Further developing on player freedom is the Trust system introduced in , that let players summon NPC characters to fight alongside them. This meant that players no longer had to form parties to take on the game's tougher challenges, encouraging solo play and guaranteeing options even if player numbers fell.
Many of Final Fantasy XI's systems might seem archaic by today's standards, but features like its job system were revolutionary at the time.
Final Fantasy XI is a punishing game, especially in its early days, and the complexities of the game can make it tough to jump into. Because of this, it was essential for players to band together, as it presented a better chance of success and survival before there was any kind of Trust system. It was an MMO that really fostered cooperation, and it showed.
Apart from that, Final Fantasy XI stuck true to the series' roots and doubled down on story and lore. It tried to make players feel like a part of a breathing world and succeeded in that for the most part.
With these two main points, Final Fantasy XI fostered a tightknit community. The game has thousands of players still subscribe, nearly 40, a month according to the site MMO Population.
If you head to the Final Fantasy XI subreddit there's still several posts every day, even if things have slowed down. I tried to get into it last year and just couldn't. It was almost impossible to find anything and the way the game plays is just so archaic. If you're trying to play every mainline FF game then go for it but yeah I think it can be skipped over. Taruranto Member. Oct 26, 3, The game is pretty much finished with an ending, so as long you can endure the fairly obtuse gameplay It still is a PS2 MMORPG at the end of the day with like 15 years of sub-systems built over sub-systems it's a great experience, story wise.
Gameplay wise you level up so fast these days you don't have too worry about the usual mmorpg stuff. Gentlemen Member. Oct 25, 6, XI is only playable with walkthroughs. The game gives you no good hints as to what to do and even the modern tutorial only vaguely describes it requirements. Worth it? I like the story but understand that the time gating involved is extremely old school. The guides help diminish the pain here but if you don't like having to check a guide every 5 minutes XI is not the game for you.
MetalKhaos Member. Oct 31, 1, As a heads up, check out the XI sub on Reddit. Someone put out HD textures and everything for the game, so it'd look far better with that. Griselbrand Member. Oct 26, 2, I recently came back after a five year break. I've gotten a few Jobs up to 99 and have been working on gearing up my Paladin.
I don't know what it is about FFXI that keeps me coming back. FFXI though still has lots of story for me to get through, all of which are standalone so you can work on multiple main quests at a time. There's still lots of content I haven't seen and the exploration and zones actually feel like you need to be careful where you tread, even at level I'm on Sylph currently, and will likely stay there as it's decently populated. I've mostly been soloing with the occasional party with a few people I've met along the way.
Dekuman Member. Oct 27, 15, You may get some generic advice like 'Join Asura' but to be honest most of the servers are quite busy, and the game is at its busiest easily in the past 5 years since they announced the game ending in as people have come back for various reasons, including the fact it actually didn't end and due to COVID lockdowns. The game is old and will have lots of whatr we can generously call soulslike systems but really, these are just archaic systems that can't be easily patched out.
Otherwise the devs have made the game soloable up until you hit the end game where groups are still needed to clear certain content.
So it's open and available for you to play at your own pace, which is probably the most important thing these days. I think there's a feeling SE is more or less doubling down on keeping XI around in some way shape or form and have given up trying to move the users to XIV , to mobile to elsewhere. Here's a couple of helpful guides if you do choose you want to give it a try. Active nearly two decades, FFXI has ….
Kill3r7 Member. Oct 25, 16, Nevermind thought you meant XII. Ralemont Member. Jan 3, 3, Not really, no. As someone who played for seven years it was only worth it for the few lifelong friends I made. I certainly regret putting as much time in it as I did. And that's a vet player talking, new players are more likely than not going to find it an impenetrable grind filled with time wasters that feel egregious in Plus very outdated control schemes. Oct 25, 1, I got into this around You had to form and fight with parties, you had to deeply understand your character skills, you had to be okay with spending hours just to get to a certain place, everything required a ton of preparation.
I'd have no time for it now but if you have that kind of time to dedicate to it, it's something special. Hzsn Member. Nov 10, 1, I played this years ago and it's sadly really hard to get into. I got as far as a chocobo license and never knew what to do after. There were high leveled players willing to help, but honestly they just complicated things for me and they were few and far between. I just never really felt like I was in to it completely I guess. The grind was long and a bit tedious as well, and that's one of my favorite things to do in Final Fantasy.
In saying that, XIV is the complete opposite I fell in love from the minute I started playing it, can't wait for endwalker. MetalKhaos said:. Click to expand Thanks, I am loving the responses so far!
I think I am going to give it a try when the time comes for me to play it as I mentioned, I am playing the games in the order they were released and I will update here with my thoughts! I admit I am really curious on playing this game because Koichi Ishii and Hiromichi Tanaka, from the mana series, were the head of this project and the Mana IP is one of my favorites! Sep 19, 4, Worse than XIII even.
There are aspects which are amazing. The story and world building is amazing. The sense of exploration is great, and the Trust system is nice. But basic usability is awful. The game is also still a massive grind. Even something as simple as finding an NPC is hard. If you put the effort in to learn the game, you may learn to love it. Bane The Fallen.
Oct 27, 3, Very much so, yes. It's a weird game by todays standards but has great stories that you can solo the vast majority of, if not all of it. Rotobit said:. Panther Member.
