My Final Farewell to FFXI

It’s been several years since the release of Final Fantasy XI, and several years since I “broke it off” because of the game’s failure to put-out the way I like my games to put-out. Yet even after all this time, I still feel hostility toward my experience playing in a similar way I feel hostility toward some ex-girlfriends. And I just haven’t been able to let go. So here’s my final attempt to make amends before turning my back and saying goodbye forever to a dysfunctional and unsatisfying relationship.

Most MMO’s have several commonalities. Most never end, (or, at least, not in the traditional sense of finishing a campaign with cut scenes and credits) most provide some form of quest system to assist the player in their leveling experience and make the grind less tedious, and most offer an expansive world that feels just real enough to confuse the barrier between reality and fantasy. Final Fantasy XI shares only one of these commonalities.

Everything in FFXI feels very real. And I’m not talking about graphic quality or any of the visual affects offered (although they aren’t terribly impressive, either). I’m talking about having to deal with similar bull crap nobody wants to deal with in the real world. And this reality, taken several steps too far, is responsible for every problem I have with the game.

My first complaint revolves around transportation. Most of us, when traveling to work or school, use a car. Some of us take a bus. Some even use a tram if it’s an available option. My point is, we use transportation because it gets us from point A to point B faster than walking.

FFXI also provides a form of transportation called the Chocobo. But you can’t use it until you reach level twenty and complete a nine hour quest that involves buying greens (which I will cover in more detail when I bitch about the games economy) and feeding the stupid thing. Once you’ve reached level twenty and completed the feeding quest, you don’t get to keep the Chocobo. Each time you use it, a fee is required that is determined by the amount of Chocobos currently being used by other players. If the number of Chocobo’s being used is high, the cost sky-rockets. Then, once you arrive at your destination and get off the Chocobo, it leaves you stranded, forcing you to return by foot.

My problem with this wouldn’t be as significant if the world wasn’t enormous. But the fact is, I spent at least forty percent of my play-time traveling by foot. On many occasions I was forced to run between two of the main cities, a whopping thirty real minutes from one city to the next.

The game does offer one other form of transportation—the airship. If you’re lucky enough to carry a boarding pass, be level fifty, and be heading in the direction of one of its three destinations, you can use the airship every forty-five minutes.

My next complaint revolves around the leveling system. Setting aside the irritation I felt after being obliterated by a level thirty-eight rabbit when I was level fifty-nine, my major problem lies with party structure.

FFXI was designed to force players into groups to kill more powerful monsters. I actually like this aspect of the game. I enjoy gaining levels with groups of people more than I enjoy playing alone. But the structure of the group system, combined with lack of players, provides endless frustration when looking for a group or attempting to create one.

When grouping with others, there are several rules that must be followed.

First, you must find players that are within two levels of each other. For example, if I’m level fifty, I must group with players level forty-eight to fifty, or players level fifty to fifty-two. If I’m in the group of players level fifty to fifty-two, and the level fifty-two player levels to fifty-three before all level fifty players are fifty-one, he must leave the party or experience goes down the drain. (If you understand that you’ll know that it’s dumb). This causes an unnecessary amount of time asking questions and searching for players in the proper level range.

Second, the classes that makeup your parties are very specific. A party is made of five players. Among these five players, the following classes are required: Paladin, White Mage, and Bard/Red Mage. The damage-dealing classes are interchangeable. If you’ve managed to build a party with all required classes except the White Mage, and there is no groupless White Mage in your level range currently online, then your balls out of luck. Your next step is to speak to the party leader of a currently formed party (if there is one) and tell him you’d like to be put on the waiting list, or wait for a White Mage to come online and hope the other players in your party are willing to wait (because you might be waiting for eight hours).

To refrain from writing a novel (and trust me, I’ve considered it), I will express only one last large frustration. In fact, this last problem, in my opinion, is the core issue with FFXI. It’s also one of the core issues in our country right now (remember that real world bull crap I talked about?).

The economy in FFXI is totally screwed because it’s controlled by the players. All items and equipment worth having are sold through an auction house. Each item’s information shows you how many are available and the price history for the last ten sold. This information gives players a perfect arrangement for jacking up the price whenever an item’s availability is zero.

