My weekend hasn't really gone the way I expected a few days ago. There are a couple of reasons for that... distractions, you might call them.
Distraction #1
One of them is this:
 | A few friends were trying out the beta of the re-released Final Fantasy XIV and said it was pretty good. So, I decided to give it a shot last weekend (beta 3, open) and found that it actually was quite fun. I haven't spent any significant time playing an MMO since the now-defunct City of Heroes, although I tried out a couple along the way that didn't stick, but one of the attractions of Final Fantasy XIV (and XI, to be fair) is that you build up your one character, rather than creating numerous alts. |
 | This is my main. Character name (Lapis Ritter) taken from two different characters from the same game. I leave it to as an exercise for the reader to determine which game. I will say that the (rough) look and the job are appropriate. As a separate aside, I find it entertaining that the Caucasian look for this character is a very Japanese-style Caucasian. |
That said, the launch so far is demonstrating that Square Enix (Japan) doesn't know how to hire software engineers who understand the concept of managing load. For an MMO. When their approach for dealing with a heavy load is to reject players because the world queue is putting too much of a load on the server, there's something really, really wrong. It's really a pain in the ass to have to gamble to try to get into the queue to log onto a game.
Distraction #2
And this is the other [WARNING: 18+ content], a demo of which came out just this Friday:
| The graphics are quite a bit different than the game it "succeeds" (even though it's a prequel), largely because they've elected to go full-3D this time around. |  |
| Mmm... combat. There are a few similarities to the previous game, but quite a lot of differences, too. One major item that you can see here are that the game takes advantage of its 3D nature to zoom in during close-range engagements. Another item, for people familiar with the predecessor, is that you only see six weapons, a major reduction from the twelve that were there before. |  |
A couple of notes about combat:
- As noted above, you only equip six weapons (close/far), rather than the twelve weapons from before.
- On the other hand, you now equip three force crashes instead of one (upgraded to two).
- Each weapon has its own heat gauge, instead of a shared heat gauge. The bar below health is the "armour break" gauge instead.
- Ranged weapons have ammo restrictions. When a weapon runs out of ammo, you have to wait for it to reload before being able to use it again. Even though GIGA was aiming for encouraging long-range weapon use, this is a pretty big detractor.