I am about 1.5hrs into my install and set-up of FFXI, and I am at least 20mins away from playing (according to the estimated time remaining). Ugh.
Word to the wise: Plug in a USB keyboard to speed things up.
I will give a full report as soon as I finish and get some playing time in. One of the neat things, apparently, is that even though FFXI doesn’t support the Xbox Live communicator, you should be able to hold conversations with other Xbox 360 players via the communicator thanks to Xbox Live and its ubiquitousness (word?).
Nowl, its back to watching a status bar inch its way along… slowly… ever so slowly.
“Ubiquity”, no?
Ubiquity just isn’t as impressive sounding.
If you’ve played WoW, I think you will be sorely disappointed with FFIX. I played it for a good three or four months on my PS2 — with a USB keyboard — and it just wasn’t worth the time. :/
Yea, I don’t think I will like the game that much. But, I couldn’t pass up the free beta program.
Did you mean IX or XI wasn’t worth your time? I’m thinking of picking one of these up and playing them (finally) but would like to hear an opinion of their quality.
I think he meant XI for the PS2. I haven’t had a chance to tinker with the 360 beta-version much, so I can’t offer up an opinion, although I will that the connection to teh gaming servers via the PlayOnline service seems a bit of a kluge. Its a shame it couldn’t have just been done through Xbox Live (I know… then you wouldn’t be able to mingle with the Sony and PC folks).
I did mean FFIX, and I did play it on the PlayStation2. I had a USB keyboard, so it wasn’t that I couldn’t type or anything silly like that. I played the game for three or four months, and I tried four different characters in that time, so I’d like to think I gave it more than a fair hearing.
I guess I had three real issues with the game:
1. Connecting via PlayOnline was a huge pain in the ass. This may be asking too much, but I felt like I should be able to turn on the PS2, click once or twice, and then be playing FFIX a few seconds later. Instead, PlayOnline had to load, let me log in, then I had to navigate to the FFIX screen, and choose my character, and wait while it logged me in to the game server and loaded the initial game data. All together, you probably have to “click” about 10 times to load FFIX. I found that really, really annoying — but I do have a bit of a pet peeve about someone (or something) wasting my time, so take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
2. Past level 15 or so, you really can’t play solo. Hell, with some classes, you just can’t solo at all, not even at third or fourth level, and be effective. I’m not saying that the entire game had to be all set up to allow me to solo straight through level 1,000 (or whatever), but if there had been some race/class/etc. combination that at least allowed one to play solo *most of the time*, I would have been happy. I can accept that you might need to group up to beat the mega-boss of doom, but I didn’t like the fact that I pretty much couldn’t safely explore anywhere alone, outside of the starting “newbie” areas.
I don’t have a lot of time for online games, and what time I do have tends to come in small chunks (a half-hour here, forty minutes there). Grouping was a big headache for me, but it was just about the only option, even in just the second zone outside of the starting town.
3. The crafting system stunk. It just wasn’t fun. All the ingredients were hard to find/expensive, and none of the end results could be sold for even 50% of the cost of materials required to make them. Especially as someone just starting out with the crafting skills, you will not be able to make any money crafting, at all. Not to mention that, with a poor skill, you are much more likely to fail and destroy your rare, expensive materials then you are to actually make something.
Games are supposed to be fun. If I want to break rocks for a living, I can do that w/o paying SquareEnix ~$10/mo. And I am like the biggest otaku Square fanboy I know — I finished the original Xenogears. I liked Seiken Densetsu. I loved Final Fantasy X-2 (helll, up to FFIX, I’ve loved any video game that’s had the words Final and Fantasy in the title, regardless of order). I liked Front Mission 4.
And it’s not even just Square. I friggin’ played all the way through the end of Grandia II, and I’m talking about the really, really, really bad port to the PS2, not the original DC game.
Admittedly, I didn’t buy Grandia Xtreme, so I’m forced to admit that there are even bigger SquareEnix fanboys then me out there. That is a scary thought.
So yeah. If I had to offer someone advice on what MMO to invest it, I would not say FFIX. Maybe it was just me, but I think I’d rather stab myself with a fork than play that game. Save your money at get WoW instead, the word on the street is that all the cool kids think that game is actually fun.
Grrr. I meant Final Fantasy XI.
Let me say that one more time. Final Fantasy eleventy billion, or whatever the hell XI means.
Eleven. Okay? I meant eleven. Every time I wrote “IX” in my previous comments, you must read “XI”, because that’s just the way the entire universe wants it, and you don’t want to make the universe sad, do you?
Stupid damn internets. I hates you forever.
Shhh… don’t let the internets hear you say that.
The internets are our friends!