And they take advantage of that. When a popular item is not available and the price history shows the last ten selling for approximately twenty million, most players will place that item on the auction house for twenty-five million… then thirty million… then thirty-three million, etc. Before you know it, the items price has become seventy million – an impossible amount for any new player to afford (severely reducing the chances of new players being successful in the game). Because of this, the rich, higher level players get richer, and the poor, lower level players get poorer. Let me share with you an example.

Once I attained level forty as a Dark Knight, players wouldn’t group with me unless I had two Sniper Rings. These rings improved accuracy and transformed my character from useless to useful. I had two options for acquiring the rings. I could either compete with the numerous Chinese gil farmers (Asians who sell game money for real money) to find and kill the monster who appeared once per hour and dropped the ring three percent of the time you killed it. Or I could spend the time earning and saving money to pay the ridiculous price of twenty million gil per ring. Although it may not sound like it, earning and saving money was the more practical route; and it was the route I took. Eight hours per day and three months later, I had saved enough to buy both rings (and in those three months the price had increased from twenty million per ring to thirty million). Dumb.

And now that I’ve gotten all of that out of my system, I will answer a question that I have been contemplating while I’ve been writing. And, perhaps it is even a question you have been considering while reading. If the game is so terrible, why the hell do I know so much about it? Well, the straight forward answer is that I’m a competitive ass hole. I don’t like being beaten. Even in spite of all the things I hate about FFXI (and there are many more I won’t cover) I had to keep playing. It wasn’t until I had logged fifty-five days of playing time, only to discover I wasn’t more than half way to the level cap, did I throw in the towel. And until today, I’ve never vented properly. Goodbye FFXI. Goodbye forever. I won’t think of you again, and I hope you don’t think of me.

SDTV's don't have to suck!

Like I mentioned in a previous post, after PAX I went up even farther north to hang out with Squash for a week of sitting around and playing games ‘til the early hours of the morning. So pretty much what I normally do, just with Squash… so pretty much what we used to do until he moved to Washington. While there I finally finished Fallout 3, and still plan on eventually finishing that post about it that I started back in July. Then I started Banjo-Kazooie and Star Ocean 4, which I am still currently working my way through.

What I want to talk about today however, has much more to do with the television I was playing these games on. At my house, I have a 50 inch 1080p DLP rear projection television made in 2006 or 2007, I can’t quite remember, but it has all the goodies you’d ever want for gaming. Maybe not the best HDTV by today’s standards, but it gets the job done wonderfully. Squash also has a nice 1080p LCD that he uses for all this gaming needs, aside from that horrible World of Warcraft addiction of his. We are both pretty adamantly opposed to playing splitscreen. Especially on HDTV’s because of the 16:9 ratio, which provides no good way to split the screen and still give players a good aspect ratio. Sadly, I think Halo 3’s solution is the best, which wastes large chunks of screen real estate by outputting the game in 4:3 and splitting it the traditional way. Anyway, I’m getting off topic. You might even say I digress, but that’d be dumb. So, the point was, we hate splitscreen so when he used to come to my house, he’d actually lug his 37 inch TV with him. Mine on the other hand, while actually being a good deal lighter, is far more impractical because it’s gigantic. Not to mention having to unhook the thousands of things I have plugged into the back. So what I’d do is just bring my 360 and hook it up to his old CRT. It’s a pretty decent size, definitely over 30 inches, but it can still only do 480i.

So back on track, I played Fallout 3 for a good 5 to 10 hours before moving onto the other titles and had no real problems with the display. Sure it didn’t look as nice in the lower resolution, and reading text was a bit more tedious do to the interlacing, but it worked. No real complaints there. Banjo-Kazooie, however, wasn’t so nice. The game looked like it had a thin layer of Vaseline smeared over the camera lens, and the text was quite small, which combined with said Vaseline made it very difficult to read. The game has even been patched because of text complaints and I still had to struggle to read anything. Picking out my vehicle among all the other objects was like trying to focus on a fast moving brownish blob in the middle of a puddle of Skittle induced vomit. How’s that for tasting the rainbow! …Sorry. So I’m exaggerating a bit, but it was tedious. It was playable, but I found myself with a dull headache after a short time from concentrating so hard on simply seeing. Alternatively, playing the game on my TV provides a crisp picture, that really shows the amount of detail and polish Rare put into their game. It looks outstanding.

