I know some of you people like Switch and DiseasedPunk like this game, and I want to know why. The reason I ask this is because I played an honest 2 hours of it at my friends house, just to say I had played it, and found it to be the most boring, generic game I have EVER played.

Now I don't mean to bash this game to hell, but I just want to know why people find it so "enjoyable".

-val

See my topic here...

Legalized Extortion

I cannot speak to the game play, however, as I have never played it.

I didn't buy it at all, after I knew it was to be played entirely online. I don't play
online games... when developers decide to make MMRPGs, I feel like it means
that they try to get the most money out of you and save a lot of their work by
actually having you put your imagination in the game. I never played an
online RPG though... are there any good free ones that you like so that
I can criticize them more properly?

Well 2 hours is hardly enough to get the full feel of the game anyway especially if you started in Bastok, which can be quite a boring area.

As for the percs... well there are so many, I'm not sure where to start (expect a loooong post).

1: You get your own house right from the start, something I've never seen in any MMORPGs before, so you avoid the problem of there being an extortionate housing market (like UO).

2: You can furnish your mog house however you like. Furniture can get a bit pricey, but the basic stuff is quite cheap.

3: You can grow your own plants, depending on how you treat them they'll give decent rewards.

4: The graphical detail is impeccable compared to games like EverQuest. No cr@ppy chainmail painted onto the walls, etc.

5: An incredibly huge world to explore. Running from the top to bottom of the continent it would take about 8 hours. Real world time. Really. And almost each and every area is unique.

6: Chocobos. You get to ride one once you hit Level 20, and they're VERY fast (they're basically FF's answer to horses). Quite fun to ride plus they can dig for treasure if you feed them Gysahl Greens.

7: Excellent atmosphere and soundtrack, each area has it's own feel to it.

8: Battles are a hell of a lot better than other games, as each weapon on each race has a good 5 or 6 different animations to add variety, and you can unlock some pretty impressive skills later on once your skill with these weapons increase. You can also chain these skills when in a party by unleashing one weapon skill then another within a couple seconds of eachother to cause very nice damage and effects. The same goes for magic. I've never come across this in any MMORPGs before.

9: The cities. Sand'Oria for one, is a very impressive city, as is Jeuno even more impressive than that, I've never seen cities this good in any games I've played.

10: Craft skills, there are loads. You can fish, cook, do carpentry, smithing, clothmaking, (all the usual ones, not that unique to MMORPGs I know, but the way they're done is very good IMO. Like being able to find "Harvest Spots" where you can use tools to harvest materials, and depending on where you fish and using what bait you can get tons of different fish. It's more fun than you might think ).

11: There's an Auction House system to sell expensive items to other players, you just put the items in, set a price, and leave to do whatever you want, even log off, if they sell the profits are automatically sent to your mog safe at your house. Much simpler than sitting around leaving the PC on all night with your bazaar.

12: You're not limited to one class, you can change whenever you want and still keep your skills, spells, levels, stats, etc in your other job. So you can level as many jobs as you want and just pick one when you want to play it, so really you only need one character, provided you keep enough space to store all the different armours in your mog safe

Well those are just some of the percs, I could probably go on all day if I really thought about it

So basically it's a big UO ripoff that DOES have good graphics. UO had plant growing long before. At least in UO you can BUILD your own house and change how it looks tile by tile.

And just wait till I've made my own world on my UO server

Just from the little information that Switch just gave, about why its a good game... makes me want to play it !! and i'nve never even seen it before lol

You don't have to log out and change characters to play a different job either, all you really need is to have 1 character and go to you moghouse and he will switch your jobs back and forth for ya. This doesn't make you lose any exp of your other jobs either. So you could be a lvl20 warrior and then switch to a lvl 1 white mage, and if you want to switch back to your 20 warrior you can. also
-impossible to kill steal
-instanced battles (with the huge 40+ named monstesr "BCNMs" to prevent camping)
-Awesome graphics
-You don't have to play for hours and hours to get something done
-getting a group has never been easier in any mmorpg
-its not plagued with idiots(yet)
-its a great way to improve your japanese skills even though thers an in game translator
-MANY trade skills including cooking, eating certain things affects your skills
-you don't have to go find your corpse after you die...
-Money is easy to come by so gearing yourself up isn't near impossible at lower levels
-theres an auction house that sells your stuff to people so you don't have to stand around yelling WTS AXE OF FLAMETHROWING +4, you can actually just leave and continue doing whatever.
-you can also sell stuff out of your inventory by going in a certain mode so people can just insepect your items for sale and click which one they want to buy it right off of you
-theres mogs in it ( i love mogs )
-The music is actually good vs ...most other mmo music
-square actually cares about its customers unlike SOE, im not sure about other mmo companies
-You have the playonline viewer where you can chat, play mini games, read FFXI guides and news letters as well as even review your payments for the game with a history of how much you paid on exact dates, where with SOE you'd have to bug them for like a month and even then you might not get the information.
-It's fun....if you wait till your in your highi 20's at least.

Anyways yeah, the only other game that comes close to it is world of warcraft And when retail is out im still keeping my FFXI account.

Theres a lot of free mmo's out there, guild wars for one. I recalls seeing a list on http://www.onrpg.com but they're not "top quality", they're just fun.

You guys have almost convinced me. The only thing I'm irked by is the technical niggles. I've heard stories, read comics and know peope that have experienced the 3 hour install times.

Also, I think it's increbly expensive for a video game. $14 a month + the $50 to purchase the game. I mean, I just can't stand throwing down $50 for a game, much less a monthly fee THAT big (UO's is like, what $10?).

I do love mogs and chocobos, though.

-val

Don't forget community events like at Christmas,they placed 5 or 6 Giant Christmas tree Ents around the world for players to kill in a certain amount of time to get a server wide gift. There was litteraly hundreds of players attacking one ent. Great fun to see a mass of players attacking it. Mages in the back rows healing and cursing like craxy,and swarms of Fighting people up front. Great fun.

Its is a really long install time but its not that big of a deal if you have cable or dsl...i mean who would really be playing an mmorpg if they don't have at least dsl . As for community events theres a ton. They had christmas trees during the christmas season, and also a bunch of japanese holidays where moogles around towns were passing out these fireworks that you could run around and set off. They also have a bunch of special event quests that change constantly it seems, I'm constantly seeing new NPCs somewhere with a new quest to start at least monthly. The new balista events are awesome also requiring huge groups of two different factions and battling each other. If you win you usually get money or gear and other random stuff. Theres also BCNM (burning circle notorious monsters) where different linkshells form battle parties to take out huge creatures that drop nice armor and what not. It seems like they took the good points of previous mmo's and made them better, and took the bad parts of other mmo's and fixed it.

as for price its not 14 but 12 a month if you choose not to play the other little card mmorpg that comes with it, which is 2 extra dollars / month.

Yeah, money wise it's $12.95 per month, and the first month is free (so you can try before you start the monthly payments), you only pay 90c extra per new character you make (and you can easily get by with one, as was stated earlier.) Believe me, it's well worth the extra.

As for install times, yes it takes about 30 mins to an hour to install I think, but it's the patching process you really have to worry about. Roughly 3 hours on DSL, trust me you do NOT want to do this on dial-up

But it's all well worth it.