Final Fantasy XI!

If you kill somone in PvP now you get some of their EXP, so basically people pay for kills.  They can't be more than 19 levels higher than you though, or you get barely anything.

Yeah, I'm sorry but Khrymson doesn't know what hes talking about.  I've heard getting to 75 in a month, but that was always because the person had their subjobs leveled, had already done the cap quests, and usually had another 75 to do the AF quests and get money for gear plus they already knew a lot of people so can get a competent party together.

To get your FIRST 75, takes a bit.  Not because the actual leveling takes awhile, but because doing the side stuff and just getting a good party can take awhile.

Going to Korea for a business trip has its advantages, getting to play Aion!  So here's my review.  Just as a side note, I've played Lineage II up to 55, Wow to 80, and FFXI to 75 on multiple jobs.

The first thing I noticed is that this game is basically a perfect fuse of Lineage II and WoW.

The graphics, fighting animations, classes, and environment is VERY Lineage II influenced.  Theres also those stone type things that you equip to your weapon to do extra damage and end up buying in the thousands.
The looting system, item rarity, party system, UI, quests and flight paths are basically cut and paste from WoW.

With that being said, I'm level 12 and liking the game.  I played with 2 friends and we partied the whole time, doing all the quests together and had a great time.  If you play by yourself, I'm sure you going to find it feels like WoW but with slower leveling.

For the flight system, think druid bird form...sorta.  You have a green bar that charges while you are not flying.  While flying it starts to decrease.  If it gets to the end, your wings dissapear and you fall to your doom (unless your high enough up that you can charge a bit while falling and then open them again before you hit the ground).  The controls while flying are same as WoW.  I personally use W to move and then just hold the right mouse button and use the mouse to steer in any direction and the game responds very smoothly.

I didn't do much flight combat, but what I did experience was a bit difficult.  Positioning yourself in three dimensions can take time, time that you dont have because of the green bar.  I didn't do any flight PvP, but I imagine its not very effective because you can fly straight up, drop your wings to fall, or fly any other direction to get away if things get hairy.  Basically both people would have to just hover and exchange blows...which you can do on the ground.  But like I said, I haven't tried.

Along with the normal take and turn in quests, theres the story quest line which you have to do to get your wings and do the first class change at level 10.  Every once in awhile the quest text would be accompanied by a cutscene full with voice overs which brought me back to my FFXI days and was awesome.  For awhile FFXI was the only MMO which had that and I never really understood, definitly makes you feel more involved (and pay more attention) with the story.

Oh, also, the character creation is terrific!  30+ hairstyles, dozens of faces, height and width bars, and a full color palette for hair, skin, eyes, and lips.

With that note, I have a request.  With the character customization, you have the option of making your character very tiny.  Like...up-to-a-normal-height-characters-knees tiny.  My friend told me when the game first came out, most people choose the normal height or a small variation of it.  Then, when they realized the large PvP aspect of the game, it dawned on them that being tiny made you hard to find and target.  And thus, now 80% of the Korean Aion's population could fit in a handbag.

Ok...so I understand the slight advantage it has in PvP.  But honestly, having a bunch of rodent sized people scurrying around the towns kinda ruins the seriousness and epicness of the game for me.  I don't know NCsofts opinion on this, or if they are going to do something about it for US release, but if they don't...please please PLEASE don't let this happen to the US version :/  As I said, it just makes a beautiful and cutting-edge game feel silly and childish to play.

I don't care if theres giants running around everywhere...just don't make your character small v.v

And for the record, I do NOT believe this game will be a WoW killer.  It took me 10 hours of hardcore quest grinding (and my friend has a level 50 so he knew exactly where to go for everything) while in a party to get level 12 (partying does not gimp you in any way for exp, questing, or other).  My friend told me it took him a week to get level 12 when he played by himself.  Theres enough quests so it hasn't felt like a 'grinding game' for me yet (unlike L2), but I've heard it does get a bit worse.  I don't think the game is "casual enough" to beat WoW.  To me, WoW is the MMO for non-gamers, and this is just a bit too hardcore for people like that and I can forsee them quitting after a week or two. 

For me, as someone who used to wake up at 3am to camp Fafnir for 4 hours, it's not bad at all.

So at my home in California, I set up my account and was able to play FFXI no problem.  At home I use wireless Internet.

I am now on a business trip in Seoul, Korea using wired (Ethernet) Internet.  My browser works, AIM works, WoW works, everything ELSE works, except PlayOnline v.v  It gives me the "Unable to Connect" message and says to check my Internet when obviously its not that.

Any advice?

haHA!  I KNEW I wasn't crazy for remembering Windower made the graphics better!

Honestly, it makes it look almost as good as the regEdit stuff.

Sword of the New World is one of the best F2P games I've seen.  Great graphics and you control 3 characters at once which adds a spin to things.

www.swordofthenewworld.com

:O I didn't know that!

