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I played a white mage in FF11. I have never been as popular as I was playing a WHM in that fuckin’ game.
I didn’t play for long, but I played a fuckin’ lot. Crammed as much as I could into those two months. It was me, in real life, feeling like I was going to die any day, healing other people in digital, and that’s one of the best things you can do aside from healing people in reality.
One of my favorite video game memories – scratch that, favorite memories – is from FF11. Like, me 1x years ago would have said “that is so pathetic, having a favorite memory that is related to a game” but nowadays I can accept that I enjoy video games and many of the people that play them. Nowadays I wouldn’t play a WHM though. That shit is a fuckin’ burden.
Anyway, I roped a friend into playing the game with me. And we both started out on one continent. I don’t remember the name. I’m in awe of people how remember names and dates and like, plots of movies and books and such. I can’t do that shit! But I can play video games, and make Bad Choices. And I remember we both thought “This continent we’re on…it fuckin’ sucks. We should go to that other continent, cuz there’s probably a party going on over there.” Grass is greener, etc.
But this was FF11, and going from one landmass to another was a fuckin’ nightmare. We were relatively low level. There was no fuckin’ way we could ever possibly get from the low-man starter towns to that other continent without dying a billion times. And when you died in FF11 back then (and maybe still?) you lost XP. You could fuckin’ level down in FF11. It was super brutal. I loved that so much. I also probably threw a bunch of shit and screamed all sorts of profanities after dying and leveling down more times than I can count, but shit, at least I cared about something.
Also I think you had to take a boat from one continent to the next and that shit cost a lotta money I didn’t have. We were pursuing an impossible dream.
We decided to hoof it to the port. We kept dying. It was awful. But eventually we ran into this Japanese dude. He was high level, cuz he was in Japan and they had that game way earlier than we did. And somehow we used a bunch of emotes and pre-programmed phrases to communicate to this guy that we wanted to go across the sea. In retrospect this seems really brazen, asking some stranger to waste his time helping out a bunch of foreign jerks, but I have to think he somehow noticed us having a hard time. Or maybe my friend is the one who bugged him. Cuz me, I’m shy. I’d never talk to a stranger. I feel like I’m gonna have a heart attack right now, typing this shit! Believe it.
Anyway, this guy, he somehow got the point. He knew we didn’t belong there, in the desert, dying and dying and dying. He invited us to his party, and he killed all the tough monsters. He guided us to the port, and then he gave us some gil. He /waved goodbye, and we /waved goodbye, and I swear I got kinda choked up, cuz this stranger was so kind to us, and he didn’t have to be! I’d like to think he treasured that memory as much as I do. I wish I knew that guy’s name so I could send him a postcard saying “thank you”.
Of course I quit playing the game, like, 2 days later, cuz I couldn’t afford the $12 a month. And when I resubbed 6 months later I learned about the horrors of Japanese subscription services, and how they bill on the first of every month, so if you sign up on the 29th you’re paying fuckin’ $12 for 2 days of play time. They still do that shit, on the 15th anniversary of FF11’s launch. Someone should have a long talk with the people who run this shit in Japan. But the people who play those games, and help strangers? They’re good, and deserve better service than they’re getting.
So…thank you, Japanese stranger…wherever you are. You were way kinder than anyone I ever met playing WoW. Especially the WoW player I confided to about being borderline crippled. He had me join a guild and told the guildmaster that I was a wheelchair bound ex-stripper who was into that poly lifestyle. That guildmaster kept /whispering me about how I should get together with his wife and him and do some rude shit until I quit the game. Fuck Americans, man. Fuck Blizzard. Fuck taurens and orcs and especially elves. They’re way lamer than mithra or gelkans or blingglorps or whatever the fuck FF11 had.
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i might go into this in some detail later on but despite not ever playing it in its prime and only being a couple dozen hours into it, i love this game so much. and i love stories from this game. doing really intense research into the history of ffxi and how the game changed over time got me through a mental breakdown period that lasted a couple of weeks last august. thanks for sharing that.
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This is incredible and I wanna play it.
