So yesterday I got to play the first four hours of FFXV. I'm not 100% certain but I'm pretty sure it was the gamescom build based on the 50min video floating around. I took plenty of notes and below I've shared them in their moderately tidied up form. I'll be doing an actual preview write-up thing but figured for now I'd just give you the details.
Few disclaimers. Firstly I have only played three Final Fantasy games to completion (I, II and VI), in fact I made a LTTP thread for the entire series recently. I'm currently playing through VII and enjoying it. Second, I have not been following the development of XV closely at all. I'm of course aware of how long it's been in limbo and have been watching the occasional trailer, but I haven't been reading every preview or watching everything they've shown off. I also haven't watched the 50min video, so I apologise for anything below that is already common knowledge.
Roughly Chronological Demo Impressions
I had fun despite all its flaws. I would like to take my time to get to grips with the combat, weapons and magic, all of which were pretty confusing. The outset of the story is fairly traditional, but the roadtrip with your buddies spin is quite unique and did interest me. I could tell from the subtitles that the writing would be more of a problem if I could hear it in poor English voice acting.
While at times it felt like wading through mud, it also managed to capture the sense of new adventures and camaraderie. Going on a journey with friends. This is something sorely missing from a lot of grand RPGs these days, so I'm intrigued as to where that leads within the game itself. The visuals are definitely a problem for me however, if no great changes are made between now and release I'll be holding off for a Neo/PC version.
Few disclaimers. Firstly I have only played three Final Fantasy games to completion (I, II and VI), in fact I made a LTTP thread for the entire series recently. I'm currently playing through VII and enjoying it. Second, I have not been following the development of XV closely at all. I'm of course aware of how long it's been in limbo and have been watching the occasional trailer, but I haven't been reading every preview or watching everything they've shown off. I also haven't watched the 50min video, so I apologise for anything below that is already common knowledge.
Roughly Chronological Demo Impressions
- I know people have complained about the opening, for me as a relative newcomer to everything Final Fantasy, it wasn't a big deal. My thought process was basically 'oh that's them when they're old, who the fuck is that giant dude, oh we're done'.
- The CGI cutscene, while short, looks very nice.
- The world does seem large but it also feels quite segmented, it's very obvious if you picked a direction at random it wouldn't be long before you'd hit an impassable wall/cliff. Especially in the starting desert area. Think Dragon's Dogma. Examples of what I mean in these three shots:
- I've just recently been playing FF VI and VII for the first time so to me Cindy is just the worst thing ever. Not saying Final Fantasy has ever been the pinnacle of progressive ideals but Jesus... Ridiculous design.
- Talking to shopkeepers adds nearby POIs to your map. They can also give you monster hunt side quests, but only one at a time which seems silly.
- Each of the fellas has a skill they can level up: Noctis - Fishing, Ignis - Cooking, Gladiolus - Exploring and Prompto takes photos.
- All your XP from finishing quests, killing monsters, or working on above skills only gets added when you rest/camp somewhere. A screen comes up like a Bayonetta/DMC type 'chapter complete' thing and gives you a rank based on your stealth, defense and offense.
- When you camp you can get Ignis to cook a meal, depending on what ingredients you've looted. A nice touch that made me smile was while you're selecting which meal to cook he's standing there looking pensive. Then once you select the meal he clicks his fingers as if he's suddenly made his decision.
- The classic battle complete jingle plays when leveling up at camp.
- A nice touch is after the tallying up of your exp it just has a screen with "Your Lodgings" along the top, and you can see the group (including people not always in your party) chilling out at whatever location they're at. Definitely adds to the immersion.
- Sometime when approaching an enemy one of the team will come up to Noctis and suggest a particular strategy. This basically amounts to having a specific, timed objective to complete for that encounter. Stuff like carry out a link strike with Ignis or block something three times.
- Just gonna quote this line verbatim from my notes: "Cause the game is fun, could get used to ugliness". YMMV.
- Florence's Stand By Me cover was playing on the pause screen (options, load, save etc not the equipment/skills screen) at some point, not sure if that was just at the start or not.
- Some of the ambient banter wasn't subtitled. Hopefully just a bug.
- Prompto uses the phrase "totes adorbs" at one point. How about that millennial chutzpah.
- The guys find out about the invasion of Insomnia by reading the morning newspaper. This is really lame. In relation to where they are at the point, Insomnia is essentially just over a nearby hill, it is hard to believe they wouldn't have heard or seen any signs of an invading army going by. I wasn't invested enough in the guys, Noctis, Insomnia, Regis or their quest at this point so this rather pivotal scene lacked impact.
- The giant bird monsters called 'hurricanes' are cool although the aliasing on their wings is intense. In terms of how seamless its appearance was in the open world? Pretty impressive. Same with the imperial dreadnoughts.
- The driving is very much on rails. If you just hold R2 and turn at the right time you'll be set. I tried forcing the Regalia off the road but it just kinda guides you back into place. It feels very clunky and slow as a result. If I end up playing this I'll more than likely be letting Ignis drive so I can look around.
- You can quick travel to the last place you rested, as well as to your car. Due to how sluggish and dull driving the car is, I would just fast travel back to town after finishing a dungeon instead of driving. Once I progressed the story I would fast travel back to the car and move on.
