The Best Games Ever: EffortPost Your Favorites (2024)

ziasquinn
Jan 1, 2006
The Best Games Ever: EffortPost Your Favorites (1)
Let's talk about my absolute favorite game, a little 20 year old MMORPG by the name of Final Fantasy XI

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This game is... another experience.

I’ve played over 8000 hours of FFXI. And I love it. I love how esoteric it is, how arcane its features are, how strange and impossible some quests are to finish without consulting a wiki. Hell, in one storyline mission, an NPC tells you to meet them at Port San d’Oria and they aren’t even there when you go. You have to go to another town’s Port to continue the quest. I don’t know how you would’ve figured that out back in the day, and before there were teleports everywhere, you’d have to have ridden an Airship at least 5 times. Note, an Airship ride is 15 minutes minimum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Nqjz5R8LrU
Players before doing anything in FFXI

This game is quite an MMORPG. Released in 2002 in Japan for the PS2, and 2003 on PC and PS2 everywhere else, it has 5 expansion packs and a huge world to explore. It isn't in really development anymore, but the devs (which we suspect is probably like 6 people...) still release updates. The most recent update allowed the ability to increase your subjob levels, which, well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Game [back in the day]

FFXI is a story-driven MMORPG with party-based experience systems. It has a pretty good sized world to explore. You cannot jump. There is no flying. There are mounts, but when the game was first released up through the 75-era, you could not summon mounts at will, only rent them after a 6-hour long quest. The game was punishing, with brutal trains of monsters that would destroy you the minute you entered a zone, and you lost EXP on death, up to the point of de-leveling if you lost too much. Finding parties as a damage dealer was arduous. You could spend hours in the main hub with your invite flag up and your search comment talking up your gear and ability, and finally get an invite.

You get a teleport-taxi to the nearest teleport point to the party (500-1000 gil depending, chump change overall), rent a chocobo/mount from a nearby NPC, travel for 15-20 minutes to the camp, get there, find your party, fight four monsters, and oh, your White Mage needs to go, and they did not find a replacement for themselves, Party is disbanded. Get warped home, kill yourself (blood warp) or hike your rear end back to town. Oh! This game has aggro-systems -- Hope you brought your invisible powders (for sight-based mobs) and silent oils (for hearing-based mobs) to avoid aggro on your adventure. Alternatively, you could simply avoid line-of-sight for sight-based mobs and keep your distance from sound-based ones, but that's a little trickier. Oh, I forgot to mention, these buffs the powders and oils give? Random duration. [This has been fixed].

Food buffs? Unknown what they do. You can reverse-engineer the buffs by taking a look at your stats before and after you eat the food. [Nowadays it tells you exactly what the food does].

But you know what? It kinda rocked. Every level felt earned, because it took hours to get it in the late 50s and 60s. And the experience of actually playing the game and getting stronger and better, nearly sublime.

The game has a current level of 99. With gear that goes to level 119. That's the gear cap. No gear goes higher than 119, (yet) but figuratively gear does go much higher in practice: additional accuracy bonuses and hidden traits of Ultimate Weapons make them effectively level 125-135. Content varies between 1 to level 150~.

The first time you reach level 99 and equip level 113 gear, your stats will dramatically increase in bonuses [say your Strength goes from being modified by +10 to +100] and you'll go from barely defeating level 99 monsters to utterly annihilating them. Nothing like it, I'm afraid. By the time you're super-end game with an Ultimate Weapon (or two) and can self-skillchain with capped haste and gear skill, your character's animations start glitching out and not playing even though the combat log is filling up with damage. It's incredible. The power game is like nothing else. Essentially, by the time you reach super-endgame, you can expect your gameplay to appear similar to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXWb5v-mZnY
A monk using the Kraken Club, an incredibly rare weapon that has a special trait: [Occasionally hits 2-8 times], using their 2-hour ability "Hundred Fists" that removes delay from your weapon for 30 seconds.

Gameplay
FFXI is an Everquest-like game, you'll notice the release date predates World of Warcraft. WoW changed the game completely, but before WoW, there was Everquest. Everquest was a monster of a game. It did not respect your time, your life, or your effort. Along with a much, much, slower pace of combat in comparison to WoW, FFXI mostly focused on party-based experience point parties. The quests in the game were for flavor, unlocks, or story, and almost 100% of them did not grant experience points when the game released. Few still do, nowadays. To level up in FFXI, you gathered with a group of 5 other players, and went to an experience points camp and killed monsters for 200-400 exp a pop. It would take hours to level up at the higher levels. Hours of grinding monsters.

