Not Terribly Final

Obviously, the only logical thing to do now that I’ve been linked to by WoW.com is to, of course, blog about something that’s not WoW. (Of course, to be fair, they linked to the bacon sandwich post. So we’re already off to a rockin’ start.)

Vaguely spurred on by Faulsey, boredom, and nostalgia, and not finding the inspiration to rejoin WoW (seriously, I’ve been following all the news about WoW closely… and still have no urge to re-up my account, in case someone was hoping), I decided to head back to my first MMO love: Final Fantasy XI. I’m playing at a casual (some would say ‘glacial’) pace, and a number of things have changed since I last played (two years ago!), but here we are.

Let’s take a little retrospective into my history with this game, along with a list of things it does very, very right, and a list of things it does very, very wrong (that hopefully they’ll fix up in Final Fantasy XIV). Just as a warning, this post turned out a lot more enormous than I anticipated.

They Always Come Back (In This Case, ‘They’ Means ‘I’)

“But Stop,” asked Shopshopshop, “Don’t you hate that game? Why did you go back?” Nope, I don’t hate it – in fact, it’s exactly the opposite. Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we?

I first started playing Final Fantasy XI in college – to be exact, March 23rd, 2004, which would’ve been the end of my sophomore year. This, for those of you keeping track, was the US PS2 version’s release date. I bugged the living shit out of Gamestop that day, because I’d had it pre-ordered for some time. I still fondly remember installing the included hard drive and network adapter onto my PS2 (side note: they’re still there).

I played for, oh, probably 2 or 3 straight years. My only real character of any note was a hume red mage named Severus. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and let me tell you now – no, he was not named after Severus Snape. In fact, while the Harry Potter series was in full swing at that time, I hadn’t read a single one of them. In fact, I had absolutely no idea where the hell the name came from – it just popped into my head during Chemistry class. Still, I had to put up with a lot of ‘lol like snape’ tells. Ugh. (Of course, now that I have read the series, I’m okay with this.)

In that 2-3 year period, I never managed to hit the level cap. Ever. Why? Simple. You know how I have alt-itis? Well, I guess I had an inkling of an idea about this going in, because I made Severus a hume specifically so that I could switch jobs whenever I liked… and I did so, frequently. (For those of you unfamiliar with FFXI, any character can switch to any job at any time, and retains those job levels. After hitting level 18, you can do a quest to get a subjob, where you essentially have two jobs at a time – one at its full level, and the subjob at half level – and can access most of the benefits of that job. More on that later.) My highest job was red mage, as I mentioned, which I got to 50 or so, but I had attained level 37 in at least every caster class (I justified it as “leveling my subjobs”) and several of the melee classes, as well as the game’s only (at that time) solo class, Beastmaster.

I had a great linkshell (WoW people: read “guild”) at the time, RedCrossSociety, and I made some good friends in that before the inevitable drama caused it to explode. Elamie, Zhandal, if you read this, say hi.   Sadly, I think the implosion of RCS was what caused my enthusiasm to go downhill – without the support network that such a huge social linkshell provided, I didn’t have a lot of motivation to keep leveling; after a year-long absence, in 2005 I finally closed my account.

Then I re-opened it in 2006, at the urging of a friend from a MUSH. Go figure, eh? However, at the time, the only way to even create characters on a separate server was either a World Pass, or deleting all your alts and going with the random shuffle approach. (Square Enix hadn’t implemented server transfers yet.) So, with only the slightest hint of sadness, I deleted Severus and his mules (WoW people: read “bank toons”) on Titan and rerolled on Midgardsormr, I wasn’t too sad to leave Titan: Titan had the single most fucked-up economy of any FFXI realm at the time, and Square Enix had only just begun their massive hate-on for gilsellers (WoW people: read “goldsellers”). So, I arrived on Midgardsormr as an Elvaan named Socrates. Yes, Socrates. Shut up. I ran out of names and I picked something off the book that was holding up my monitor, which happened to be titled “Socrates to Sartre.”

