I know it sounds inflammatory but I have to be honest: No, I didn't. And I don't think it was because of me or because of my unwillingness to accept the game's merits, strenths and weaknesses but because several of its technical and gameplay pillars are fundamentally badly designed and thought out. I have to give one big caveat though: I skipped the cutscenes because I didn't want to spoil me too much but what I saw from the screens next to me the pre-rendered cutscenes looked fucking gorgeous. But first I really want to dispel one thing:
This is absolutely 100% false. Those screenshots convey very accurately what the game actually looks like while exploring, running and driving around. This is how Final Fantasy XV's open world looks like when there's no motion blur and flashy effects from fight scenes, running on a PS4. The framerate seemed like it was a pretty steady 30fps, which is obviously a big step up from Episode Duscae and very likely the reason the game looks so much worse even compared to the demo.
But to get to my more important points:
I feel like there are three big pillars to this game:
1) Driving around (The Road Trip pillar)
2) Fighting (The Final Fantasy & Action Game pillar)
3) Exploring, Questing, Looting (The Open World pillar)
I have huge problems with each one. Let's start with my biggest disappointemnt from this demo:
1) The Driving feels bad, lacks interactivity and betrays what a road trip is about
When I think of the concept of a road trip I think about freedom. About driving around unshackled from any boundaries and obligations, about exploring unknown territory, about going out of your comfort zone. In contrast to all of these concepts FF XV takes all control away from you when you drive. Even when you choose to control the game "manually" you:
-can't leave the road
-can't turn the wheel more than a few cm, while you snap back to your previous position the second you let go from the analogue stick
-can't drive fast
-can't exit the car wherever you want (kinda, but not exactly)
-can't take corners the way you want, the game automatically breaks, even if you pull the Gas button as far as you can
You are basically on a fixed track and you have to hold R2 to keep on driving on that fixed track. Whenever an intersection comes up you hold in the direction you want to drive and the game does the rest for you. When you want to make a U-Turn you just press Square and the game automatically does a U-Turn for you. There is no way for you to do this yourself since you can't actually steer away from the road in front of you. Even if there's a huge, long, endless straight in front of you Noctis will not drive with more than what feels like 15 mp/h, no matter how much you just want to race to your next waypoint. This means that driving long distances takes WAY too long with no way to skip to the end (at least in the demo I played), even in Automatic mode. When I hold X to exit the car, they don't immediatly do it but instead drive a few meters further to a predetermint point where the game allows me to stop. After that, the screen turns black and I stand outside of the car.
Nothing works as you'd expect it to work, nothing feels good, you are never in control and the black screen seems completely unnecessary and betrays the seamless transition they were going for originally.
Your Number 1 method of transportation feels like garbage and isn't fun in the slightest.
2) The Fighting System couples the action of Character Action games with the control responsiveness of JRPGs. It doesn't go well.
The controls are incredibly sluggish and unresponsiv, even at a steady framerate. Since you have to hold the circle button to attack you can't accurately control each strike. It's not intuitively noticable when one attack started or the next one ended. You never know 100% if you already queued up the next hit or not.
At the same time the fast paced fighting demands the accuracy of a Character Action game. You should not attack enemies when they block you, you should block when enemies attack you. Since you do not have complete control over your character and instead just tell him which NPD to attack instead of actively attacking him yourself, this demanded accuracy seems unnecessarily frustrating to achieve.
The developers also didn't think about several fundamentals of the Action game genre and instead had to work around them with stopgap solutions. The biggest example to me is the utter lack of noticable enemy tells. The best character action games achieve a perfect balance of letting the player know when and how an enemies is about to attack while also demanding great reflexes and the knowledge of how to counter said attack. An obvious example would be the red flashe some enemies in Metal Gear Rising display shortly before attacking. This red flash always means the same and is an established part of the ruleset.
In FFXV everything explodes in effects and characters since 3 of your companions share the screen with you most of the time while you often fight against 3, 4 or 5 small enemies at the same time, making it utterly impossible to actually notice any tells from any of the enemie NPCs. So what did Square Enix do?
The put a Huge "GUARD! USE SQUARE!" tooltip up everytime an enemie attacks with an attack you could parry. Instead of actually working on the issue the built a ugly workaround, removing any learning curve and finesse inherent in actually learning an enemie's behaviour. With big enemies there comes a new problem of actually not knowing what is an attack and what's just movement. You don't really know what hurts you and what doesn't.
And don't even get me started on their solution to "Oh Jesus, no one knows what's going on during these battles, what should we do?" Just PAUSE them? Are you serious? That's like building a terrible shooter where no one hits anything and instead of working on the AI or the controls you just tell your players to pause the game and move the crosshair over your enemie's head in that time.
3.) Exploring the open world is tedious and straight-up not fun
I could go on and on about this point (oh my god using the car is seriously such a fucking chore) but this post is already way too long so I just want to give you one perfect example of how badly thought out almost every aspect of this game is:
I drove on a street when I heard a scream from somewhere and a new side quest popped up. A hunter needed help! I wanted to help him...but the game didn't actually tell me where I should go to do that. The game registered the side quest. It marked it in my Quest Log. And I could even get a waypoint! But not just like that - I had to put in some work. And, honestly? This feels so obviously unintuitive and easy to fix that I think I probably missed a button here. If that's the case, please correct me and I will quote you as soon as I see it. But I tried and tried and didn't find a way. So what did I have to do?
Well, I was driving in my car - and while driving I couldn't access my Skill Menu or Quest Log anymore. The options were gone from the Start Menu. I could only open my map. I had to get out of the car to be able to access the Quest Log. This was the process:
- Getting the sidequest notification
- Holding X to stop the Car
- Waiting for the Car to stop further down the road for no discernible reason
- Getting a Black Screen while my characters left the car.
- Accessing the Quest Log
- Marking the Side Quest as active
- Leaving the Quest Log
- Getting back in the car
- Turning around
- Slooowly accelerating and driving back to the point where I got the notification and go from there
For whatever reason I could only ever track one quest on my mini map. This sounds like a small thing but in an open world game where such notifications hit by the minute, making me leave me car slooooowly only to be able to tell the game to allow me to approach the activity while I could have done so way easier while actually already sitting in my car is a completely unnecessary obstacle between me and my desire to explore the world.
I would go in further detail but just imagine a really ugly Dragon Age: Inquisition and you got the picture.
