It's been almost two months since I complained a bunch about trying to get Final Fantasy XI to start on my blog, and believe it or not, I did finally play the game. My free 30-day subscription ran out a month ago, and I've been meaning to follow that blog post up with my first impressions. It sounded like some people were interested in what I'd think of it. I even prepared screenshots and stuff. Obviously, I ended up never actually finishing that follow-up. Sorry for jumping straight to the end of the story here, but it might partly because I just could not care any less about the game afterwards. One, two weeks later, I felt like it was too late to post this anyway. Who cares anymore? (Also, I'm a lazy garbage, but that's a whole other story.)

Right now, I'm just sitting here with not much to do, having played too much Rocket League for the day. I thought, forget it, I might as well just get it all out there while I still could. Killer Cuts just came on shuffle, so I'm super feeling it. Without further ado, here is the rest of my Final Fantasy XI experience, told in three parts because that's how many times I sat down and played the game. (Note: there's just as much complaining in this one as the last one!)

Session 1

Continuing where I left off last time, it may not surprise you that the game setup was far from over. I tried launching the game and it immediately froze my whole computer. To be more accurate, it froze Windows Explorer and Task Manager, which made it practically impossible to do anything.

It took some searching, but I figured out that this is a problem that anyone with newer versions of Windows or DirectX, I'm not sure which, would have. The Final Fantasy XI engine uses a DirectX networking API called DirectPlay, which has been deprecated since at least DirectX 9.0. If you don't have this on your PC, everything will all go to crap. So, pro tip: You have to go to your Windows Features setting to enable the DirectPlay legacy component before starting the game. I had to restart my PC three times before figuring this all out.

(This video is not mine, it's the only one of the main menu I could find on YouTube.)

After finally solving The Puzzle once and for all, the game started! A flythrough of the world is in the background while sweeping orchestral music plays. I hadn't felt such excitement over starting a game since I tricked Knights of the Old Republic into thinking that my PC had a better graphics card than it did, so that it will let me play the game at all. Don't worry though, it did not last very long, as my gamepad was not working at all. I was warned of this, so it did not came as a surprise, but the control options are nowhere to be found on the main menu.

The process of setting up the gamepad was so annoying that I don't even want to recall it. It all came down to the separate configuration program that is stored within the PlayOnline installation directory. It was then when I realized how incredibly frustrating the PlayOnline experience is, as it takes forever to exit the game, log out of PlayOnline, exit the program, and then start it back up, log into PlayOnline (with the whole One Time Passwords process), and get into the game just to test out my gamepad configuration. By the way, in case any of you want to play this (for some inexplicable reason) and play it with a gamepad, I figured out that the DualShock 4 works better on its own without any DS4Tool/DS4Windows turned on. The game accepts it as a generic gamepad. The configuration program also comprises of some other esoteric game settings, and most importantly the resolution settings! Good thing I found it. Oh, by the way, there is also a different setting for aspect ratios, but that can only be changed in-game. Yeah...

I finally was able to see the main menu at a good resolution, controlling it with my gamepad, and I was too exhausted to play the game already. I guess this was enough of the game for the day. The main menu was pretty cool, though.

Session 2

Character creation is probably my favorite part of playing an MMORPG. I really like morphing a character into existence, testing the limits of the systems, imagining the sorts of adventures these weirdos I am making will have. I always spend a lot of time doing this, so I've gotten quite particular with character creators. I am saying this because I want to emphasise that FFXI probably has the dumbest character creation I've ever seen. Just look at this:

FIrst of all, I could barely see the text for the character attributes 20 centimeters away from the monitor. What kind of a typeface is that?! That looks the font my mom would have chosen to write a restaurant menu with (just kidding, I love my mom.) Second of all, that's not zoomed in because I zoomed it in. The camera cannot even be controlled. What was happening is that for every race/gender option up there, they will play this custom-made cinematic to show off the character. In this screenshot, the camera zoomed in by itself as that Male Hume looked over his shoulder, anime-style. The Tarutaru character skips around and trips like cute child or something. It's like the dumbest fashion show I've ever witnessed. I'm not entirely sure if I really hate this, or really love it. Anyway, third of all is the most legitimate, but understandable issue. There simply isn't enough customizable options. I struggled to make someone resembling my FFXIV character, Jajaboy Mamaboy, though I'm not too disappointed with the final result.

I chose to start in the castle area, San Antonio or whatever it's called. A lot of what I encountered screams PS2-era JRPG. The graphics is definitely outdated, but I found it comfortably nostalgic. The character movement is also enjoyable in a weird way. Most jarringly, everyone speaks only in the small text box on the bottom of the screen.

