Does anyone play final fantasy 11

I was bumbling but in good company, and my stream managed to attract some in-game help. To my surprise, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with a diminutive thief who found me in the wild. Without so much as an introduction, they offered to trade with me, and I opened the menu. They offered me , gil, a significant amount of money for a newbie like me.

After a few hours of beating up monsters, I only had around 30 gil. It was confusing. Was there simply some small, dapper philanthropist wandering the game world and tossing money at newbies? This is a game that resists easy learning, but some established players who suffered through the early game are eager to help dimwitted adventurers like myself.

My subsequent education at the hands of this tiny master player revealed that Final Fantasy XI is largely a single-player game with occasional personal interactions—that is,until you reach the massive endgame hunts against notorious monsters. Quest givers and limited-time events grant players access to allies of all classes and utility. After some help from my gentleman-thief benefactor, I was able to summon beefy paladins, stalwart samurai, and healing mages to assist me in my dungeon crawling.

Playing Final Fantasy XI today is a crash course in both old-school sensibilities and adaptation. It may be the end of the current story arc, but there is still a lot of world left to explore.

Final Fantasy 14 is now also available on PS5, with those who own the game on PS4 eligible for a free upgrade. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.

Press ESC to cancel. Ben Davis April 15, How many active players does FFXI have? Do people still play Final Fantasy 11 Online? You couldn't just walk up and whack and stack them like much of the previous content allowed. It forced us to clean up a lot of slop that we were used to. And the final battlefield was mesmerizing. FF11 emerged at a time when wikis and fansites were much less formalized, formatted, and user-friendly than they are now. These days everything has been datamined and documented.

Not so back then. Much of what we knew was based entirely on hearsay, and a lot of the info we got was plain wrong. Sure, we aggroed the zone—but not because we rubbed against any wall. In , even something as basic as enemy aggro had to be puzzled out. Defeating her allowed us to add her to our growing selection of summonable avatars. It was a disaster until I did a mentor search and looked up this awesome 75 Dark Knight. He came out and shepherded my group through the mission, not just the Castle but he offered [to help with] the other two zones, too.

FF11 was never just a game, it was a way to make bonds. Almost every one of my best memories isn't just from some fight, but it's the people I did it with. Nowadays players rarely touch these parts of FF11 or multiplayer PvE and PvP activities that offer underpowered and antiquated quest rewards compared to current endgame loot.

Of course there are people who lapsed and came back in return, but it is set up now that leveling can go up pretty quickly, and we try to avoid having content in the older part of the game where you have to form a party and spend many hours on that content or put in a lot of time and effort. It's a bit of a shame to see so much of FF11 collect dust.

But it's also inspired the developers to be creative. Since the dev team didn't want players to have to solo content that usually requires a full group, they created the 'Trust' system, essentially unique NPC allies that you can summon at-will to form a party with. Rather than making people get stuck in that content and grind for it, we would rather have them use it as a stepping stone and move on so they can catch up to the people playing the game [actively] so they can socialize and be up-to-date on the content.

PlayOnline seems like madness now, but it's easy to forget how little of the modern infrastructure felt figured out in Gmail was still two years away. There was a time when FF11 fully embraced the grind. Chains of Promathia added quests and missions that were frustratingly opaque. New areas would cap your level, requiring very specific armor. New enemies aggroed in new ways to magic, sound, sight, and even True Sight enemies could see you even with invisibility on , thus requiring players to carry stacks of expensive consumables to safely navigate the world.

I really felt like the developers were trying to keep that monthly fee going. It sometimes felt like an abusive relationship. Who remembers camping timed spawns to earn certain gear with abysmal drop rates? But we kept coming back for more, because when we survived and came out on the other end, we had war stories to reminisce about together.

Subsequent expansions often shipped with little content baked in, to be fleshed out over time via sizable patches and maintenance downtime, with only the most opaque and shallow fetch-quests occupying the disc space. This was before all of the current QoL improvements, too. So getting around was a tremendous chore.

We often had to hire white mages to teleport us for a fee, usually to far flung locations to save us a half-hour here and there. One annoying CoP mission required me to run to one of the most remote locations in the game—taking around an actual half an hour—just to click a spot in the middle of an empty field, get a key item and text message, and then I was off again to another spot in another far off place to do the same thing.

It was almost every quest. Other competing MMOs and their easy skill-ups, gratifying character progress, and perhaps most importantly, ease of entry, started to look awfully good. Games like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars simply required you to enter your log-in and password, select a character, and that was it.

If we were to redo it now… trying to create something like that in modern times would be pointless. I have a particularly strong memory of just the first time getting to play: Hours of difficult setup, an unreliable internet connection, very few notions of English, but eventually I landed in Bastok Mines by the Alchemy guild. I remember my dad was helping me set up and we tried together to figure out how to move he's not into video games so he was just watching without being very involved.

Eventually I got the movement down and after turning the first corner saw this player standing in the middle of one of the alleys in that area. When Square Enix later moved their player database over to a new backend system my character of eight years could not, for mysterious technical reasons, be converted to a normal subscription. My account vanished. Eventually I was the only editor on a non-FFfocused gaming magazine or website that was still regularly covering the game.

I asked if I could take direct feed of the game or off-screen footage of what we were seeing. The game was over four years old by this point, and this was one of the basic introductory areas. It's a testament to how many players were invested in the game over the years. Strong design and a dedicated community can keep a game afloat for a while, but true longevity only comes when a developer continues to iterate upon what they created.

Amazingly the game has received a new patch nearly every two months since its launch, with the latest version update hitting on March 10, On top of that, Final Fantasy XI received an expansion or major update every year or two years after its launch, until Rhapsodies of Vana'diel in Each of these expansions added on a variety of content like new races, new jobs, new areas, and extra story content.

This kept a constant stream of new content for fans to dive into, ensuring that the community had something to talk about and some new challenge or boss to beat. Final Fantasy XI had a strong enough user base that it stayed a consistent moneymaker for Square Enix, and in turn, they continued to update the game and bring new content. No doubt, there will continue to be a community until the game's last days.