Year: 2010
Genre: MMORPG
Developer: square enix
Publisher: square enix
System requirements for maximum visual quality in FINAL FANTASY XIV beta recommended by the gameGPU website:
The minimum
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: 2 Core Duo 2,86 GHz or Athlon 64 x2 6400+
RAM: 2 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 512 MBRAM Radeon HD 4830 or GeForce GT 8800
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 9 GB free space
Effective
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core i3 540 or Phenom II x2550
Memory: 3 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 1024 MB RAM Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce GTX 470
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 9 GB free space
Optimal
Operating system: Vista®, Windows 7
Processor: Core i7 920 or Phenom II x4965
RAM: 3 GB
Video card: DirectX®9 compatible video adapter with 1536 MBRAMGeForce GTX 480 OC
DirectX: DirectX®9
Winchester: 9 GB free space
Official description of the game
Final Fantasy is a brand; a series of games where each new part is different from the previous one, but there are constant, characteristic common features between all of them. Final Fantasy XIV is one of the unique representatives of this series. FF XIV is first and foremost a game with a rich, interesting game world and a lot of PvE content. The game does not involve unmotivated battles or random actions on the part of players. One of the features of the game is freedom. The player can change the class of his character whenever he wants, the player can change the deity he worships.
The player can also choose the style of play, be it mining ore and plants, or one of the many types of crafting or hunting single mobs; completing story missions or special Guildleve – raising your own reputation in the city and before your deity. The game is also positioned as a group game, this is the main and thickest stroke in the picture of gameplay.
Review: Playability
Final Fantasy XIV is a Japanese role-playing massively multiplayer online game and the fourteenth game in the Final Fantasy series. The developer is Square Co. and the publisher is Square Enix. The gameplay is similar to Final Fantasy XI, which was also a fully online game. The release of the game for a personal computer is scheduled for the end of September 2010, for the PlayStation 3 game console – for March 2011. Beta testing of the game began on September 1 and everyone can still evaluate all the advantages and disadvantages of the game for free.
As with most paid MMORPGs, players purchase a subscription. In Final Fantasy XIV, a monthly subscription will cost $12.99, for which the player will be able to create one character and a servant – an NPC to store various currently unnecessary things. If the player wants to create another character, the monthly fee increases by $3. Creating a servant for a new character costs $1. For one account, the player can create 8 characters and, accordingly, 8 servants, which leads to an increase in the monthly subscription fee to $42.00
There are 5 types of races in the game, descriptions of which are given below:
Hyur (in the early stages of game development was known as Hyuran) – the most numerous race of the world, the Yorzea (English Eorzea), depending on their habitat, are divided into those living in the mountains and those living in the center of the world. After the fall of the capital of the race – the city of Aramigo, the number of the once numerous mountainous part of the nation decreased sharply and now its representatives are very difficult to meet;
Miqo’te – a race of hunters, divided into Day and Night clans. The name of the first is “Seekers of the Sun”, the second is called “Keepers of the Moon”. The Sun Seekers clan is active in the daytime and worships the god Arzema, the Moon Guardians clan is active in the dark and worships the god Manefina;
Lalafell – a small race of farmers who came from the islands in the South Seas. Currently distributed throughout the world, they prefer not to settle in areas with cold climates. The race consists of two species: dune dwellers – live in deserts, and field dwellers – live in thatched houses, thanks to their excellent hearing they are able to hear the slightest noise (in the early stages of game development, this skill was mistakenly attributed to the Elezen race);
Elezen – an ancient race that previously ruled the world of the Yorzea (English: Eorzea). Representatives of the race have very good hearing thanks to their protruding ears (later it turned out that in fact representatives of the Lalafell race have these abilities). Were at war with the Hyuran race when the latter invaded the world. At the moment, both races coexist in peace. The race consists of two species: forest dwellers – for hundreds of years, representatives of the species lived in forests, then adapted to city life, and then returned to life in the fields, shadow dwellers – previously lived in dark caves, many real representatives of the species still continue to live in caves, engage in theft, despise the sight of those living in the forests;
Roegadyn – a race of seafarers living in the Northern Seas. It is divided into two types: Lohengarde – they live near the crater of a volcano, which, according to their belief, is the gateway to hell, and Seewolf – former pirates who came from the Northern Seas, currently working as sailors.