The way combat works, essentially nowadays but more-so back in the day, was based around Skillchains and Magic Bursts. Every melee combatant gains Tactical Points (TP) when they inflict or take damage, dependent on the delay of their weapon they're wielding, and how much Store TP bonuses you have going on from gear or traits (passives). TP is essentially a form of a Limit Break. It goes from a range of 0-3000% [originally it was coarser, and went from 0-300%]. Once you've gained an adequate amount of TP [>1000%] from auto-attacking, you can dish out a Weapon Skill. Utilizing more than 1000% can increase damage, accuracy, or debuff duration. Weapon Skills are tied to your weapon's skill level (natch), which must be leveled separately from your job level.

Oh, did I mention you can be any job in the game at any time? You can change your job at your home, and your retain the levels you've gained on that job exclusively. Thankfully, you also retain any skill levels you've gained, so if you have a level 99 Black Mage and capped Dark Magic skill, switching to Dark Knight will have a capped Dark Magic skill as well. Additionally, you can equip a sub/support job, which is always half the level of your main job. Say you're a level 50 Warrior and you've leveled Monk to level 50, you can equip Monk as your subjob to Warrior and be a WAR50/MNK25. You gain (almost) all the abilities, traits and skills of the support job up to the equipped level. There are 22 jobs in the game, ranging from classic Damage Dealers, Tanks, and Healers, to more interesting and varied support classes like Bard, Corsair, Dancer, Beastmaster,

Now, when you dish out a Weapon Skill, you have a window of 3-5 seconds to deal another Weapon Skill to create a Skill Chain. Back in the day, few jobs could accomplish such a feat, self-skillchaining, but thankfully, you have 5 more party members, right? Another party member deals out their Weapon Skill, which creates a Skill Chain, which deals bonus damage dependent on the element of the Skill Chain. Distortion Skill chain? Ice/Water, so if the monster is weak to water/ice, it'll take even more damage. But wait, it gets better -- after you create a Skill Chain, the monster becomes vulnerable to a Magic Burst. Align an offensive black magic spell with the same element as the Skill Chain, and deal Magic Burst Damage. For example, Tachi: Enpi -> Viper Bite --> Skill Chain: Distortion --> Magic Burst! Water/Ice. Between these bursts of synergy, you're mostly auto-attacking, using skills on long timers (2-5+ minutes up to 2 hours long timers), and most of all.... talking to your party.

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The pace of the combat opened up something that basically doesn't exist in MMORPGs nowadays, conversation. Chatting with a great or a lovely party was a great way to kill the time, get to know people, forge friendships, build a reputation, and build a community. You'd meet friends leveling up that you'd run into several times throughout your journey to to the level cap and you might party with them several times, or even go out of your way to stay in contact outside the party. I made friends back in 2004 I still talk to today from this game. Even nowadays, it is a difficult process to change your name in the game, mostly as a philosophical decision -- SE didn't want players to try and duck or skip out of whatever (read: bad) reputation they had built for themselves by being lovely party members, bad players, mean people, or ill-equipped. Unfortunately, nowadays, combat is quite a bit faster paced because of the power creep and there isn't much time to talk in pick-up groups. People might talk in end-game leveling parties, but it's less likely as they're busier hitting their abilities since they come up much faster.

Gear
Additionally, the gear in FFXI isn't vertical, it's horizontal. Most MMORPGs utilize a vertical treadmill for gear: Equipment level 300 gear is worse than Equipment level 350 gear, and every new content drop or expansion pack drives the gear level up until the old gear is completely obsolete. However, FFXI's gear isn't like that -- outside the level 100-119 gear, which is clearly superior in some ways, there is also weird poo poo in it. For example, most accessories like earrings and rings don't have gear levels, outside of required levels to equip it. So a level 75 earring from the olden days might still be useful in specific contexts. But who is going to wear that earring all the time? Gearsets are in the game that you can macro into your gear so you equip specific gear for specific circumstances so you can utilize all the gear from your range.

