Live Presentation Event: The Future of Final Fantasy XI (03/19/2015)

[Byrthnoth]

Well, there is still the standing question of why they totally wipe and resend the inventory structure on zone instead of just keeping it in memory and updating it, but that is just another thing for the list of infrastructure changes they should have made in 2003.

[Kaisha]

Well, there is still the standing question of why they totally wipe and resend the inventory structure on zone instead of just keeping it in memory and updating it, but that is just another thing for the list of infrastructure changes they should have made in 2003.

Gotta hide those memory leaks by having the game reload everything when you zone man.

Spoiler: show

Did that old problem where the game ran progressively worse the longer you stayed in a zone ever get fixed? Was most prominent back during Abyssea's primetime when you spent hours farming NMs/lights/XP

Maybe the announcement is FFXI for New 3DS!

Wishful thinking would be a PS4 port so they can drop PS2 on their home turf, but if they bothered to budget that they may as well give it the budget for another expansion/engine upgrade while they're at it, but I doubt SE is that generous.

[Petitssk]

One thing I would love to see getting fixed are the massive issues when you're being targeted by several monsters or players at once, especially as far as engaging and disengaging are concerned. I think they claimed to have fixed Cure-Stun about five years ago, but the game still has massive issues with that, which can outright get me killed because I can't do a thing when I've got five mobs hitting me and three casting spells.

At times, it reminds me of FFXII where you could have everyone on the screen casting spells, but only one could be processed at a time, which made for some awful situations when you wanted to quickly react to something.

[Imoq]

Guy in my LS sent me this email his friend got. http://s69.photobucket.com/user/stim...named.jpg.html

Too late for the party, but as a native Spanish speaker, I just want to clarify about this. The style and the wording of the writing is not like the one of an e-mail; it is more like a short news note. They are just stating there will be a press conference and then that "what they say that evidently it is still unknown what will be it about", but "the two choices with most possibilities" are "F2P or ending of the game".

That note has no more value than any speculation by any user on this or any other forum, and there was NEVER FFXI support in Spanish; only German and French.

[Shirai]

And it's also been debunked in FFXIAH already.
Including translation and source.

http://www.ffxiah.com/forum/topic/46...19/12/#2849051

[Sephiran]

Personally, I'd love some more Dullahan camps... preferably ones with a lot more mobs. <,<

EDIT:
Good thing we're on different servers. Cause I'd be in your umbril camps. lol.

I don't think Umbrils are weak to breath dmg specifically, just Light, Fire, and Earth dmg of any type. Be it nukes, Atonement, or Enlight. Anything of those elements does extra dmg to Umbrils.

Also, there are at least a few Dullahans in each of the "gates" zones second map. There's also a few camps in Ra'kaznar and Inner court.

To my knowledge, Atonement and Spirits Within are not elementally aligned. I do not use them enough (CdC, Resolution, and KoR have my heart) to make a definite conclusion on this though and I may be wrong. This conclusion was also reached while I was operating under an older hypothesis regarding the hierarchy of damage. I later scrapped this one in favor of a new one that spanned all combinations of damage and accuracy (and to my present awareness, has no exceptions). If someone could test Flying Hip Press against some umbrils, elevated damage would allow one to make a valid induction about the elemental nature of Atonement and Spirits Within as well what umbrils are weak to. SE has in the past modulated breath damage and breath damage alone. Abyssean NM's are a prime example. Tchakka is another example of an enemy that take elevated damage (about 1.5x normal damage) from Atonement and Spirits Within. (I was just as shocked as you all probably are right now when I saw this for the first time.) I don't recall Light chains elevating as well though, but I'm hazy on that and I will check next time I'm practicing for my Dakuwaqa solo by add-burning.

For rapidly dispatching umbrils, my WS of choice is Flash Nova, as it's TP bonus is invariant of the user's TP. At 3000 TP, I use Seraph Strike though. Generally, if I'm burning CP on them, I'll use Trusts that can give me forms of magic Haste to keep my Reprisal recast under one minute and use Priwen (which will absorb more damage than Ochain will) and Phalanx to zero their hits. This prevents them from gaining TP.

Reflecting on the behavior of Atonement and Spirits Within in light of my present understanding and theory of damage and accuracy, I probably am wrong and both WS's do have an elemental alignment. If I get permission to, I'll post the whole "tree" of types that my hypothesis entails in a new thread.

Does it matter the type of the bat?

It does matter. Bat swarms use Sonic Boom which sucks if you're using Resolution.

