Anyone here ever played Final Fantasy 11 Online?

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

Just out of curiosity because out of all the Final Fantasy games this one is the least talked about because its in MMORPG.

I knew of its existance, but what recently caught my eye was this intro:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TGe6PC-Tk4

And I proceded to listen to the soundtrack of that intro and got the feels. I feel as though I missed out on quite an interesting MMORPG.

So anyone has any stories to tell?

CAPTCHA: Yes definitley

Yes deinitely is right.

 

[Foolery]

Once upon a time, yeah. It sucked. And it was a ghost town when I started. Quit playing pretty quickly. I imagine it would have been great, had I played it from launch. I played XIV:A Realm Reborn from launch, and had a grand ol' time, but the grind got to me, so I haven't really been back.

 

[Private Custard]

I remember when it was coming up for release on the 360, and they offered a free trial/beta period. Our server was called 'Hydra'.

I know that I lost an absolute shitload of time to that game, as it was absolutely packed with new starters, all trying to figure things out.

I got myself to a level where I could defend myself from some of the more serious threats, and then got into fishing. I even joined a fishing clan 'The Crazy Fishers'. There were quite a lot of us, and for a time, actually set the market price for fish at the auction house.

We had regular customers, that were training themselves up to create high level potions, foodstuffs, clothes, just about everything, and they could come and deal with us direct for bulk discounts.

We were dotted all over the world. You'd be running through seriously dangerous territory, people would be getting aggro'd everywhere, and you'd find one of us sat next to the chaos, pulling gold carp from a small watering hole by the dozen, whilst keeping our rod/bait combo a secret!

I was quite sad when the free trial ended. I distributed all my kit and cash to the rest of the clan and moved on. I never did like the idea of a monthly subscription.

Good times though, even though it was just a grind.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I played for over 3 years in the early times when it was new. Talking about the mid 2000s here. I only had Dragoon at max level (which was 75 back then) but my lowest job was at 30something, I really loved that game.


The game is the single most party-based game ever. You can't do anything without partying past lvl 10 so you have to learn to communicate and be a decent human being to people so they'll team up with you. This made it so that the community was quite good attitude wise compared to other games.


The story is really great but it took a WHILE to get to it. Once you did it was epic but sadly a lot of players never reached to that level.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

I played for over 3 years in the early times when it was new. Talking about the mid 2000s here. I only had Dragoon at max level (which was 75 back then) but my lowest job was at 30something, I really loved that game.


The game is the single most party-based game ever. You can't do anything without partying past lvl 10 so you have to learn to communicate and be a decent human being to people so they'll team up with you. This made it so that the community was quite good attitude wise compared to other games.


The story is really great but it took a WHILE to get to it. Once you did it was epic but sadly a lot of players never reached to that level.

The thing that upsets me is that Square makes these beautiful Medieval Fantasy settings in FF 11 and 14 and only makes them MMORPGs while keeping their Single Player games in this Sci-Fi setting. Thats the one thing that alienated me from FF 13 how ridiculous its Sci Fi setting looked. (Same with FF 15 which sadly is still under the Fabula Nova Crystalis setting)

They even shoehorned Sci Fi flying ships in 12, my favorite Final Fantasy game to date.

 

[Saltyk]

Yes. I started out as a Red Mage. That is one unique class. A jack of all and master of none. With the ability to use offensive magic, healing magic, buffing and debuffing spells, and hold it's own with a blade. It even gets unique spells like Refresh and Dispel. You'll start out occasionally on the front lines or healing, but before long, you'll be straight support making the fights easier for the rest of your party. It's an odd path for the Red Mage.

One of the game's strengths was the ability to switch jobs and mix and match with subjobs. Paladins practically required a Warrior sub to use Provoke, but a Dark Knight may use Thief, Warrior, or even Samurai to take advantage of their abilities. A Ranger may sub a Ninja to equip two daggers as well.

I also found Parties to be great fun. Getting a good group that knew what they were doing could become an amazing time. A smart puller, a competent tank, a Skill Chain and a Magic Burst and many enemies were crushed allowing you to earn Experience Chains.

However, the economy was fucked by Gil Sellers. Virtually anything good cost hundreds of thousands of Gil and Gil wasn't easy to come by. Very few enemies dropped Gil and those that did dropped very small quantities of it. Unless you were crafting, you probably had to buy Gil just to equip yourself.

