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It's no secret that I'm not a strong supporter of MMORPGs among my coworkers here, but it's not because I dislike them or think they are evil. I just know the addictive nature of them having played two over the course of my grad school days. I've also seen too many a staff member here leave us in the dust to save Azeroth or Vana'diel. But having some experience with both of those worlds, it's easy to see the appeal of each. There is no doubt that World of Warcraft is wildly more successful than Final Fantasy XI has ever been, but Square Enix's little MMO surely had some strong drawing power in its day. But, there were and still are a lot of problems with Final Fantasy XI that make it overwhelming for most causal users and will stop it from ever having the drawing power that WoW has.
Square Enix has been mentioning little by little a new MMO in the works codenamed "Rapture" for Windows, Xbox 360, and PS3. While SE has made no official comment on whether this game will having any ties to the Final Fantasy name at all, this game still has potential to be successful for the company. They just need to decide if it's going to try to take on/copy WoW or if they are going to stick to FFXI's stronger party focus.
Let me start by saying that I know that things have changed since I played, but regardless of how things are now, they took lots of modifications to get there. If they do want to compete with WoW in the casual market, then some of the biggest complaints will need to be address without a doubt. First and foremost, SE needs to make sure that players can solo at any point and with any job. At the starting levels, you really shouldn't be dying as often at the start from simple enemies, just when doing something stupid.
Final Fantasy XI did a lot of things right, too, especially for fans of the series that were willing to take the plunge. Having a single character that you can focus all of your time around is a great thing, but the inventory problems has forced people to have to purchase an additional character just to store more items. Like I said, I know that inventory issues have been patched up here and there, but you shouldn't have to buy more characters or wait forever on updates to then go on a long or expensive quest to gain a few more spaces for items. I can understand not having unlimited space on your character, but back in town? Seriously. There are tons of fun jobs to try out, but equipment management made it a day long affair just to play around. And then you when you first get your unique set of Artifact Armor (AF) and want to keep it, but want other armor too, it's just too annoying to keep things organized.
Dying is a natural thing in RPGs, especially an MMO. You shouldn't be able to just dive headfirst into something, die, and have no consequences, but at the same time you don't want to go backwards in your progress either. Dropping down a level is one of the most annoying things in Final Fantasy XI and it's even more compounded by the equipment management.
Worst of all is the community biases due to job imbalances. The job system and support job option made character customization something really fun to play around with. While I can understand that for larger scale missions and big group quests that you want to have the ideal party to be successful, you shouldn't have to be the community's ideal job/sub job/race combo just to get into a standard party. It's understandable why FFXI players would shun a bulky Galka Monk that wanted to sub Black Mage, but this job combo should at least be somewhat useable, not totally broken and therefore shunned.
The little time that I played WoW, I was thrilled with the fact that I could be a Warlock with any kind of focus I wanted and still be able to play the game and enjoy most of the content. I could explore new areas and not have to worry about dying. Yeah, I would die, but I wouldn't delevel and then have all my new equipment become unusable until I gained that level back... which wasn't going to happen without a party and was going to cost me more in-game money to rebuy new armor. I'm dealing in extremes here, but if Square Enix wants to get some of the old FFXI people out of WoW and back for "Rapture" then they will need to move as far away from FFXI's weaknesses and focus on it's strengths: excellent (though poorly paced) storytelling and a strong (yet unbalanced) Final Fantasy themed job system.
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