I recently got into the beta of Final Fantasy 14 and gave League of Legends another try. I decided to write some reviews.
FFXIV- This game is still in beta, and I'm sure that they will optimize the graphics speed for the various video cards "soon" (because as of right now, even with a very good system, the graphics are very unresponsive), so I'm trying to not hold this against them. I'm also going to try to pretend that they didn't simply take the exact races/models from FF11 and relabel them and try to pawn them off as "new" races. The old races weren't 100% terrible. Oh, I'm going to give them a pass for the pathetic enemies that we have to fight too, since it's almost Final Fantasy-ey to have that kind of mobs. Not that I'm not bothered by fighting rabid bunnies with a party of 5 level 20s. I mean seriously, the only other place I've ever seen a bunny be threatening was Monty Python, which wasn't going for seriousness.
If I could ignore all those problems, the game could still be passable. But the biggest problem is the interface and controls. The game is built from the ground up to be used with a game pad! This is just terrible, because gamepads are only good when a mouse+keyboard are not available. So much loss of precision, and mashing tab over and over until you happen to be in range of what you're trying to target (and for some reason, tab picks the target right of center, and goes left-to right until it wraps around to just-left of center being the last in the cycle) only to have hit the button so many times that we skip over and have to tab through everything again. Yeah, I think shift-tab backs up a target, but why fight over table scraps? There's no reason to do something so idiotic when simply using the mouse to click what you want to target is 2,000 times better.
The follow camera lags behind, as if we're tethered to a balloon that eventually gets around to floating into approximately the right position. This is just terrible and makes me feel like I'm playing a game on a console with a game pad (/shrug.... again, we could fight over table scraps, but mouse+keyboard is clearly superior to gamepads) which isn't capable of the precision necessary to use an immediate-reaction camera following scheme.
Toggling in and out of combat still takes about 2 seconds, and your character has to stop moving, equip or unequip his weapon, and then ready to continue moving. This gets really obnoxious when you forget you're already in combat mode, run up to a mob (with the terrible control scheme) only to go out of combat, and then have to go back into combat, oh crap accidentally hit tab have to cycle through all the targets again. Crap that bunny walked through me ugh now I have to try and get this dilapidated camera control to move 180 degrees so I can see that stupid bunny that walked under me so I can tab it and hit the "target lock" button (which wouldn't even be necessary with a mouse+keyboard setup, which is 100% superior to gamepads). The game ends up feeling like doing my chores, only in doing so I haven't actually put the laundry into the washer or taken out the trash. Though we may as well just put FFXIV into the trash.
LoL. This is all I have to say about League of Legends. Yes, they obviously knew their game's acronym was laugh out loud, which is what you should do for this game. Let's pretend that the heroes aren't annoying, juvenile, cartoony, and/or cliche, because stylistically they could have just been trying to be different. But eventually all the classes end up seeming about the same. Then I just start feeling like my hero is running in place because everyone in the game moves so slow. The only potentially good thing about this game is that they have a stat called +ability power that allows spell damage to scale (a potential "issue" of DoTA / HoN is that the agility-based classes scale into terrors by endgame, where int/str don't) into endgame. In theory this should be a good thing, but in actuality this just seems to force all of the heroes into farm/carry mode, and instead of anything exciting happening, everyone just farms up for endgame, which never ends up being very satisfying. Essentially LoL is just EM (easy mode) Heroes of Newerth, plus about a suck factor of 500.
Let's just say we ignored all those negative aspects because the game is still fun, and HoN guys are just too hardcore. LoL is for casuals, right? Well, the free to play model fails. Sure, they rotate in 10 or so heroes every week, and then if you have favorites you can drop some real money to purchase the ability to have the rights to play the heroes (which all suck, by the way). You don't have to spend real money, because for playing games, and especially winning games, you get special points that you can accumulate to buy your heroes for "free". This aspect really sucks, because after as many games as I could manage- I think I won 5 of 8 games, I still didn't have enough points for one of the "cheap" heroes. Cheap being 1350 points. I think I ended up with 900 points or so. However, the "cool" heroes cost more like 6000 "free" points, which is what, a weeks straight of winning? And I have to do this with the epicly retarded heroes of the week?
If you still haven't decided this games deserves the trash can, if you calculate how much real money you would have to spend to buy all of the heroes, it would probably be $100 or so (oh, and you can buy special skins! The skins cost real money too!) to just buy the heroes straight up. If you do buy all these heroes, which end up all playing very similarly to each other, and have really lame game voices, you're still going to be playing a bunch of nubs who didn't want to drop $30 up front to play Heroes of Newerth either, and are still just using the weekly heroes. Plus, the hero picking method doesn't prevent both teams from picking the same hero. There's nothing more lame than laning against a mirror. It takes all strategy out and just turns the game into a brute-force and skill match. Ever play starcraft as Terran vs Terran? Yeah, it's really lame.
I'm not even going to recommend you to play LoL casually for a while and then switch over to HoN, because LoL sucks. I'm just going to say, play HoN, maybe watch some casts at honcast.com, and don't waste your time with LoL.
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