Looking for a new MMO made in FF

[Inactive]

lots of stuff

I can pretty much agree with all of this. The whole ability spamming aspect is completely true and something I never really thought about. FFXI's battle system was slowed down, but still felt epic. I think it may just have something to do with stat scaling in FFXI vs every other MMO I've played. Having 1400hp when HNMs hit you for a few hundred really forces you to min/max, and pick your abilities wisely.

Speaking of which, I loved having to min/max gear sets in ffxi which is something I've yet to see in any other MMO. Sure you can theorycraft to squeak out some extra dps/healing, but the difference is pretty negligible. The difference between being MDT capped on Tiamat, and not, was night and day.

Lastly, creating a game around having to play alts is dumb. Give me enough content to be able to play 1 character

[The Stig]

Regarding the slow battle pace of FFXI, I remembered when I showed my friend (full time WoW fan) combat in FFXI -- I went to Boyhada Tree and then started beating on a Robber Crab on my PLD/WHM. All I had was a slow ass Espadon on me.

The crab defense boosted early. The fight took maybe 3~ minutes?

Regardless, by the end of it, he was completely turned off with the game. When he asked me what level I was in comarison to that crab, I told him I was 75, and the crab was probably 62. He hated the idea that even though I was level capped, a low ass crab like this can drag a fight on like this for a mere 30 exp lol

The one character system still remains top notch though of FFXI, switching jobs on the fly was so nice to try everything with little to no repercussion.

Explaining the subjob system to friends was also interesting. Some actually like it, others can't get their head around it.

[Dimmauk]

Ive been playing this recently, and its a blast! This might ween me off of FFXI.

From the DC Universe thread. I havent used FFXI since wednesday. I think Im close to been done with FFXI.

[Ohemgee]

The grindy nature of FFXI is what made it the game it was. It was a lot more memorable to play because you were forced to play it a lot on 11 (scale of 1-10). I don't see how eliminating the need to compete in an MMO is good at all. It makes the game like a wanking match if all the content is shared and instanced. It really removes the humanity out of the game.

I completely agree with Takiwaki, it wasn't a perfect system, but the results were absolutely incredible because it forced you to group from Lv 10 and on. Hitting 65,70,75 and beyond were all achievements rather than the next thing, and if you think about it, there was plenty of meaningful shit to do 1-75 and now 99 -(leveled cap CoP instances, LONG AS FUCK missions in ToAU, somewhat progressive story in WotG [note: this was the weakest expansion]). And often times the genius behind SE was that they released a new expansion pack, though it was incomplete as fuck, there was enough grinding in the game that filled in the gap between patches.

Its the submissive nature of grinding that really fuels an MMO. What sort of achievement is it when all of the grind and competition is taken out? None. If camping Fafhogg, Behemoth and Turtle were the only thing people did, then they chose to do HNMs. But there were Linkshells that were dedicated to Sky, Dynamis, Sea, HNM, Missions, Social/XPing and even all inclusive ones that everyone knew and loved. Hell even the RMTs in FFXI were better than any other MMO. YOU COMPETED AGAINST THEM!

Not to mention the fact that there was one mob, on a specific spawn condition, with a broken claiming system that fueled drama. PEOPLE LOVED DRAMA! Shit got real and personal back then. We have BlueGartr for really focusing on end game and all of its shenanigans and there's a fuck ton of bickering that closely resembled high school. Yeah everyone is older and wants a more mature game base. But in reality, end game is boring as shit without competition and drama. That's the reality of MMOs.

tl;dr - Bitches be trippin if they think GW2 is anything close to FFXI.

[Alderaan]

Bitches be trippin if they think botting HNM's is "competition".

Server vs. server skill based PVP > standing around afk 90% of the time talking shit in say.

I miss the class system of XI and how long it took to reach cap, but that's about it.

[Ohemgee]

I did say it was a broken system! But even if you're not camping HNMs, you're still indirectly competing with other LSs - funding relics, gearing up on other shit, clearing sky/sea etc

[Senji]

If open world/pvp was added with a HD graphics overhaul...