Socrates fared about as well as Severus, but in a lot less time. It didn’t help that the second and third expansions came out just before and in the middle of this period respectively, so I immediately got distracted by the new Blue Mage, Corsair, Puppetmaster, Scholar, and Dancer jobs. Also, with Socrates I took an approach I hadn’t with Severus: planning. Oh, and melee jobs. That was my first time tanking in FFXI (as a Ninja; yes, Ninja’s a tank job), and I loved it. Couldn’t get enough of it. If I had actually had a reliable source of money, I probably would’ve gladly taken Ninja to the level cap. However, this time around, after a stint as an elvaan dancer (shut up) I finally retired Socrates, too, and deactivated my account for the second time. Once again, I can chalk this up to the deterioration of my linkshell. I had a small social LS named TheCorleones, with probably my two closest friends in there being Skaphia and Wendell. I still remember how, after I decided I wanted to level summoner, Wendell and I visited each of the Prime Avatars and I hung back as he soloed them, one by one. Wendell was everything Severus should have been, but I digress. In the end, there wasn’t any drama; TheCorleones just kind of… dissolved. Wendell and Skaphia, probably the two most active people besides me, had moved on to bigger and better things (Dynamis, Limbus, and Salvage to be exact [WoW people: read "endgame raiding"]), and so I was mostly talking to myself. I wasn’t surprised to find one day when I logged in that the linkshell had been deleted. And so, I moved on… this time, to WoW.

Well, you all know what happened there.

So I guess it’s not terribly surprising, given my on-again off-again going-on-five-years relationship with FFXI, that I find myself back there now. I moved to yet another new server, this time Ifrit at Faulsey’s urging, but since he mostly logs on to snark and to get me killed by ghosts, I’m pretty much going it solo again. I got through 12 levels of Monk before I remembered that melee bores me silly (again, more on that in a minute), so I’ve spent a couple nights on and off leveling black mage between doing loads of laundry, and have very nearly caught up to Monk in levels – level 9, when I logged off last night. And, well, this time I did what I hadn’t done before: I actually rolled her as a mithra (WoW people, and everyone else: read ‘catgirl’) named Rowena. There, now you know.

That turned out way longer than I hoped. Let’s get on with the rest.

The Good: What FFXI Did Right

Keep in mind that like everything else, this is opinion – specifically, mine.

Job Variety

To say that FFXI has “a variety of jobs” (WoW people: read ‘classes’) would be like saying the sun is “a little bit bright” or Monty Python were “slightly cheeky lads.” Every expansion pack, save one (and the more recent mini-expansions), has introduced 2-3 new jobs. Furthermore, Square has done a great job of making all of them feel and play differently. The list, as of now, is:

• The six basic jobs: These are the jobs that, as a freshly-rolled level 1, you can choose from. Furthermore, these jobs remain useful up to level 75, although maybe in different roles than Square Enix originally intended them for… If you’ve played Final Fantasy Tactics or its derivates, these should sound pretty familiar.
  • Warrior: At low levels (pre-30 or so), Warrior is a meatshield, on par with Paladins and Ninjas (and sometimes Dancers…). The others pull ahead a bit after that point, but that’s okay: by then, Warriors are swinging big axes and being DD (WoW people: read ‘DPS’).
  • Thief: The name of the game with thieves is threat control. Sure, Thief does get a few thief-like abilities – Sneak Attack, Mug, Steal, Hide – but the majority of a thief’s abilities, and the ones they’re primarily known for, are designed to not just do massive damage, but to then transfer that threat to someone else (Trick Attack, Accomplice, Collaborator). Thieves keep the bad guys hitting the right people.
  • Monk: Monks are the other physical DD class available from the start, and they’re pretty straightforward: they punch things. Hard. At later levels they kick things. Monks are pretty “Final Fantasy traditional,” in that they don’t wear heavy armor but they do have a boatload of HP. Unfortunately, for the first 20 levels or so, they’re pretty Godawful boring.
  • White Mage: Healplz. White Mage’s are the game’s premier healers, and they do it well. They also have a small assortment of holy attack spells (which for the most part are not worth it, unless something’s changed lately), and are the only ones capable of casting the group Teleport spells to move entire groups to the game’s teleportation crags (huge teleporter endpoints in strategic locations throughout Vana’diel).
  • Black Mage: Damage, pure and simple. Black mages zap things really hard with elemental damage spells, some enfeebling spells to weaken the enemy (WoW people: read ‘DoTs’), and a small smattering of utility spells that most other classes don’t get (like Warp and Retrace, to return to a homepoint, and Tractor, which drags dead bodies to you). Black Mages can learn the most powerful elemental damage spells the game has to offer.
  • Red Mage: In previous games, they’ve just been a combination of black mage and white mag with a little swordfighting thrown in for good effect. Well, true to form, FFXI red mages are jacks of all those trades, but they actually have one area they can call their own: Red Mages are the masters of enfeebling and enhancing magic. They also get a few powerful spells no other class gets, like the ridiculously good damage-reducer Phalanx, the ability to Refresh other people’s MP (WoW people: read that as ‘Red mages can hand out Replenish effects’), and the ability to swap their HP and MP totals to keep on rolling. If red mages sound super-versatile, you’d be right: with the right subjob (namely Ninja), a red mage can solo nearly anything in the game.

