The hardest aspect of the game is definitely the controls. You can force yourself to get used to it but it takes some doing. The only thing that kept me going at that stage was that I wanted to play the game for the sake of a friend who was a 3 year vet of FFXI. But it can be done. You eventually memorize what keys or controller buttons do what. They keyboard scheme is simply an almost straight across button for button port from a modern game controller. I still think they one thing they could add that would go the furthest toward saving the mouse players would simply to allow a mouse click on inert environment to move the toon to that location. Just like with L2,PWI and Aion. Very simple. nothing else would have to be changed as mouse clicks on non objects currently do nothing. Oh well, maybe someday.
As for there being no jump, it is because there wasn’t enough buttons on the controller. basically the enter key is used to confirm an action instead of opening the chat bar so they moved the open chat to the space bar and then move jumping to nowhere because they didn’t want to give up the other functions. Simply, a controller has 12 button clicks and 3 directionals. They actually did a pretty good job of cramming what they did into that. So really the only things they could add to the UI for the mouse to do would have to be duplicatable somehow on the game pad. Movement is done with a directional stick so duplicating that in a mouse click shouldn’t have been a problem. Jumping on the other hand would probably take an emote that could be put in a macro.

But I digress, you can learn new controls. The real question is do you want to bother. That is the sticking point. It does a very good job getting you into the story. Great graphics has been repeated about a million times. The audio is great too. Every NPC has something unique to say. Some more or less important but it does make the world seem more real. The down side is that they simply drop you at the door of one of the cities after some great cut scenes and then simply let you figure out what is up. That is a little disconcerting. People who are used to FF games understood that you have to talk to everyone and discover the world. Kind cool when you get past the shock but somewhat unexpected to the average MMO player. The other problem I see is that you are left to completely figure out how to do things like combat, interacting with objects and how to work the crafting and gathering mini games. Hopefully they are planning to add some tutorial elements but it may also be that they are again expecting people to “discover” how to do things. I have remarked elsewhere that FFXIV does, in fact, have a very detailed tutorial. It is called FFXI and it takes a few months to get though. The game really is designed from both style of play to the control scheme to appeal to those who have played the other game.

The slow updates have been fixed but it still crashes a bit too much. It appears to lack content but I understand that SE normally disables things for betas since “discovering the world” is really the point of all their games.

All in all, I would say that if you like discovering new worlds, it is a very good game. Very engaging. Something keeps drawing you back in. But you have to be willing to force yourself to learn a new control scheme and you have to be willing to rething what to expect from the content.

Heh.

Heheheheh.

HAHAHEEHOOHOOHAHEEHOOHAHAHEEHOOH!!!!

Now, pull the other one. Is got bells on it.