I managed to get an invite during the first round. To my surprise, not liking XIV at all, I love what little bit of the game there is in the alpha, it's a solid game. I've leveled all the available classes/crafts to max, ran the dungeon (more times than I can count), done all the quests and leves, yet I still hop on and play... a lot. I can't wait for it to come out and I'm very glad I managed to get Legacy status just before they cut off 3-month sub fees on the original now.
As for the graphics, they aren't very impressive at all, but they could be given the time-frame. The options here are extremely limited right now. Before going into detail, I have a high-end PC housing a EVGA GTX 670 FTW Edition so I'm capable of making it look its absolute best. You guys have already brought up the noticeable lack of detail in the trees and such, as well as how they look like paper cutouts. I'm guessing those images are still somewhat compressed for whatever reason, I don't see them staying this way though. The main problem comes in with the lack of high resolution textures. What you get is ambient occlusion and HD effects bouncing around, glowing/shining off crappy textures and that just makes things look horrible. It's like a blurry, low-res HD on everything right now, is the best way I can explain it. Then they have this effect on everything that creates a glow, most notable in an inn or near a light source (not ambient light, ex the sun, but like a room light) and the glow seems to be, like a lot of things, not linked to any AA code, oddly enough, forcing AA in the Nvidia control panel doesn't even provide some things AA. So ultimately, right now, what you have is a game that looks "fuzzy", jaggy, and ill-lit (though not in a sense that it's dark, in fact, there is too much light). This is an alpha though and graphics are generally rough in this phase, this is normal. It's still cause for concern though given how much emphasis the team has put on making this one of the best looking games out there (on the PC).
The U.I. is great. It's very, very clean and straight forward, like any great U.I. should be. It's also fully customizable and the U.I. editing mode is very intuitive making it very easy to get things how you like them.
There are a few things though that really do concern me, though they'd be easy fixes. The controls aren't really "stiff" (the animation however is) as someone put it, but they're off from the norm. It uses your typical WASD movement style, but with A and D you can't turn, only strafe. Simply put, it only allows for 4 directional movement in the traditional format. The normal usage of movement with A and D instead uses Q and E. Once you get use to it, it's not a big deal, but it's awkward at first if you use those heavily, me, I typically move with the mouse and that works just as it does in most other normal (non-FFXI) MMORPG games. My final gripe here is party member selection keys, generally designated to F1-F(# of party member). F1 is you, F2 is someone in your party at random, and then every other F# is either you again or does nothing. It's quite frustrating playing WHM and having to click peoples tabs to target them, very frustrating given how slow and inefficient it is, definitely feels like a bug.
And finally, the control feeling in general on PC. PC controls in XIV were just awful. In ARR, minus the mentioned quirks, are really, really good. No mouse/pointer issues, and it follows the traditional MMORPG control feel really nice, again, something that XIV failed at. There definitely will not be a high desire to use a controller this time around for the game to play properly, if people use a controller on the PC, it'll be simply because they want to.
All that said, to touch on how I feel about it; I'm relieved. For years after I left FFXI I've been searching for that same feeling of belonging I got from XI. I've played tons of other MMORPGs but FFXI was a "home" in a world I wanted to stay in for years and years despite any sort of lacking content. ARR puts me back into that feeling, that I'm in a FF world that I want to be a part of, something XIV failed to do. So I'm looking forward to spending some great years in ARR if the rest of the content is as good as the Alpha content.
If you guys want to know anything specific I didn't cover ask away. I could care less about the NDA past posting pictures and videos.
