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It breaks my heart that we will never get a game like Final Fantasy XI again...
- Thread starter Mr. RPG
- Start date
People saying FFXI was hard... It wasn't actually difficult the word you are looking for is unfair. Forcing you to group in partys to level but not having a good way to setup a party or encouraging people to play tanks and healers? Unfair. Gaining a level only to lose it dying? Unfair.
The players who loved FFXI really have these rose tented glasses on when it comes to the game, the game was not good but you found enjoyment in it despite the numerous flaws and bullshit unfair systems the game was designed around. FFXI would crash and burn in todays market and FFXIV is an infinitely better game.
The players who loved FFXI really have these rose tented glasses on when it comes to the game, the game was not good but you found enjoyment in it despite the numerous flaws and bullshit unfair systems the game was designed around. FFXI would crash and burn in todays market and FFXIV is an infinitely better game.
You are right, as I played through the entire thing all expansions included just last year and the amount of things they've had to add/improve to make it playable is quite impressive. Even with all of those, you absolutely have to use a guide. I don't see how people even got through the game back then.
Love the stories though.
I'm glad you came in here to tell us what our memories and feelings of the game truly are. Pack it up folks, FFXIV is the game we should be talking about.
I do love that they made a gospel version of the track for an arrangement album with lyrics that wouldn't be too out of place in a church, if it weren't for the mention of Altana:
While at it, it can take 5 Ark Angels to tango, for an extra fun take at Divine Might:
All these people think they can grow as a person without being subjected to torture. LOL.
i got my Amanomurakumo and quit the game before wotg storyline was complete.
The game forced you to make nice with others and the oppressive nature of the game pushed people together. I still have friends from ffxi, more than a decade after i met them because of the shit we went through together.
It was badly designed at the most fundamental but the design on top of that was phenomenal compared to what else was out. We all hated WoW for being casual mode garbage and happily suffered shoulder to shoulder for years.
i got my Amanomurakumo and quit the game before wotg storyline was complete.
The game forced you to make nice with others and the oppressive nature of the game pushed people together. I still have friends from ffxi, more than a decade after i met them because of the shit we went through together.
It was badly designed at the most fundamental but the design on top of that was phenomenal compared to what else was out. We all hated WoW for being casual mode garbage and happily suffered shoulder to shoulder for years.
I agree OP, but I'm a different person now than I was in FFXI's heyday. And I still play the game, it's still enjoyable to me, but it has changed utterly... the leveling process in XI is now shorter than WoW or any other MMO. The game has dropped the forced community aspect and you can complete much of it solo, with Trust magic.
FFXIV is a reskinned WoW with modern graphics, a more cohesive story, slower combat, and some quality-of-life improvements. It's not a bad game but it fails to live up to the legacy of XI, with its lack of interesting classes or strong class differentiation. Also, the vertical progression in XIV is the most poorly-disguised treadmill of any MMO that I've ever played. World of Warcraft has a better and more varied endgame even at this late date.
Agreed. Content had value in FFXI. It wasn't disposable. I finished Chains of Promathia and unlocked sea 13 or so years ago. And today that mission progression is still used to forge endgame gear.
FFXIV is a reskinned WoW with modern graphics, a more cohesive story, slower combat, and some quality-of-life improvements. It's not a bad game but it fails to live up to the legacy of XI, with its lack of interesting classes or strong class differentiation. Also, the vertical progression in XIV is the most poorly-disguised treadmill of any MMO that I've ever played. World of Warcraft has a better and more varied endgame even at this late date.
Agreed. Content had value in FFXI. It wasn't disposable. I finished Chains of Promathia and unlocked sea 13 or so years ago. And today that mission progression is still used to forge endgame gear.
It's my favorite game and we'll never see anything like pre-Abyssea XI again. Indie MMO's just don't have the budget to recreate the magic XI had.
I still play on the Phoenix server (IGN is Drelkag) casually leveling jobs and helping linkshell members.
I still play on the Phoenix server (IGN is Drelkag) casually leveling jobs and helping linkshell members.
And I preferred the direction XIV 1.0 was heading to what we have now. Legacy account, only jump in to play once every few months since the repetitive patches burned me out around Heavensward.
When I walked into Lufaise Meadows for the first time I felt like I actually accomplished something. I can't think of many games that made me feel that same feeling.
This is false. In FFXI there were a lot of viable parties, regular trinity parties, but also TP burn, BLM only parties.. there was more freedom on how you set up a party, and some camps were better than others depending on your party.
In XIV you are forced to make a trinity party, that's it.
