Ffxi:pc

[KaiTenSatsuma]

To start: i dont like Square Enix, i loved squaresoft but i just hate enix, i dont even really know why, but i still try my best to do fair reviews on their games.

unfortunatly there is nothing good to say about their recent games, im just sorry, its a cesspool of suck, Drakengard, Drakengard 2, FFXI, FFX-2, Dirge of Cerberus, all lack creativity, and here im pointing a shothun at FFXI's chest and pulling the trigger.

The Interface is total crap, they set combination keys (ctrl + a = auto attack a target and so on) while this can be rebound and reset to your own desire, the whole fact that they could have simply set a key to start typing things to say or shout (i dont know, press t to start talking or somthing) they would have only needed to set basic binds which would have made things automatically easier right then and there. EVERY MMO THAT I KNOW OF USES THIS SYSTEM, but some people argue that FFXI was ment for consoles, there are two control types: compact and regular, switching between the two makes no large difference other than movement goes from the numberpad to your regularly used WASD set up, and you dont need to press ctrl+H to heal, some other keys are rebount for camera i think, but i just removed those binds for lack of need.

so what? who cares? this is the PC version, you dont ship a game between console types without changing to keys to fit the console in question, in this case a monkey (no offense to programmers or monkeys) would have done a better job at setting keyboard controls.

Camera control is mediocer, its hard to set it at a decent distance, without making your character take too much space or too little. at least if you configure your game a bit you can keep it at the 3rd person point, but setting it so that your mouse wont move it unless you want it to (normally moving your mouse to the end of the screen with pan the camera in that direction, a very slow panning at that.) is a good idea. you can use the arrow keys next to the numberpad to pan the camera also.

Graphics are generally good, spell effects are nice and attacks and criticals have graphics as well, character detail is fairly good for a game of its age, distance can be set, texture detail and model detail can be lowered or somthing, so you have your own idea of what your PC can handle.

UNFORTUNATLY enix was incompetent enough not to include a windowed mode, well let me correct that - they used to have a window mode, but when they heard about people hacking the game they made it so the game would shut down if it WASNT in full screen, this limits things in so many ways its not funny, no aim, no ventrillo, no websurfing between downtime or anything like that, so instead of securing their game they just sue anyone who messes with the game. i have not played a MMORPG (aside from freeware ones) that you can window that has a problem with hackers, or at least a serious one with them, so thats pretty messed up.

The job system from FFT makes a comeback, with several jobs to change into at your leisure to work for a party. unfortunatly it takes so damn long to level them up without any sort of help from the other ones that it only makes sense to have 2, 3 jobs TOPS, a main job, a support job, and maybe one of the special jobs you need to unlock through a quest. most of these quests are rediculously hard, the summoner quest makes you hunt for a gem which is an EXTREMELY rare drop off of leech creatures, this can take days im told, and then you need to take the gem through several weather types (different area types pretty much) so usually youll have 3 jobs you use. at least they give you open options. oh, before i forget, support jobs only use 50% of their power compaired to your main job (you have a level 20 warrior and white warrior, if warrior is your main, you can only use up to level 10 of abilities your white mage has, 20/10, 30/15, 40/20, so on and so forth.)

controls...graphics...camera...game.... uh... Fighting is generally basic, you cast spells, you swing your sword. the one major gripe i have with it is that the battle system is retarded sometimes, youre unable to see targets, and most of all enemies you have no problem killing usually, will **** you, you can always con a monster but the interface just makes it so unweildy youll often just not do it and go based on what youve killed before. this will kill you. very often if you dont watch how far in you are on a map.

i cant speak on sounds since i started around the time of the festival, this causes a major headache since every "night" a crapload of fireworks are set off above my city, but on to character creation : basically, you have a male female system for Tarutarus, Humes, and Elvaan, only female mithras and only male Galaks. Each sex/race combo has 7 faces, and 2 hair colors each, which actually makes me question just how customisable things are.

i dont even want to break down the scoring, bottom line is 5.5/10, ill probably change this later since at this point in time (2:41 AM) i want to end this and have it saved, i might be being optomistic, and i may have missed parts.

