Walking Other Worlds 118
- Title: Final Fantasy XI
- Developer/Publisher: Square/Enix
- System:360 (PC, PS2)
2003 was a long time ago, though. The Taru Taru are still cute, but just about every other aspect of the game feels dated in comparison to modern online games. Questing is extraordinarily awkward; There are lots of quests to do but almost no way to know how to find them. Hint books or the internet are really the only way you'll know that the surly gang of school kids behind the fish warehouse in Windhurst is a consistent source of fun missions. Graphically, the game looks serviceable but out of place on the Xbox 360. On a hi-def screen the jaggies ignorable on the PC or PS2 try to reach out and remove your optic nerves. The job system (allowing you to try all the classes with one character) is still one of the finest examples of balance and utility in the genre ... but raising levels on those classes will drive you to distraction. Leveling is an unrelenting, punishing grind. The first ten levels are basically required soloing, but beyond that you'd better be grouped or you're going to be enjoying the 'feature' of xp loss on death. My favorite moment is when you die just after having gained a level. You lose xp so, of course, you lose your level. That's some class A fun.
The 360 version collects up all three expansions to the game (Rise of the Zilart, Chains of Promathia, and Treasures of Aht Urhgan) along with the original gameworld, to allow the 360 experience to be a 'complete' one. Unfortunately, unless you've already been playing this title on the PC or PS2, much of that content will be weeks or months away from your level 1 character. The most recent expansion, Aht Urghan, has been getting very positive commentary from those who can play it, but the expansion's inclusion into this bundle is of limited interest to the new player.
- Title: Guild Wars: Factions
- Developer: ArenaNet
- Publisher: NCSoft
- System:PC
The two new classes brings the total up to eight, and fit seamlessly into the world of Ascalon for both PVE and PVP play. The Assassin is a direct damage character, carrying a lot of similarities to the Warrior class. An Assassin character has to get very up close and personal to do maximum damage, though, not having some of the skill with ranged weapons other classes do. The class also breaks ground with 'combo' moves. The mix-and-match actions that any character can slot are always fun to combine in interesting ways, but the Assassin relies on stringing together specific moves for increasing damage. The other new class, the Ritualist, is a support class that features a good deal of group buffing and debuffing. I found the Ritualist's laid back style of play kind of awkward in PVE, but it was a lot of fun in PVP matches. As long as you're in the main pack of your team, you're doing some good. A simple strategy even an inexperienced player like me could follow.
The new questing continent, the region known as Cantha, will keep the PVE players happy for a very long time. It's simply gorgeous, and artistically very different from many of the initial Prophecies zones. For example, the summer green that the lower-level original zone uses gives way to an autumnal orange and gold in Eastern-themed Cantha. There are over two dozen core quest missions, and enough side-quests to keep even the most dedicated PVE character busy for some time. For me, the most enjoyable element of these environs is the smaller zones, some of which go far beyond the traditional fantasy tropes we've come to expect. A beach-front area dominated by villages built on giant tortoises, and an ancient city built into a massive gorge, are just two of the nonstandard zones you'll travel through in Cantha. The Guild Wars designers went about as far as they could from the look and tone of the original Prophesies zones, and the Eastern sensibility and flair is like a breath of fresh air.
PVP is the gameplay that most people come looking for when they sit down to a session of Guild Wars, and Factions provides for these players as well. Besides the same gameplay seen in Prophecies, travelers to Cantha have the opportunity to align with two warring groups seeking to control the newly found lands. In PVP battles, guilds can struggle back and forth across a highly militarized zone. The more PVP victories a faction has, based on the guilds associated with it, the more land it can claim to control. The most interesting thing is that individual guilds can then lay claim to some of these lands, based on the amount of favour they've curried with their patron faction. This favour is earned not by PVP, but by PVE questing. The most successful guilds under Factions, then, are mixed bags. PVE questers garner favour with the ruling faction, while PVP gladiators ensure that their faction has control of a large swath of land. It forces players that normally would not associate to come together in a common goal, and is a right brilliant idea.
FFXI poor port (Score:4, Interesting)
OTOH it's primarily aimed at the PS2 gamers for an upgrade and is a big improvement for them.
IMO you either like things like FFXI or you like things like Guid Wars. If you want PvP then go for GW, if you want involved storylines and RPG then go for FFXI.
Text based MMORPG (Score:1, Interesting)
Best free text based mmorpg by a mile and half. Great community, nifty spells, and a whole lot of clicking!
Automated characters (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Automated characters (Score:3, Interesting)
It's actually frighteningly easy to expose the scripting to users. The problem is that most custom script languages provide too much functionality and you can make your NPC help you cheat. The language has to be planned to prevent any 'hacks' via the NPCs scripting.