There was something about the writing in this game that reminds me of FFXIV. It's some combination of strong characterisation and endearing dialogue that left a really good impression on me. I genuinely enjoyed the character interactions, as wooden as the actors themselves were on the game screen. I actually laughed when I was given the dialogue option, "I want to go shopping," to start my adventure. I included some of my favorite dialogues at the end of this section.

I goofed around in the city for some time, while learning the basic controls to the game. Everything about the interface felt so bizarre. The camera was inverted by default. Menu options are really difficult to navigate, and it wasn't immediately obvious that some of them have multiple pages. A lot of the UI elements just have no explanation to them, there are no tooltips or anything. I guess UX has gone a long way since 2002.

Another thing I noticed in the city: it felt very dead. NPC's are just standing around like statues, existing just for the sake of players. There is a lot of empty space everywhere. I saw only a couple player characters, and even said hi to them, but none of them responded in any way. They looked like they knew what they were doing. It felt lonely.

In the previous thread, @leegillespie kindly offered to restart from scratch and play with me, so I tried to add him to my friends list. The interface for the friends list is as confusing as ever, so that did not work out. I think I have to add friends from PlayOnline, but through some PlayOnline ID or something? Anyway, I gave up pretty quickly on that front. Sorry, @leegillespie.

Gallery

Session 3

Enough goofing around, let's fight something!

Some guy in the city gave me some basic tasks to do as a beginner, and one of them was to go out and level my weapon skill up to 5. The combat system was immediately familiar to me, as it's not too far off from how the combat works in FFXIV when you lock on with a gamepad. You move around the targeted enemy, and the character auto-attacks when in range. Using a menu to use abilities is new to me, but I kinda like the idea. What's also similar, unfortunately, was how mindbogglingly boring the combat is at low levels, as there wasn't much to do at my level. Jaboy had one skill, which apparently takes a whole hour to cool down, and I accidentally cast it back in the city. The combat was literally just watching each other's health meters going down until someone wins. My weapon skill level was taking forever to increase, so I gave up pretty quickly and returned to the city. In retrospect, the rate at which I was giving up on things at that point is alarmingly high.

I kept hearing about this Records of Eminence thing being very important for beginners, so I went ahead and looked into it. I took the first objective and met this Rolandienne guy. He gladly explained the ins and outs of the Records of Eminence in a deliciously meta one-way conversation. According to him, this whole system works by having some kind of floating, invisible creepy voodoo doll following behind me, watching everything I do and writing it into a journal. It's so dumb. I love it.

I started to go on the basic tutorial quests, which gave a nice themepark-like structure to this whole mess. It gave me an incentive to trek further away from the city walls to look for training from this Field Manual, and so I did. The world outside the walls was kind of a bummer, to be quite frank. It felt even more dead outside than inside the city. The fog—which I reckon is either a weather effect or, as PS2 games are wont to do, hiding the draw distance—felt suffocating and depressing. Like in the city, there seemed to be stretches of empty space everywhere. The wildlife is very sparse, so I had to chase them around from far away. It felt like another forever until I reached the Field Manual. From what I can tell, it's a literal manual that gives me repeatable quests. I took the quest that told me to hunt five of a specific type of worms, and I could not even find any of them.

Something about having books and invisible floating voodoo dolls giving me quests bothered me. The things I were doing: they were not in service of any story or anything. They're explicitly made in service of me, the player, to level up and learn how to play. It felt self-indulgent. It felt pointless.

Two unrelated but equally bewildering things happened during and after this, and I guess they serve as an ending to my adventures in Vana'diel. The first thing that happened is treasure chests. Some monsters dropped treasure chests, which I like, but what's this?

They had a freaking lock picking mini-game. I liked the novelty of the first one, but wow, it just keeps happening. If you haven't figured it out from the screenshot, the mini-game is to guess a two-digit number within a limited number of guesses. One attempt can be spent to ask for a random clue about the number. It sucks so bad. Even navigating the menu and entering the numbers sucks, especially with the latency that I had. What purpose does this mini-game serve? Am I supposed to have fun wishing for a good clue and executing a binary search in my head? It confuses me even more when I open a treasure chest that fortunately had no lock to pick, to find items marked as temporary. I think they just disappear when I leave the area, and unlocked treasure chests only store temporary items. I just.... I don't understand why any of this is a thing.

