I've never been one for mmo's (paying every month isnt for me) and I haven't gotten all that far in the playstation set of Final Fantasies, so i figure that by the time I get to Final Fantasy XI (I'm well aware that each FF has nothing to do with each other, but I still want to play them in order), even if I wanted to play it, all of the other players would be long gone. That said, I would like to ask people who have played it whether or not it could be transformed into a single-player game, and if they did, what would have to be changed? (besides creating a solid group of heroes and a villian)

They already did -- it's called Final Fantasy XII.

Yes it can, we like to call it Final Fantasy XII.

Never played XI, so no legit answer from me.


edit

Axersia beat me to it!

What I mean is that I would want to play every Final Fantasy, but im not about to pay for game-playing priveleges. So you are saying is that XII is essentially XI for a single player? fair enough, but it still has a different world with different scenarios

They'd have to do a lot of things to make it work, that's for sure. One thing that made me quit FFXI was the goddamned terrible death penalty, which essentially is a giant chunk of your EXP which can de-level you from even the maximum level. They'd also have to tweak the hell out of the monsters, since your standard fight took multiple minutes (standard being against only one regular foe...) and then they'd have to make everything weaker in general because I found that the second a second monster came into the fray, it was wipe time.

They'd have to make it easier to make money, remove the insanely long spawn times on "rare" monsters, and tweak Burning Circle (essentially boss fights) to make it work for single player more effectively. It'd probably also be nice if they halved the travel time on the boat and the airship, and made it skippable, since it'd be annoyingly long for single player. Something which brings me back to my first point is the levelling. They'd have to make levelling dramatically faster, since it was slow, as well as removing the stupid level cap raising quests, or making them more practical.

I loved the whole idea of the jobs, though. If it were to go Single Player, I'd love for them to streamline the job changing, instead of forcing the player to retreat to their Mog House.

"What I mean is that I would want to play every Final Fantasy, but im not about to pay for game-playing priveleges. So you are saying is that XII is essentially XI for a single player? fair enough, but it still has a different world with different scenarios"

there is plenty of people still playing it trust me. they got 2 million total. and LOTS of people in level 15+ areas. just play as white mage and you will have no problem fining ppl to play with

I've been playing FFXI for about 2 years now and it's the only online rpg I've played (or will ever play, because like you I'm not too keen on them... I tried FFXI only because it was part of a universe that I was a fan of).

When I first started playing everything was so difficult to get: equipment, gil, exp you name it, but as the years went by SE made alot of changes, the most notable one being 'level sync'. Normally what would happen is that you'd need to find 5 other people, in the range of 1-2 levels higher or lower than you, to from an 'exp party' to beat up mobs. With level sync you can ask anyone, anywhere to join you and they will all 'sync' to whatever level your on until the party is finished. So in a sense it is much easier to level in the game, but level sync came with its share of problems too (ie. not being able to skill up certain attributes is a pain sometimes).To put it bluntly, FFXI is actually not too bad when you have a group of friends to play with on a constant basis. Especially on the Gil side of things, since having friends around means you can always count on assistance to defeat a mob that drops a high selling item. Then again, not everyone playing would have a good amount of friends so it becomes more of a solo experience; which leads us to your question.
 
I've felt frusterated at times when I have to 'farm' mobs for items so that I can sell them and attain gil from them (it's kinda like ffxii's loot system) but I wouldn't be able to because 3 or 4 people would be in the zone farming them, thus not giving me an ample chance. So I've wanted, like an offline mode where it would be single player only, no missions but to have all quests available and to be able to farm without hinderance... that probably wont happen because of all the security issues revolving around the game already.

Having a single player experience would actually be really awesome in that you could see the awesome storyline evolve in a quicker, memorable pace and you could experience the sheer size of the game without anything holding you back. Could FFXI be a single player game? Yeah totally, but if it was I probably would not have made the awesome friends I have, friends that I will probably still talk to when all is said and done. Not to sound too cheesy but, friendship is probably the theme of ffxi and it's one of the main reasons I keep playing the game.

-Hiro

Very few new FFXI players will ever stick with the game.  Everyone's too used to the instant gratification of WoW. 

FFXI has the potential to be an excellent solo RPG.  The story is pretty fantastic, especially for an MMO, and the world is pretty well fleshed out if not a bit generic.

I've got a few friends who are big into FFXI online. It would make an awful single player game- hell, it's a mediocre MMO at best. You aren't really missing anything...

A lot of people consider FFXI a bad game simply because it relies heavily on the community, where as most MMOs these days might as well be single player RPGs until the level cap.

Because of the difficulty of the game, every little accomplishment in FFXI means something.  I love the game, and wish I had the time to play it still.

I'd love it if they remade this for single player. I enjoyed the story when I played it online. But I do think it's possible, as others have pointed out FFXII.

this game will be crap if it was one player game because when you hit 75 with one of your characters, there are still some monsters you can not kkill

Well, now 2013 after the Lv cap raised to 99 and two new jobs here is my opinion.

Kickstarter- In order for Squareenix to invest time to properly port this to a single player they would need to sit down and actually look at the cost to port this. From my coding experience if they had a team of 5 programmers (because that is all they would need). At the level company they would each make.....almost 10k for the project. Anyways getting off track. Kickstarter is a great way for them to take their assesment of cost post it and see if they can sell pre-orders. Kickstarter is a win win. We as consumers would win because we get the FFXI story experience even when they decide to pull the plug on the servers and game. They win because they didn't even have to spend a single dime to make the game. Plus the fact that Square Enix is doing a Final Fantasy Kickstarter is enough advertisment.

NPC - Really replace players with Story NPC's eg: Lion, Zied, Ironshield etc. Imagine you could do quest to unlock certain NPC's in the game not only your custom NPC fellow but one from the Missions and quests. I can work.

Monsters- Most of the game you can solo now with your fellow thanks to the Fields of Valor. But obviously monsters like Ultima and massive bosses like that require you to get in 18 man parties then they obviously need tweaking. simple math corrections.

If they did a kickstarter for this I could see it like this :

20$ donation gets you alpha access to what is going on in development and a t-shirt that has something to do with Final Fantasy XI.

60$ donation would be your preorder and all same gifts below 60$.

(something along those lines.) I would love to see a strech goal like bring the game to Linux and Mac to reach a even bigger audience.