Square Fixes a Bunch of Stuff (Part 3)

Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. I took a break from FFXIV around Christmas time and it lasted a little longer than I expected. In fact, I haven’t played FFXIV since then. It’s a little bit hard to be immersed in a game when you are not a part of a linkshell (my fault) or all of your old FFXI friends are… well still playing FFXI or stopped playing online FF games altogether. I’m sure there’s a very tiny violin somewhere that’s playing for me. I’m pretty sure only two people read this blog anyway.

While I have not been playing the game, I did patch my game in mid-Feb and even read a bit about the updates Square rolled out. They’re pretty good. The main two things that stand out are: they added side quests and we now have an auction house (kinda).

Side Quests
Nice! More content to explore and be sucked in. That reminds me that I should try and finish that dumb storyline fight that keeps killing me. I’m a little bit higher level now.

Auction House (Kinda)
This is probably as close to an auction house as we’re going to get. It’s not bad mind you. You can go to a ward, perform an item search, and get a list of people with prices that have your item there. The bad part is that you still have to travel to that retainer to purchase your goods. I guess that’s for a more authentic feel.

There is also a bunch of UI improvements. When you’re synthing items for a levequest, there is an option to repeat the same synth again. Hostile mobs now have a nice red icon of death by their name. MP regenerates in passive mode (so… whenever you’re not fighting).

Overall all the changes are pretty good and exciting. Maybe I’ll go back to playing one day. Due to the recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Square decided to conserve electricity and shut down their game servers. That’s a fairly good way to save electricity since I believe four of their nuclear power plants are in bad shape. This has also delayed development of the game too. Well… I can wait.