What I like and what I didn't like

Shinami

Hi everyone

Here is a list of things I liked and I didn't like about this game.

Things I liked

~I liked the idea of an FF MMORPG, In fact we all did, and that is what got many of us to play it. Not the game itself, but the fact it was square. That drove me to play this game too.

~Auction Houses: I did like the idea of centralized areas where you can buy stuff through auctions. It reminded me of the FF6 auction house. The House itself was a good idea. The way it was exploited wasn't (covered later)

~I like the Subjob idea, it gave a lot more to the game.

~The sheer amount of areas. There are many and a big world to explore.

~The idea that all versions were compatible with one another, allowing you to play and talk with anyone across the servers was really nice.

~Chocobos, Everyones favorite chicken bird, which sadly other MMORPGs are ripping of the same idea and having them as enemies. We all liked riding on them. Even better we all wished we could strike down thieves who use flee with lightning.

~The difference civilizations were cool. They all looked different from one another. Which is nice.

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Things I did not like

Hitscan bug:

When you attack an enemy, combat is locked between you and the enemy. This prevents another player from actually attacking the same enemy you are attacking. The problem lies when you retreat from a battle where you unlock directly, but the enemy doesn't unlock on its side. This causes the enemy to attack and hit you as if you were standing next to him along a clear line of sight, making it that as long as the line of sight is clear, you will be hit by melee attacks, from the opposite end of the map. This hitscan bug makes it the only reason why everyone in the server won't give up their characters and become a black mage. In order to escape a creature, people perform "Zoning" which is actually withdrawing from the entire map and returning to it. When you run away from a battle and the console reads "You took 20 damage from Yagudo (whatever)" while you are 100 miles away, it can frustrate anyone.

Economy: There is a large scale IGE presence in Final Fantasy 11. There are bots for every skill and it shows. A bot is a program that allows you to actually have the computer play the game for you through Macro settings. There are bots that farm for all skills and items in the entire game. Most of these come from www.ige.com who is a group of people who specialize in selling accounts, game money and items for real money. They claim its perfectly legal and state that they are doing a good thing by redistributing the economy of a game to players who don't often play, when its really a bad thing because it violates End User Licensing Agreements, another company is making money and most importantly, this money comes from all the bots camping all the grounds. This leaves real players who are honest people out in the cold because the bots take everything away from them bystealing their camping grounds.

The auction houses are a great idea, but abused by the players and bots who push the prices too high. People auction at reasonable prices in early levels and then the prices skyrocket through the roof. Economy varies per server, so some may have good economies. I admit, I do not know them all, to those I leave them alone. This is for servers with bad economies.

The Problem with the Opening Animation: Don't get me wrong, it was beautiful. The opening Animation, while it was great, left me a bit confused and empty. Here you saw a large scale battle taking place and an entire civilization getting destroyed. Then the story skips to 20 years in the future where the last survivor returns with an army. You see soldiers walking, marching as if they are ready for a war, but what makes me feel empty is that you never really take part in something that spectacular through the whole game. In fact I felt more like a secondary character in the world trying to get known while the real heroes were out saving the world.

Too many character clones: It doesn't matter what level you are in the game and what character class and race you are. Every character of the same race, class and level has the exact same attributes, HP and MP. The only things that change these attributes are buffs or food (temporary) or Equipped items. Also its too predictable. If you see someone at say level 5, chances are everyone will be using the same sword and about the same equipment of armor more of less. The same is true for all levels. Where you get one of two choices and a few choices for weapons. What you see is basically a lot of characters who completely are clones of yourself running around. Most of the time their equipment will be the same too because equipment is way too linear. This happens in many games, but there tends to be a fix for this in most games. I guess Square wanted to be traditional.

Shop Prices: I didn't like shop prices for healing items. It was bad.

White Mages: I didn't like the way they were treated and the way they are forced to live. A white mage can not really solo and always depends on a party. In fact everyone but a beastmaster depends on a party. However a white mage has no way of really making money in that game and at higher levels Paladins are just as prefered in parties. What ends up happening is that if you die or want a teleport, A while mage will charge you for them both. This is the first MMORPG I have played where you are actually charged by another character class for using their basic abilities on you. I can understand being Revived by the best revive spell that gives you 0 EXP loss and being charged for it. I really can not understand being charged by a white mage for anything else though.

Leveling Cap: I hated having to do a quest every 5 levels past 50 just so I can level up again. They give you this tough quest every 5 levels Past 50 so you take around two weeks more to try and stay in there. To slow you down. It aggravated me a lot

TimeSink: I spent as much time walking around the giant civilizations as I did fighting monsters. In fact most time went towards talking to people in linkshells or trying to put together a party than actually playing the game. Putting together a party can take 20 minutes to 2 hours depending on where you are Just so the party can last for 5 minutes (If its a bad party) and a few hours if its a good one. When ou do reach maximun level, choosing another job is nice, but its better to get a crafting skill developed as soon as possible. At high levels they make a ton of money.

The Problem with Linkshells: There always has been way too much drama in that game. From people going through forumboard, communicating through linkshells and having fun. I don't know about you, but if I pay to play a game online and I ask linkshells for help. I hate being told to chill out, simply because I don't have a conversation about lesbians in the linkshell or talk about why we have a Republican in office. The worse is when someone is going to leave a linkshell, where drama breaks out and I simply stand in a corner somewhere. I think there is way too much chatting in a linkshell and too little playing.