[Lucavi]

And guilds in WoW, SW, Rift are still competing with other guilds with the exact same things you posted: funding legendary weapons (where they apply), gearing up on other shit, clearing hard-modes/ect. The only difference is the "bring the stunners and the utsusemi and the rangers!" "difficulty" compared to movement and memorization-based difficulty of hard-modes of other games, and the easily-abused system of placing the best items on .03% drop rates of mobs that pop once a week in the world, promoting rampant botting and cheating to have a shot.

FFXI was great for what it was: forcing people to party and promoting people to cheat. The sense of community was fostered due to being forced to party with others to get anything of value done, having no functional PVP to force players to accept PVE endgame as the be-all end-all of content (and thus, reinforcing said forced-grouping), and being inundated with the same world-spawn system for so long during people's MMO-infancy stages to the point where they rationalized that XI's system was the superior system to all others. There was a lot of brainwashing going on, and clearly it worked: we learned that if you drive a systematic design into people's heads long enough, some of them become obsessed with it, like some sort of bizarre stockholm syndrome.

If WoW hadn't been so brain-blisteringly successful, we may not have had this conversation, as there would have been other MMOs that tried different things, just like how WoW tried different things. The fact that WoW exploded so amazingly has directly and indirectly led to the ever-lingering trend of MMO system stagnation.

Damn you, Blizzard, and your amazing design/refinement.

[Alderaan]

I personally think the community went out the window the second server transfers started in XI. The game still followed the same mechanics but we could no longer police ourselves and weed out the asshats.

[Eaglestrike]

I've been sampling many MMOs since leaving XI, here's what I miss from XI

2. Diverse classes/races (only applies to fantasy MMOs, not superhero/futuristic ones).
Ok, XI didn't have diverse races. It was the usual 5 with a bit of shuffling around and not much practical difference between them. But at least, it had many jobs with well-differentiated (but poorly balanced) flavor.
Other old MMOs like EQ offered quite a variety of choice, as well.


These days, races tend to have been reduced to:
- Humans, generic "average" types.
- Elves, with all the usual clichés. Sometimes, many types of Elves, sometimes just Light/Dark.
- Dwarves and their own clichés. Usually only 1 type. Sometimes, Orcs (or Galka) fill the niche.
- Some diminutive race. Gnomes, Hobbits, Halfling, Taru... whatever you want.
- A furry race.
- THAT'S IT!

Look, I get why those races are used: some people don't want to play a non-Human, some people always play Elves, some people like playing brutes (I prefer Orcs to Dwarves in that respect, myself), some people are midgets, others are furries. You've got to appeal to all of them.
I don't bemoan their presence, I bemoan their exclusivity. At least offer 2-3 other choices.

Same with classes:
- Warrior guy!
- Priest guy!
- Rogue guy!
- Sorcerer guy!
- THAT'S IT!

Once again, those classes are fine, but offer a few more choices. At least bit of effort when naming them would be welcome. You'd be surprised how much fresher your MMO looks when the Priest is called a Soothsayer or some such and the Warrior a Titan or some such rather than bland purely descriptive names.
They're not very imaginative names either, but at least it looks like you're trying to create a lore.

Having appealing races and/or classes is the backbone of getting players to actually join. LoTRo was particularly bad in that respect. Looking at the races and class pages, I saw nothing I'd want to play. Zilch. Boring humans, tired of elves, fuck midgets with hairy feet. Doesn't help that they portray all their non-Human races as being one foot in the grave in the little blurb they give.


3. Meaningful strategy.
Most MMOs I've sampled are "establish a rotation, apply it ad nauseum".
In XI, we didn't approach all enemies the same way, be it positionning, kiting vs straight-tanking, meleeing vs nuking/arrowing,... and some skills/spells were sometimes conterproductive to use: you wouldn't Diaga a huge Dynamis pull (well, ok, for the lulz) in most other MMOs, you spam your skills/abilities/spells are fast as possible.

Everything is always worth the cost and "doing something" is never going to bite you in the ass. You use your whole arsenal on every encounter. Always in the same order.
And mobs are all the same. Sure, sometimes different mobs use slightly different attacks, but never does it warrant a change of tactics.
Even different classes all play similarly. In XI, a BLM solo, a THF solo and a BST solo happened very differently. In more recent MMOs? Spam your shit at point-blank range, it's just named differently.