Thank god, then, for Third party programs like Windower (the game was originally un-windowable, alt-tabbing would crash the game, so some people hacked together a program that lets you window the game, along with bonus features like showing your party member's TP alongside their HP and MP in the party window) which nowadays comes with powerful add-ons like Gearswap, a programmable add-on that lets you code for EVERY instance and circumstance your gear might come up. Fighting a monster and trying to maximize the amount of damage, accuracy and speed in which you gain TP? Equip a specific set of gear when you're engaged in combat. Running around the world? Equip a set of idle gear that maximizes your MP and HP regeneration, as well as defense levels. Dealing a weapon skill that utilizes STR and INT? Stack that poo poo in a gear palette. Charmed? Auto-equip your worst gear to not kill your party members.

Nowadays the grind from 1-99 is extremely fast and you can be power-leveled to 99 in about 2-3 hours by a competent and well-geared player. You can also solo your way to 99 with NPC summons filling out the gaps in your party. You are still welcome to party with people, and the NPC summons start to fall short for true-end game experience parties. Which includes mastering your job/class, or doing end-game content. The grind for traveling around the world is much less intense as well, with the ability to teleport between Home Points (think of them as Save Points, you respawn at them if you die or are are Warped). This doesn't mean the game doesn't have tons of poo poo to do that'll suck dry all your time!

My main job, Blue Mage, has about 180 pieces of gear that I use in different situations. It all gets used in one way or another. Gathering all that gear? Hell of a job. Took over a year to accomplish, and I was playing the game religiously. I feel like my job is in a good place right now, because of how I've tweaked my Store TP, Haste, Dual Wield, and other stat bonuses based on my gear, magic spells equipped, and other things, I dual wield 2 swords and gain exactly 100 TP per swing of the swords. I can cap my own haste with two different haste spells (very hard to do solo unless you're a Blue Mage). I think the swords I use usually gain 50-60 TP a swing, so I needed about +85 STP on my traits and gear to accomplish this goal, but it feels great-- I can self-skillchain extremely easily, almost clipping the 3-second window by going too soon and failing to skillchain.

The Ultimate Weapons in the game are another league. They can fundamentally change the way your job plays, or add perks and bonuses you cannot live without after you gain them. For example, my main hand sword as a Blue Mage? The Tizona, restores MP when I deal damage, essentially keeping me topped-off, as long as I'm dealing damage, forever. Normally, your MP does not regenerate in the game unless you are 1) Being Refreshed by a spell or 2) Healing by kneeling. Refresh is usually generally slow -- 3-5MP a tick. Gear can give you Refresh, but you wouldn't wear it while fighting. But with the Tizona, I have essentially unlimited MP, which is extremely useful as my buffs can use up to 300 MP (out of about 900) a pop.

However, they take a grind. To unlock the Tizona, which is a Mythic Ultimate Weapon, you have to do the entire story line for an expansion pack, then do 50 sub-missions... twice. Then you need to gather 150,000 tokens from a maze-instance that usually allows you to gain about 1500-3000 a pop and requires three people to do efficiently. Then you need 50,000 ichor from a instanced battle you can solo, but can only do once per hour. You can gain up to 1900 ichor per run. And finally, you need 30,000 Alexandrite, which is a material you can gain through a monthly event (maxing out at 1750) or by grinding an instance for 100-200 a pop. There might be other ways to do it nowadays, but there's the general path.

Ultimate Weapons, when they released, were server-wide achievement level hard to obtain. Relic weapons were the first Ultimate weapons to be released and could require the effort of an entire guild (linkshell in the game) to obtain one for One person in the guild. People would remark "Oh so-and-so is the only player on the server to have an Apocalypse."

More info here: https://www.bg-wiki.com/ffxi/Category:Ultimate_Weapons You can augment the Ultimate weapons now too, but you have to deposit like...

To be honest, the game looks older nowadays, but the art style has held up for 20 years, it looks decent-to-ok. There are graphical reshaders you can apply with some effort, but the game is kind of resistant to things like 60 FPS mods. There's been some nice QOL improvements over the years, such as being able to summon NPCs to solo your way to 1-99 as well as some end game content, several teleport systems to get around the world, lessened exp loss on death (almost none nowadays), +25% base movement speed (lmfao), and an insane amount of content to work on and do all the time.

I could seriously go on and on and on and on about all the subsystems, intricacies, arcane and esoteric systems at play in this game, but this post is already 15000 words long, so I'll save it for a video I'm working on right now.

#?Dec 10, 2021 21:12
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