| there were a lot of aspects of FFXI that were good. I played it about a year and a half before quitting. Quit because of a lack of an end game (imagine competing with 3 other groups for 3 hours every night just for a 1% chance of getting an item that would improve the overall effectiveness of your character by 3-4%. Just stupid... not to mention, imagine having to pay 250pp in EQ in order to get 2.5 hours in plane of fear, pre velious... that sums up dynamis)
I think SEX (square-enix) really screwed up the release and could have gotten a lot more customers if they didn't disperse english players way too far. FFXI is a very community/group oriented game, and fragmenting the english player base was one of the worse things they did. Everything falls apart when you can only effectively communicate with 1/4-1/7 people in a group/person focused game.
FFXI also suffered a lot from mob competition problems... Zone instancing would have done absolutely beautiful things for this game. Nothing more frustrating than getting an exp group together just to find out you have nothing to kill.
Things that were good about FFXI:
AH system easily the best I've seen in a MMORPG. WoW sucks here.
Server reliability , patch upgrades were near flawless. Probably has to do with Japanese quality standards and the fact that they were making the game for the PS2 also (not as much room for bugs). Clearly clearly superior to WoW here.
People focused game - if you had friends who played with you a lot you could do quite a bit here. An MMORPG where you actually interacted a lot with ppl vs a lot of the solo aspect in WoW.
BCNM battles - hard fights with (ffxi standards) good items
Game storyline - pretty good, one of the more involved storylines I've seen in a MMORPG. WoW has good storylines also but the approaches are very different in both games.
Class flexibility - nice being able to stick with one character yet try different elements of the game. Main job/sub Job also created more flexibility (even if it was limited to viable combos - still created more interest).
Very well designed game world - FFXI is one of the very few games where I can say I literally went everywhere... there was no corner of the map I hadn't seen, and all the times it was because I was doing something that I wanted/needed to do (no exploring just to explore). WoW has a lot of areas that some people never set foot into (no need). A lot of art/ambiance of the game world was well done.
Just to be clear I'm not praising FFXI in its entirety, but there were some aspects of the game that were/are very good. |