For various reasons, I’ve started getting a bit curious about FFXI, partly because I’ve long been a fan of the franchise, and I love love LOVE blue magic (and hate hate HATE that it’s not been in the past few single player games). However, I’ve been wondering a few things:
Ability to play. I have a Mac, so using the computer is out, unless I want to install Windows on this thing and risk getting it as virus-laden as a PC, which is one of the reasons I love Macs in the first place. I have a PS2, but it’s quite old. I do have cable internet, tho’. And how much would it take me to get any peripherals necessary?
Expense. How does it compare to others of its genre?
I hear FFXIV is in the works for very soon. If it’s going to cause FFXI to be ignored, and the player base to drop off significantly, I figure, forget it and chalk it up to something I simply missed. Likely? (And if FFXIV will have blue magic at some point, hey, maybe it’ll be better to wait for that. If I can play - see #1 above.)
But as for expensive I believe it’s entirely comparable to the rest of the genre, no more and no less expensive.
Now FFXIV is coming out relatively soon, as in they’re trying to get it out this year. It’ll release on PS3 and PC, so you might just wanna fork out the cash for a ps3. I dunno if it’s going to hit xbox360 or not. I doubt you’ll be able to play it on a mac as the gpus on macs tend to be less apt for handling games (I’m a macbook user myself, and I do have win7 installed, but just for my older pc games like System Shock 2 and such) so forking out the cash for a ps3 might be your cheapest bet, cause when XIV launches you can pretty much bet that both support and user numbers are going to drop off significantly for XI
The numbers for XI have already dropped off significantly, although from what I understand there is still a core of dedicated players. 95% of my friends have quit and moved on.
I’m not sure if FF14 will have blue magic, but FFXI takes a looooong time to get anything done. It’s a fun game, but it takes a while to get to a high level, and you can’t start off the game as a blue mage. You have to get level 30 first, and then do a quest… but if you go right into blue, you’ll be dirt poor and probably unable to get most of the magic without a good linkshell.
It’s not expensive at least. I think they sell a package with all the expansions for 30-40$, and then it’s 16/month after that.
Anyway, the answers so far are about what I expected… I probably missed the “golden age” of blue magic, although I suppose it would’ve been a time and money sink at a time where I couldn’t really afford it, especially if it takes as long as Autolycus indicates. Still, more opinions would be nice.
Based on my experience with the game, I’ll say skip it. When I switched over to WoW, so many features made me think, “This is about a billion times better than in FFXI.”. Hopefully FFXIV will be decent.
IIRC, the subscription is a bit higher than other MMOs. You have to pay an extra dollar per month per additional character; while you can switch between the different jobs and level them all on the same character, bank alts (“mules”) are very useful.
1) Ability to play. I have a Mac, so using the computer is out, unless I want to install Windows on this thing and risk getting it as virus-laden as a PC, which is one of the reasons I love Macs in the first place. I have a PS2, but it’s quite old. I do have cable internet, tho’. And how much would it take me to get any peripherals necessary?
I’m also a Mac user. I played this game on the PS2 for my entire 3-year-run, though, just because it felt more natural when casting spells. I did have a chance to play this on the PC, but it just never felt the same (although it’s easier to create action macros on the PC).
You need a PS2 equipped with a hard drive to play this game on PS2. I got this as a gift, so I’m not sure how easy it is to obtain. I’m under the impression it’s hard to find. I also had a USB keyboard, which are cheap.
I’d say whether you’ll like this game depends on what you like doing in MMORPGs. Monsters’ difficulty is scaled to be killed in groups. Soloing is possible, but you have to kill weaker monsters, and it’s very time-consuming and challenging. Overall, that’s the entire game: time-consuming and challenging. It requires a level of investment that other MMOs don’t. I loved it and miss many things about the game, though choosing between it and sleeping is not one of those things.
FWIW, blue mage was very fun. It was very versatile, and I had plans to level many other jobs so I could use them as a subjob for my BLU.
Realistically, what Autolycus said. I played FFXI semi-casually for three years (I mean, an hour or two a day, and then two 4-5 hour sessions a week), and I pretty much just barely was able to get to the top of two jobs (Dragoon and Paladin). I knew some blue mages and basically with exceptional linkshell (guild) support it took them each over a year to really succeed as Blue Mages.
I would skip it, honestly, and it pains me to say that because I loved the game in its time. Unless you have a dedicated team of buddies, it takes forever to get through the low levels with random groups, and unless you have a dedicated team of buddies, money is extremely hard to come by.
P.S. – everything I’ve seen of the PS2 version pretty much sucked compared to the PC or X360 versions, both of which are pretty decent.