The second thing happened after I finished all basic tutorial quests. It seemed like I'm a little way off from doing the other Records of Eminence tutorial quests, so I went back to the city in hopes of continuing the main storyline, the other tutorial quests, anything really. I walked through the city gate and the game was suddenly cut to elsewhere. It was an important looking cutscene featuring characters I don't know, talking about events I've never heard of, in a location I've never seen. I was so stunned, I forgot to take any screenshots to prove that this actually happened. The cutscene ended and the game returned to Jaboy, in the city, as if nothing had happened. I thought I was going crazy. I tried to look it up online, and the best explanation I could find was that it was a cutscene meant to introduce players to one of the expansion packs. It made no sense at all.

Epilogue

I honestly thought I was going to play more of this. A lot of it was really weird and annoying, but it definitely had heart. I tried to play it again, but it felt like my apathy towards the game beats the charm it had just so. I definitely had some more free time I could have spared, but there's always something I'd rather do than to play this game. I think the biggest problem is just that it takes so long to do anything in the game. There's too much blank space in playing the game. When I got the 5-day warning for my free trial, I could not be bothered to even think about it. I had so much spirit going into this game, refusing to let the convoluted setup to stop me, yet I was then defeated.

The warning signs were definitely all there since the beginning, but I'm still glad I gave this a shot. It makes me sad that games like these are just going to die off in the future, and it's good that I saw that much of whatever transient state the game was in. I wish I could see more of it, but this is where I give up one last time. Time to head back to Eorzea, I guess!

(Edit: I changed the title because it was meant as a placeholder and I forgot to change it, oops haha.)

Pro tip: if you haven't already been playing this game for 5-10 years, than this game is not for you.

It's actually been really streamlined in recent years in terms of getting around, sorting gear and weapons, and having access to things. But new players wouldn't know this because there's a lot of stuff you need to do before you actually get to that point. And most, if not all, experienced players use third-party plug-ins and add-ons to play the game. Things like mini-maps, and even a plug-in called Gear Swap which changes your gear set depending on what actions you are performing.

And this is by no means a soloable MMO if you actually want to make any meaningful progress. If you're not familiar with the community, then it's not worth playing.

@kasaioni said:

Thank you for reading!

This is one point I failed to get to in the blog, the improvements to the game that they have seemingly been added into the game. Some of it feels tacked onto the game, to be honest. Especially stuff like Records of Eminence, which obviously is a whole separate module that wasn't initially there. There was also a configuration option for a "new UI", which I couldn't find a full change list for, and the NPC recruitment system for soloing that I've heard much about but didn't really get into. I can understand the problems that they're trying to solve, but they don't fully solve the problems and come with new problems like the feeling of detachment the RoE gave me that I've mentioned. The game does seem better with them than without, at least. I guess it's still a matter of me being too late to the party, like you said.

I did look into third-party add-ons, but I ended up not installing any just because I didn't really have the time for it. I didn't really get far enough into the game where those quality-of-life stuff would have made much difference anyway. I didn't even get to a point where I'd want to make macros.

I can't even imagine starting from scratch without someone to guide you, but there is a lot to experience there if you can crack the surface. If you want a sherpa to guide you I'd be happy to help, I am currently an active player after a long break from the game. That said, like any mmo there's a pretty significant time investment to see most of it. It took me a year to get max level when the game came out, now you could do it in a week or so, so things have definitely changed!

You'd probably want to make macros from the beginning! More convenient and faster to select your weapon skill from your macro bar than the menu.

But yeah, I can't imagine someone going fresh into this game ending up enjoying it much. At least not without like 5 friends that know what to do, show the ropes, and show how new players used to experience the game before. As I've mentioned before, FFXI was miles ahead of its time, in such areas as having personal storylines to go through, to level syncing so that you at lvl 20 can go get exp with your lvl 11 friend, to having the game work cross-platform between PS2, PC and 360, and a UI that while horribly unintuitive (but actually quite usable once you got the hang of it), for mouse/keyboard, still worked well on gamepad. Also I liked the traditional quests in that game, they didn't reward exp, and rarely gil, but they did usually give you something useful and felt a bit more meaningful than our post-WoW era quests of "skip past a bunch of text, kill 5 rats, turn it in for exp."

I hope you started on Asura, the most populated server. Or if you were on Sylph I coulda run around and done stuff with ya. It's reeeaalllyyy hard to find people on the less populated servers in general now, they've needed merges for a couple years now. On Asura you'd probably find a decent number of people online. Also while everything feels empty to you, there really is no real reason for players to go back to the early cities/zones at this point. Except for some seasonal events, but if you were able to get to Jeuno, Adoulin, or (possibly), Whitegate, you'd find quite a few people running around.

