Also, the frame-rate is much improved, and action and animations are a lot more fluid. Character models are better defined and more detailed, the environments are busier, lit beautifully in places and much more textured and tactile. With little changed elsewhere, the biggest improvement is seen in the visuals. Games like World of Warcraft give you a reason for thousands of adventurers walking the same paths, but in A Realm Reborn it feels somehow unnatural. It’s harder to swallow such role-playing tripe when there are a few thousand other people running around, past and through you while on the same world-saving quest. There’s always been a slight disconnect between gamers and the world of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, not helped by the fact that it tries to make you feel centre of attention rather than as a smaller cog in a grander machine. It’s a solid system and offers a good deal of side content if the quest grind ever gets too much. The job system is deep and well structured, allowing you to switch class and profession at the press of a button (well, two or three buttons and a menu), and if you take the time to level your various jobs you can become very self-sufficient, fishing and cooking, mining and crafting, gathering animal skin and leather-working. A great deal of the early game can be played solo, and unless you’re running instances as a pastime you’ll rarely need to buddy up – although it’s always fun to do so. Questing in Eorzea is almost precisely the same affair as previous versions, and if repeated fetch & carry objectives or kill requests sound like a turn off then don’t bother turning it on. FFXIV also handles hotkeys incredibly well, allowing you to assign a total of 32 actions to the pad per job. The menu system is easier to navigate, having been slightly modified and streamlined – but once you get the hang of using the touchpad to select the different HUD elements, it becomes a pretty intuitive system. The latter is handled very well here, as playing on the Vita even offers a tweaked HUD to maximise the smaller screen-space and utilise the Vita’s touchscreen functionality. The sharing option is always welcome, as is remote play. Other changes come courtesy of the PS4’s tech rather than anything freshly developed. The option to resize and customise every box on the HUD is also a wonderful addition, especially as the screen can easily become cluttered. Aside visual changes, most additions are subtle, such as allowing you to use the DualShock 4’s central touchpad like a mouse to better navigate the viper’s nest of menus. In actual fact, the PS4 version we played is arguably the definitive iteration. In the case of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, however, there’s already a version with shinier graphics and less bugs on the PC, so you’d be forgiven for assuming that the PS4 port is a pointless cash-in, but you’d be wrong in doing so. The recent PC release of Dark Souls II, for example, offers the exact same game as we played on consoles, but with slightly improved visuals. Sometimes, there’s no point even bothering. Because of this odd see-saw between the past and the future, we’re very often called upon to critique a big release several times, once for 360 or PS3, then for Xbox One or PS4, then perhaps for PC, Vita or 3DS. We’re very much still straddling the fence between last-gen and new-gen so much so that the term “current-gen” feels like a misnomer. It’s a strange time to be a games critic right now.
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