Thoughts on FFXI (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand, I can't help but feel that Square-Enix have wasted a big opportunity here. Don't get me wrong - I vastly prefer FFXI to World of Warcraft, and the fact that almost everybody who left FFXI for WoW ended up coming back seems to indicate that a lot of other people feel the same way - but WoW taught everybody some important lessons about MMORPGs that you just can't afford to ignore these days, particularly in terms of inducting new players. The simple, depressing fact is that getting started in FFXI as a new player now is no easier than it was when the game first launched. Which is to say, it's bloody hard. If anything, it's even harder now, as much of the game is becoming geared towards end-game content and prices on newbie gear are much higher than they used to be. The 360 release was an opportunity for S-E to address this; to revamp the hideously outdated quest-log, to put in some easily-identified, tightly structured quests to break newbies into the game and teach them the basics of playing while also getting their low level gear for free and, in short, to make the game FUN to play with a character below level 50, which is something that's always been lacking.
Don't get me wrong, my opinion is that in terms of end-game content, FFXI stomps everything else around. There's challenge, variety and a whole lot of other stuff that's absent from other MMORPG end-games, particularly WoW, and, to cap it all, this is geared for everything from 3 man groups through to 64 man alliances, unlike the WoW focus on ever bigger groups at the top levels. However, if I were just getting started on the 360 version now, I seriously doubt I'd stick with the game long enough to see that.
Also, I know I'm in the minority here, but I personally think that the Treasures of Aht Urhgan expansion *stinks*. It's had an easy ride from the player-base, because it added 3 new jobs, which is what people always shout for in expansions. However, I don't see any of these jobs as adding anything new or exciting to what was on offer before. Frankly, the chances that more than about 0.01% of the player-base had actually experienced everything that the existing 15 jobs had to offer are pretty miniscule. So we get landed with 3 new jobs which suddenly everybody and their dog are playing as and which break the game-balance quite nicely. We also get some of the ugliest zones ever seen in the game. The zones for the previous expansion, Chains of Promathia, were breath-taking visually. It's a bit disappointing to go from that, to wading around in a swamp with blatant copy-pasting of tiles, which is all that ToAU seems to be. Besieged and Assault (new game-modes) have also completely failed to live up to their potential.
GW is the new generation of MMOG. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well let me tell you something: the world changes, and the EverQuest idea of how you define a MMOG does not fix it in stone for eternity.
ArenaNet designers found a way to preserve all the good things in the genre (most importantly the gameplay), and throw out all the bad things, like camping, kill stealing, training, harrassment, downtime, level grinding, and mindless repetition.
They did so by instancing, but that's no different to what many other MMOGs have done with instanced dungeons. The big difference with GW is that they did it with outdoor zones, and the result is 100% absolute magic. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in removing the bad and promoting the good.
You are hung up on the bad things, and think that by not being able to have 50 mobs trained on you by a passing idiot, then somehow it's not a MMOG. Wake up. You're simply not thinking straight. None of the shared world "benefits" you claim are real, they're just a right pain in the butt, and I speak as someone who took two of the largest traditional MMOGs to their end games on several characters.
Guild Wars has got it very very right, and boy, not only is it a full-blown Massively Multiplayer Online Game (it's truly Massive, because it doesn't split people off onto different named servers), it's also one of the very best.
Re:Scary. (Score:3, Interesting)
If I hold down a career that makes me enough money to survive and also contributes to the knowledgebase of society more than Programmer X. Websitedesign, why does it matter to you if I want to spend my free time in front of a computer or at the park? Obviously your friends prefer their computer to you. Do you feel threatened?
Everyone in the end looks back on their lives and wonders if they've really accomplished anything. And the deeper you get into philosophy, the more you start questioning if you're really going to find a meaningful accomplishment in anything you do. You're taking up this crusade because it makes you feel like you're doing something positive. It gives you self-righteousness. It confirms your view of a meaningful life.
I stopped going out with my friends in large part recently because, frankly, I've been bored going to the same old parties, having the same drunken conversations, pretending there's some deeper meaning where there really isn't. I'm not hiding from the world. I did not suddenly develop a social phobia in my twenty-second year on this world. And the patronizing kiddie-freud analysis that people try to subject me to with those conclusions (like you're doing to your friends) is one of the #1 reasons that I really don't want to hang out with them. If I told them the truth, that I'm bored with them, that I spend more time trying to entertain them than being entertained, that I think their deep philosophies and purposes and meanings are shallow, I don't think they'd want me around much longer. But I can't quite bring myself to do that.
Re:Guild Wars Question (Score:2, Interesting)