In the end, before you write off this game entirely, try and consider this game in the context of when it came out and the audience it was sold to. It came out IIRC in 2001 in Japan, then in 2003 in NA, with the first expansion, Rise of the Zilart. The game was pretty much Japanese Everquest for consoles. Pretty much everything in the game for the most part could be compared to the EQ origins. Most players were entirely unfamiliar with MMO's before it, most buying it on the FF name. To them, simply being in this really pretty, FF-themed online world was mind-blowing. No one really cared about rushing to endgame, or looking up optimal dps rotations, or anything like that. We were running around there like idiots, aggroing some rabbit that looked like the rest but was 5 times stronger, running back to town and dying just short of the gates. We took waiting 10 minutes for the boat to arrive for granted because, hey it's travel, isn't it supposed to be an inconvenient means to an end?

At this point we're all way better at games, we are used to more streamlined experiences, and we have a much better grasp on what MMO's are. Back then UO, EQ and FFXI were blazing trails in figuring out what the point of an MMO is at all. You had people in UO starting the game wanting to be a tailor, seeing a mage conjure a piece of ham, then deciding to become a mage. Not that the ham was in any way useful, but it seemed awesome. There was this massive, scary world out there to explore. You needed to band together with your fellow adventurers to stand a chance. If you didn't... no levels or gear for you. You needed to find crafters to make gear for you, or look on the AH (btw all of the gear was entirely crafting-based for a long time, even endgame gear). You had paladins being the de facto tanks, but finding out that ninja happened to have a broken skill that allowed them to tank far better and suddenly the damage dealing job that was ninja was now the top tank.

In the end I think that in general there isn't the same kind of audience for FFXI and similar games now that there were before. Hopefully VRMMO's will rekindle old feelings, and MMO's such as EVE and some indie ones are on the right track. Just please remember that FFXI was blazing trails, it was helping shape a genre that was largely formless that no one really had a grasp on, and was pre-WoW. There was little money in it back in those days, and MMO's were for far fewer people then than now. SE tried things because they sounded cool, many of the ideas didn't work. In the end we're left with a game years past its prime, hell years past when it was really relevant to most of its fanbase, mostly memorable for experiences from a decade ago, and its storylines.

Oh, if you ever try and stick it out the storylines in FFXI are worth it IMO. The old leveling, the quests, the old endgame, the job balance, the economy, and the storylines are all things from SE's first MMO that I think they'd do better to consider more for their second. Sadly Yoshi-P is more known for his DAoC and WoW days, but I can always hope that the better, more memorable parts of FFXI, somehow get follow-ups in new content in FFXIV.

That's the other thing; I don't think many FFXI players even consider playing with a gamepad to be an option. It just limits you so much. Once you actually get into the flow of the game, macros are a necessity. Going through menus to select a spell or weapon skills isn't very fast when you could just hit ctrl+1 instead.

The RoE stuff I think helps intermediate players more than anything. It mainly gives you stuff to do when you're not partying or doing scheduled linkshell events. And a lot of those objectives aren't even open to a new player like yourself.

More than anything, FFXI requires that you dedicate a lot of your time to it. Even if you have other people to play with. For you to reach the meat of the game, it would probably mean that it would be the only game that you would be playing.

@kasaioni: Hey I still play with a ps1 controller on pc lol, with macros and gearswap and lots of addons of course

@kasaioni: I also feel like that with the right macros + windower stuff ps1 pad works fine for a number of jobs; it's still a fairly slow-paced game. Certainly always felt on my PUP and MNK that I was able to play the job to its fullest effectiveness.

Now my BRD or SCH? Not so much.

@belegorm: You might be right. I always played the mage-type jobs which didn't seem viable with a controller.

Also PS1? What?

@kasaioni: Well the game was designed for a dualshock 2 since it was developed on ps2; I used one of those for a long time till it broke and fell back on my dualshock 1, my old standbye.

For a while there I DID try playing SCH on pad, pages and pages of macros. What I ended up doing was using pad, but being REALLY fast at setting it down and typing a spellcast command like //cure4 and then picking up the pad again. But if I was to take it more seriously on SCH I'd probably go with keyboard only. For BRD maybe being on keyboard would let you do more support stuff like cleansing debuffs easier, but really you needed to be able to cast your songs, drop party, accept party invite, and sing in that party too. Always figured that everything beyond actually doing the bard rotation usually ended up being gravy.