    Also, their class-specific hat is a pimp hat.

• The advanced jobs: Once you get a job to level 30, you can start unlocking advanced jobs. Each one has a quest, some easier than others (some of the jobs from the 3rd expansion can be ludicrously hard to unlock with Sneak and Invisible, for avoiding aggro, and Dragoon is just absurd at the end), but once you do it, you get a new job you can switch to. Oh yeah, I guess I forgot to mention that until now: you can switch to any job at any time, just by going to your Mog House (WoW people: read ‘player housing,’ nyah nyah).
  • Paladin: The epitome of meatshield. Paladins take a licking and keep on ticking. This is pretty much their purpose in life. They also have some white magic.
  • Dark Knight: Sort of the exact opposite of a paladin, Dark Knights wield big, heavy weapons and do big, heavy damage – sometimes at the cost of their own life. They also cast some black magic, and have their own special line of dark magic that lets them absorb an enemy’s statistics.
  • Beastmaster: Widely regarded as the premier solo job (because for a long time, they were the only legitimately soloable job), beastmasters are a lot like warriors – they specialize in one-handed axes, they wear decently heavy armor, and so on. Where beastmasters differ is their pets – they can charm the beasts of Vana’diel for a period of time and turn them on each other (thus the soloability), or call pets that won’t turn on you when charm runs out (commonly referred to as ‘jug pets’ after the item used to summon them). Beastmasters love soloing stuff. Love it.
  • Bard: Support job extraordinaire, bards play various melodies to make people better at what they do. They also can lay down some debuffs, like a DoT or making an enemy weaker to certain elements. Outside of that… well, let’s just say bards don’t do a lot of solo work. They’re super-squishy. Bard songs have the neat effect of being based on a radius, so if they’re far enough apart you can give two songs to the melee and two different ones to the mages.
  • Ranger: Hey, guess what? They shoot things. They’re also expensive, because they require a crapton of ammo. I never played ranger for any period of time for pretty much that reason, but boy was it fun to watch them do one weaponskill and BAM the tank loses hate because of the enormous damage output of your average ranger.
  • Summoner: If you played any Final Fantasy game outside XI, you might expect summoners to be avatar-summoning badasses. Well… not quite. Summoners, at least last time I was up in the level range where you saw lots of summoners, were largely backup or main healers, and the only use for their avatars was adding their unique group-wide buffs to their party.
  • Samurai: Much like how thieves were the masters of threat control, samurais are the master of TP, or technique points. (Sorry, WoW people, I don’t have a convenient analogy for you this time. Basically, as you hit (and get hit), you build TP, and at 100%+ TP (it goes up to 300%), you can unleash a weaponskill. These can be chained together, and the resulting skillchain can be hit with an elemental spell (even the non-damaging kind: every spell has en element) to cause a magic burst.) They build it, they use it, they can skillchain off of themselves. There’s some evidence that Square Enix originally intended for them to be a new tank class, but they have a tendency to introduce a class with a scattershot array of abilities and see what people do with it.
  • Dragoon: Initially, dragoon was just another DD class, and they were a lot like their earlier-FF counterparts – they hit things with spears and jump really high. They also have an adorable pet dragon. their wyvern. Eventually, the wyvern changed so that if the dragoon had certain mage subjobs set instead of the more traditional melee subjobs, the wyvern would breathe healing breaths when the dragoon was below a certain hit point percentage and cure bad status effects. And so, dragoons became a second (mostly-high-level) solo job, as well. They ended up being pretty versatile.