- I did try driving at night despite Ignis' warnings. Drove like 100m from Cindy's place and ran into a lvl 30 Giant. The car automatically pulls over and you're forced to get out. You can't get back in until you break combat either, so after getting my ass kicked for a bit I ran away and fast traveled back to rest til daytime.
- It doesn't take long for Noctis to get super angsty. One scene with Cor in a royal tomb sees him chuck a real tantrum: "What was my father thinking! What good am I! What did he expect me to do! I'm no king! etc. Eye-rolling stuff, couldn't dislike it more.
- The Royal Arms are super powerful weapons that cost MP with every swing. I found three of thirteen in my session. The second and third were preceded by short dungeons. The first one Cor takes you to and it's just a room. The Royal Arms I got were a sword, an axe and a polearm I think, I didn't use them much.
- This dude was in the third dungeon and was pretty tough. He kept one-shotting everyone with his quick slashes, the only way I avoided that was by doing the block parry thing. Basically hold square then quickly press circle when the prompt comes up. It was very frustrating having no control over my party and so they kept dying.
- After you see Insomnia has fallen with your own eyes, you have to meet up with Cor, who tells you about the tombs, then you have to get to Lestallum to check on Iris and find another tomb. That was essentially the narrative of the first four hours.
- Cor only joins the party for like 5 minutes max, between two Royal Tombs. Then he rocks up for a bit when you take on an imperial checkpoint on the way to Duscae.
- A lot of plot/character details are conveyed while driving. For example this is where Gladiolus first mentions his sister Iris and how they should find her, they talk about the meteorite/disc thing near Lestallum which apparently powers the town. Word-building stuff.
- Cor and your friends all make a big deal about how far away Lestallum is and how you better fill up the tank etc. It was under 2 miles away, which admittedly was the longest drive I did in that session, but it was still weird. Also to get to the third tomb from Lestallum was an even longer drive and they made no mention of that fact. Perhaps nitpicky, but it took me out of it.
- Lestallum looks pretty cool aesthetically but it lacks soul. NPCs are lifeless, wandering around not saying anything, music was repetitive and the ambient sounds of a crowd felt out of place. Compared to the Witcher (I know people are probably sick of this comparison), its incredibly dull. Felt more like a town from Xenoblade in terms of dynamism.
- When you arrive Iris takes you on a tour which was a nice way to see the whole place but she herself isn't much of a character. She's very 'oh this is kinda like a date huh Noctis, tee hee'.
- The demo ended with the maroon-haired smirky guy offering to show them the way to the meteorite/disc. He was going to take his own purple lowrider-looking thing and you had to follow him in convoy.
- Option to turn off hud and select different combat modes (didn't get to try these out though).
- I played with Japanese voices and English subs, this was of course optional.
- Noctis has four weapon slots, assigned to the dpad. By default, starting from the left, he had a big ass sword, a regular ass sword, a polearm and then the down slot was empty. Could swap them all out if you wanted.
- Combat reminded me of Dragon's Dogma but also of action adventure games like Bayonetta etc. I'm not saying it was as good as either of those games, just that it's similar fundamentally. Combat could be confusing though, the warp strike wouldn't always lock on to where I wanted it to, which was possibly something I was doing wrong. Targetting in general felt a bit iffy.
- Each character has a skill tree and they all share the one pool of AP. I had a brief read of most of the abilities, nothing really stood out as balls to the wall awesome. Gladiolus can unlock the ability to use shields, Ignis can infuse Noctis' weapon with different elements, Prompto can... Take photos. Majority of stuff was just boosts to attack or the ability to wear three accessories etc.
- Loading times varied from standard fare for an open world game on PS4, to between 1-2 minutes. These longer ones seemed to only happen between chapters, and when loading the game up from scratch.
- After around 2 hours and 40 minutes the game crashed. Just the one and only back to the dashboard.
- The game does not look good. I was sitting fairly close to a pretty big TV, but even forgetting that there's intense shadow dithering, aliasing to the high heavens (you've all seen the hair), texture and vegetation pop-in and on top of that the frame rate was incredibly inconsistent. I kinda just got used to the combat being a bit of a mess visually. It was often hard to tell what in the hell was happening.
- Moving the camera around somehow makes things worse.
- It's perhaps not the best way to explain this due to the size of this shot but I'd like to draw your attention to the shrubs in the upper left corner of this screen. When blown up to a decently sized TV, even at this close distance, those shrubs looked like sprites from Minecraft/Stardew Valley, and I swear I'm not being hyperbolic.
- Also I tried driving in 1st person and there was some bug (I can only assume) where everything looked pixellated and low-res when looking through the windscreen. Needless to say I refrained from using 1st person after that.
I had fun despite all its flaws. I would like to take my time to get to grips with the combat, weapons and magic, all of which were pretty confusing. The outset of the story is fairly traditional, but the roadtrip with your buddies spin is quite unique and did interest me. I could tell from the subtitles that the writing would be more of a problem if I could hear it in poor English voice acting.
While at times it felt like wading through mud, it also managed to capture the sense of new adventures and camaraderie. Going on a journey with friends. This is something sorely missing from a lot of grand RPGs these days, so I'm intrigued as to where that leads within the game itself. The visuals are definitely a problem for me however, if no great changes are made between now and release I'll be holding off for a Neo/PC version.