When there is playing in Linkshells, you find most of them scattered across the gameworld, doing their own thing trying to link up with others. This was the first MMORPG where I would literaly spend 1 hour walking around town getting ready for something simple, and by the time the others from linkshells would come.....It was already 30 minutes to two hours later.

I know chatting in RPGs is important, but if I wanted to chat endlessly without playing the game, that is why I have instant messengers, forumboards and teamspeak.

The problem with Technical Ends:

FF11 is a game that uses a playstation 2 emulator called PlayOnline in order to actually run the game. This is why screenshots come out at 640 x 480 (Television resolution of 720 x 480 NTSC reduced to 640 x 480 for interlaced TV, which ironically is PAL format resolution). The Emulator functions as a Client where you log through and then it also uses the client itself to launch the game. If you check the FF11 folder, there is no such thing as an FF11.EXE file, but there is an FF11.SYS file.

This is the file that launches the game through PlayOnline. This forces your PC a drain in resources and due to the resolution of the game (running at higher resolution) plus emulation, it requires a graphic card more powerful than what is in the X-Box to play on PC recommended settings. Now further proof that PlayOnline is in fact an emulator of sorts is the fact that FF11 is a PS2 port of the game. Not just that, FF11 has 2XSAI in its programming which ONLY exists for console gaming.

There are two settings for resolution. One is resolution setting for the monitor and then there is a second resolution for say rendering textures at higher resolutions.

SAI series is taking a square resolution in a texture and doubling the resolution for better quality and mipmap functionality. The three Options are 256 x 256, 512 x 512 and 1024 x 1024.

This is simple enough. 256 x 256 = the default for texturing, so to get the first 1XSAI, you have to double the resolution of the textures, which make them 4 times bigger.

Double the resolution = 4x the size

Example 800 x 600 = 480,000 while 1600 x 1200 = 1,920,000.....divide them together and you get 4 even. So when you go out and buy that graphic card and you play at double the resolution, your card does 4 times the work.

Now we are still at 1XSAI, so now we redouble the textures again, from 512 x 512 to 1024 x 1024 and it becomes 2XSAI

This causes ALL textures to be completely Smooth at a High resolution. However running 2XSAI does not work well on all resolutions. ts the way of blowing up a picture frame without losing its quality at higher resolutions, but be warned, you will truly see the difference between a non anti alliased frame and a real anti alliased frame when you do this.

Emulation is the only device in the world that actually has a 2XSAI feature existing with it. Nothing else has it. Also PlayOnline is a 300MB client in its own program folder.

Another Problem is what happened with Sony and Square

The PS2 is a 300mhz console, which utilized a hard drive at one point with games running off a dual GPU 32MB graphics. The more you put into a hard drive, the longer it takes for the drive to seek and find that one file you need.

FF11 is a 30,000 file game which passes through PlayOnline. After Chains of Promathia, I wondered how they would keep expanding the game without slowing down the hard drive to the point that it was unplayable.

This is what happened. A lot of Hard drives had failures and some were lucky, but it was detected that by the time another expansion is released and all updates are combined, the drive would have too much for the game to run on a 300mhz processor, so Sony killed the hard drive from the PS2 and released a thinner one because the hard drive also slows down other games if you start with it. Since it takes more power as well. Meaning that now the system generates more heat and Sony never has been good at handling Playstation heat Dissipation.

At one point I had Final Fantasy 11 and Risk Your Life on the same hard drive. The two games combined to make 65,000 files. I had more files in 2 games in another hard drive than all the files in my C drive and D drive combined. In my E drive I had around 100,000 files. 85,000 of these were games. When I deleted both games as well as a few more I wasnt playing anymore. Comparing to previous benchmarks and current ones. I got around 14 - 23% performance increase in everything that drive did because I deleted 2 games that combined for 65000 files, when the average game is between 50 and 2500 files.

Isn't that great?

The Login Screen: Reading that message at the beginning of the login screen made me feel bad. That "Please remember you have a life, family and work" message due to the fact in Japan so many people called out of their jobs to play FF11 that the message was inserted into it.

Finally. I didn't like being forced to party every single time I wanted to do just about anything. It took forever to find a party. Your choices in this game are the choices you get in other games

Either

a) You enter a party because you are qualified to enter

b) You create a character that is needed in every party and choose to be used, exploited and thrown away like nothing(white mages).

Don't get me wrong, I like partying, but not dealing with waiting for 1 - 2 hours to make one.

FF11 is only a decent game if you have a party and you are prepared to handle and deal with all of the game's problems. I played this game for two years in two versions of the game. I pretty much did everything you could do, but there were many many things I did not like. I remember the many times I said that I wouldn't be in the game if it wasnt for the party I was in.

This is a game that if you can't communicate to enter a party of you are not wanted, eventually you will die of boredom and leave, like most games out there.

RPGs were meant for parties and some soloing. I always tell people that if they want to solo and be extremely good at working on it and want something challenging, specially against other players, then play a genre called first person shooters and learn how to play the ultimate fun in Soloing, called Deathmatch where you get to kill people for free and get praised for it.

Maps: I liked the areas, but hated how linear they were. Most players from level 1 - 20 would level on 2 - 4 maps. When I was in Windurst I would do East Saturabatura (or whatever its called, its been a while), The canjon and the Desert outside of Sabina and go from level 1 - 20. Then there were 7 other spots were you go from 21 - 60 and a few others to reach level 75.

Hopefully I won't get flamed. Just stating my piece.

Good luck everyone and have fun