i feel that! that’s why i like playing an mmo where i never see another soul outside of towns
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Yeah! I really enjoyed those images, it looks like basically my ideal video game experience. Would love to hear more tales from your journey if you ever feel like documenting more.
At the time the plain-ness and expanse of 11s world were a turn-off for me, but now the sparseness looks sublime. I think because it’s the antithesis of the open-world playgrounds we’re currently plagued with dotted with ‘activities’.
Kind of like shadow of the colossus, this world doesn’t feel like it’s there for you. you’re just there, and it doesn’t care, and that’s real cool.
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what server are y’all on or gonna be on?
yes! this is something my friend and i have talked about. the world feels really indifferent to my existence in it, and other than the story mission cutscenes, it feels very de-centralized (with regards to me as a player character).
another tangent:
apparently ffix, ffx, and ffxi were all in development at the same time? link
so with that in mind it’s interesting because the ps1-ps2 era was a huge gradual shift in tone for the series, and i feel like xi never gets explored in the same way ix does for being a “throwback to the fantasy style of older final fantasies” or whatever
idk, most people just skipped over this game. i know i did, even though i was super curious about it when it came out. but it occupies a really interesting place within the context of the entire series, and i think it’s worth experiencing!!
btw re: servers, asura if you want a lively server and sylph if you want a dead server
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also the playonline viewer has wonderful music
free login until the end of the month has begun for anyone who previously had an account!
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That open frontier feeling is literally the only good thing about MMOs, and it disappears damn quickly.
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btw ya’ll look forward to my thread like this about ffxiv in 2028!
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I’m really curious about the kind of people still playing FFXI in 2017. Wandering an empty wasteland looking for sentient life sounds kinda neato.
Yeah, this is easily the closest I’ve come to wanting to play this.
However, I’m bad with limited windows for playtime, and would never get to it. If anyone feels like doing a video diary that would probably be awesome.
i played some ffxi when the game first launched in europe around 2003 or so and i couldn’t stand it - it felt like an enormous grind even by mmo standards and if you didn’t have a full party with the proper class diversity you couldn’t get anything done
i’ve always been curious how it evolved since
this is very true and the one thing i really did enjoy
as the game stands you can easily get a full party of powerful npcs to follow you around and complete almost all the story content and level you very fast just to be able to see everything. the end game is still there for people interested in that but it’s pretty easy to play just for the story and environments
yeah I played this briefly because I already had a hard drive in my PS2 to use HD loader (& I think I’d gotten the network adapter necessary for that whole hookup for free from the gamestop backroom) so I figured what the hell
I remember an extremely dense game browser UI & the requirement to have a full party with near-perfect class diversity in order to do anything. I don’t think I got beyond like level 10 because it was extremely boring. I do still have the USB extension cable I bought in order to use my keyboard from the couch.
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it’s interesting how these things, bought/obtained just in the passing, end up staying around way beyond your imagination, and can easily pass a decade or more without a hitch.
And when you do want to get something that lasts, it somehow falters before too long. Ah well ~~~
Apparently I previously had an account, but I’ve clearly never actually played this game. Huh.
These are some really nice “checkin’ my e-mail” tunes.
Apparently PlayOnline IDs are four CAPITALIZED letters followed by four numbers?? If I can find my old FFXI manual, I can probably find out what that was.
Fifteen years ago I was apparently a real asshole who didn’t write anything down or maintain any sort of reliable password document, so I finally took three+ hours to sit through SquareEnix’s support chat system. It turns out that the email I’d registered with was on my old screamingspheres.com domain, so there was not gonna be any way I’d have gotten that back, anyway. The chat rep was pretty helpful, though, and I was able to get my PlayOnline ID & a temporary password for this. It’s all coming together soon!
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…man. What a weird, awkward game. This takes me back, though.
Despite fucking with the resolution settings, my aspect ratio is still off. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, though.
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the aspect ratio option is tucked away in the in-game settings, under “other” or something. poke around there and you’ll find it!
i nabbed this but am not keen on that 1-hour download and the patch available from some other site always cuts halfway through the d/l. alas
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