I'll also say that enemies were over powered. The game wanted you to form parties. For everything. Meaning you couldn't really do anything alone. I remember a Black Mage making the joke that he couldn't even solo enemies that were classified as "Too Weak" (worth no experience).

The game was hard[footnote]I still remember seeing the 75 Red Mage get killed by a level 10-20 monster[/footnote]. But I enjoyed a lot of it. The fact that it was tough made me learn to avoid enemies and learn how they detected targets.

I think FFXI is still active and supported by Square. No idea if it's evolved or had an expansion. You may wish to look into FFXIV if that interests you. It seems to be a great evolution of FFXI with much better solo balance.

 

[kris40k]

FFXI is kind of like an MMO in slow motion. If you are playing a warrior with a two-hander you can make a sandwich between swings. There are some interesting chain/combo moves you can do with party members either using spells or special attacks which was a good point.

And you will be with party members, like Dreiko said, you were going to be grouped up or sitting in a city with a tin cup out. One of my funniest memories was a Black Mage in my linkshell, dead serious, asking "Can somebody heal me while I try to kill this bunny?"

Those groups that do form, will likely kick you out and send you back to begging because you are wearing the wrong earrings. The "right" earrings drop from one monster that spawns once every 72 hours (if not once per week), and is permanently farmed by some guy who only knows how to say "fuck off" and then sells them on the auction house for more money than you have, as gold farmers have devauled cash so much Zimbabwe looks good, leaving you to consider raiding your kid's college fund so you can pay the gold farmers, to pay the item farmers, so you can then get a group.

By the time you manage that, mud-flation has rendered those earrings moot and your are now kicked out the next group because of your trash earrings, or boots, or whatever reason.

I'm exaggerating a bit, but not much.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Yes. I started out as a Red Mage. That is one unique class. A jack of all and master of none. With the ability to use offensive magic, healing magic, buffing and debuffing spells, and hold it's own with a blade. It even gets unique spells like Refresh and Dispel. You'll start out occasionally on the front lines or healing, but before long, you'll be straight support making the fights easier for the rest of your party. It's an odd path for the Red Mage.

One of the game's strengths was the ability to switch jobs and mix and match with subjobs. Paladins practically required a Warrior sub to use Provoke, but a Dark Knight may use Thief, Warrior, or even Samurai to take advantage of their abilities. A Ranger may sub a Ninja to equip two daggers as well.

I also found Parties to be great fun. Getting a good group that knew what they were doing could become an amazing time. A smart puller, a competent tank, a Skill Chain and a Magic Burst and many enemies were crushed allowing you to earn Experience Chains.

However, the economy was fucked by Gil Sellers. Virtually anything good cost hundreds of thousands of Gil and Gil wasn't easy to come by. Very few enemies dropped Gil and those that did dropped very small quantities of it. Unless you were crafting, you probably had to buy Gil just to equip yourself.

I'll also say that enemies were over powered. The game wanted you to form parties. For everything. Meaning you couldn't really do anything alone. I remember a Black Mage making the joke that he couldn't even solo enemies that were classified as "Too Weak" (worth no experience).

The game was hard[footnote]I still remember seeing the 75 Red Mage get killed by a level 10-20 monster[/footnote]. But I enjoyed a lot of it. The fact that it was tough made me learn to avoid enemies and learn how they detected targets.

I think FFXI is still active and supported by Square. No idea if it's evolved or had an expansion. You may wish to look into FFXIV if that interests you. It seems to be a great evolution of FFXI with much better solo balance.

For all the unique stuff, redmage was a gimpy healer until they got refresh and then they were a necessity for every party without a bard becuse of refresh.


FFXI is a game where you grind for HOURS on end for every level you gain and when you die you lose 10% of your xp needed to reach the next level (not how much you have, how much you need to level up, meaning you can delevel if you had less than 10% when you died) so that being the case people were really particular about efficiency. This lead to people being negative if you, well, sucked or were horribly underequipped.


