun to switch over to a DPS class when I feel like a change of pace from my tanky damage output.

The combat in FFXIV rarely delivers the kinetic adrenalin rush that is second nature to Neverwinter and Guild Wars 2, but it's very well animated and plays smoothly.  A lot of the energy that the fights do have comes from the fight music because this is Final Fantasy so of course it has fight music.

I turned off the combat music in LOTRO a long time ago because it got repetitive and I didn't like the way it interrupted the far superior zone themes, but I wouldn't dream of doing so in this game.  For one thing it's extremely well integrated into the rest of the soundtrack, avoiding the abrupt start/stop/start of LOTRO's music by fading out gradually when a fight is over, which allows it to ramp up again seamlessly if another fight immediately follows, which it often does.

This will absolutely not be the last time I talk about the music in this game.  It's everything you'd expect from this series and more, and is as effortlessly evocative of this particular franchise as the best of the music in SWTOR is of Star Wars.  The theme that accompanies boss fight Fates in particular is probably my favourite recurring boss fight music since the iconic Still More Fighting of FF7.  Hard To Miss is a siren song that never fails to call me to my death as I charge into battle against something I really shouldn't be fighting solo at this level.