This last weekend Square Enix added in the Duty Finder to the Closed Beta for Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, allowing players to queue for dungeons, four-man guildhest quests, and Trials from anywhere in the world. I decided to spend most of that weekend trying out the various dungeons to see how well they stacked up compared to what's available in other MMOs. Well, that and because I was tired of being stuck on the "Finish the Sastasha dungeon" part of my main story quest.

When I left off yesterday, I'd switched to healing as a Conjurer due to lengthy tank queues (yes, I know DPS have it worse) and proceeded to clear the first two dungeons ARR had to offer. I was impressed with how good the dungeons looked, both in terms of general appearance and the cutscene tours leading in, and the side chests littered across the dungeon helped provide incentive to explore rather than just riding the loot train in a single linear path like I'm accustomed to with many MMOs. Unfortunately though these two dungeons are meant as starter dungeons, so the mechanics never got complicated enough to make me feel like my abilities were being taxed. They're a good warm-up for inexperienced players and someone who might be a bit rusty, but I was looking for something a little more interesting than "occasionally summons adds". Time to see what else ARR's Duty Finder has to throw at me with the next few instances.

Over the last couple of weekends the writers here at ZAM, myself included, have been trying out the remake of Square Enix’s second MMO, Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. Corey gave his early impressions of the game’s mechanics, questing, etc. I focused on crafting and gathering for that early weekend, but followed up later with my own impressions of the rest of the game that I’d experienced up to that point. While I covered most of the areas I was interested in during those first two weekends, there was a fairly glaring hole in my coverage; other than participating in the open world FATE events I ran across, I did not participate in any group content. With no grouping tools other than yelling in General chat and an apparent abundance of Gladiator and Marauder competition for tanking roles, I focused on solo content and story until I ran into a wall when my level 15 main story quest was “Go clear Sastasha, the first dungeon”. Sure I was still content to work on crafting/gathering and there were other classes to work on for my cross-class skill slots, but I like running dungeons so I was somewhat disappointed I couldn’t cover that content.

Thankfully that problem was rectified, as this weekend’s build included a new feature for FFXIV:ARR: the Duty Finder. With that major hurdle taken care of, the goal for this last weekend became clear: run everything I could with the Duty Finder, see what group content is available, and find out.

As part of the press beta event to showcase Neverwinter, I had the good fortune to go running through the first of the D&D based MMO's dungeons yesterday.

After meeting up at the Hall of Justice in the Protector's Enclave (which you can see in the screenshots included), we prepared for our five person adventure.

Playing a Guardian Fighter, I was boosted up to level 16 by one of the very accomodating Cryptic devs such as Zeke Sparks. Then, along with some other games journalists, including Bill Murphy and Garrett Fuller of MMORPG, we hacked, slashed and romped our way through a variety of enemies including some fun boss encounters.