[Shinma]

They made the Summoner job hard to get because EVERYONE would be a summoner otherwise. By the way, once you finish exposing your crystal to all the weather types you get only Carbuncle as a summonable. You have to defeat all of the others, just like in the other FF games. Also, it was my understand that the con was a group con, since easy mobs would wipe the floor with you solo.

The only a couple things that really pushed me away from this game. One was the lack of soloability. I have very odd hours, and odd availibility times. The other was that chocobo rental prices would skyrocket during the day, making it impossible for even a decently geared players to rent them.

You are right about the lack of customization though. My 49 Samurai / 30 Warrior / 17 White Mage will probably never see the light of day again...

[KaiTenSatsuma]

right, i also forgot to mention you have to level whatever new jobs you get from level 1, aaaallll over again, the only advantage you get is you might still be toting your level 1 gear around in your mog house, that and if you trained the particular weapon type the class uses you pretty much kick ass alone, but getting back to a decent level to use them in parties and group is a pain.

i should also mention that the nice little mentor program the booklet mentions isnt really implemented at all, sure theres the ? over your head and somone to hire mentors, but noone actually volunteers for it, and if they do theyre off fighting giant monsters that could crush you. this is checked between 3 servers also, so i figure its pretty constant in lackage.

ah right, mog houses. its pretty much a place for you to put things away into, unless you feel like sinking a load of gil into it, then you can grow plants and your moogle might gain abilities based on what furniture you buy. storage is self explanitory, hard to screw that up but at least they could have added an auto stacker. for example: if you loot (looting is done automatically, heads up.) 3 earth crystals they dont stock. you have to go to your inventory, and press the sort button to make them stack, and you need to do this every time to ensure that you dont have any wasted space for new items, if you do pick items up while your inventory is full of unstacked items at least theyll be put in if you make space for them, youll be sort of "holding" them.

and i just cant comment on tradeskills because they confuse the crap out of me, ill have to look up a guide for it.

[Raxtull]

The only real problem I've ever had with the game are the players. It's min/maxer paradise, they've completely taken the game over and leeched all the fun out of it. For instance, your WAR/WHM you mentioned will get you yelled at because it's inefficient. You have to be WAR/MNK or WAR/NIN or you're a n00b. If you're not using the highest rated weapon for your job, you're a n00b. If you're a mage and are swinging a weapon, you're a n00b. If you're not carrying 50,000,000 gil worth of gear by level 20, you're a n00b.

But aside from the players, it's my favorite MMO. I just have to play it in short bursts because I can only take so much stupidity before I want to start killing people.

[KaiTenSatsuma]

so other than that people pretty much dont care or agree?

[Shinma]

It's min/maxer paradise, they've completely taken the game over and leeched all the fun out of it. For instance, your WAR/WHM you mentioned will get you yelled at because it's inefficient.

Yeah I know what you mean. This was a long time ago, back when it was only me, my girlfriend, and 2 other friends. We all had to trade off doing jobs from time to time. I wouldnt try it now, unless I was with that same group of friends.

Here is a short video i found of chocobo raising, as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CP0WxcLfCg0

[KaiTenSatsuma]

must be the new expansion, if i had any faith in them id be happy, but theyll probably force you to sell your chocobo when it grows up so the chocobo riding company can make money

or at least youll still have to get off the damn thing, and watch it run back to your homepoint

still doesnt make the game's camera suck any less -_-

[Wolf]

I'm going to make this short since I haven't played in awhile and don't remember much....

I only played I think 3 days before I quit, even though I had 3 friends playing it. The interface was terrible IMO, it was just really clunky and annoying to use when trying to buy stuff in their AH/Bazaar/whatever its called.

I also hated the fact that I couldn't jump. I mean it doesn't seem like much, but it really adds a lot to a game, makes your character feel alive instead of just some pixels running across a screen. It also annoyed me when there was a small hill in front of me and I couldn't jump on it and get to mobs up there.

