Game Details Developer: Square Enix

Publisher: Square Enix

Platform: PC (reviewed), PS3, PS4 (coming soon)

Release Date: August 27, 2013 (PS4 coming 2014)

Price: $40 (plus monthly fee of $12.99 or more)

Links: Official website Square Enix: Square Enix: PC (reviewed), PS3, PS4 (coming soon)August 27, 2013 (PS4 coming 2014): $40 (plus monthly fee of $12.99 or more)

Here's the reason Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn (FFXIV) is good: it's bad. That is, it's bad at following the conventional wisdom that says MMORPGs are bad when they're too much like work, when they're harder to play alone, and most of all, when they're not accessible enough. The creators of FFXIV know that these are actually the trends making the genre bad, and by ignoring them, the game manages to be good.

The drive for accessibility has led to a recent string of mild disappointments within the MMORPG genre. Guild Wars 2 is perhaps the most successful recent MMORPG, and it aimed for accessibility in gameplay, with every class able to both do damage and heal itself, avoiding more rigid distinctions. That made Guild Wars 2 easy to pick up, yes, but equally easy to put down. Or there's Star Wars: The Old Republic, which seems to have been made under the quite wrong assumption that it was a good idea to attach a Knights Of The Old Republic-style single-player storyline to MMORPG gameplay.

The Secret World, like SWTOR, fell over backward trying to attach narrative weight to every quest; it also had free-form class customization. Even the dominant force in the genre, World Of Warcraft, has aimed for increasing accessibility with each expansion, doing things like making switching class specialization easier, allowing any race to play any class, and blurring distinctions so that specific specs like Shadow Priest are no longer unique. And of course, there's the ultimate attempt at accessibility used by an increasingly large number of games in the genre: switching to a free-to-play business model.

Final Fantasy XIV stands unapologetically against all of these trends trying to make the genre “better.” The game charges a subscription fee. It allows for easy switching between classes, but those class roles are still quite rigid. It gives your character a personal main quest, but it still requires you work with other players in conventional dungeons. It has cut scenes and explanations for that main quest, but almost every other quest is essentially “go kill five antelope.”

Surprisingly enough, Final Fantasy XIV is actually better for avoiding the pitfalls of modern MMORPG design. That's because the attempts to add accessibility to MMORPGs demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the genre works. The gameplay systems in the best MMORPGs are intentionally rigid, controlling player behavior to make the game work as a multiplayer experience. They're designed around long-term planning, building expectations, the introduction of new things to work for, and work leading to reward.

In that respect, MMORPGs are more like strategy games like Civilization than most other games. These are not the kind of games that are made better or more fun by increasing accessibility or letting players earn rewards more easily. It's about anticipation, planning, and breakthrough, not the act of playing itself. Final Fantasy XIV understands this more than any MMORPG I've played since World Of Warcraft back in the Burning Crusade days.

Being a piece of the puzzle

In an MMORPG, combat for a single player with their single character should never be as simple or as smooth as that in a game designed for single-player combat. That's because, in an MMORPG, you play as a piece of a larger combat puzzle. It's a small puzzle for the early dungeons (four-player groups in FFXIV), but it eventually leads to larger parties and raids composed of dozens of people with clearly defined roles: healing, dealing damage, or drawing and absorbing massive attacks (i.e. the “tank” role).

I'm playing as a tank class in Final Fantasy XIV almost by accident—I picked the Marauder with the big two-handed axe, but it turns out they're slotted in to absorb damage more than to deal it out. But tanking is what I know best in these kinds of games—during my raiding period in World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade I played as a protection warrior, the purest of its three tanking classes.

And tanking feels fantastic in FFXIV. The balance of skills, consistent variety in boss fights, and clarity about what's happening on-screen all work in harmony. When tanking is at its best, I feel like a maestro, coordinating everyone to the right place at the right time, ensuring that they're safe and controlling the ebb and flow of the battle.

It's the kind of feeling that's just not possible in a single-player combat—or in an MMORPG that's trying emulate single-player combat. The amazing feeling of successfully guiding a party through a situation that's just on the border of being out of control is one that only an MMORPG can provide, thanks to its rigid class structures and combat style. This is the great strength of the genre, and when games attempt to deprioritize group play by setting dungeons to the side and making them optional or by blurring the lines between class roles, they become weaker games. They fail because this kind of combat is built for that jigsaw-puzzle feeling, and it doesn't stand on its own.

All that makes me far more willing to forgive FFXIV's relatively few sins. The crafting and gathering systems are incredibly boring, for instance, but they're well-integrated into the rest of the game, and it's possible to work around them by making connections and money. I simultaneously disliked crafting and respected the system for fulfilling the rigid constraints and work/reward loop demanded by the genre.

I don't want to give the impression that FFXIV is deliberately inaccessible. It doesn't reach the level of impenetrability of, say, Eve Online. The presentation, especially the music, is charming, which provides a huge motivator to keep going. The game's pop-up tutorials tend to actually be helpful and come up at the right times. Perhaps most impressive is the way the game's early quests start simple and escalate in complexity to avoid being overwhelming while also training you for later parts of the game.

No, it's not that the game is unwelcoming. It's more that Final Fantasy XIV doesn't apologize for the kind of game that it is. Learn your role, work hard, and you'll be rewarded. That's how MMORPGs work at their best, and FFXIV has learned that lesson and is well on its way.