f13.net

Final Fantasy XI is on sale on steam today for $7 with all expansions and add on packs.

haha Why not then. I'll save it for when I finish GoWIII. I've always kinda wondered about FFXI.

I'll warn you and say that it has not aged gracefully.

Not by a long shot.

I've been on a curious streak lately. Last month I picked up Guild Wars.

Guild Wars was leaps and bounds beyond Everquest.. FFXI was a step sideways.

It's up to you of course, I'm in no position to lecture anyone about stupid purchases. (Unreal 3, Dawn of War 2, Killing Floor, Borderlands...)

If 7.49 is all it takes to satisfy your curiosity, consider it an expense to put your curiosity at ease.

I picked it up also, although I have no idea when I'll get around to playing it.  Curious to see how it's changed since I've only played it once briefly since launch.  My biggest concern, and what caused me to uninstall it fairly quickly after the last time I gave it a try, is the UI.  This time around I intend on trying the  FFXIStyle and FFXICartography UI mods to see if it makes the game a bit more playable.  I imagine it still won't bring things anywhere near modern MMO standards (detailed quest logs, large icons over quest givers heads, etc...), but maybe it'll do.

Spent all day installing this fucking thing.  Whoever designed the installer should be fucking shot.  Got it on Steam yesterday, six hour download for the client.  Okay, fine, whatever, leave it to run overnight.  Come in today, spend maybe an hour wading through goodamn menus trying to sign up for this fucking thing.  Enter login for playOnline, enter a password, enter your e-mail password, here's your account name (hope you wrote it down because it's a series of gibberish characters you'll never remember), now re-enter your account name and password to verify all that.  Fuck, finally, that took like, an hour.  Annoying piano music all throughout with no way I can find to fucking turn it off.  Log in to FFXI.

NOPE.  Still not authorized.  What the fuck.  Go get a game authorization, associate it with this game.  Scroll through fifty licensing agreements, click on the button that says yes, I did read all of them in ten seconds.  Authorize all the expansions, now, too.  Great.  Credit card info. Subscription setup.  More goddamn piano music.  Done.  Fucking hell, about time.  Log in to FFXI.

NOPE.  Not patched.  Wait 30 mins for patcher to update.  God damn, this game is taking forever.  Okay, patcher is done updating.  Log in t.... no, no, of course not.  Patcher is updated, now it needs to update the actual game.  Six more fucking hours of downloading.  Holy shit.  I haven't watched this many fucking bars fill up since they got rid of the ATB system.

Wow, I figured they would have fixed that arcane system by now. It was that bad when it first came out.

Oh God, playonline. I had almost forgotten about that, or maybe my mind suppressed the memory of it's existence due to how much pain it's caused.

Every Final Fantasy since VI has had some sort of variant on the ATB system. So.... I'm not sure of what you're talking about. Just because you don't always see one doesn't mean there isn't one filling art. The art of having a bar with no bar. It's a zen JRPG staple.

I had thought they dropped it after IX, but I guess there was a fair bit of watching bars go up in XII, too, so yeah.  My bad.

Ah, the FFXI patcher. The only patcher I ever saw that was worse was the one for Horizons and only because it used IE and would keep crashing out. I remember having my laptop crash and had to reinstall everything. Thursday night (LAN night at one of the schools were I work) I start reinstalling FFXI at 3:00 pm. I *FINALLY* have it up and running by 8:30 pm only to have all the other guys who play start packing up and leaving. Pissed I was.

I came very close to re-buying it this weekend to see if/how things had changed but after reading the above post, no. Just no. I am not Grunk enough to endure that game again. I'll go back to EQ first before that archaic piece of shit.

I almost picked this up off of Steam, but I have a ton of games right now to play.  Thank you for mentioning PlayOnline.  Now I know for sure I won't be picking this up ever again.  I completely forgot about that part of FFXI.

Yeah, it feels a lot like picking up that old BMX bike with the padding on the cross bar and handle bars at a garage sale for $10, getting home and riding around the driveway. Sadly, I used to love logging into this in 2003/4. The music still haunts me and does make me crack a smile, a maniacal one, but a smile none-the-less.

edit: memory lapse on the years. Getting too old for this shit.

I almost did it, as I'm curious about the leveling and xp changes.  Then I remembered Play Online and decided to wait for FFXIV.

This, pretty much.  I would have gotten it to update my account to all expansions and packs, but I just don't want to deal with the hassle that is playonline anymore.  Hell, last time I was subscribed I forgot to cancel before I reformatted my computer, then when I tried to install it later just to cancel, there was some issues connecting to POL so I wound up having to use my PS2 just to get on playonline to cancel it.

The same exact thing happened to me, except instead of using the PS2, I just called my credit card company and told them not to accept charges from Square Enix or Playonline.

The leveling and xp changes were actually pretty stellar in the way they did the field manuals, lessened the TNL, etc. But the game was still clunky and did not age gracefully. And yes, it did still have the "uber bunny syndrome" problems (fighting same con / same type mobs only to come up against one that wipes the floor with you).

Regardless of the changes, the primary leveling focus is still the party based, 1 mob per fight, same model over and over, soul crushing grind that makes vanilla WoW's tier grind look like a light weekend trip.