  • Ninja: This is the number one case where I can point at a job and note how the community ended up using it totally different. Ninja was originally intended as a fast, dual-wielding DD (Ninjas are actually the only class that can Dual Wield, though other classes can use ninja as a subjob to dual-wield from level 20 on). They also have a ‘wheel’ of elemental spells at higher levels. So, of course, people decided to focus entirely on one spell to the exclusion of all others and, well, now ninja is a tanking job. (Utsusemi, which ninjas learn pretty early on, lets them completely avoid a single physical attack. Ninja tanking is basically evasion tanking.) Square Enix is finally supporting this with a new job ability, as well adding a second one that might make DD viable for them again (of course, first you have to get over everyone’s opinion of what a ninja should do.) Ninja also has a reputation for being ungodly expensive, because their ninja spells each require a use of a consumable component – a ninja tool. (Because they’re not really casting magic: they’re using ninjitsu training!)
  • Blue Mage: Blue mages take their enemies’ skills and turn them against them. While the actual acquisition of these skills can be super-annoying, especially at low levels, blue mage is easily the most flexible job in the game, hands down. They can set different arrangements of spells to give themselves different job traits, prepare for different situations, and – oh yeah – utilize pretty much every subjob in the game effectively. They usually DD, but they can heal in a pinch, and at low levels (like sub-20), a BLU/WAR (that’s a blue mage with a warrior subjob, natch) can even theoretically tank effectively.
  • Corsair: First, you take the bard. Make it slightly less squishy, take away that flute, and give them a freakin’ rifle. Now, instead of songs, give them dice rolls, each of which has a lucky number for stronger effect, an unlucky number for weaker effect, the ability to double-up or bust (which takes away the roll and gives the corsair a negative penalty), and is amplified by the class in each roll’s name. Oh, and make them frigging pirates. That’s the corsair.
  • Puppetmaster: The job no one knows what to do with! Puppetmasters have a little dude that follows them around, the automaton, who can be customized with parts and maneuvers and can melee, shoot a crossbow, deal magical damage or heal. But puppetmasters themselves are weird: their highest weapon skill is…not that great, and it’s hand-to-hand, but puppetmasters don’t get anything heavier than medium-weight armor (usually not even as good as a monk). However, interestingly, Square finally came right out and said that they intended for Puppetmaster to be the solo job from Treasures of Aht Urhgan, and the skies opened up, and the angels sang. Puppetmasters who solo either tend to let their automaton tank, which is difficult, or they evasion tank while the puppet heals them. It’s sort of a fascinating little job, really.

The Storyline

Have you found yourself skipping quest text in WoW? Who hasn’t? While quests in FFXI are usually laughable wastes of time unless the rewards are actually good for once, the missions are brilliant. The difference between the two is simple: quests are side quests, while missions are the main storyline arcs. There’s a ton of them, too – one for each starter nation (Bastok, San d’Oria, and Windurst), one for each expansion (Rise of the Zilart, Chains of Promathia, and Treasures of Aht Urhgan), and one for each of the mini-expansions (A Crystalline Prophecy, A Moogle Kupo d’Etat, and the upcoming A Shantotto Ascension). They’re probably the most vastly entertaining part of the ongoing story.

 

The Music

… is brilliant. Not a lot to say here, but there is a reason why I own every soundtrack CD related to FFXI. No offense to Russell Brower, but none of the music from WoW ever really sticks out in my head other than The Tower of Karazhan.

