Square-Enix announces new FFXI expansion

[Duhulk]

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/index.shtml

Wow, for some reason I always got the feeling they were kinda done with any major new FFXI content.

[Iannis]

Why surprising? MMOs are never done.

Considering Sqenix has decided to go the way of sequels and prequels rather than new FF additions, too....

[Itzena]

There's also the minor detail that FFXI is getting an XBox360 port, as well.

[Guzrog]

I read somewhere that square had also said that with the release of the xbox 360 version, which will have an updated graphics engine or update of the current to take advantage of the 360's hardware that we should expect to see an update option later for PC users for the graphics. They said this would take "a really great system" or something along those lines. But i'm sure most 3ghz + gf5900+ users should be able to handle it just fine. If I'm not lazy someday, good luck, I'll find the link.

[Manatra]

Originally Posted by Guzrog

I read somewhere that square had also said that with the release of the xbox 360 version, which will have an updated graphics engine or update of the current to take advantage of the 360's hardware that we should expect to see an update option later for PC users for the graphics. They said this would take "a really great system" or something along those lines. But i'm sure most 3ghz + gf5900+ users should be able to handle it just fine. If I'm not lazy someday, good luck, I'll find the link.

Depends, FFXIs engine isn't really built to scale well. The more it has to draw, the amount of resources it uses increases exponentially. Think something along the lines of Half-Life, when you build maps in that game you can make them huge, but it'll bring even high end computers to their knees because the engine just isn't optimized to use large amounts of resources. So they can probably increase the distance as the Xbox360 can handle it, and for the PC version a high end system could as well since it'd be roughly equivelant to the 360. The FFXI engine itself has really been pushed to the limit (on the PS2 especially), in the latest expansion some of the really pretty areas do tend to get a tad choppy at times.

This is also probably why the Xbox 360 version isn't getting any major graphics overhaul, as they would probably have to completely rewrite the engine.

[redav]

Are there going to be new servers when the xbox 360 version comes out?