*Short review:

The bad:
- Story. Awful writing. You can't fathom how bad it is without experiencing it.
- Bugs. Most bugged MMO I've ever played.
- Daily maintenance. You know those emergency maintenances for 2-3 days after a big FFXI update? Well, in STO it's every day.
- Ground combat.
- Obtuse mechanics makes it very confusing for a beginner.
- Aged graphics.
- Forced cameos everywhere are very tiresome. If you're to believe this game, everything that happens in the galaxy is the work of someone from one of the series. Billions of billions of billions of people from billions of species and the same few hundred people did it all, good or bad. I like the characters like anyone else, but this is downright ridiculous.
- Cryptic-ness. It'll be quite familiar for those who've played/tried other Cryptic MMOs.
- Voice acting (with one exception, see below)/motion capture. I wonder if that was done by humans. Speech stopping mid-sentence, completely alien (not in a good way) animations...

Edit: just re-checked the LoTRo site, they've altered their race description page to be less gloomy and there seems to be more classes than when I last checked, so yeah, pretend I used another example.

I do agree with your races, I actually think WoW does alright. Trolls, Orcs, Tauren, undead on the horde side opposite the staple races. More games should work on some more variety in this. And I think at minimum should have the difference in races WoW has. FFXI the difference stat-wise was both big and completely useless, and was only a stat difference, no racial abilities whatsoever. In WoW there are actually 2-3 races which can compete with each other for each class a lot of the time, which I find to be excellent for variety (instead of just mithra thf, galka pld, elvaan war, taru blm, etc.)

Yeah uhh, that LOTRO bit is actually...true to lore. I wouldn't be surprised if the description of those races were right from the damn book. And since you're supposed to be accompanying the ring-bearer or aiding them in some fashion, you can only be the races on the good side. In a way, that would be one of the major weaknesses of LOTRO, they're staying true to the lore and only being on the good side. A strength, but also takes away a lot of dynamic and "new".

I think for classes WoW does that alright, and Rift took that model and tacked on the "new names" approach to give it more feel. It was ok, but using base descriptors really helps get people to know what they are getting into first. In a way I think that makes Rift even closer to perfect since you start with one of the 4 base classes and expand it afterwards to be very different.

Strategy:

Oh please at XI strategy. Every melee job was "get to 100% tp, use ws" with the possibility of waiting to sc with someone, depending on the encounter. And some classes had 2-3 abilities to use otherwise, but generally only 1-2 per minute. BLM was just cast the highest tier nuke, then 2nd, then 3rd, then repeat. Remove certain spells because of resistances.

In XI the boss fights are almost always the same once you start, you don't even have multiple phases. If it's a kite fight, you always kite, if it's a stand and fight one, you stand and fight at all times. There's little dynamic nature to it. Even Rift's first dungeon had more dynamic aspects and more strategy required in it. And Professor Putricide requires more strategy than an entire Abyssea boss run.

As for soloing, a paladin, hunter and frost mage all solo very differently in WoW. There's a balance issue with having too high of stats in the old world for low levels, but get to Cata levels and it's a bit different. Though I do wish there were more "elite" mobs in WoW-model games that could have a heroic dungeon boss fight length fight (which would be almost like a normal FFXI fight lol) and you need to be able to handle yourself during it. Though those situations also really hurt things because it's damn hard for some classes to solo. In FFXI only a handful of jobs were believed to be capable of soloing just because you need to either be able to avoid damage or reduce it in a meaningful way.

I pretty much agree with 4 and 5. They need to be able to lengthen boss/elite fights, as fun as it is at times to destroy something in 3 hits in an action setting...it gets boring rather fast. And I think the claim system from FFXI is solid, just get rid of buggy code that lets others steal it and such.

[Inactive]

People talk as if camping kings was the only thing to do once you hit 75. My LS never camped anything aside from a stray DI. 1-2 People would AFK/Camp Tiamat and that's about it. I still had more fun during those times of FFXI than anything to date. Vanilla WoW was also up there, simply because there was a sense of community (No transfers etc) and more than 1 raid on a week lockout to participate in.