It wouldn't be about earrings as the above poster mentions but yes, if your weapons or your belt are under-equipped and the alternative is not super expensive to get, you're expected to have the good one for your level and if you don't why would any party pick you when they can pick someone else out of the 20 people seeking for party who has that item. For every one gimp player, there's 5 other non-gimps who are wasting their time, basically.


I played dragoon as I said above and because of a balance patch drgs had a baaaaaad reputation. Bad as in never invited for party bad. They weren't actually bad, just balanced, but it didn't matter to the general perception. You know what I did about that? I learned to make my own parties. People won't invite a drg but they sure as hell will party with one if the alternative is just sitting there looking at the grass grow. Then, after partying and seeing me outdamage people with other "better" jobs, these people would become educated and go out of the world looking for more drgs to party with. Changing the mind of the populace about my job was one of the most fun parts of FFXI for me.

 

[The Lunatic]

Yup. 75WHM/SCH on Slyph back in the day.

Quit before all that weird level-cap changes and so on came about. Always wistful for a game that could recapture the experience.

Tried FFXIV, left disappointed. Seemed more in common with WoW than the MMO I enjoyed.

FFXI really excelled in it's kinda heartless nature towards players. The game was hard, you could not solo, you had to group, enemies could kill you pretty quickly with certain abilities, and it required a level of dedication and skill from everyone involved in order to make some decent leveling progress.

It was the only MMO I've played where leveling was actually engaging. Not just running from quest to quest but actually fighting as a party and working together in a very real way with other players.


The economy was a whole separate game. And money making was pretty tough. You typically did not make money from leveling, and had to dedicate yourself towards a craft or gathering profession if you hoped of being able to afford decent equipment. The vast majority of gear was player-made and knowing people could prove pretty useful in getting gear at a less elevated price.

 

[Michel Henzel]

I remember playing this when they released a complete edition for PC. And I remember the patching...oh god the patching, 20 hours of patching. And no, it was not my internet, this was apparently not out of the ordinary for this game. I did somewhat enjoy the game and the community was incredibly nice and helpful. But I just could not get used to the controls since it's a console MMO that was ported to pc so many things you are used to in PC mmmorpg's aren't in there.

 

[Ayen Matthews]

I played a little bit of it around the time it first came out while over at my cousins. I remember liking it okay, but it reminded me of WoW just with a FF skin. To be fair, a lot of MMOs feel that way, not just FFXI. Recently, I got the game while collecting all the main entry Final Fantasy games, but due to Play Online I can't figure out how to get it playing, so I kind of gave up on it.

 

[jademunky]

I vaguely recall playing it for about 5 minutes at a friend's apartment years ago. The main thing I remember was that it seemed incredibly slow-paced compared to WOW (which was my only point of reference for MMOs). I also found it to be kinda noob-unfriendly, no obvious instruction on where to go or what you could do.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

I vaguely recall playing it for about 5 minutes at a friend's apartment years ago. The main thing I remember was that it seemed incredibly slow-paced compared to WOW (which was my only point of reference for MMOs). I also found it to be kinda noob-unfriendly, no obvious instruction on where to go or what you could do.

Both of those are true, just much more true than you even realize right now.


It's the kinda game where you work for a long time towards goals and they feel all the more satisfying due to that.

 

[Rizil]

Long time former FFXI veteran here. Played since NA launch in '03 and played for about 8 years. This was a game that was very tough starting out and was pretty unforgiving, but any time you finished something it felt like an accomplishment. First and foremost the game put a HUGE emphasis on teamwork. Unlike WoW where you just grind your way to max level then started doing raids, you needed to party pretty much just to level up. Also party dynamics were key. The basic formula was Tank, 2 DDs that can weapon skill chain with each other, a nuker (Black Mage usually), a healer, and a batter (Bards and Red Mages usually filled this role.) Obviously some jobs were more in demand then others (just like WoW, good luck finding a healer), but the thing I liked the most is you had all of your jobs tied to 1 character, instead of creating a million alts. Any race could be any class and you could switch between them at major cities or small towns.