Chiming in to echo what Geek Mecha and Zeriel have posted. FFXI is by no stretch a bad game or anything like that, but the time:reward ratio it demands is really unlike anything I’ve ever played in an MMO. It’s not hyperbole to say that, since the game’s Japanese launch back in '03, there are players who STILL don’t have that item or weapon or whatever it is that they may want, that they’ve been playing years to obtain.
After having played it, FFXI is indeed a “hardcore” game (non-players who hear/read this always roll their eyes and think only fanboys would use that term), thanks to how long it takes to get things done. And not just questing or leveling: the game’s infrastructure is setup as a huge timesink, getting from one area to the next (especially if you’re a new player) can take forever as you have to travel on foot for the most part.
At this point in the game’s life, I don’t believe it’s a product worth paying for. That being said, if the game went F2P I would at the very least reinstall to see if I could get my characters back.
Also, IMO FFXI had the best storyline out of all the FF games. Many players skip the quests and missions, but if you do the vast majority of them, the world comes to life in a most awesome way. Everything has a backstory, and you can really get attached to the supporting characters.
I cried when I reached the end of the Promathia missions. That song is just too sad.
You could play it now and do most of the storyline… but again, that would be very difficult without help.
So the message I’m getting is that it takes a metric buttload of time (and thus money in fees, besides the peripherals) to even become a blue mage, and even longer to actually get a good cache of spells, unless I know people already playing, which I don’t?
Sounds like it may not be worth it for me. Heck, it may not have been worth it when the blue mage class first came out. How sad. Oh, well.
If you play on Alexander, I can donate you a lot of gil and items to help you get started. I also could introduce you to any friends I still know on the server. (I haven’t played in years, but my account is still active, and I wouldn’t mind rejoining briefly to help you get started.) Like I said earlier, it’s worth it for the storyline alone.
Money is another issue: the last time I played the game economy was so grossly, massively inflated it was disgusting. UNless someone could hand you some cash, you may as well not bother.
Seriously, go with WoW. WoW’s design is so much superior to anything else (and is always being improved) that it’s insane. The onyl thing which comes close IMHO is Lord of the Rings Online, and that game copies WoW as much as possible, just with Tolkein instead of fantasy mishmash.
That was a long time ago. There was a huge gil crash in…2006? and that put an end to the massive inflation. Since then, SE has been very much on top of the economy, doing a pretty good job of squelching gilsellers and closing exploit loopholes that caused them to thrive.
I had a lot of fun on that game. But I wouldn’t recommend it to a newbie, at this point, just because everyone on there has been on there forever; you won’t have a whole lot of people to play with to be new with you. Wait for FF14, where we’ll all be newbs together again.
Soooo funny that you started this thread. I was going to start one asking if I should go back to playing FFXI after a year-and-a-half hiatus.
I sunk a lot of time into FFXI over a 5-6 year period. The linkshell I created was at one time the oldest North American linkshell (NA LS) on the Titan server. I quit because I really just wasn’t having fun anymore. Everything started feeling like a chore. My gear was average and after 2 1/2 years of Dynamis runs, I never could obtain the elusive Valor Surcoat (Paladin relic armor). I had three level 75 jobs, but I plateaued on the quality of my gear because I had no interest in doing all the quests to get “sea”. Furthermore, obtaining end-game gear is literally impossible if you don’t have an HNM/ENM linkshell and/or don’t like how they’re run.
Still, I have fond memories and a sense of nostalgia for the game. The graphics, while completely obsolete nowadays, are fun to look at. Certain skills and attacks, like Sneak Attack/Trick Attack and Tachi: Gekko, are just fun to do. Some of the scenery is glorious, and Paladin tanking is a challenging and fun activity. And yes, the story (which is really just a mish-mash of a bunch of stories) is fantastic.
Money is damn near impossible to make unless you spend ungodly amounts of time camping notorious monsters or taking up a craft. Neither of those options is good: There’s a lot of competition at NM camps, so you can spend hours camping a mob only to have it aggroed by another camper. There’s an expansive craft system in the game, but it takes a ton of time and money to level up a craft, and it won’t be profitable until you get to the highest levels of the craft.
The two things that really hurt FFXI are that Japanese players were given a two-year head start, and that gil-sellers were allowed to run unchecked for so long. Square-Enix finally instituted anti-gill-selling policies, but it was too little, too late. Japanese players were very unhappy about the swarm of gaijin disrupting their game, and most would flat-out refuse to help or ignore NA/EU players. Hell, they wouldn’t even join an XP party if it wasn’t completely Japanese.
Basically, FFXI had the potential to be on par with WoW, but Square-Enix made stupid decisions along the way that handicapped it.
Oh, well.