Curious

[Markus. D]

How substantially different from Final Fantasy XI is the game play at it's core. This includes pacing and general complexity as a standalone character.

[Loony BoB]

I've only played FFXI for a few months and got up to L40-something, so bare with me!

Hmm. It's very different and not at all, depending on the angle you're looking at.

The appearances of characters and locations are very similar - although a hundred times better looking, obviously enough.
The classes are very different, and the lack of an absolute healer class is... interesting to say the least. Party dynamics - although I've not got into a large party yet - must be very different to FFXI at the moment.
There are chocobos, airships, crafting still uses (shards and) crystals, the items are similar.

The layout of the map will be very familiar - three major starting cities and one 'capital' city of sorts. Various little locales dotted around here and there, although at the moment I don't believe there is a large amount to do in them... they're obviously going to be adding a lot of extra storyline though as the number of places you can go to is notable. There are roughly six "small towns" so far that I know about.

The core of any MMO is a glorified grind, which this game has, and a lot of people to grind with, which this game already has. Possibly not as many as it needs to become truly awesome, but it's got 2.1k on my server at the moment and that's certainly not terrible for a CE-only release to date. It'll be interesting come the 30th September.

It's too difficult to say on pacing at the moment. Let's face it, it's only been out for a few days and nobody will know how the pacing will be for the higher levels yet, nor will they know exactly how much SE will change over the next month as it tries to balance things out. The story pacing? Every 10 levels from what I've seen so far, which is pretty much how it worked in FFXI if I remember rightly.

This game has got so much room for additions though, and it's fairly obvious that SE will be introducing a lot. How that compares to FFXI in it's current state... well, we'll know in about 8 years, I guess. xD

Basically, the game bleeds FFXI to me, but also has some very, very notable differences that will make fairly big changes to how you play the game.

[Markus. D]

I thought so, but thank you for the deep answer <3! I should have skewed the question's potential span; replacing it with battle mechanics instead. Just wanted to know how it was from the get-go.


The core of any MMO is a glorified grind

Now that's just an MMO standard ;p! I won't go into my statement for the sake of conversation, but yeah.

[Loony BoB]

For battle mechanics, people are still figuring things out. It's a very pick-and-mix kind of thing - you can be a Conjurer with your white/black magic spells, but if you also level Thaumaterge then you could get Regen etc. and mix it up with your Cures and Poisonas and 'create' a White Mage. The ability to use the abilities of other classes is an interesting one I've not yet experimented with, but I'm sure Danielle will look into it more than I as she's a mage. For now, I'm just a beat-things-up kinda guy and it's serving me well.

Mages seem harder to level. Oh, and there are battle regimens - things like working together to get better results. Sometimes you can do them with a single player - for example, if I do two consecutive light swings of my axe, I sometimes get an increased parry rate out of it. You can mix this up with other players, hopefully resulting in things like flaming arrows etc. as seen in the opening cinematics...

[Markus. D]

Oh that sounds nothing short of eventually awesome! I was initially intrigued at the choice of changing it up, should have gotten in on the Beta.

[Loony BoB]

Eventually, potentially. xD It should be awesome. I've yet to really see it in full swing, although I watched about seven people take on a giant nanny goat thing the other day and it was pretty epic to see all the different effects their multiple attacks had. I hope it's as effective as it appears to be.