Final Fantasy XIV Online

As to the game's combat system, it too is a curious mixture of the new and the familiar. Gone is the somewhat slow-paced battle of FFXI, replaced by a rapid-fire combat system which gives you a steadily refilling stamina bar and a selection of abilities which drain from it. If the bar is full enough, you can fire off abilities one after the other - only if you drain it entirely will you have to pause. Special abilities retain a cooldown timer, and spells take a certain amount of time to cast, while some other abilities draw from yet another pool - your TP, which fills up as you spend time in combat and steadily depletes out of combat.

Even fighting solo is quite an interesting juggling act as a result - expect players to be debating the most effective chains and combos for exploiting Stamina, TP and cooldowns to their maximum for years to come. It's also worth noting that the game seems much more friendly to solo players than its predecessor, which pretty much enforced partying from level 10 onwards.

However, like any MMO, the real meat on the bones lies in teaming up with other players. Here, too, things are a bit different from the usual. It's common for players looking for a party in an MMO to mark themselves as "looking for group", but in FFXIV the leaders of teams in need of members flag themselves as "looking for members" instead, having informed the matchmaking system of what kind of people they require. It's going to take some time for players to get used to this - in the beta, most parties seemed to be formed in public chat rather than in the LFG system.

Party combat in FFXIV can be approached simply as an exercise in collaborative monster-bashing - which is great fun - but there's a depth to the game which was by no means fully explored in the limited time we had in the beta. A system called Battle Regimes calls upon players to figure out the strategy they're going to use and then queue up attacks to unleash in order. It seems incredibly powerful, but lacking a tutorial or a gradual introduction, was utterly impenetrable during the closed beta, and it remains to be seen whether it will have the desired effect of turning party play into a strategic affair rather than the DPS melee it is at present.

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In fact, this is the sentiment which can be taken away from much of the FFXIV closed beta - "wait and see". Over the past decade, MMO makers have recognised that betas aren't so much technical tests as they are advertising for the game - but Square Enix apparently didn't get the memo. The closed beta felt very much like a technical test, with accelerated XP gain making it hard to evaluate how the lower levels would really play, while huge swathes of the game's features seemed to be switched off - including, I suspect, a lot of the major quest lines and the various tutorials which would ease you into the more complex professions and systems.

If that incomplete picture of the game seems a little disturbing on some levels - is this really a game that's going to be finished and polished for its launch in late September? - it's also hugely promising. Final Fantasy XIV could so easily have taken the path of least resistance, neatly inserting the Final Fantasy tropes of chocobos and summoned beasts into a WOW-style framework. The fact that it's something radically different, willing to willfully ignore WOW in favour of trying out its own ideas and expanding upon the core themes of the franchise, is cause for celebration.

Whether it will work or not, however, is another question entirely. We'll have to wait and see - but with only three weeks remaining to its launch, the wait will not be very long.