This was a game that early on really put the emphasis on working together, as that would always result in killing faster, killing stronger mobs for more exp, and keeping a chain going so that you can multiply the exp the faster you can keep killing. As the game progressed however things started to become a bit more lenient in terms of teamwork as new mobs introduced through expansions started to come with specific strengths and weaknesses that were more exploitable (Colibri birds come to mind, where their weakness to piercing attacks put a premium on Dragoons, Rangers, Thieves, and polearm Samurai's, but their ability to mimic magic made them impossible for Black Mages and Scholars, but they had slimes which were physically resistant but were super weak to magic)

I think the real stories came from endgame though. Fights between Linkshells (Guild equivalent) getting claims on high end super strong monsters (Hello Fafnir and Nidhogg) or claim spots for Byakko and Kirin. The most legendary story however, had to be this 1 group who decided to take on Absolute Virtue, at the time the strongest opponent in the game to which nobody has ever defeated. Ever. Seriously this guy was a beast. Some shell on Odin decided to take him on (to fight him you have to already go through a fight with the Jailor of Love, another high end monster, and then Absolute Virtue was a random spawn after.) They decided to take him on, and fought him for 36 hours...straight...no breaks. They managed to drop him to about 40% until eventually they just ran out of gas. Still, however, this was something that was of legends (up until some japanese LS found out you can just kill him with a bunch of Dark Knights with Kraken Clubs using Souleater and Blood Weapon and burn him down in 90 seconds, to which Square enix quickly then patched so that AV had resistance to souleaters extra damage boost.)

Still, I loved FFXI a hell of a lot more than WoW. WoW was just boring and endless roaming, killing, rinse, repeat. You didn't have to talk to anybody. You didn't have to work out strategies until endgame (you can skip the alternative dungeons leveling up, so no point in doing them.) FFXI just felt like you knew everybody. Everyone eventually parties with people. You work out combos and order of weapon skills. You actually talked to people, and that's why I always loved FFXI. It was hands down my longest experience with any MMO.

(For the record I played WoW for about 2 years, Guild Wars 2 since launch although I haven't really been playing recently, and Wildstar for maybe 3 months...it was flavor of the month...I was also in FFXIV alpha and it was horrible, although I know they completely rebuilt it from the ground up and it's a lot better, but I just don't have the time anymore to play.)

 

[Kolby Jack]

I played back in 2005-2008 ish. I never hit max level, mostly because max level (at the time 75) was a colossal time sink. Money in that game was stupid hard to make unless, again, you put in tons of time to be able to make it.

That said, it wasn't BAD. It was just old. The game came out in 2001. It had no WoW to compare to, so a lot of its mechanics were old-fashioned and it over-emphasized group play for every single thing you did. Outside of one select job, you could NOT level by yourself ever. You always had to get a group, and maybe with a decent group and a couple hours you could gain a level or two. If you died, you lost experience, and yes, could DElevel, which is the worst feeling in the world.

The community when I played was great. People were very, VERY defensive of the game once WoW came out (as was I, to the point where I still have never even TRIED WoW), but within the game itself people were friendly most of the time, because you HAD to be. You had no choice. You were so dependent on everyone around you that being a jerk was the surest way to kill your chances of success.

And that's basically why I decided to quit eventually. The game was too old, it basically held you hostage if you wanted to make ANY progress, and in order for me to be accepted into any parties as a max level monk I would have HAD (HAD) to have leveled ninja enough to be my subjob, and I HATED ninja so much. My favorite job ever was Corsair, but I couldn't even level that anymore because bullets bankrupted me. Eventually I realized I was putting in huge amounts of time just to scrape out tiny amounts of fun. So I quit. Now I play FFXIV and it's SO much better.

 

[Elementary - Dear Watson]

They even shoehorned Sci Fi flying ships in 12, my favorite Final Fantasy game to date.

I wouldn't really call it Shoe-horned in... bearing in mind there isn't a main series Final Fantasy game that doesn't have airships in. They are a staple for the series... as important as Tonberry, Cactuar, Chocobos and Cid.

 

[Samtemdo8_v1legacy]

They even shoehorned Sci Fi flying ships in 12, my favorite Final Fantasy game to date.

I wouldn't really call it Shoe-horned in... bearing in mind there isn't a main series Final Fantasy game that doesn't have airships in. They are a staple for the series... as important as Tonberry, Cactuar, Chocobos and Cid.

Its not the fact that they are airships, its that they have a Sci Fi look to them. Final Fantasy 4 and 9 showed us more medieval style Airships, but than again FF4 did gave us the Lunar Whale.