@chumm:Thank you for the offer, but I don't think I can make that time commitment anyway. Such is life!

How do you even connect a PS1 controller to a PC though?! That's impressive.

@belegorm: I did play on Asura as per your advice (thank you again for all your previous advice!) I'm not writing the game off completely, as much problems as I found in the game I did enjoy parts of it immensely. I know it's just a matter of circumstances that the game did not stick with me. I think I enjoyed playing what little of this game more than I did playing WoW back in its heyday.

About the macros, I only got like two weapon skills... I really didn't get very far. One thing I didn't mention is how slow I am at playing games, lol. I have never reached the level cap in any MMORPG. If it's any more indication, I have clocked 100+ hours in Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 and have not finished either game. I'm the kind of person who likes to take it slow and enjoy the view, so it probably was naive of me to want to experience as much of this game as I could in a short time (especially with my busy schedule.)

Yeah, I mean, it's a 14 year old game at this point. It's the MMO conundrum that, to get the intended experience you have to play in its early days while there's still a bustling audience, and as of this point the game's population is pretty dead, sadly. A person today is never going to experience these zones, these storyline battles, the world as its built, the way it was five to ten years ago. The storylines are still special, and contrary to an earlier post most of the game is, in fact, soloable these days (seriously, get the NPC companions, the game is effectively unplayable for anyone new, without them), but people who are completely fresh to this game should not play this game without an extreme amount of patience and a primer for all the things added in the last couple years.

For what it's worth I played with a controller more often than I didn't, and there's nothing that prevents you from playing well in this game with one. The UI is labyrinthine but easy to memorize if you spend time with it (and at this point I'll have the muscle memory for a decade after I never play it again) and overall, yes, newsflash I guess, FFXI is an old MMO with a very small population.

As @belegorm pointed out, this is a very different kind of MMO from a very different moment in time. MMOs were slower, bigger, harder, required more of you. I've spent hours and hours of my life waiting for and traveling on boats, doing nothing but getting from one place or another. Whole days have been lost to trying to travel the world from place to place. Quests didn't explicitly tell you what you were doing or even where you were going and crafting was super obtuse. You actually had to get good at your individual class because they weren't all super homogenized. You died a lot and there were consequences. Today, the audience for MMOs wouldn't tolerate letting go of the theme park.

I miss it a lot. There should be more MMOs like those days.

@marokai: I'm enjoying FFXIV quite a bit, but I also am just waiting for something closer to FFXI in its glory days (or even Abyssea era FFXI or after, the last 5 years has had a lot of fun stuff, the problem was it threw the old stuff out the window). I'd really like to have an MMO where leveling actually takes a while, exp parties, travel time, etc. These things won't appeal to many people (hell probably not even most of the former FFXI population because most have jobs and families now so they can't smash their heads against a boss for 4 hours or more), but there could be an indie one some time that would work.

I remember playing this game when it first came out, and it was garbage.

That being said, it has been vastly improved over the years and I was interested in coming back, but man, your write-up is making me a bit uncertain. Is the draw distance really that bad even with the highest settings? Is the UI and menu still a terrible mess after all of these years?

Well, whatever, I might still check it out regardless, though the cost of entry kind of sucks.

Edit: OH! Final Fantasy ELEVEN, I thought you were talking about fourteen! Haha, my bad.

One thing I will say about FFXI though, is that its world is fantastic. The areas, settings, set pieces, atmosphere, music. It's some of the best I've seen in any video game. It has this overall mystical feel to it. And when I first played it, back when the game still had mystery for me, it was one of the best video game experiences I've had. So glad I was able to finish quite a few of the main story lines to; like Chains of Promathia and Treasures of Aht Urghan.

Ah man. Loved 11 so much. I think you need to meet certain criteria to be able to play this game:

• You need to have grown up and tried MMOs pre-WoW. They were paced extremely differently (slower) compared to games post-WoW. If you played or at least understand what it was like way back in the day, then it'll be easier to understand and deal with the all the old-ness of it. The UI, general speed/pace of activities, graphics, difficulty etc etc are all from an age long passed.
• You need to have a group of people to play with. Like, not casually, because that gets stuff done at a snails pace, but a set of people who will play a lot with you. And everyone wants to play a job/class that makes a well rounded party.
• You need lots of time. I was able to get into it when I didn't have a job. I played it every day, all day, for months and years. I think my character had 8,000+ hours of game time on it and there are people with waaaaaaaaaay more..