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fuckin love ffxi so much. want to go through it soon now that you can solo practically all the story content
protip: up your background resolution by a bunch to eliminate all your aliasing and take awesome screenshots. it used to be a registry edit but i believe they’ve added it to the client in recent times. any modern toaster should be able to oversample significantly for great looking graphics. ffxi always had stellar art direction so it’s nice to see it very crisp
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yo you take that back
I find it pretty crazy that someone started playing FFXI in 2016. more power to you, yaru
Now that WoW is a well greased mobile game power level OVER 9000!!! achievement grinding treadmill I wonder what all the old vanilla leveling areas look like.
Altpost: time for my biannual looking up of the Galaxies emulator so I can log in and take some screens
Unfortunately cataclysm changed them into themepark rides so they aren’t what they were either. People keep throwing up private vanilla classic servers if you’re ever jonesing for the cool embrace of Westfall.
I love seeing pics and hearing about FF11, I’m fascinated with it. It still belongs in that hardcore era of MMO where I’d hear a story about a guild fighting a boss for 24 hours nonstop and thinking “what the hell is going on in this game?” I’ve got some pretty crappy solitude coming up soon during which I might play catchup on ff14 to pass the time but I keep having an urge to pick this one up too just to experience some piece of it.
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ffxi is dense, and even though there’s a ton of quality of life improvements over the years it’s still a hard game. pretty much all story related stuff can be soloed at this point, you just have to figure out what you’re doing!
starting tomorrow to celebrate the anniversary the game + all expansions will be on sale for $10 (which I believe includes a free month of playtime), and anyone who has previously had an account ever will be able to play from may 16th to may 29th for free.
I started playing because it’s an old game and I had always been curious about it and wanted to play it before the servers inevitably shut down. and I’m really glad I did! I read stories about the game during the first couple of years it came out and it’s so drastically different from my experience, but so interesting. back around launch it used to be team up or die. you could barely do anything solo (even level grind) so the difficulty forced a sense of community. with the gradual decline in server populations, they increased global exp gain and reduced the penalties for death and added a system where you can summon NPCs into yr party to fight with you. so with those changes, plus the increased level cap, you can definitely solo most or all of the game. and doing it with a friend is a solid and fun challenge.
idk. it’s a good game from a very different time. if anyone is interested in trying it, you should try it. who knows how much longer it’ll be around.
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10 bucks is just right, thanks for the heads up.
This owns
I love documentation of game places long after user activity has regressed or completely disappeared
Do you know how busy the active servers are? I can’t imagine anyone other than the most dedicated or curious players have anything to do with FF11 now
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i like the idea of an urban exploration/abandoned malls deal where somehow there exists forgotten servers you can log onto, visiting something like anarchy online in 2017 in total disrepair with bugged quest text and missing npcs, etc
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God damn it Blizzard.
I’m a Booty Bay man.
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Sup fools, FFXI launch player checking in. At the turn of the century I was a hardcore, unapologetic Squaresoft fanboy, to the extent that my GeoCities home page had an abortive attempt at a Final Fantasy Encyclopedia. I’d played a little bit of Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot, so I was cautiously optimistic to see how Square took on the challenges of an MMO. I got my local friends on board and we made characters on the Pandemonium server, principally in the hume region at the south of the western continent.
I was quickly dismayed to discover that the MMO FF game was much more of an MMO than it was an FF game. I wound up playing a lot more Tetra Master in PlayOnline than I did FFXI. We barely managed to make it out of the starting areas before my interest and patience with this oversized, overpunishing world wore through.
One interaction I did manage to have in my first few months was with a girl who was just starting out. She had a lot of questions about how the game worked, and she hadn’t gained more than two or three levels yet, and since I was bored and exhausted by the grind to get my subclass unlocked, I wound up spending a lot of time helping her out in the first areas. Still, my subscription lapsed, and that was that.
Years passed. Six or seven, I think–maybe more. I decided to see if I could recover my login, and after a few hours, I was back in my mog house! And that girl was online! And SHE then helped ME get to whatever that main city was long before I was supposed to, because she was an endgame player. That felt appropriate.
Probably gonna try to log in again, considering this thread.
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the first Final Fantasy that I passed on – even as a very big fan – this thread brings me one step closer, thank you
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i think the most active servers have about 1000-1500 players on at peak hours. servers are shared between regions, so there are two peaks during the day (us peak and jp peak).
i’ve never seen the server i play on get above 300 people.
Star-crossed buddies…strewn across time and space…
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listening to people describe mmo experiences like this really make me want to try one, but i feel like 99/100 it’s just grinding with trolls and children and i don’t want to take the risk
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