No nerfing PvE in the name of PvP

‘Nuff said. For one thing, FFXI’s PvP system is kind of retarded, it’s basically a tacked-on set of sporting events. Neat in concept, but not super in execution. However, they also haven’t ever rebalanced PvE abilities because someone was dominating in Ballista (hint: because no one ever does).

However, it’s not all sunshine, daisies, and puppies in the magical land of Vana’diel. Let’s talk turkey for a second.

The Bad: What FFXI Did Wrong

Oh boy, where do I begin?

Biting it, buying the farm, shuffling off the mortal coil, becoming an ex-parrot

Bullet points, whee!

• Exp loss on death. I know this was pretty much par for the course when FFXI came out, but I think it’s time to drop this old dead system. If they’re determined to have a penalty for death, may I suggest (1) equipment breakage or (2) Experience Debt?
• Homepoints suuuuuuuck. They’re great for Warp, of course, but when your options on death are “warp back to your homepoint, which may be halfway across the world, or wait for a raise, or hope you cast reraise"? Not so much!
• Losing key items needed to even start fights to begin with. Did you just drop 60 Kindred Seals to get a key item to get into an NM fight? You didn’t all get rezzed in time? Suck it.

The economy

I’m not even sure this one is their fault.

Basically, FFXI’s economy was ruled for years by gilsellers. They finally started making advanced to block them around the time I left, though Titan’s economy is still fucked up from what I hear. However, essentially, the economy problems boil down to these two simple points.

1. Gil is difficult to earn and impossible to find, and
2. Everything is expensive.

Everything. Ever. Starting equipment by level, oh, 8 can cost roughly 2000 gil a piece from vendors or more from the auction house. Quested gear is few and far between. WoW players: imagine if instead of getting quest gear while leveling, you got pretty much nothing, and had to buy your armor – but it all cost 2000 silver per piece, at level 8.

I rest my case.

Leveling: I get by with a little help from my friends these random idiots

Hey, so, you know how in WoW you can level up at your own pace, on your own, without relying on a party (because in most cases a party is detrimental)?

Yeah, unless you’re playing a Beastmaster, a Puppetmaster, or (reportedly) a Dancer, that ain’t gonna cut it here.

FFXI doesn’t award XP for quests or missions (well, not all of them: some have an XP award, but I can literally count the number of them on my hands). Furthermore, by about level 10, monsters that grant any significant amount of XP take an absurd amount of time and resources to beat, slowing soloing to a glacial crawl. So what’re you gonna do?

The answer: XP parties, from 10 to 75. Suck it. Sure, they’ve made some minor effects to help with this (Fields of Valor certainly speeds up those first few levels – kill a certain number of a certain kind or kinds of enemies, get bonus XP), but even that isn’t an answer. Plus, a lot of parties are just plain incompetent.

Mentioning the name “Valkurm Dunes” will send some veteran FFXI players into catatonic shock. It’s terrible. And it’s the first place you party (because, sure, why would anyone want to go to the other level-equivalent area, Buburimu Peninsula?).

Minor quibbles that don’t deserve their own heading

• The skill system is abysmally slow (though it’s definitely been sped up at lower levels these days). The crafting system is terrible.
• The default walk speed is kinda slow, though you can start raising a chocobo as early as 15 (yes, before you can even get a chocobo license [that's level 20], you can raise a rideable chocobo. You just can’t wear the whistle to summon it yet). Unless you’ve raised a chocobo, also, transportation is entirely from cities and teleportation points. Didn’t raise a chocobo yet? Stuck in the middle of nowhere? Suck it.
• Remember those storyline missions I mentioned above? Good luck seeing most of them if you’re not at the level cap. The Chains of Promathia storyline is a great example: to even get started on it, you have to convince 5 other people to hike with you through an area where you’re capped at level 30 (thank goodness gear scales to level these days: you used to have to have a set of level 30 armor…), three areas to be precise, which consist of an absurdly laid out area in the middle of literally Nowhere with progressively harder enemies, randomly organized teleports, and a final boss who is, quite frankly, a bitch (at least in 2/3 of the spires). These are the Promyvions, and they are the source of a lot of hatred. (Me? I love Promyvion. It was all I got to see of Chains of Promathia until I was playing Socrates.)
• The playerbase. You know how in WoW, you’re expected by a lot of people to have a cookie-cutter spec, and any deviation from it will earn you weird looks and cost you raid spots? Yeah, now imagine that instead of raid spots, I actually mean ‘spots in parties to level up, which as I mentioned earlier are required’. That’s the playerbase. Sometimes it’s rejection of something that is blatantly stupid (sorry, WAR/WHM is just dumb), but it also takes them a really long time to adjust to new concepts that do work, like the idea that summoners might want to do something besides heal or that puppetmasters can do anything at all, or that beastmasters might want to actually join a party. Judging by the rate of change of FFXI’s playerbase, by the time ninja (with its new job ability) is accepted as a DD again, we will be playing FFXIV already and laughing at the people still playing FFXI.
• The real game is at level cap, but hey, that happens in every MMO, doesn’t it?
• Dear God, the interface.