I liked FFXI's UI because its so minimalistic.  You dont' have macro bars and menus and buttons cluttering your screen.  Yes, it takes awhile to learn the slash commands or program your macros, but that's part of the fun for me.  Feels cool when you can keep a tank alive all while swapping people in and out of an alliance and chat at the same time lol.

I loved that you have access to all jobs on one character.  Don't need to add someone and 637463 of their alts to your friendlist or try to keep track of who is who v.v.  The only thing that was a downfall was having to have equip for all your jobs lol.  Your inventory + mog safe + storage filled up fast XD

The sub job system is neat, its interesting to see how people make the different combinations work.  I remember in the beginning PLD/NIN was completely frowned upon because you didn't get provoke.  A few months later PLD/NIN were tanking dragons and healing themselves for aggro.

I think the quest system could have been better.  Quests are pretty much pointless to do, they take tons of time and don't give any good rewards (most anyways).  I liked the Missions with the story line and cut scenes, not many MMOs have cutscenes.

I agree, decorating your mog house was cool, but it would have been even more awesome if other people could come inside your mog house to visit!

I think the party system with the EXP chains is good, but it was very time consuming and you always needed that "perfect party" makeup.  I hope they keep a good party system but do something to make it easier to group (like Level Sync).

More ways to customize your character would be cool both with hairstyles/faces/etc and items.  And it was a little upsetting that all end game healers used the elemental staves and that Healing Brauit (sp?) and RDMs had Errant and DPS had Scopion Harness or Haubergeon.  Everyone ended up looking the same :/  I hope they have more equipment variety.

Hmm...that's all I can think of atm.

Yes, there is.  I actually prefer the laptop keyboard controls to the normal ones anyways.  Here's how to change it:

In the game open the menu, hit -> to change to the second menu.  Go to Config and then I think Gameplay.  There should be different categories include Misc 1 and Misc 2.  Go to Misc 2.  In this window there is a controls option for Normal or Compact.  Set it to Compact.  You will now move with ASDW and the camera with the arrow keys.

So I finally went ahead and reactivated my FFXI account!  The laptop I have now is significantly better than the one I used to play on, but when I logged in I was a little dissapointed with how the game looked.  I definitly remember the graphics looking crisper 2 years ago.  So I did the obvious thing and uped the resolution to 1920*1200 (which is what my laptop is set at).  This made the menus and text really great, but the models are still a bit rough.  I even set the texture compression to Uncompressed which helped, but still isn't at what I'd like.

Then I remembered I used to use Windower, which some how made the graphics a lot nicer as well as  put the game in a window.  When going through the options I noticed there is a "Start game in a Window" check box though.  So, my ultimate question(s) is:

Do people still use Windower?

If not, any other advice on how to made the game look sharp?

I didn't read all 10+ pages so sorry if someone already said this, but if anyone is looking for a good jobless game I highly recommend Titan Online.  The graphics aren't out of this world but your character is completely crafted from stat points, weapon/magic skills, and passive skills and theres lots to do.  I think it just got out of Open Beta, might even still be in Open Beta.  It's f2p too.

WAHHHHH IM SO EXCITED!  I can't wait to waste away another half a decade or more on a SE mmo.

I was on the fence about reactiviting my account, but I think this pushed me over into doing it :)  Thanks for all the information, I haven't played in about 2 years.

I'm actually going to E3 next week and I heard Square Enix is going to annouce their new MMO there, so I'm going to wait and get the details on that first.  If it seems promising and is going to be released in the next few months, I'll probably just wait for that.  Otherwise, I'll reactivate my Mithra :P

Ok...to start, I used to play FFXI back when it first came out.  I played it for 4 years, everyday, for hours on end.  About two years ago the officers in my Linkshell quit and started playing WoW, and ultimately I quit too.  I kid you not, I've had dreams of starting to play the game again, thats how much I miss it, but I never did.  I recently started talking to an old Linkshell member of mine (who still plays) and he tipped me into seriously considering to come back.   I contacted SE CS to see if my character would still be available, they told me I would have to log into POL to find out, but even if it wasn't, they could get it back for me, so that fear has already been settled. 

My only other fear is time requirement.  I'm not in college anymore, I have a full time job, I definitly don't have 8+ hours a day to play.  In the past the game was very time consuming, I remember camping/fighting bosses for hours and hours.  Even missions would take awhile, and if you couldn't stay in a party for at least 3 hours, it wasn't worth joining.  So, my question is, with only 2-3 hours to play at a time now, is it worth coming back?

Honestly, even if everyone says no, I probably still will, just to see a few of my old friends and be nostalgic (although it would probably end up depressing me), but I'm really hoping thats not the case XD  So what do you think?

~Melieza Asura Server 75 Red Mage 75 Samurai 70 White Mage

Have you played any of the Unreal Tournament games?

They have a more sci-fi and futuristic feel to them like Halo, but no customization like War Rock or Op 7.

Operation 7.

Its relatively new and pretty similar to War Rock, but better I think.

http://op7.netgame.com/