Yes, and no. There were definitely "rules" that had to be followed, especially in the first year or so.
Of course it wasnt perfect, but it was a 1000x better than the garbage that modern MMOs have become with vertical progression killing gear in 3-6 months, simon says bossfight design, and a worthless overworld
But even within your points. There was verticality before the level cap reached 75, but that was before NA release. The earliest of 75 cap event gear stayed relevant from its release until the level cap was raised. Not all of it, but large swaths of it.
So it didnt matter if things took a while to get, or levels to a while to get. You could sit back and take it all in because there was no race to be had. There was even plenty of things that were end game relevant that you could do during the levelling process. I had finished CoP's airship battle before even getting my first job to 75
Also you could go from new player to endgame in todays ffxi in 3 weeks, easily. Levelling to 99 takes no time, and ambuscade ensures you have quality gear.
XIV ARR is among the worst games I've ever played. What an identiless boring pile of focus grouped ideas
Flashback to Allakazham (RIP) threads filled with people telling everyone to go back to WoW every time they suggested to ease some aspects of the game, ahah.
it was way more flexible than XIV though, especially starting ToAU that popularized TP parties.
Borderline controversial because of DNC and Campaign.
Everyone would be in agreement of cutting it off before Abyssea.
Why tho? WoTG didn't add anything worse to the game, for better or worse.
Honestly? It is where the game lost me. The changes were enough that I didn't want to expend the time needed anymore.
I freely admit that Abyssea probably saved the game, but I have way too many good memories from the early days that makes it not feel like the same game anymore.
The moment I heard FFXI was "online" that was the last time I wanted to hear anything about the game, to the point I dont even know what it looks like, same with FFXIV, a shame for me since some people say both games are awesome, but that online thing just doesnt go with me.
1) I didn't say you should be talking about FFXIV I was saying its a better game and in every way it is, part of that comes from the changing marketplace and the failure of the original FFXIV, another part of that is lessons learned from FFXI and the host of problems that game had. Hell I'll say its a better game because it doesn't delevel you when you die, that one thing makes it a better game because that really sucked in FFXI.
2) I didn't tell you how to feel I said people describing the game as 'hard' aren't using the right word as unfair is a better description of the various elements that people were saying made the game difficult. A difficult or hard game is something you can generally overcome with practice and skill, something you can't do with the various problems in FFXI such as the deleveling system or the way the game forces you to group up into a party to progress, those will always be things that can screw you over no matter how good of a player you are or how much you've learned about the game or its various systems, thus unfair.
You love the game as much as you want but I would like to hear how these systems actually made the game good in your eyes because the deleveling alone was a terrible feature that burned a lot of people on the game including myself. Spending 3+ hours to get a full party only to die on the first few monsters, delevel and have everyone leave is not a good experience and its something that happened multiple times when I played this game back in the day. Whats fun about that? Look I love Ragnarok Online an even older MMO then FFXI but objectively I know its not a very good game because of all the unfair bullshit it also had, you can love something and still understand that the love of that thing comes in spite of the game you actually played because its not all bad and the good parts are really great and the people you met and played with defined the experience not the game itself because the game itself had a crapton of problems that generally a lot of people couldn't get past.
This is the same way people talk about Classic WoW as well, yeah sure a lot of people have great memories of it and really loved it but classic WoW was also a buggy mess of bullshit not just unfair bullshit but stupid broken glitchy bullshit. You can love the great memories you have for that experience and still be realistic about the real problems the game had thats one reason there is such a big debate on what form the 'Classic WoW' will take whenever Blizzard eventually release it, some people want the original experience with all the bullshit other people want them to fix at least some of the bullshit so its not such a shitty experience.
This is where I think the game got too bloated with different events introduced with each expansion with their own currencies and junk, granted by the time Aht Urhgan came around I no longer had the time to play religiously so I was still working on getting those endgame gears when Wings of the Goddess launched. But Campaign felt like such a timesink and having to do it consistently or risk losing your rank was a good way to lose motivation to keep at it. I never got high rank in Campaign and I didn't even finish the WotG missions...but I got back into the game big time with Abyssea before ultimately putting it away because I didn't have time for MMOs anymore.
Campaign was still FUN, but felt like an even bigger timesink than what came before. I did love when just a few people in a zone would gather and try to hold off the enemy waves, when it got really challenging it was a real blast.
Another thing I really liked about this game, and what's missing from today's games is the sense of community. It has become easier than ever to interact with people online but it's often avoided because of that. Things have become way too toxic for one, and it's so easy to just use party chat on console, or discord or something.