[Mugmug]

I miss a lot about FFXI. I miss a lot about vanilla/tbc WoW

I'm going to give TERA a shot until Phantasy Star Online 2 / Diablo 3 come out.

[Ashmada]

Eaglestrike: note, this is just a list of stuff I miss from XI when trying other MMOs. I've been trying quite a few since leaving XI, some for a few hours, some for a few days, some for a few weeks, some for a month or two; STO is the latest in a list too long to mention, most of them not that well-known or memorable.

I'm not saying other MMOs don't deliver, not saying WoW is bad, nor Rift.
I actually haven't tried either.
I get the sense you think I was attacking WoW or something (I'd attack other aspects than gameplay if I wanted to ridicule Warcraft), not the case.

I do agree with your races, I actually think WoW does alright. Trolls, Orcs, Tauren, undead on the horde side opposite the staple races.

Yeah, they do. One could nitpick, but yeah, there's sufficient choice in WoW, overall.

FFXI the difference stat-wise was both big and completely useless, and was only a stat difference, no racial abilities whatsoever.

Agreed. Aside from the fact that a Taru could throw a couple more TIVs before running out than I could, racial difference meant quite little in XI.
I shouldn't have included "stronger racial difference" in a list of things I miss from XI, I rambled a bit, there .

Yeah uhh, that LOTRO bit is actually...true to lore. I wouldn't be surprised if the description of those races were right from the damn book.
And since you're supposed to be accompanying the ring-bearer or aiding them in some fashion, you can only be the races on the good side. In a way, that would be one of the major weaknesses of LOTRO, they're staying true to the lore and only being on the good side. A strength, but also takes away a lot of dynamic and "new".

I'm aware of it. The question is: was restricting themselves that much worth the publicity from the license? I don't have the answer to that and I don't particularly care to find out, I was just sharing the complete lack of enthusiasm I felt when visiting the site.

Not every fantasy setting needs be adapted in an MMO, in the end.
Love A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones (who doesn't?), but I wouldn't particularly want a GoT MMO.

(note, those descriptions changed, old ones were just gloomy about most races. Those pages are one of the things people check out when deciding to give your game a whirl or not, there's a reason they're usually dithyrambic, not denigrating)

It was ok, but using base descriptors really helps get people to know what they are getting into first.

Hard to convey, I guess, but to me, there's descriptor and descriptor. For instance, "Rogue" makes me groan, "Assassin" does not.
Both are pretty common, both ascribe to a similar archetype, the latter is even more descriptive than the former, but I guess it hasn't reached saturation yet.
"Warrior" alone is fine, so is "Mage", but "Warrior+Mage+Rogue+Cleric"=major groan.

It's a subjective thing, we've all been exposed to different clichés in different ways. What's groanworthy to me can be fine in your eyes or vice-versa.

Oh please at XI strategy. Every melee job was "get to 100% tp, use ws" with the possibility of waiting to sc with someone, depending on the encounter. And some classes had 2-3 abilities to use otherwise, but generally only 1-2 per minute. BLM was just cast the highest tier nuke, then 2nd, then 3rd, then repeat. Remove certain spells because of resistances.

I'm not saying XI was a masterpiece of strategy, far from it. But at least you had something. Go look at 'clopedia pages for HNMs.
Is it simple? Yes. But it's not just "spam your rotation over and over". There were reactive elements, timing elements, position elements.
You'd be surprised how many MMOs are literally "spam your rotation over and over"; no exageration whatsoever on my part.
And you did have several different ways to bring down a NM (kite, straight-tank, zerg,...).
You'd be surprised: in many MMOs, that previous sentence just wouldn't make sense.

And least's not fall into hyperbole. As a BLM, I very rarely chain-nuked my highest spells. A few NMs here and there (Love comes to mind), but for most things it was a mixture of crowd control, Stunning, nuking and sometimes a bit of curing.

In FFXI only a handful of jobs were believed to be capable of soloing just because you need to either be able to avoid damage or reduce it in a meaningful way.

