Thinking of getting FFXI

Comments

• ChrisMattern Member Posts: 1,478

  May 2006

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  Originally posted by blunder1983
  Hi guys,I'm coming back to England next week (finishing my job in Korea) and am keen to fire up the old MMORPGing lark again now I'll have a desktop. So my options are: COV (I had a COH account so I can get both for my subs)
  Guild Wars: Factions
  FFXI. Now I know nothing about the latter but I played SWG for 2 years and this is the game one of my mates there switched to and he utterly raves about it. Grinding aint an issue but fun, team based gaming is. The other thing I love is crafting, and the last game I played (WOW) had me always just giving up at level 35 when I hit 300 in my craft and realised it was all pretty worthless (compared to SWG at least). This game seems to be "a thinking mans WOW". My main queries are:1. What is crafting like, what are professions like?
  2. What is the server population like nowadays, and whats it like at 2am, I'm coming back to Korea in 6 weeks and will still be playing.
  3. I've never played a single Final Fantasy game in my life, will I be unable to relate to the game?
  4. What is the community like?
  5. What makes the controls SO bad?I think thats about it, thanks for the help!

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  1. Crafting is pretty good, much more challenging than WoW. Each craft recipe has a cap--once your crafting skill is above that cap, you don't get any more skillups for crafting it, so you have to move on to higher-level synths to keep levelling. The fun part is that the really profitable part of crafting is the High Quality (HQ) synths--and you don't really get a good HQ rate on a synth until you have a crafting level 30 points above the synth's cap. And some synths need more than one skill, with each skill involved having its own cap. You don't need to "have" recipes, you just have to know them (guild members will tell you recipes for free, or you can look them up easily online--which has the added bonus of telling you the cap, the game only vaguely hints at what cap a synth is); but synths that have a cap several levels above your level will have a miserable success rate, and failure carries the risk of losing some or all of your crafting materials. At the very least you lose your crystal (all synths require an elemental crystal to power the synth). If your level is too low, the system won't even let you attempt the synth. Add all that to fact that skillups, success rates *and* HQ rates are all also related to an astrology system that looks at the day of the week, phase of the moon, the direction in which you're facing, the element of the synth crystal and possibly the element of the synthing skill used (and is complicated enough that even now there isn't 100% agreement as to how it all fits together) and it's a pretty involving system. Professions are a good, interesting range of jobs. With the new expansion there's now 18 to choose from, although 12 must be unlocked. You can freely switch between jobs in your mog house (player housing), but each job has its exp and level tracked separately, and each starts from level 1, 0 exp. Adding interest to this is a subjob system, where once you complete a quest at level 18, you have a main job and a subjob (support job). The subjob is capped at one-half your current main job, and provides stat increases (different subjobs provide different stat bonuses), and the subjob's spells and abilities (you don't get access to the equipment the subjob would've let you equip if it was your main job, however). While not all main job/subjob combos work, you do get interesting options. For example, a WAR could sub MNK to get more hitting power, or THF to get evasion, steal & treasure hunter (more loot drops), or NIN to get Utsusemi (shadows that aborb attacks).

  2. Server populations are quite good, regularly in the thousands, and are even very good at 2 am. Bad news: at 2 AM US time the population will be mostly Japanese. Good news: many JP players speak good english, and the game provides an automated Japanese-English phrase book covering many terms you need to play. I speak almost no Japanese, but I have successfully participated in parties run by JP players who spoke no English, communicating with the auto-translator.

  3. I don't think you'll have too much trouble. Being Final Fantasy means you get to have fun seeing stuff that makes you say, "Hey, I remember those", but the fact that you haven't seen a chocobo before, won't recognize Cid when you meet him in the Metalworks, and don't get the "spoony bard" in-joke won't particularly interfere with your ability to play.

  4. Community is pretty good; we have our allowance of jerks, of course. Perhaps the least appealing aspect is a relative lack of tolerance for new players who expect to be spoon-fed. But if you do your homework and show a willingness to learn, the community can be amazingly helpful.

  5. The controls are bad mainly because it was originally a PS2 game, and Square as a company knows making PS2 games, not PC games. The mouse controls are a total loss. The keyboard controls aren't bad once you get the keyboard settings set to "Compact" (which isn't the default) so you can WASD. However, using a gamepad controller rocks. Square knows gamepads. Get yourself a Logitech Rumblepad 2 USB controller (which Square supports, and, in fact, recommends), make sure you use the configuration program to enable it, and you're ready to rock and roll; it works just like the PS2 controller for the PS2 version.

  Chris Mattern