There is something extremely fucked up about my psyche that calls me to be an FFXI apologist to its detractors and its harshest critic to its fanboys.
It's still the distilled essence of an MMORPG. That is:
1) No soloing, fucking ever.
Not exactly true. For reasons that should be fairly obvious, they can't at this point make players as strong as WoW players in relation to mobs because it would require restructuring the game from the ground up, but they have done a LOT to add solo viability in the past few years.
1) Signet change: you get a massive buff to evasion and defense when fighting EM or weaker mobs while signet is up, and resting hp ticks scale with your level/max hp.
2) Adventuring Fellows: A short quest chain at Rank 4 gets you an item that lets you summon an NPC that will follow you around, fight for you, heal you, and only cost you 30% of your exp. He'll level up and gain new abilities, too. I had a lot of fun with mine.
3) Buffs to EP/DC XP. This just happened a month ago but particularly easy prey XP was doubled. I was trying it out and leveled a Ranger from one to 6 in 20 minutes.
4) Dancer, a new job that converts TP into healing abilities. Sub it and lololololol
5) Campaign: The most recent expansion allows 60+ish players who are LFG to travel to frontier bases and sign up to fight TEH BEASTMAN HORDES for solo XP. It's nothing compared to the XP you get in a level 75 merit point party (usually 10-12k/hour) but hey, it's 3-4k an hour on a good day and it's great if you only have like a half hour to play and just want to jump in and kill stuff. Also, no XP loss for dying while your Campaign tags are active. So there's that.
None of this makes it like WoW soloing, and rightly so, because the game's focus is totally party. But it's not like soloing isn't semi-viable these days.
2) Player-based economy is the only real way to get by.
This was always my favorite part of the game, honestly. I like the fact that crafting is
actually viable. MMO crafting is a dying institution, it seems, and it's nice to have a game like FFXI that still strongly supports it, but YMMV. I would rather make money to buy something than wait for a random drop in a 40 man raid, at any rate.
3) Min/max or face, if not defeat, a torrent of rage from your allies for not being as efficient as possible.
Every game has this problem, and FFXI's player base is such a bunch of pussies that they'll just complain about you in LS chat.
4) Quests never deviate much from kill x ys or bring me z qs.
Yes and no. They aren't that rewarding either, for the most part. The main reason to quest in FFXI is cutscenes, because hey, you're playing an FF game.
That said, most quests really flesh out a complete story arc. It's really impressive the amount of detail and dialogue there is in the game, to say nothing of all the nation and expansion mission tracks, each of which basically encapsulate an FF game in themselves. Chains of Promathia, in particular, is one of the more engaging Final Fantasies in recent memory.
5) Everything else is grinding.
Yes. But the flipside is that the (massive) endgame is way more casual than, say, WoW, without getting into too much detail.
I'm sure it appeals to certain players - those who want nothing more than to be a part in an extremely efficient machine. Very Japanese. If you're looking for the usual exploration and freedom of the genre - and the series - however, you can forget it.
I've been playing it on and off since launch, and my current character is about 4 years old. I dislike the game more often than not; it really does suffer from absolutely crippling design flaws that will never be fixed. That said, I can honestly say that not once in the past 4 years have I logged on my dude and said, "hmm, there's nothing for me to do."
FFXI is a game for somebody who wants it to be a full-on hobby in its own right.