Oct 27, 2, I can't fully remember but I'm pretty sure the obtuse nature of everything in the game and lack of handholding is pretty much the same with any MMORPG that came out around that time or prior. But currently unless you feel like looking up guides for everything, it's very difficult to get into without someone who knows what they are doing telling you about everything.
Bane said:. Keep in mind I've not done those missions since '03 or so but, IIRC and assuming it's not been changed any some of those missions are level gated so you might need to grind out some levels then come back later. Deleted member User requested account closure Banned. Oct 25, Is there a recommended guide for XI in terms of how best to experience it now from a story perspective?
It's something I have on the gaming bucket list but have found it somewhat impenetrable when I've tried. XBlade Member. Oct 26, I was having a fun time recently until I got to level Parshias Member. Like hobbits huddling around a campfire having survived a brush with death, these things bond you to those who can relate. The development team are caretakers, satisfying the hardcore fans who stick around.
Someday it will be their job to shut the game down. Final Fantasy 11 has always been a special MMO: Well-balanced despite its difficulty, possessed of considerable depth, rewarding to master.
Veterans proudly display their hard-earned gear, while newcomers look on with envy and strategize how to get good enough to obtain the same swag. Thousands of players wouldn't still be forking over an antiquated monthly fee in an era of free-to-play games otherwise. The FF11 I'm playing today is a much more generous version of the one I started nearly half a lifetime ago. It's a difference producer Akihiko Matsui and director Yoji Fujito understand well and can talk about at length—their relationship with the games goes back even further than mine.
Rather than trying to reinvent itself or remain a shrine to its younger self, Final Fantasy 11 has done something unique among MMOs: it's aged with its players, slowly reshaping itself to offer new adventures alongside nostalgia.
I played Final Fantasy 11 for a full decade before walking away. But to celebrate its 19th anniversary with a retrospective that would do it justice, I decided I had to play it again.
To see how the game had transformed: what had stayed the same, and what was still annoying. The expansions that once felt so new and exciting now feel retro and distant. Yet they still maintain a dedicated team to continually balance the game. FF11 isn't growing. It's abandoned consoles altogether. A planned smartphone version was canceled. But that time won't come this month, or this year.
They can't quit now: the 20th anniversary is just 12 months away. Even playing the game at the time was demanding. On PlayStation 2 you needed an add-on hard drive and a network adapter. On PC you needed a capable graphics card, not a cheap proposition in The learning curve was steeper still. After spending hours setting up my Japanese PlayOnline account, my initial entry into Final Fantasy 11 smacked me down hard. Though it isn't as complex as FF11, FF14 is gorgeous, fun, and tells a shockingly emotional story.
Check out our review of its latest expansion, Shadowbringers , to find out more. Rabbits, beetles, crabs all took turns murdering me in the wild. PSO this was not. And by my character constantly whiffing attacks the lowest dexterity class—elvaans—on the lowest character level using the worst gear is a terrible combination. And by the endlessly cascading menu options.
If you grew up playing Final Fantasy games, your menu memory for attacks, items, and spells was basically useless here. Every menu had a menu which had a menu. Over time this menu gauntlet revealed itself to be quite powerful in terms of customizing the game to my liking. Editing macros was really impressive at the time.
It felt like low-level programming, letting me assign actions as shortcuts to hotkeys or controller shoulder buttons, complete with text announcements. The more I played, the more the once-impenetrable wall of options became clearer. It was like deciphering the Matrix. Even so, breaking through the UI was but the first step. Vanilla FF11 was tough, but its second expansion took ages to beat.
Was it because it was substantial, or was it just because the dev team knee-capped the player base to keep them busy longer? Looking back, I think it was a little bit of both. COP was hands down the best expansion. You couldn't just walk up and whack and stack them like much of the previous content allowed. It forced us to clean up a lot of slop that we were used to.
And the final battlefield was mesmerizing. FF11 emerged at a time when wikis and fansites were much less formalized, formatted, and user-friendly than they are now. These days everything has been datamined and documented. Not so back then. Much of what we knew was based entirely on hearsay, and a lot of the info we got was plain wrong.
Sure, we aggroed the zone—but not because we rubbed against any wall. In , even something as basic as enemy aggro had to be puzzled out. Defeating her allowed us to add her to our growing selection of summonable avatars. It was a disaster until I did a mentor search and looked up this awesome 75 Dark Knight.
He came out and shepherded my group through the mission, not just the Castle but he offered [to help with] the other two zones, too. FF11 was never just a game, it was a way to make bonds. Almost every one of my best memories isn't just from some fight, but it's the people I did it with. Nowadays players rarely touch these parts of FF11 or multiplayer PvE and PvP activities that offer underpowered and antiquated quest rewards compared to current endgame loot.
Of course there are people who lapsed and came back in return, but it is set up now that leveling can go up pretty quickly, and we try to avoid having content in the older part of the game where you have to form a party and spend many hours on that content or put in a lot of time and effort. It's a bit of a shame to see so much of FF11 collect dust.
But it's also inspired the developers to be creative. Since the dev team didn't want players to have to solo content that usually requires a full group, they created the 'Trust' system, essentially unique NPC allies that you can summon at-will to form a party with.
Rather than making people get stuck in that content and grind for it, we would rather have them use it as a stepping stone and move on so they can catch up to the people playing the game [actively] so they can socialize and be up-to-date on the content.
PlayOnline seems like madness now, but it's easy to forget how little of the modern infrastructure felt figured out in
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