Their problems are with the basic mechanics of the game, I don't see how they screwed them up.

[junior]

I played. I still play. And the first thing that comes to mind upon reading the first post was that the bias mentioned in the start of the post was fairly obvious throughout the rest of the post.

Having said that...

Yes, the UI is apparently clunky. I personally have never had a problem with it, but a lot of people have complained about it. I don't really understand the fuss myself, but apparently I'm in a minority on this one.

I have no trouble at all with the camera. It defaults to chase mode when you move (it'll rotate in place to keep you centered until it's behind you), but I don't really know why this would be a problem. The Page Up and Page Down keys smoothly move the camera closer and further until you get a distance that's convenient for the way you like to play.

Forcing you to relevel new jobs from level 1 is, imo, one of the key strengths of this game. What are the two biggest complaints in most games that have been around for a while?

1.) Too many high level players in too little high level content that you run over and over again until you die of boredom.
2.) Starting a new character becomes more and more difficult because there are fewer and fewer people leveling up alongside you to form groups with.

FFXI neatly sidesteps those issues by encouraging people to start a new job and level it up. And it's not like starting an alt in another game. There's a definite advantage in having multiple jobs leveled at least partway up so that you can have multiple options for sub-jobs. So people have yet another way that they can improve their character without running the same high end zone over again. And lower level characters have access to a pool of people who are interested in grouping with them.

Weapon skills are an important part of combat, and yet no one has mentioned them. Combat in the game is practically built around them and the ability to cause magic bursts, and they are what sets the combat in this game apart from other games. Sight issues with targeted mobs can generally be resolved by locking the target (can be set to automatic in the config menu, or press the * key on the numpad). Once a target is locked, you merely need to tap a movement key and your character will automatically turn and face the target.

Yes, the fireworks and the evening music got annoying after a while. But it was only in the areas immediatly around the cities. Once you get out to the level 10+ areas, the fireworks couldn't be seen.

Galka are asexual egg-layers.

Summoner is something that the developers conceived of as a prestige class. i.e. it was something that you were only supposed to be able to properly finish (i.e. get all of the avatars) at a high level. That's changed, though, since you can get the original six optional avatars with the new level 20 fights. And other than the rare drop (which can be farmed from level 1 mobs in Bastok), it's a pitifully easy quest. The quest merely requires patience.

That, of course, also applies to the Dark Knight quest (kill 100 mobs with a VERY poor quality weapon). Beastmaster and Bard can both be completed fairly easily while solo (as can Ranger if you don't mind dying right after finishing it). A few others are a little more involved but can be done solo with Sneak and Invisibility. And there are a few that will require the help of a group or a high level player (for instance, Samurai or Dragoon).

Some jobs solo quite well. Beastmaster, for instance, is built around it. Red Mages can do a fair job of it, and a Dragoon with a White Mage sub-job is supposed to be quite good as well (due to the way the wyvern's breath weapon works with that sub-job). Not every job can solo, but this is pretty much standard outside of World of Warcraft.

And finally...

Why would someone pick (insert melee job here)/WHM? It doesn't have enough mp to actually heal anything. It's so-so for soloing (since it can reduce downtime a bit, and possible give you a few extra hit points in a tight spot), but I frankly can't think of a single reason why it might be considered even partially useful in a party. Picking someone with that combo would be like letting a level 50 warrior in bronze armor tank in Everquest or WoW. Sure, it's a warrior with armor. But there are much better choices that the player could have made that would increase the value of his character tenfold. And those other choices won't risk getting your party killed.