I really liked the battle system in XI, you had plenty of time to type to people, like your Linkshell members for example while grinding away in your XP party leveling up. In FFXIV I'm too busy mashing out a global cooldown and running out of red circles to ever talk to anyone.
I also like how the entire open world of MMOs used to have a purpose, and while being able to queue up for instances in a party finder is convenient, there's no connection - you join, play through the dungeon, and leave. Meanwhile the open world is relegated mostly to story and many of the zones end up empty or near useless once you've hit level cap.
I really liked the battle system in XI, you had plenty of time to type to people, like your Linkshell members for example while grinding away in your XP party leveling up. In FFXIV I'm too busy mashing out a global cooldown and running out of red circles to ever talk to anyone.
I also like how the entire open world of MMOs used to have a purpose, and while being able to queue up for instances in a party finder is convenient, there's no connection - you join, play through the dungeon, and leave. Meanwhile the open world is relegated mostly to story and many of the zones end up empty or near useless once you've hit level cap.
I loved loved FFXI when it came out in NA with Rise of Zilart, but I don't ever want or need an MMO like that ever again because it destroyed my life for near two years. Best time I had playing a game while also destroying my college career through endless leveling, LS bickering over HNMs, and farming mats to fight god. I think I'm glad I was around when the community went from awesome to toxic when the economy got fucked by gil farmers. Means I'm less likely to go back to it.
Still, we will never get another MMO like FFXI because WoW came out and changed how MMOs worked. For better and worse.
Still, we will never get another MMO like FFXI because WoW came out and changed how MMOs worked. For better and worse.
I went back to it on a private server and it's still good, though the server wasn't that populated, but I did cross a old guild member which made things scary and awesome lol. I also tried dual boxing which was very nice. The game holds up for me, and I still haven't found a game that has a character or class that plays like Beastmaster, Thief, Red Mage, or even Dancer. I want FFXI co op + offline option remake/master whatever, I just want it!
Just got FFXII TZA so I'll be busy for a while while SE make this... (taps watch)
Heck I should just reinstall FFXI and that private server mess huh?
The game's reliance on EXP parties basically made it so you had to make an effort to be courteous to others and get along. Because you'd be leveling up alongside the same people for a while and you don't want to burn bridges for high level parties and missions lol. Definitely the best sense of community I've ever experienced in an online game.
I do like how XIV added both sexes for Miqos and Roegs though. I liked my catdude in XIV, and Roeg ladies are awesome.
Yes, I stinking hate FFXIV's battle system. Press a button every millisecond to half second, it's annoying as heck. I loved positional abilities in FFXI but in FFXIV with the whole button rotation, and redzone get out the way littered floor, it just pissed me off.
And I loved the community in FFXI, people with bad reputations followed them like glue, cool people were always welcomed, very skillful players were gods in my eyes. I still remember to this day the Samurai that impressed me on Lufaise Meadows birds (Abraxas I think), a slash samurai on birds! He was Japanese so I never saw him again but he was cool with his auto translate use.
The one time I felt like I was in a community with FFXIV was when I was in a long Fate EXP party that moved to a different zone together. Then the next day I crossed some of the same people and remembered their names. That was just one time, never happened again, and I lived in Fate EXP party, I hated the dungeons and the LFP Party Finder waiting thing.
I remember when I realized that samurai was the job for me. It was right before getting to the Aht Urghan camps, and I played with some japanese players. I kept getting compliments from them, and for about a week I was actually being headhunted by japanese exp party makers. I'd just get invites out of the blue. Great feeling lol.
Yeah I'll be trying that, I like the way it looked in the screen shot, I hope they bring it to PC, anything at this point.
Haha you lucky dog. The only time I got invited to a Japanese group was because my friend begged them to let me join their Dynamis runs. The same group owned Fafnir on our server. That lead to my entry into endgame content.
Wish I still had all my old screenshots, lost most of them on my old PC I was using at the time
Absolutely! I used to take pride in my ability to organize 5 random strangers in FFXI and have everyone work together like a well-oiled machine!
Also, (as others have mentioned) best FF OST by a landslide!
While I was definitely decent at samurai when I was leveling up, I'm sure the Soboro-Sukehiro made me look more impressive than I actually was :P
Oh snap I feel a screen shot thread and reminiscing on old days talk coming up. I have a lot of my old screens, I could have had so much more if I didn't forget to email myself all of the screens on my Play Online account 3 at a time. That was annoying.
A picture of this broke thief with assJerkin surrounded by pimped out people.
