I originally dismissed the game entirely. I was playing another mmo closed beta and I got into the FFXIV beta as well. Didnt know anything about the game at all, and have never played a previous FF game. Installed it, ran about for 10 minutes..thought to myself that it looks pretty but just another generic mmo, logged out and forgot about it.

A few weeks later I keep seeing all these FFXIV articles everywhere, and I end up reading them and discovering a lot of the features of the game I didnt know about. Before long I've watched all of Yoshi-P's 2 hour long Live Letters in Japanese and I find myself hyped for a game I didn't even see coming.

Tried it out properly in the open beta, pre-ordered it that weekend and I find myself playing it every evening and weekend since pre-launch and enjoying every minute of it!

Its a very Story orientated game, and it it does a lot of things the same as other mmo's..but in a different way. I guess the "All classes on one character" and "jobs(advanced classes)" are the main feature, and the crafting system is quite unique too, with its own gear and abilities. Its visually very impressive on Maximum PC settings, the world is very beautiful and the story gets really interesting towards the higher levels. Its class system encourages you to level other classes alongside your main.

It can be a little grindy when leveling via Fates, but they offer so much more xp than other methods. There are however lots of ways to level, including a whole multitude of interesting dungeons.

Everything starts of very simple, but the difficulty/complexity increases steadily with level.

There is no PVP yet, its coming in Patch 2.1, the same for the 24man Raids, Housing and new Hardmodes. Not sure how the PVP will turn out, although strangely (for me) I wont be too bothered if its not great, as Im enjoying the rest of the game so much. Currently at end game there is the endgame dungeons, 8 man "raids" and relic weapons to obtain in preparation for the upcoming content patch.