Personally as a BRD I cannot stand stuff that dispels.
It fucks up with my songs (when a song gets dispelled I need 1) to see it or other people to tell me, which never happens, 2) to re-do fake song and then overwrite it with real song) and especially with NiTro and Clarion Call.
I refuse to play BRD in such circumstances, I can't stand it anymore.

I never said it wasn't annoying or severely detrimental. I'm just illuminating how SE sees it. To SE, Volcanic Stasis is nowhere near as crushing as Incinerating Lahar (personally, I agree with that one despite the overwhelming majority of people I know disagreeing).

Orly?!
Sarcasm aside, they're awesome if you have a mage pt with good mages and/or a GEO giving macc, syncnuke and tear them apart, but when an Umbril aggroes your typical PUG party composed solely of melees it's pretty much unavoidable that they will use their dangerous TP move before they get killed.
Which makes it very very very annoying.

I wouldn't know how any CP parties are like as I've never been in one. I don't want to shout for one and that have it fail miserably because I've never done it before. I solo in Dho Gates with Trust for CP in the Velkk, bat swarm, umbril, and twitherym camps. Personally, I really wish SE would let us enter Incursion solo like they do with Skirmish. Then I'd be in business. (Then again, my first runs of Incursion were merc'd simply to avoid dragging my rep through the mud by fucking up a shout group. Wasn't after drops per say as much as I was after the opportunity to try Stun/Sleep-SCH'ing for it to learn the mechanics from experienced people. Suffice to say, I can lead it now that I've learned it, and I have astounding control over stunning and sleeping simultaneously.)

[Damane]

i am no dreamer and 11 is in decline for sure. but this massive game with all its content could work very well if it was overhauled in its core mechanics and it would have a graphic skin of FF14. the amount of content is just insane.

[Byrthnoth]

Mist recent Matsui post still has planning past march, so that is positive at least.

[Sonomaa]

Im no FFXI lover anymore, I cant think about the game without feeling ill and dont ever want to return. However as far as speculation goes my brain is unable to stop thinking about stuff.
End of PS2 support would actually help the game from a coding standpoint. Porting the game to PS4/XBone would actually be pretty easy based on the very similar architecture to the PC version.
Another expansion feels unlikely to me however I could absolutely see them doing a load of mini exp packs like abyssea or the moogle things. Right now the bigger issue of the sub loss has to do with quality of content and how fast it comes out, shorter and cheaper content that is harder would help alleviate that. I watched the video of the Hades fight which I assume was currentish content and it was just silly how easy it looked, transitioning from alliance content to party content really did hurt the game massively, you have to have both.

As I see it they have customers who want to play but dont feel like the sub cost is justifyable so they will play on the free servers yet toss them undeserved donations for stuff. So go for a dropped sub cost and add in XP boosts and other shit in a cash shop, people will likely spend near the same amount of money on XP boost items and other things. Tossing all of that in a store tied to your SE account after they get rid of POL and it would see a resurgance and since the sub cost is cheap they would likely retain a large portion of the playerbase who might not be playing but dont care enough to unsub (you really think wow has 8m+ active subs? assume 10% of those just forgot they were subbed).

A new engine would honestly cost a shit ton of money, porting the game to the XIV engine would create a direct competition that might not be healthy. Dropping the PS2 support and letting the brakes off the other versions that are holding the game back, with a heavily discounted or even free PS4/XBone version would draw back players, especially with a dropped sub cost to like 7.99. Especially if they did a cross game discount rate to sub to both XI and XIV gets you a cheaper price, blah blah. Thats the only way I would resub if I got a perk for my XIV account, I like my glamours too much to go back.

Just my two cents, dont expect to see me back in the game, I closed that book on my life a long time ago, Im writing a new one.

[Petitssk]

i am no dreamer and 11 is in decline for sure. but this massive game with all its content could work very well if it was overhauled in its core mechanics and it would have a graphic skin of FF14. the amount of content is just insane.

I agree. While this is also a result of the recycling of old content, it's amazing how the game's age actually works in favour of it.

About two months ago, I started playing again with two friends of mine, and we were overwhelmed by the content. In the past, we played FFXI for about five years straight, then hopped from MMORPG to MMORPG, but the lack of content in everything we played caught up with us rather quickly and usually, we didn't last a month before logging into the game turned into a drag "because we need to cap points for the week and use the dungeon finder".

In FFXI, we have so much to do that we need to discuss to figure out where to start; seriously considering to do pointless things because we completely run out of things to do only two days into the weekly reset seems like a far-off bad memory.