Modern day FFXI has almost as many actions as XIV, and that's with using macros and windower to do the swaps for you. Back in the days it had a very slow pace but nowadays everyone is haste/fastcast capped and spamming stuff, you can self chain on any class even without SAM sub just because you gain TP so fast. XIV has a GCD of 2.5sec, with some classes(mostly melees) going down to 2secs, and you're rarely pressing buttons more often than that(a few abilities are off the GCD, so sometimes you press 2buttons in that 2.5secs). It's one of the main complaint from wow players about XIV actually, it's TOO SLOW, rather than too fast.
Yeah, I've heard. That's why I gave the private server FFXI a shot. I got it to work very well too. I would give current FFXI a shot if it didn't have subs still though. I loved the classes, and how they played, though I don't know how they play currently with the increase in button presses. From your description it sounds pretty bad.
Ehh, I really disagree, FFXIV was my first MMO and I also have "countless" stories to tell about friends made and people who helped me out and overcoming really hard challenges and what not. The difference is FFXI's design is outdated and I'd never get to experience all that friend making and what not in that type of environment today because I have a job and shit.
You'll find it in another
I thought I would never hate anything more that ff9 then I played ff2 then ff15 came out
I thought I would never hate anything more that ff9 then I played ff2 then ff15 came out
i never played ff xi, but from what i've read i truly admire how the game was designed around genuine cooperation. so many multiplayer games, not just mmo's, basically provide streamlined templates or simple goals so people can still play together and generally succeed without communicating.
i like reading people's experiences, because it's cool to hear about these raw, unscripted encounters with other players. it's rare to see that these days, when in so many games the person you're cooperating with might as well be ai-scripted because of how the game is designed—its almost easier not to communicate.
i did play ff xiv for a free month and enjoyed it a lot. the most fun i had was fighting garuda for the first time with people i didnt know. finally, for once, we had to communicate and figure out the boss's patterns unlike the dungeons where we'd mechanically work our way through, following our class roles and not having to say anything. it sounds like ff xi extended that feeling across the whole game world, not just 1% of it, so yeah—kinda wish i got to experience something like that in its heyday.
i like reading people's experiences, because it's cool to hear about these raw, unscripted encounters with other players. it's rare to see that these days, when in so many games the person you're cooperating with might as well be ai-scripted because of how the game is designed—its almost easier not to communicate.
i did play ff xiv for a free month and enjoyed it a lot. the most fun i had was fighting garuda for the first time with people i didnt know. finally, for once, we had to communicate and figure out the boss's patterns unlike the dungeons where we'd mechanically work our way through, following our class roles and not having to say anything. it sounds like ff xi extended that feeling across the whole game world, not just 1% of it, so yeah—kinda wish i got to experience something like that in its heyday.
Final Fantasy XI is the best Final Fantasy.
Specially pre-Abyssea imo.
I agree with others here though, as much as I love the old FFXI, there's just no way I would have time for it nowadays.
But man, the sense of camraderie, the difficulty of the game (imo this is the hardest and most technical FF), the inmense world, the beautiful music and art design, the sense of wonder, the openness of it all, the thrill of the danger, and the mother****ing Leapin' Lizzy... I feel like nothing can top that gaming experience for me.
Also, the Chains of Promathia expansion was brutal and fun at first. 10/10
I miss Vana'Diel!
Specially pre-Abyssea imo.
I agree with others here though, as much as I love the old FFXI, there's just no way I would have time for it nowadays.
But man, the sense of camraderie, the difficulty of the game (imo this is the hardest and most technical FF), the inmense world, the beautiful music and art design, the sense of wonder, the openness of it all, the thrill of the danger, and the mother****ing Leapin' Lizzy... I feel like nothing can top that gaming experience for me.
Also, the Chains of Promathia expansion was brutal and fun at first. 10/10
I miss Vana'Diel!
But ff11 was dam near perfect before they added blue mages
I was so into the game I decided to de-level my BLM from 75 to 37 so I could level it up again without starting over from scratch
Phoenix server forever!
Thanks to Google Photos I still have most of my screenshots from the game (and the other MMO I played for a long time "Tibia"
I was so into the game I decided to de-level my BLM from 75 to 37 so I could level it up again without starting over from scratch
Phoenix server forever!
Thanks to Google Photos I still have most of my screenshots from the game (and the other MMO I played for a long time "Tibia"
I doubt you've been following XIV but the game is seemingly introducing a new form of content called Eureka that is pretty similar to what XI used to be like. With NMs and everything.
Elemental wheel, butbit still plays like ffxivf No solo skillchain light, samurai setsugekka doesn't count. I'm playing ffxiv again, also a legacy account.. It looks fun but it's ffxiv with an elemental wheel.