85/100 Metascore on MetacriticFollow

This was posted within the 9.5 on Forbes thread, but wanted to post it here, too, because Metacritic is perhaps the most relevant of all gaming review scores.

Good review scores are great and all, but the real test will be how this game has evolved a year or two from now.

Keep it going, Yoshi-P!

Thank you, Hairspray.

Effing Google!

Funny thing about the negative reviews... the vast majority of them are about the server issues, which were resolved a couple weeks ago. That's unfortunate... the user ratings would have been much higher had SE known it would have such a hit on its hands.

Very glad though to see that the professional reviewers are rating the game based on actual gameplay.

Seriously, who would have predicted an 85% score back in 2010?

Edited, Sep 17th 2013 1:40pm by Thayos

Love it!

Sounds about right to me!

After 3 years? Sounds legit to me.

TESO announced P2P with Cash Shop and people are calling murder.

I think this is a far better option than F2P/cash shop, because you still get the quality that you can only get with P2P games.

You can count on everything in the cash shop being pure fluff items.

Keep in mind, Yoshi-P said if FFXIV ever did go F2P, then the game would probably remain P2P but maybe just have some F2P servers. It's pretty clear that P2P is the way to go, otherwise, more developers would just launch their games as F2P.

Edited, Sep 17th 2013 9:35pm by Thayos

Yep. And deservedly so!

The negative reviews due to server issues remind me of the Amazon reviewers that rate a product low because it shipped later than they expected or the box was dented.

I think 85/100 is pretty fair and mostly accurate. Login issues aside, you can't ask reviewers to simply ignore not being able to login to the game. However, it seems that most of the reviewers actually gave weight to the ACTUAL gameplay instead of bashing a wonderful game because of launch issues. I think there is a happy medium between bashing and blind fanboism with FFXIV. Did the game have issues? Yes. Is the game awesome? Yes.

I think SE has learned through FFXI that P2P is the best way to make more money over longer periods of time. By having a few F2P servers, SE could keep the game P2P for its gamers who enjoy P2P, and then there could be a few servers with limited versions of the game and the typical F2P pay walls. I'm actually surprised that kind of setup isn't more common.

You completely missed preludes point. Shipped-late and dented-box complaints are not analogous to can't-play complaints for FFXIV.

I've been a FFXIV hater ever since 1.0 released and ruined the brand. Luckily some old friends talked me into trying Beta 3 and the rest was history. SE had restored my confidence so much during the beta. Ironically, I was now defending SE for the server issues following the Phase 3 and the launch. Maybe it was because of my IT background, but I knew the servers were overloaded and SE obviously wasn't ready for that many people. Yoshi later confirmed my hunch which proved beyond doubt, SE was really taken back by the support. People need to realize that if the game itself wasn't ready, FFXIV would of had many update patches. This wasn't the case, the majority of issues were server side. SE communicated their issues and fixed them in a timely manner. Maybe not soon enough for some people, but these server expansions weren't easy to do. SE risked destabilizing the entire network if they failed to do it right. In essence, Square put it all on the line with FFXIV ARR much like they did in the late 80's when this sleeper title called Final Fantasy was supposed to be the company's final project.

I'm giving FFXIV ARR a solid 9.0. Thank you Yoshi for this wonderful game.