So while we are on the topic of the remade Final Fantasy
XIV, I figured I should write something, because I have many feelings, and that’s
apparently what people do when they have feels.
For all intents and purposes, you can refer to me as Faiyt, because I’m
a real creative guy and make the best handle names. I’ve been a pretty avid MMO player for the
past decade, but as with any personal exposition, there’s going to be some
pretty heavily opinionated views, so feel free to disagree with my own
experiences. So sit a while and listen,
and let’s explore this interesting remix of a game together.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane and figure out how we got
here in the first place. When I was just
a young lad, I was a huge JRPG fan. A
bit late to Sony party, who was undoubtedly the console RPG king, I picked up a
PS2 a while after its release and immediately began working on expanding my RPG
collection. I started with the basics:
anything Squaresoft was a must have. And
thus began my connection to the Final Fantasy series.
I don’t remember what exactly initially drew me to into
purchasing FFXI, I just remember seeing it at my local game store and thinking
it would be another FF to conquest. Looking back at it, I’m glad I decided to buy
the game for PC instead of shelling out the additional $100 or whatever it cost
to install the game on PS2, because I’ve grown into such an endearing and refined
upper class PC gamer. *adjusts monocle*
Having never been a PC gamer aside from the occasional
Starcraft of Warcraft III match, I skipped over the Everquest fad years
prior. This meant that my young mind barely had the
notion of what an MMO was, which, in hindsight, is probably the only
reason I
stuck with XI for two or so years. I’ll lay
this out first and foremost: I was a terrible XI player. Part of this
had to do with the fact I was
still using my mother’s tiny Dell desktop that I was forced to boot the
game
through a German hardware emulation program to force load texture and
lighting
settings, but hey, the game ran, even if it was sub 5 fps at all times.
The other part was just environmental factors
on my part. I was young and certainly
more socially active than I have been in recent years. I’d quit for
months at a time, come back and
level a new job, and repeat. In fact, I
never actually level capped a single job, so I wouldn’t be able to give
you a
legitimate opinion of anything end game.
I did however, still put plenty of man hours into the game, so if I can
say anything about it now with all the years of experience in other
departments
under my belt, it would be this: that game really sucked. Controls were
awful on the PC, you needed to
hook up a ps2 controller via USB port to even play properly. There were
no action bars like traditional
MMOs, everything was handled through macros.
Almost all loot leveling up was not bound so the only way to get gear
was to just use the auction house as people resold their old crap.
Quests were random and there was no real (good)
tracker, you just kind of had to know where you were going beforehand.
And don’t get me started on leveling. Being unable to kill a dune bunny
at level 12
without a full 5 man group was just painful and slow. I could go on and
on about the technical and
design flaws that made the game not nearly as enjoyable as it could have
been,
but we might need a whole dedicated blog entry for that. (For what it’s
worth, I’ve heard the game has
undergone dramatic changes since I stopped in 2005.)
So why did I play a game for so long that I said was
terrible? Well, the easiest explanation
I have for this is simply that I didn’t know any better. The game came out almost 10 years ago, I took
a lot more for granted in games back then because games were made with a lot
tighter restrictions on what could be done.
I also had no idea on how an MMO should play. So I blindly logged on every day, made an effort
to level up and to keep going forward, pushing out to the next grinding area or
new zone. The time investment didn’t
bother me. I traditionally enjoyed RPGs
that gave me 60+ hours so having a lot of gameplay was something I
enjoyed. After another one of my longer
breaks from the game, I finally scrounged together enough cash as a poor high
school student to build my own first gaming computer. This is what led to either the best or worst
decision I’ve ever made in my life: buying World of Warcraft.
I don’t want to say too much about WoW. Only that I raided HEAVILY from Vanilla until
the end of Cataclysm. Over my years, I
was the GM and raid leader of multiple top US guilds. There was a time when you could probably only
find a few dozen other people who were as dedicated to the game as I was. I went hard.
I actually still play WoW, although not on nearly such grand
scale, having “graduated” into the real world, my priorities and desires with
WoW have shifted. I currently raid with the
original Elitist Jerks on Mal’ganis, which allows me to still experience the endgame,
which is what arguably sets WoW apart from all other MMOs, on my own schedule. –end
guild plug-
her eyes are closed because the green is so terrible
So what about the game that this blog is actually
about? Is this not why you are
here? Well, in the effort not making the
first post some ridiculous standard to always live up to, I’ll just leave it
with my precursor story. Guess you’ll
just have to wait until next time to find out about the game.
(Spoilers: it will be
worth it)
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