The game has a limit on the amount of XP a player can earn per unit of time. The unit of time in Final Fantasy XIV is the week. During the week, the player can spend 8 hours earning points; after 8 hours, the number of points received for completing tasks and killing monsters will decrease to zero within 7 hours. That is, in 7 days a player can upgrade his character for only 15 hours, the rest of the time he plays for pleasure. The creators of the game argue for the introduction of such a system by the need to maintain balance – all people should be equally interested in playing, regardless of the amount of time spent playing the game.
Players who have the opportunity to play longer than others should not have a significant advantage over those who spend less time playing. A comparison with real life was also given: if you spend 3-4 hours in the gym every day, then this will not affect a person’s health for the better, and will even harm him – the body will not develop in proportion to the number of hours spent in the gym
We invite you to evaluate part of the game walkthrough of FINAL FANTASY XIV beta, where you can see for yourself the quality of this product:
FINAL FANTASY XIV beta made a double impression on us: on the one hand, a very bright style, beautiful graphics and gorgeous cinematic inserts (although not all voiced), on the other hand, very long dialogues, a corridor open world and JRPG game elements that can will not be to the taste of many fans of online battles…
Review: Game Graphics
FINAL FANTASY XIV is powered by the Crystal Tools graphics engine, which is new to the PC graphics arena. Crystal Tools is a game engine developed by Square Enix for internal use. The engine’s original name, “White Engine”, was changed to its current name during the development of Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Initially, “Crystal Tools” was aimed at the PlayStation 2 game console, but then it was refocused on the PlayStation 3.
Tetsuya Nomura, a well-known Square Enix employee, said that “the transition from PS2 to PS3 is much more difficult than from PS1 to PS2; there are a lot more barriers to overcome.” The main feature of the engine is the high quality of graphics displayed in real time. “Crystal Tools” allows you to make a seamless transition from game cutscenes to cinematic inserts, contains fully functional physics and sound engines.
I was very pleased with the quality of performance of the game characters, who are simply irresistible in video scenes built on a graphics engine… The detailing of the environments and locations also has no complaints, but their implementation could have been a little richer. FINAL FANTASY XIV is built on the basis of DirectX 9, but even despite its “moral obsolescence”, it has some graphical bells and whistles. Perhaps the most outstanding and “gluttonous” of them are Ambient occlusion and Depth of field.
Ambient occlusion (AO) is an occlusion model used in 3D graphics that allows you to add realism to an image by calculating the intensity of light reaching a point on the surface. Unlike local methods, such as Phong occlusion, ambient occlusion is a global method, that is, the brightness value of each point of an object depends on other objects in the scene. In principle, this is quite vaguely reminiscent of global illumination. Ambient occlusion refers to techniques based on the accessibility of a surface element to various factors such as dirt, light, etc.
Ambient occlusion is most often calculated by constructing rays emanating from a point on the surface in all directions, then checking them for intersection with other objects. Rays that reach the background or “sky” increase the brightness of the surface, while rays that cross other objects do not add brightness. As a result, points surrounded by a lot of geometry are drawn as darker, and points with little geometry in the visible hemisphere are drawn as light.
Oddly enough, until recently Depth of Field was one of the newfangled bells and whistles of DirectX 11, but as it turns out, it feels more than comfortable on DirectX 9. Depth of Field is an imitation of the effect of depth of field, it can only be noticed during animation. The foreground and background are slightly blurred when activated. Enabling these functions does not seem to bring significant graphical changes, but when they are disabled, the performance increase is very, very significant, which you can find out in our further testing…
Review: Resource-intensive game
Since the game engine is already quite old, to play FINAL FANTASY XIV beta comfortably you will need a completely modern average gaming configuration, namely a Core i3 540 or Phenom II x2 processor550 and a RAM capacity of 3 gigabytes.