The game has been made much "easier" now (I say its easier, some people say the game was always easy, I disagree) at least in terms of getting around the world and doing content on your own. I'd still say there is a vertical 15 year tall cliff face of a learning/difficulty curve and I don't think anyone new can get into the game. The game has an absurd amount of content, though a lot of it is probably no longer relevant.

Now I play FF14 although not really as of last week now that I have a job again and spend most of my time sleeping when I'm not working. FF14 is fantastic.

Actually, in hindsight after having gotten back into FFXIV since 3.0, I think FFXI still has something to offer people, or at least it mostly would if it were guarenteeing more content past this upcoming November:

There's a slower-paced combat system that can still be fun. I've been playing a DRG in FFXIV, and while it's fun, complex, and more depth than other classes I've played in MMO's before, I feel like there's a lot of abilities there just for the sake of having you hit more buttons. What's hitting a 1, 2, 3 combo do for you that 1 button couldn't? Sure FFXI's combat was simple (and appropriate to its time), but it was slow-paced, you could chat with your party members while fighting, and the depth came from skillchains that were cooperative.

Leveling is still a thing (okay actually it was, I guess nowadays you need a dedicated group of people for it). Leveling felt like an event of itself, getting a group of people together, travelling out to the dunes, qufim, yuhtunga jungle, garlaige shitadel, or wherever, and doing a slow leveling party. You could always wipe if you linked too many mobs, each mob felt kind of like a mini boss battle. You did it one at a time. If you tried soloing it wouldn't work real well. Leveling was a major accomplishment: people would congratulate you when you leveled.

There's more kinds of classes in FFXI than modern MMO's. The trinity hasn't yet been distilled into the trinity in FFXI yet. Buff jobs (bard, corsair), debuff jobs (red mage, geomancer), and different hybrids, are still a thing. There's more ways to be unique.

Wealth of content and endgame design/progression. This was a major great point of FFXI's design for years and years: the fact that it managed to have real horizontal gear progression through varied endgame events that felt meaningful, and the endgame/gear never got outdated. Playing FFXIV now, what's the point of doing Amdapor Keep? What's the point of Crystal Tower? What's the point of Coil? If it was FFXI, those events' gear still would be useful. FFXI over time introduced more and more gear but it was often situational. I don't think modern games can get away with gear swapping the way FFXI did (I mean picture auto-attacking but then changing clothes just to do a weapon skill or spell every few seconds!), but in FFXI it kept the old endgame still relevant. Additionally, there were TONS of different kinds of events. Big 18 man HNM camps where you'd rotate people out, small 5-6 man focused groups, solo quests, storyline missions, and a whole bunch of other things. Abyssea largely made much of the stuff from the past 8 years irrelevant, but thanks to the game's situational gear system having the old shit still was useful. Additionally, after they added Abyssea (btw Abyssea was the major update in 2010-2011 that raised the level cap from 75 that it had been for years and years to 99 over the course of several updates), anyway after they added Abyssea old gear was still useful, and they updated many of the old events that people found fun, and let people upgrade their old armour.

Now, it was a very different FFXI by that point (maybe like 2012 maybe?), FFXIV sucked really and truly at the time, people were getting back into it. Abyssea let people catch up and then do the revitalised old content that was still enjoyable. People leveled multiple jobs. Then in... I think 2013 Seekers of Adoulin came out. Sucked at release actually. But when the Delve update (kind of endgame event), it largely made the old gear irrelevant and progression became the most vertical ever. Of course to be the best you'd still want the old shit but it was hard to find people willing to do it. Fast forward to now, the game has started to make sense again, there's still a variety of things to do and the relic/mythic/empyrean weapons are still great.

My point is, at this point while the endgame differs greatly from what it was, it still fits in the traditional FFXI model of a great variety of different kinds of things to do, which totally dwarf FFXIV's endgame. SE keeps on bringing back old stuff and adds new stuff. Compare this to FFXIV where currently it's pretty much just primals and alexander. I'm playing FFXIV because it's not going into maintenance mode unlike FFXI later this year, but I think that for many design reasons FFXI still could offer a superior experience to the right kind of dedicated player.

Man none of that stuff sounds like my experience with the game at all back in like, what, 2003? Back then all I remember is sitting around in town for like 45 minutes asking people if they wanna group up and then going out and fighting random enemies for hours and hours. What quests there were, were few and far between.

The no. 1 best thing about FFXI that doesn't really exist in modern MMORPGs is the concept of a job that solely exists to buff the other party members. I don't know why more MMOs don't do this.