So why do I keep playing?

For a variety of reasons. For starters, it’s kind of like coming back home – I started with FFXI, I started blogging about MMOs with FFXI, and despite all its shortcomings, it’s just comfortable. I’m at home in FFXI. Even if it does occasionally frustrate the crap out of me.

Plus, honestly, there’s so much I haven’t done in the game, that no matter how long I play, I seriously doubt I’m going to even be able to do it before FFXIV comes out and everyone starts playing that instead. Speaking of which, any linkshells on Ifrit want a new person?

For Hope, We Look To The Future: Final Fantasy XIV Online

So at E3, Square Enix announced their next stab into the MMO Space, Final Fantasy XIV Online, coming in 2010 to the PS3(!), then PC and optionally (probably) Xbox 360.

So, what do we know so far?

• The setting is changing from Vana’diel to Eorzea, thus making a near-total break with FFXI. It’s not a sequel. It does, however, have the same races but with different names, simply for familiarity’s sake. Furthermore, Eorzea’s just a region, not the name of the world, so presumably they’re leaving themselves lots of room to expand. The planet, apparently, is Haiderin (I had not seen this previously; here’s where I found it).
• Nobuo Uematsu is back to score the music, ensuring that I’ll be expanding my list of soundtracks.
• Hiromichi Tanaka (FF I, II, III, and XI) is producing FFXIV. Nobuaki Komoto (FFIX, XI) is the director. The art director, interestingly, is Akihiko Yoshida, whose only notable credit is apparently Vagrant Story.
• Here, watch this trailer from E3:

  That was made almost entirely with the in-game graphics engine. Clearly this is a big upgrade over FFXI’s now-admittedly-dated-looking graphics (though pumping the settings up to max helps…), and the game itself looks to be faster-paced.

• It finally drops the abysmal PlayOnline service that FFXI is tied to.
• Multiple servers in the ballpark of 5000-6000 people each (right now most realms seem to cap out at 1500-2000 people).
• Utilizes the new Square Enix Accounts and security tokens (WoW people: like Blizzard Authenticators, only your inventory store doubles in size if you’re using one).
• High technology, but not like FFVIII – think somewhere below FFX and you’ve got the right idea. Sort of semi-steampunk, in my opinion – it reminds me of Final Fantasy XII.
• Combat is supposed to be more “strategic,” which I guess means warriors and monks will have to do more than hit auto-attack and go make a sandwich. It’s also going to have a learning curve – no problem here, says I.
• And this is the one that’s intriguing me: growth is not tied to experience points; the developers have hinted that growth is tied, instead, to weapon usage. I am pretty sure that having someone from FFII as producer has led them to go in that direction, which anyone familiar with FFII or any of the Final Fantasy Legend series on the original Gameboy should be familiar with. You can bet I’ll be watching this closely.

There’s probably more, but right now, holy crap do I want this. Granted, I can’t transfer Rowena over (they’ve stated that characters will not transfer due to pretty much everything you just read, but that linkshells, friends lists, and potentially even names would possibly be transferable), but it’s great to see where the future is going.