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FFXI
Yesterday, I made a free 14-day trial account on FFXI. Not to play again, just to verify some details for that ffxi emulation project I've been helping with. To get to the content I needed to see, I had to level a little. I leveled a Galka MNK to 13.
The good: SE has made the game more beginner friendly. Exp / kill for easy prey to tough is much higher than it used to be. Signet bonuses now may include a latent of regen, and that makes a world of difference. There's a new tutorial NPC that gives a sequence of really easy quests (get signet! find the auction house! etc.) that gives some helpful rewards like a free exp ring. And there's this new wow-style element where you take on a little training mission (kill 3 of that and 3 of that) and after completing that you get another exp bonus. Monsters may now even drop chests that contain helpful items. Bottom line: 1-13 took me about as long as maybe 1-9 would have taken me in the old game. Not bad.
The bad: FFXI is still basically the same old time sink/waste. Character movement speed is so slow it just drives me crazy, especially after getting used to moving at permanent flee speed on private servers. There is no real run mode where you can get from A to B in a reasonable amount of time. It still doesn't have a system of scheduled degradation of difficulty whereas old content is made easier and faster to complete over time so new players can catch up with old players. If you start fresh now, there's an enourmous to-do list of things and the day still doesn't have enough hours to do everything you have to do to get to the top.
Yes, it's a little easier, but you essentially have to work yourself through the same old content: you start in one of the three starter cities (like in 2004). You have to get your support job, level your way to 30 if you want to level an advanced job, then start all over again. You have to find your way to Jeuno to get a chocobo license. Then you have to go through Genkais, AF quests, and you'll be frustrated by the gil driven nature of the game. Yeah, there are tons of options now. There are vastly more items than there used to be, but one way or another, large amounts of time have to be sunk into aquiring them. (To rebuild my old character from scratch would literally still take years. Maybe not five years, but probably a good two years of 6+ hour per day play. I'm speaking hypothetically of course since I had and have no intention of doing that. )
The game is still built on the same extreme version of a delayed gratification philosophy where enormous amounts of hours must be put in to achieve anything. As one person recently put it.. the game designers come up with good ideas, and these are then given to a department that maximizes subscription lengths by draining all the fun from them. You can't just kill a monster and everyone involved gets credit for killing it, goes to an NPC, picks an item as a reward and then never has do it again. No, the monster has a 2% chance of dropping one copy of the item, so it will have to be killed over and over again, every Sunday, for 3 years until everyone has gotten their item. That's the Square Enix way. I am grateful that I'm no longer doing that to myself.
Nevertheless, I think FFXI is basically a good game. If only all the crap, the senseless time wastes, the sheer tedium and frustration caused by the endless repetition of the same content forced on players by artificially low drop rates, slow travel, long repop timers, etc. and other needless hardship built into almost every element of the game could be eliminated.
The good: SE has made the game more beginner friendly. Exp / kill for easy prey to tough is much higher than it used to be. Signet bonuses now may include a latent of regen, and that makes a world of difference. There's a new tutorial NPC that gives a sequence of really easy quests (get signet! find the auction house! etc.) that gives some helpful rewards like a free exp ring. And there's this new wow-style element where you take on a little training mission (kill 3 of that and 3 of that) and after completing that you get another exp bonus. Monsters may now even drop chests that contain helpful items. Bottom line: 1-13 took me about as long as maybe 1-9 would have taken me in the old game. Not bad.
The bad: FFXI is still basically the same old time sink/waste. Character movement speed is so slow it just drives me crazy, especially after getting used to moving at permanent flee speed on private servers. There is no real run mode where you can get from A to B in a reasonable amount of time. It still doesn't have a system of scheduled degradation of difficulty whereas old content is made easier and faster to complete over time so new players can catch up with old players. If you start fresh now, there's an enourmous to-do list of things and the day still doesn't have enough hours to do everything you have to do to get to the top.
Yes, it's a little easier, but you essentially have to work yourself through the same old content: you start in one of the three starter cities (like in 2004). You have to get your support job, level your way to 30 if you want to level an advanced job, then start all over again. You have to find your way to Jeuno to get a chocobo license. Then you have to go through Genkais, AF quests, and you'll be frustrated by the gil driven nature of the game. Yeah, there are tons of options now. There are vastly more items than there used to be, but one way or another, large amounts of time have to be sunk into aquiring them. (To rebuild my old character from scratch would literally still take years. Maybe not five years, but probably a good two years of 6+ hour per day play. I'm speaking hypothetically of course since I had and have no intention of doing that. )
The game is still built on the same extreme version of a delayed gratification philosophy where enormous amounts of hours must be put in to achieve anything. As one person recently put it.. the game designers come up with good ideas, and these are then given to a department that maximizes subscription lengths by draining all the fun from them. You can't just kill a monster and everyone involved gets credit for killing it, goes to an NPC, picks an item as a reward and then never has do it again. No, the monster has a 2% chance of dropping one copy of the item, so it will have to be killed over and over again, every Sunday, for 3 years until everyone has gotten their item. That's the Square Enix way. I am grateful that I'm no longer doing that to myself.
Nevertheless, I think FFXI is basically a good game. If only all the crap, the senseless time wastes, the sheer tedium and frustration caused by the endless repetition of the same content forced on players by artificially low drop rates, slow travel, long repop timers, etc. and other needless hardship built into almost every element of the game could be eliminated.
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giggly
depressed
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pessimistic