[KaiTenSatsuma]

the game doesnt encourage players to start a new job for crap, they tell you " oh... you want to try a new job? okay, get our your newbie gear kiddo, youre back to square one!", the WAR/WHM was an off the top of my head, i mentioned it was late when i posted this, so give me a break. If you want a better one then RDM/WHM or BLM (since some people want the extra mana boost and other spells)

i beleive i have a reason to have a strong felt hate for the company at this point in time with the exceedingly large amount of dissapointing games they make, i never said that i had a bias against the game itself, but the company... they should know better.

the camera could be better in the sense that its useless in battle, it locks in and you cant look around you, you might not need to in most cases but thats it.

and i did mention weapon skills to a small extent, the whole part about starting over with your weapon level (since killing level 1 things is easier when you have the maximum sword skill you can have then) but all in all the system itself is redundent, without a micophone system like ventrillo it just makes it that much harder to coordinate these percision strikes, maybe the micros are good for that, but its a pain in the ass to set them up in the first place.

and i could really do without one monster chasing me across a map untill i leave the map, i cannot even begin to stess how much i could do without that. also, why do i have to "heal" to heal? wouldnt sitting down be a more general, and comfortable thing to do in this situation? these are the sorts of small things that bother me, they didnt implement a natural regenration, and ill be damned if i ever see a person have to concentrate to stop blood flow naturally. i can do without the jump button, i dont use it all that much, there arent very many fences.

i understand that summoners are a pain to master, its more of a trophy than it is a class in actuality untill you get the better summons, but then you realize "hell... im starting over at level 1 after that annoying ass quest! and i have to buy more spells! and equipment!(possibly, depends on what new class/old class you have) and son-of-a.... i have to kill a summon everytime i need a new one? and these things are HOW STRONG? -enter complex string of profanity here-

soloing has nothing to do with this.. but just how often do you get into a group seriously in this game?

and i dont know, the camera simply bothers me since i still cant get too good of a look, maybe this is just me and a group of people, or maybe some people are used to it, or whatever, but even using the page down and page up i couldnt just feel *right* with the camera, this is probably in part to the pointless "cinematic" angle it takes in battle, seriously, why do i need to see things from that angle? what common sense lead to this decision, and i would like to know whoes brain it came from.

thats about it for now, 1:35 am here, sleep is a necessity since school starts in 5- no, 4 days

[junior]

From the sound of things, you didn't really expend the time and effort to become acquainted with the system. You may view the fact that you need to become acquainted with the system as a strike against it, though.

The camera only stays locked in combat so long as you have the target locked. Once you're looking at the mob you want to kill, you don't need to keep the target locked, and pressing the '*' key on your keypad will allow you to unlock the camera should you want to move it around. You can either move your cursor to the side of the window to do this, or you can use the arrow keys (not the ones on the keypad) to move the camera around. I'm not sure what 'cinematic' angle on the camera in combat is a reference to, since all the camera does when it's locked is attempt to keep both the character and the target on screen at the same time.

I don't understand the general dislike toward macros. Every game has them, and they're incredibly useful. Also, FFXI allows you to use audio alerts in the party (through the <call#> command) that can be used for announcing a weapon skill to announcing a pull to calling someone who's afk back to their computer to attempting to wake up the party member who just fell asleep. A typical weapon skill macro might consist of two lines:

/party Beginning Weaponskill! TP <tp>. <call 1>
/ws "Raging Axe" <t>

This tells the game to announce in party chat the weaponskill you're using followed by the amount of TP that you currently have. It ends with a short audio whistle. The weapon skill (in this case, Raging Axe, the first 1h Axe weapon skill) is then executed. The next person in the chain can then use this as a guide to know when to start their own weapon skill.

Some people in my LS were talking about a TS server that's up and running, so I suspect the game works fine with those types of programs. I haven't tried using it, though, so I could be mistaken.

Monsters chasing you across the map dates back to at least EQ1. This was something in the original release of the game, although it disappeared in the expansions (it still exists in WoW instances). But in actuality, you can get most of the monsters to stop chasing you provided that you manage to get rid of it's method of tracking you. This means moving out of sight or sound, and in the case of monsters that track by smell moving through water or using the Deodorize spell (which only exists for this purpose). It's difficult to do (particularly the out of sight part; I've never done it myself), but it is possible.

Grouping isn't too hard. Sometimes getting a group might take a while, but the game has an excellent LFG tool. Make sure that you're not /anon, put your LFG flag up (using the /inv tool), and set a search comment if you choose (generally a good idea). And the soloing issues are hardly limited to FFXI.