While FFXI currently has many weaknesses, at the very least it doesn't force me to do things I don't want to do just for the sake of having something to do. However, it would be nice to see them improving the technical aspects of the game a little, but seriously, how much longer can the old PS2's last? Shouldn't they stop working soon?

[Classikmage]

Seems way to soon for a new expansion, right? When was Adoulin released?

Actually, it's not really that long ago, WoTG was first released only about a year after ToAU was. Adoulin was released in 2013, almost 2 years ago. So, a new expansion, if they felt inclined to make one, is very plausible.

[Classikmage]

i am no dreamer and 11 is in decline for sure. but this massive game with all its content could work very well if it was overhauled in its core mechanics and it would have a graphic skin of FF14. the amount of content is just insane.

I'm really curious if they would actually bother doing this. I mean they did it to 14. And even Blizzard rehashed WoW a bit in the last year. I've been wondering what a new age FFXI would be like.

[scaevola]

Actually, it's not really that long ago, WoTG was first released only about a year after ToAU was. Adoulin was released in 2013, almost 2 years ago. So, a new expansion, if they felt inclined to make one, is very plausible.

If you consider Abyssea its own expansion (which you should; it had more content than WotG and CoP combined and you paid the full 30 bucks for it), they stick to a fairly consistent 1.5~2.5 year turnaround.

[Suteru]

From Facebook:
"We’ll be holding a special press conference on Thursday, March 19 at 12:00 a.m. PDT to share plans for the future of FINAL FANTASY XI."

Emphasis mine. A bit of flavor at last, maybe it is good news?

[Maurauc]

I like the wording of "share plans for", rather than "regarding our plans for". You're right, it seems a bit more positive on there.

Any chance we will have anyone on the BG live chat translating the talk as it goes? It'd be nice to know what they're saying as it's going on.

[Kincard]

From Facebook:
"We’ll be holding a special press conference on Thursday, March 19 at 12:00 a.m. PDT to share plans for the future of FINAL FANTASY XI."

Emphasis mine. A bit of flavor at last, maybe it is good news?

The fact they're doing something like this at all (and announced it on the site no less) is pretty special to begin with. I think the last time they streamed anything that wasn't just them doing one of those version update summaries was them showing off Adoulin.

[6souls]

Yeah I checked the European Trademarks as well from the past 15 months

The Seeds of Salvation - Dragon Quest III
Luminaries of the Legendary Line - Dragon Quest II
Episode Duscae - Final Fantasy XV
Shinra Technologies - Cloud based gaming service
Masters of the Mask - ???
Triple Triad - Mobile App Card Game
Heavensward - Final Fantasy XIV
Brave Exivus - Final Fantasy Mobile Game
Heavenstrike Rivals - Mobile Tactical RPG
Colossus Command - Unknown Game
Record Keeper - Final Fantasy Mobile Game
Holy Heroes - Unknown Game possible Dragon Quest?
Snack Truck Fever - Unknown Game most likely mobile app.

SE has typically named their Expansions with "of" or "of the" with the exception of the 3 add ons (ACP/MKE/ASA)

Rize of the Zilart
Chains of Promathia
Treasures of Aht Urghan
Wings of the Goddess
Vision of Abyssea
Scars of Abyssea
Heroes of Abyssea
Seekers of Adoulin

So Masters of the Masks could fit.

Can add 'World of Assassination' & 'Puzzle Soccer' to that list.

https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#deta...arks/013843776
https://oami.europa.eu/eSearch/#deta...arks/013843751

[Suteru]

True, but "There will be a press conference regarding our plans for the future of FFXI." leaves a lot more room for doom and gloom than "We're having a special press conference to share our plans for the future of FFXI!"

[Orestes]

From Facebook:
"We’ll be holding a special press conference on Thursday, March 19 at 12:00 a.m. PDT to share plans for the future of FINAL FANTASY XI."

Emphasis mine. A bit of flavor at last, maybe it is good news?

If I had to guess, I'd say a mini-expansion. They've already let slip they've been working on ilvl 120+ content, and that job points would eventually cap @ 30.

Going into pure speculation, but they recently mentioned they were devising a method to acquire HMP outside of old-content. It seems like it would be extremely easy for them to make iLvl versions of old VW content, and possibly add VW NM to Adoulin areas.

I just noticed this yesterday, but how long have they let you download the seekers edition for windows for free from their website? http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/dow...stall_win.html

[Isiolia]

I just noticed this yesterday, but how long have they let you download the seekers edition for windows for free from their website? http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/dow...stall_win.html

It was put there to support the Return Home campaign(s), that I recall anyway. I don't remember them stating it would remain available, even though it makes sense for it to be.