XI had some mechanics horribly wrong, no arguments there. As you mention, damage reduction/avoidance was certainly poorly handled (hey, you die in 5 hits if you stand toe to toe with a VT, better have shadows or Gravity-kite!).
XI had plenty of flaws, I'm not blind to them. If I sounded like a rabid fanboy, that wasn't intentional.

I pretty much agree with 4 and 5. They need to be able to lengthen boss/elite fights, as fun as it is at times to destroy something in 3 hits in an action setting...it gets boring rather fast. And I think the claim system from FFXI is solid, just get rid of buggy code that lets others steal it and such.

Obviously, I don't mean ripping those tools straight from the game, just having some form of treasure pool/claim system.

Nitpick: Mobs going unclaimed (especially after the despawn patch) wasn't a bug, it was just due to how they chose to implement said patch. The code wasn't buggy, there were just poor design choices behind it.


Slow pace is more of a general rant, really.
These days, it's like all videogames have to require lightning-quick reflexes, regardless of genre.
I think it's a shame and a great loss for variety. There's room for Call of Duty but there's also room for Fire Emblem in the world of videogames, so why this whole rallying call of "MOAR ACTIONZ!" across the board?

[DeathbySnoosnoo]

If open world/pvp was added with a HD graphics overhaul...

I dont even care for open pvp, just add more options than balista and brenner, and make it easier to do both. HD overall and a place like golden saucer for funsies.

[Rhyis.]

You can tell that FFXI was the first MMO a lot of you played. Your first is always glorified.

I think the most impressive aspect of FFXI was the single character and the sense of community. Which really, went hand in hand. It's hard to know everybody on the server when everyone and their mother has 10 characters.

[Dantrag]

You can tell that FFXI was the first MMO a lot of you played. Your first is always glorified.

I think the most impressive aspect of FFXI was the single character and the sense of community. Which really, went hand in hand. It's hard to know everybody on the server when everyone and their mother has 10 characters.

It wasn't the first I played. Honestly, I don't remember the first one I played lol. But I played plenty that I wasn't able to stick with for a while XI was the first I was able to play for multiple years though.

[Syntex]

Because it took so long things felt more rewarding when you got them. First AV/PW kill actually meant something because they made a mob(broken as hell but still) and said "figure it out" rather then have people test how to beat it for months like wow does. The sense of reward was so much greater in FFXI and it felt DAMN good. This game also came out when the MMO market was rather new so taking months to level wasn't bad but turned out well. This day and age if you can't solo your XP and need to group then your sales will plummet by 80% easily. Imagine FFXI being remastered today and being re-released like it was a new title, it would do horrible.

I think a lot of people can agree kings were not a challenge once you learned their pattern and getting everyone not to AFK during windows was harder but you could really tell in FFXI who the good players were. People in bad gear shined with proper macros/strats/class knowhow then some with better gear then any other game to date in my opinion.

I could go on for hours but you get the point I think.

[Lordender]

I don't think FFXI was all that special(the game itself). I look back at a game that a lot of people enjoyed just because it was so easy to cockblock people, notice how most of them quit and whined over Abyssea?

There was some cool things about the game, it was a game that could have been a hell of a lot better had retards not ran the game the way they did. I had a lot of fun on FFXI, I've met amazing people from FFXI but I'm not going to crown it as the best MMO i've ever played. I would say the community was a lot better than some MMO's I played just because you kinda had to interact with people to exp back in the day.

[Ezek]

FFXI is the only MMORPG where I was technically "cheating" via utilizing Windower and its delicious addons (ilu, Spellcast xml scripts). Thinking back, I honestly don't think FFXI really too much skill. The hardest part (for me, anyways) was writing the actual Spellcast XML script for gear swaps on abilities (e.g. RDM Convert, PLD cure cheats, WS sets, etc). Situational awareness was important, especially for us healers, but it was very easy simply because of how slow paced FFXI's combat is. Not saying that it's a bad thing, of course. Some of my most fond memories in MMOs are from the olden days of FFXI.

Your first MMO tends to be the most memorable to most people so it's hardly surprising that so many people on this forum has such fond memories of the game.