I've gotten invited into three betas so far this summer. All of them were earlier in the summer actually. I just wasn't blogging then. And when I say invited I mean they actually emailed me and asked. Yeah. Two of them were supposed to be pre-order only, so I guess EA just loves me. So I'll have some information on Medal of Honor, Final Fantasy 14, and Need for Speed World.
I didn't actually get to play FF14, and I'll be ranting about why. NFSW's closed beta likewise would not run, but I did get to play the open beta. MoH's beta went smoothly (as it was on PS3) and, ironically, it was the worst experience of the three.
I'll take these in chronological order, so first up is Final Fantasy 14.
My experience with Square role playing games started with Kingdom Hearts, which was really the best role player I had ever played at that time. Kingdom Hearts 2 was awesome as well. My Final Fantasy adventure didn't start until number 12. I'm not the kind of person that back tracks through video game series just because he likes a current one. I am however the kind of person that keeps buying sequels. That brought me to Final Fantasy 13, which really let me down. Everything I loved about Final Fantasy 12; the freedom of exploration, the programmable AI, the challenging battles... the Viera; they were all gone! They had trashed their series in order to fit it onto a box (as in xbox) it wasn't meant to go onto. I don't like mumorpigas, and I was a little upset with Square, but I was still excited to get the invite to the Final Fantasy 14 alpha testing on the fourth of June.
The first thing I did was log into the link they gave me, and it said my account wasn't active. Okay let's actually read the email this time. Apparently they're letting people into the alpha in phases to slowly strain their network. So I can't start testing until the 9th (of June). Okay... I wonder why wouldn't just wait until then, but cool!
Alright so the 9th finally arrives and I can't login. They didn't really give a time. I first tried it at 8:00 a.m. EST and my account was still not active. I tried about ever hour or two for the rest of the day. I started to get a little antsy that it still wasn't working.
So the next morning I log in, and it lets me in! The first thing I do is read the forum stickies and what not (the tester's website is actually a forum with a sidebar of links to important threads to make it look like a real website with pages). Not a single mention of technical difficulties or work arounds in their stickies. Okay looks like everything has gone smoothly so far; the first perfect testing launch I've ever witnessed; Just what I'd expect from square.
So I download their special downloader (because everyone has to have a special custom download manager these days); 170+mb! For a download manager? Okay so I start it up and... the interface mentions remote and local connections. Uh oh. I dislike torrent downloading. P2P anything scares me when it isn't on strictly locked down console video games. After a little bit of arguing with myself I decide I can trust Square. I give Windows firewall the go ahead and the download starts... at 5bps. Yes you read that right. Five bytes per second. Ouch! So I go back to the forums and read some non stickies. I didn't have to forum search because literally every single non-sticky thread on the forum was about that.
Not a good start I think. You'd think they'd be doing something to help us, but instead they're ignoring the problem completely. I was completely mislead by their stickies. So note to self: a lack of information on how to solve problems does not mean there are no problems. The people in charge could just be ignoring them!
It's also worth mentioning that my upspeed for this was maxed out. So my entire family's internet connections were trashed and I was getting nothing downloaded. So did I wait for the several gigabyte download at 5 bytes per second? Uh... no. I decided to wait until beta when the kinks were worked out.
Except that the beta started a few days ago and the downloader *still* sucks. Many people on the forums, by that point, had reported success with 3rd party torrent clients (the torrent file that the download manager was using is located in My Documents and can be opened with BitTorrent). But even then I was only getting seventeen kilobytes per second max. 180kbps or GTFO.
The good news is that because I bought FF13 very soon after its release I am automatically (supposedly) invited to the FF14 PS3 beta which will be downloaded via PSN.
Next up; Need for Speed World. Later today or tomorrow.
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