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Hardware configuration |
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Processors |
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550@ 4.25 GHz cache L2 12 MB Intel® Core™ [email protected] GHz cache L3 8 MB Intel® Core™ [email protected] GHz cache L3 8 MB |
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motherboards |
MSI P45 Platinum 7512 socket LGA775 MSI X58 Pro socket LGA1366 product provided by the company MSI MSI P55-GD55 socket LGA1156 product provided by the company MSI |
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Memory |
GOODRAM PLAY 1600MHz (8-8-8-24) product provided by the company GOODRAM GOODRAM Pro 2000MHz (8-8-8-29) product provided by the company GOODRAM |
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Video Cards |
GeForce 8800 GTS 640 MB |
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Hard disks |
3×2 RAID0 Western Digital Caivar WD2500GL 250 GB, 7200 rpm, SATA 3 Gbit/s |
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Power Supplies |
FSP GROUP EVEREST 800W 2xSeaSonic S12D 850 Silver 850W product provided by the company SeaSonic |
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System software and drivers |
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Operating system |
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64 |
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DirectX |
DirectX 11 |
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Platform Driver |
Intel INF Chipset Update Utility 9.1.0.1012 |
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Graphics driver |
Nvidia GeForce/ION Driver Release 258.96 ATI Catalyst 10.8 |
All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality by the Fraps program in the most resource-intensive part of the game. You may ask this question – why not in the gaming benchmark, which was released quite a long time ago? The answer is simple – the benchmark does not show the real load on video cards. In the game itself, the FPS drops quite seriously – almost twice, and if you buy a game based on the benchmark results, you will be seriously shocked by the drop in frame rate.
Less productive video cards are tested based on the Core 2 Quad Q9550 processor, and more productive ones are based on Core™ i7 processors. This time our video cards were tested in separate screen sizes of 1280×1024 and 1920×1080, and you can evaluate how your video card behaves relative to other modern solutions. The tests were carried out in 2 stages – with and without activation of Ambient occlusion and Depth of field. All video cards were tested at maximum quality graphics settings with full-screen anti-aliasing activated at 8X level.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1280×1024 Ambient occlusion and Depth of field off
The first tests were carried out with Ambient occlusion and Depth disabled. At a resolution of 1280×1024, players will need video cards of the Radeon HD 4830 or GeForce 8800 GT level.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 Ambient occlusion and Depth of field off
If there is a resolution of 1920×1080, players again have more powerful video accelerators, namely Radeon HD 4850 or GeForce GTX 260. As we see, it’s quite tolerable, as of today. Now we’ll see how the balance of power changes when Ambient occlusion and Depth are activated.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1280×1024 Ambient occlusion and Depth of field on
And here, perhaps, the most interesting thing begins – the required minimum for maximum settings rises to video cards of the Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce GTX 470 level. But only owners of a GeForce GTX 480 will be able to play comfortably – only this can provide a comfortable minimum FPS with a threshold of 25 frames.
Testing at maximum quality settings 1920×1080 Ambient occlusion and Depth of field on
When switching to HD resolution 1920×1080, absolutely all video cards are given up, and even the GeForce GTX 480 cannot overcome the 25 frame barrier. When overclocking it to frequencies of 850/1700/400, we managed to reach the average FPS mark of 28 frames, as a result of which we can talk about more or less acceptable playability. Overclocking the HD 5870 was only enough to reach 21 frames.
Final World: FINAL FANTASY XIV is a good gift for all fans of specific Japanese JRPGs, but we advise most players to try the game while open beta testing is underway, otherwise later you will have to pay for the test… The graphics in the game are good, but you will be required to see them The most advanced gaming PC configuration.
