Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

[Feba]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I popped into a twitch FFXI stream a few months back, talked with the streamer and he showed me his gear, new abilities and stuff, it was just silly. It's really a totally different game now.

I'd like to revisit Vana'diel someday, but FFXI is just not the vehicle for it.

[Yellow Mage]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Yeah, no doubt. The power creep for both the players and their adversaries has long since spiraled out of control.

Since it's free to log in this week I popped in to get some swag and to get some long-awaited closure for my Missions. Trust NPCs are now summonable in these battlefields, and as I've been at level cap for quite a while now, I can basically progress completely uninhibited. Just now I had some Campaign NPCs mop the floor with the "One to Be Feared" fight . . .

[Aksannyi]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

There are basically two camps on that one then, because I've heard from the people who are like "WOW! SE revitalized the game and made it so much better!" and then there's the people who are like, "I really liked how the game was before all this easy-mode leveling and massive jumps in levels."

I mean the game definitely needed to change and grow out of what it had been, but it was hard for them because for what, 6 years it was capped at 75 and gear never completely overwrote another piece? Their challenge was not making the old gear obsolete, especially gear that took some people years to obtain. (Hi2u AFv2). And they failed to realize that, how much it devalued what people had done up until that point when they raised the level cap.

I think they shot themselves in the foot by keeping the game stuck at 75 as long as they did. Then they went completely to the deep end with the way they expanded and changed the game. It was just too severe of a change.

[Firewind]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

They needed to do something about the exodus of players, and people being consistently blocked behind story missions to progress, which is why they just removed the level cap from fights entirely. I remember duoing the Airship fight with Cid as THF and RDM, which was fun. The big thing that improved was that you didn't need to spend an entire day trying to get a party, only for it to fall apart because someone only had 10 mins left to play. And it made replacing static members a lot less painful. Before Abyssea, if someone dropped from your static, your static would basically disband if you couldn't find someone who hadn't already cleared all the content. Nobody would help someone get Dyna access, clear ZM/CoP, open up Salvage, or get to floor 100 in Nyzul Isle.

Keeping the status quo with unlocking content would have killed the game for sure.

Problem is is that the Power Creep just got so high, during Abyssea, the standard response to trying to find a party was "Lol just solo it noob!". Basically the paradigm shifted from being unable to do content because nobody would help you, to still not being able to do content because you aren't already self sufficient. I know for a fact that I drove Yyg and Cid nuts over farming for Atma and upgrade stuff because I still didn't have Utsusemi Ni, and couldn't solo.

It also turned the game into a game where people rely on gear as a crutch more. I've had a lot of people act surprised at me for doing well on my WHM for I quote "having shit gear and no Atma", even though a lot of my WHM gear would have been considered BiS back at the 75 and even 90 cap. I got along fine in my "outdated" WHM gear but would get looked down on because the gear from Abyssea onwards was just so ridiculously overpowered, it was crazy.

[Etra]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

I'll go back to FFXI when they inevitably make an offline version a decade from now.

[Feba]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Etra, that's what I'd like to see, essentially, although I'm not sure I believe it's at all inevitable. I mean, you look at the content that SE puts out for FF games, you look at the general lack of anything referencing FFXI (compared to VII, VIII, X especially)...

If they were to reuse the existing graphics assets, even by Vita standards FFXI is probably somewhat outdated; the idea of remastering a game by actually totally recreating the assets is something SE has avoided in situations of what seems like obviously profit (FF7 HD), with such a high probability of busting on FFXI (which is a much larger game, in so many ways) the odds seem extremely low.

[Firewind]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

The closest games to "FFXI Offline" I can think of are FFXII and Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

The #1 reason I never picked XI back up after quitting when they raised level cap was that when I quit I deleted my Spellcast XMLs, and the thought of doing either one out of playing without Spellcast or re-writing all of those files was enough to say eff that lol

Tell me about it. I still have mine but just the thought of having to go in and update them all after wrestling Windower into a functional state just kills any lapse in judgement that would lead to my return.

In other news, I survived being a groomsman this weekend but now I feel like I need a second weekend to recover.

[Malacite]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Xenoblade was pretty close to it honestly.

[Callisto]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

The closest games to "FFXI Offline" I can think of are FFXII and Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment.

Not counting the things where you can bring in friends to help, White Knight Chronicles felt extremely similar to single-player FFXI to me

[Firewind]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Well SAO: Hollow Fragment does also have 4 player local Co-Op, and since it's a Vita game you can easily set up a session over Hamachi or Ad-Hoc party.

White Knight Chronicles is fun but the servers are down for good so the majority of the content of the game is gone (Basically your usual 4 player Co-Op RPG). Plus the single player experience of that game was kind of average at best. The music was awesome though. I has the intro theme as my phone's ring tone for the longest time.

[Callisto]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

What I really remember about WKC was that they did some sort of patch for multiplayer, but that patch broke the dialogue tables of an entire town in single-player, so almost every character in the town you could see the actual script tags when they would talk and sentences would just be randomly cut off, you talk to item vendor and it'd be like <text>blah blabbity blah...</text> and I was so mad at them for just leaving it like that, lol

[Feba]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Yep, and that's one of the things I loved so much about FFXII. That and the very strategy-friendly Gambit system, which combined with the "wait" system, allowed you pick anything from a near ATB-turn-based game to a real-time-action-RPG, depending on what appealed to you.

I think the closest SE is ever going to make to "FFXI:Offline" is "FFXI:Ridiculously fast leveling, overpowered gear, and apparently now NPCs everywhere too because why not". Every time I see stuff about the game now it makes me think that SE is accepting it as a "play alone, together" sort of MMO now.

[Callisto]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Now that I think of it, Nier actually had a ton of FFXI-style elements to it as well; especially hours upon hours of grinding for one last stupid material to drop lol. At least the fishing was less of a pain in the ass.

[Aksannyi]

Re: Official Bored at Work / Off-Topic Chat Thread II

Honestly I'd love to see it happen and play like a typical RPG like the others before (and after) it, if for no other reason than the game won't be online forever. They could have three playable story scenarios were you start from one of the three cities, all of which save the world in different ways and take you through most (if not all) of the zones in some capacity.

It would be a hell of an undertaking but man it would be rather awesome if they'd ever do it. I just don't think they ever really would.

But definitely 100%

if they did.