Final Fantasy XI is entering August with some additional 20th anniversary campaign events to continue the celebrations. There’s also a recent interview with FFXI Producer Matsui on 20th anniversaries, pros and cons of classic servers, and more.
When it comes to events, Vana’diel will be getting the Fun in the Sun campaign starting on August 5th. The first part of the event will run through August 22nd and part two will go from August 22-31st. The event features a whole list of bonuses and campaigns for rewards to celebrate the anniversary as well as offer new chances to get special rewards you may have missed in the past.
For some of these campaigns, like the Abyssea Campaign, if you’ve already done them before, you won’t get rewarded again, so feel free to skip those, but there are other opportunities that should grant bonuses and stuff you may have missed.
Among these is the Surge Walk campaign which makes all Walk of Echoes content surge walks for the duration. If you participate, you'll get items and triple experience and capacity points. It's worth looking at the full list of event campaigns in each half of August to see what you qualify for and plan out how you want to take advantage. While Final Fantasy XI does often run several campaigns simultaneously for different rewards, celebrating 20 years definitely increases the volume.
On classic servers, Matsui isn’t sold, for the most part. He says, “I personally have a negative view of classic servers. First of all, assuming we could even recreate the game environment as it was at a certain point in time, there'd still be complaints and issues unique to that version of the game.” Because Final Fantasy XI has been running for 20 years but hasn’t upended things in the sense that something like World of Warcraft has, so, this is further reason for him. “It's understandable that some people feel nostalgic for the past, but from my point of view as a producer, I'd like to devote FFXI's limited resources to enhancing the satisfaction level of the content we have today,” he says.
Read the full interview, (which also features Ragnarok Online GM Yoshitada Iwata on both games’ 20th anniversaries and more) over at Final Fantasy XI.
