I was at the GamesCom on Friday and didn’t let the chance go to play the alpha-version of Final Fantasy XIV on my own.

You could choose between warrior, ranger and sorcerer. The task was to clear a simple quest (kill 6 puks or dodos) within 15 minutes. The controls were pretty similar to its predecessor. You moved via num-keys, after pushing space you could enter text in the chatbox or select yourself by pressing tab. The only command from Final Fantasy XI which seemed to work was /dance.

When I pressed escape during moving I could move 10 times as fast, which is of course just a feature of the debug-version. The operator didn’t like at all that I tried it .”Play the game like it’s supposed to be played”, he yelled at me. That was after the whole game crashed and I wanted to take a photo of it, which he didn’t like either After I got back into the game I was told that I can’t join the group doing the quest anymore. Hopefully that will be changed, otherwise disconnects are going to be the most fearsome enemy.

Swapping between battle- and adventuremode was a lot quicker than in FFXI. The map was pretty similar to the ones in the old game, but it was much bigger. This could be because there are no zones anymore. The game can be played seamless like WoW.

The horrible German translation lead me to ask the question, whether it will be possible to change the language of the game. The employee said, that it could be possible, but he can’t go further into details. The usual answer which brings up more new questions than it answers them. I asked the infamous question about the start of the beta-test again, but he only advised to keep an eye on the official homepage.

Beyond that I noticed nothing which hasn’t been already covered on one of the big FFXIV-pages. I was a little disappointed about the progress of the alpha. There was no menu, the animations were rough and I couldn’t shoot an arrow for 3 minutes for some strange reason.

I took a short video of the mainscreen, but it has poor quality.

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