What does the game play like?

[xarius]

I live in England, and am psyching myself up for the European release of FFXI and I wanted to know how it plays? I tried everquest recently and was appalled with the interface and how it all worked.

Naturally I expect better things from Square, so I was just after some opinions on what it's like to play.

Thanks in advance.

[Vaprice]

Yeah the game is good on my PS2. Nothing bad, but sometimes you do get disconnected....*damn errors.* But, it's great. Not really liking everquest though have tried it, this is a lot better. Or at least I think so.

[Ouch!]

I assume you're refering to the gameplay.

It's similar to many MMORPGs, but I would warn you that it is heavily party based. Past level ten, you'll have a rough time leveling solo. Parties are the only way you'r egonna pull in the experience.

When you attack, your character just hacks away as fast as he/she can. You will have the ability to use spells and other abilities at anytime. Every ability has a recast time, though, so you can't just spam the same spell over and over. Spells require a period where they prepare to use the spell. Depending on the spell this time can be relatively short or fairly long. The red mage passive ability, fast cast, shortens this time. If you are attacked anywhere from the 0-70% range of spell preparation, there's a good chance that the spell will be stopped. That's only a problem when you're soloing, so cast spells right after a mob attacks for best results.

The battle proceeds differently depending on your job choice, obviously. I'll do my best to explain their basic functions.

As a tank, specifically warrior at the beginning, your job will be to use provoke (a level 5 ability) to keep the monster off of the mages. Provoke raises hate, or enmity. Enmity affects who the mob will attack. You want to keep your enmity as high as you possibily can. To do this you will have to use Provoke (which generates a good amount of enmity, usually enough to get it off a mage). The more damage you deal will also effect enmity. However, when you take damage, the enmity goes back down.

Black mages will generate enmity through their damage spells, and a white mage's healing spells generate emnity similarly. When the monster aggros to them, you'll want to use provoke as soon as you possibly can to protect them from damage, as mages are naturally frail.

A thief has a rough ride through the first fifteen levels. They don't have the tanking abilities warriors have, and they can't dish out the same amount of damage that monks can. When they reach 15 and get sneak attack and treasure hunter they become more valuable. As a thief, you may get in the occasional steal (level five ability), but you'll just be a secondary damage dealer until you get sneak attack.

A monk is there to dish out damage. They have the highest HP of the original jobs and have great vitality as well. If you're good and get your warrior sub at 18, you can tank, but I still don't suggest it.

A red mage is used mostly as either a healer, especially in cases when a white mage is not available. When you do have a white mage in the party, you'll probably end up enfeebling the mob. Enfeebling is spells that hinter the mob, such as poison and blind. I'm a red mage myself, and I've never had to fill in as a nuker for a black mage. At earlier levels, red mages just don't cut it for nuking.

Black mages are fairly simple. You'll be standing back with the white mage and nuke the hell out of things. You'll want to know the weaknesses of the different creatures in the area to be most effective with your spells. You also have to time your spells carefully, or you'll generate too much hate and the mob will come after you before the tanks can provoke it off of you.

White mages are the most important members of a party early on. Later a red mage can fill in as a healer much more effectively than at lower levels, but until then a white mage is a must have in a party. Without one, most parties have a rough time.

As a white mage, your job is to heal your party members. You will be expected to be up to date on your important spells, just like any other mage. Like the black mage, if you cast your spells too fast, you'll get a mob on you. When you get cure II, you'll want to be careful with it, as casting it will easily draw a mob. Just keep people alive. I will warn you, it's not as easy as it sounds.

That's a basic description on how things work for the six standard classes. That explaination gets you through Valkurm. After that, the purposes of the jobs start to change a bit and it gets a tad more complicated. By the time you get to advanced jobs, you'll have run into enough of them in groups to have a basic understanding of how they work.

A good party that will get you through Valkurm easily will have a white mage, a black mage, at least two tanks (warriors, ninja/warriors after level 12 so they can blink tank, or a paladin) and two other damage dealers. One of the second damage dealers can be another black mage, but other damage dealers out there would be monks, samurais, dark knights and dragoons. If you can get a bard in place of one of the two other damage dealers, by all means, take one. Bards are probably the best support job other than your main healer.

Hope that was helpful.

[Lionx]

Actually getting hit means you lose enimity or hate..provoke and stuff is NOT like the EQ one..its much more complex to do.

BLMs just have to manage hate and know what they are doing, and RDMs can subsitute a WHM, but never replace them....because simply without a WHM, some mobs are never expable without their healing status spells. Namely Raptors.

THF secondary dmg dealer? :P You must be joking, with Sneak Attack they do more dmg than alot of melee even before Viper Bite...Sneak plus Fast blade can do a renkei really fast and alot of dmg.

MNk have soso VIT, but horrible armour, with defesne food they can tank til lvl 30 and beyond that certain mobs that dont hit very hard only.

[Ouch!]

Ah, m'bad. That was a typing error, not thinking.

I was stating that thieves are secondary damage dealers until they have sneak attack. Before that they've got little going for them. When they get sneak attack they're absolutely wonderful.

[Kegsay]

Beat you to it Xarius, I got the game a few weeks ago! :p
About the interface, it's pretty good. You won't be playing it on the PS2 anytime soon since the problems with the EU hard-drive so I'll talk about the interface PC wise.

At first, I was gob-smacked at all those controls for the game and I thought I'd never get used to it. Of course, I was wrong as once I switched my controls to "Compact", I prefer w,s,a,d and i,j,k,l than the numeric keypad, there were little problems. The layout is pretty clean and everything is fairly simple, there's not much else to say on these terms.

Like Zaphier said, soloing is a nightmare and you feel that it's just a repetitive boring game, and drags on and on. That happend to me mainly due to my frustration of de-leveling thanks to Goblins but once you start partying, it becomes a whole new game, honest. Finding a party is pretty hard at first since there's only so many people to go around (of course that's going to increase soon thanks to people like you in good ol' Europe). Also, considering doing other things other than fighting like fishing and special events like the upcoming Summerfest, to give you a bit more variety.

Overall though, FFXI is another Square masterpiece, wonderful controls (although confusing at first) and smack-on gameplay creates a very sensual experience which even the all hailed "Everquest" will have a hard time keeping up with. :D