Star Ocean is the same way. The bloody thing doesn’t even run in 4:3. There are black bars while playing on an SDTV forcing the widescreen ratio. The text is even harder to read than Banjo-Kazooie, but infinitely more important, and not just for the story. It’s absolutely horrible because Star Ocean is an RPG that has a lot of menu micromanagement. It’s quite fun to build your characters various skills and battle abilities, but not when you can’t read anything! It also suffers from the general blurry hazy quality Banjo-Kazooie has that results in a headache after playing for any significant length of time. Lo and behold, bringing the game back to my house to finish brought out the true high def glory that is so easy on the eyes. Both games look great on an HD display.

Last I heard though, most 360 owners don’t own HDTV’s. They are getting cheaper, but they are still a bit of an outrageous purchase for the average consumer. So if that is the case, why are all these games seemingly not being tested on SDTV’s. This seems like a bit of an absurd problem considering how long it has been going on. Dead Rising suffered from this problem and it came out way back in 2006. HDTV penetration was significantly lower back then and the PS3 had yet to even launch. HD console gaming was still in its infancy and already developers were blowing off the displays that we’ve used for the previous few decades.

What’s the deal with this? Last generation I never had this problem. The best any of the consoles could do was 480p, and the standard was 480i. That meant everything was tested and designed to run on that type of television. Now that console developers are forced to make games run on multiple resolutions I think I can see where the problems come from. Of the games I’ve played in SD on my 360, the ones developed by primarily PC studios always seem to do better. Orange Box, Oblivion/Fallout 3, and Gears of War are all made by studios that became famous on the PC first. Meaning from day one they had multiple resolutions in mind. That’s just correlation, probably not causation, but it’s a theory nonetheless!

In any case, this was more a rant than anything else, I won’t claim to have any real wisdom you can gain from reading this article, but if you must take something away from it.... Either developers start testing your games on regular TV’s, or everyone else get with the program and buy a shiny new HDTV. And most importantly, Squash, buy a second HDTV so I have something to use during my increasingly rare visits to your house. Get a job, hippie!

How the Mighty have Fallen

Back at the beginning of the year I had to make a nice 16 hour drive from Washington back down to Utah. In order to fill part of the time I listened to Giant Bomb’s huge game of the year podcast. In it, they discussed a dozen or so games they loved, and then quickly whittled their list down to GTA4 and MGS4. Oddly, it still took them almost 2 hours to decide on which one deserved game of the year, and odder still they both came out quite early in the year. Anyway, that’s beside the point. The reason I brought this up is because one of the podcasters, I think Brad Shoemaker, briefly defended Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. I remember hearing nothing spectacular about it when it came out, and since I was out of the country for the majority of the ridiculous holiday season rush last year, I hadn’t considered playing it. Well the podcast convinced me to add it to my ever growing list of games to play. Finally, 9 months later I’m giving it a whirl and it is actually quite good. A quick look at MetaCritic shows I’m not the only one who thought so.

This got me thinking, why have Rare games done so poorly since Microsoft purchased them? Looking over their list of games since the purchase makes me think it isn’t deserved. I never played anything they released on the original Xbox, but their 360 lineup seems fairly solid, barring Perfect Dark Zero, which was just absolutely terrible. I found Kameo, Viva Pinata and Nuts and Bolts to be at the very least above average and at times truly spectacular. All three had rich colorful environments, something I hear gamers asking for all the time these days in between purchasing every brown and gray shooter released. More importantly they all had solid gameplay mechanics that were above all, fun. Yet, none of them sold all that well. In fact, I’m fairly certain the brown and gray Perfect Dark Zero sold the best. Ironically, it is also the only one of their 360 games I actually own. :(

So what gives? Why isn’t anyone buying their games? Is the stereotype of 360 owners being interested in nothing but shooters actually true? Probably to some extent, but I think a large part of it is bad marketing. I mean, c’mon, Microsoft’s ads lately have been pretty horrendous. What I really mean though is it seems like Microsoft has been trying to use Rare as their gateway to smaller children. Right now the Wii and DS dominate the child gaming market and Microsoft wants in on it. The problem is they are marketing games like Viva Pinata and Banjo-Kazooie as childrens games, but then are making the games too complex for children to be interested in. I only played the demo of Viva Pinata and by the end started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of things I had to keep track of. Nuts and Bolts on the other hand isn’t overly complicated, but does require you to invent some pretty fine tuned vehicles, which may leave some of the younger children confused. Both these games offer rewarding and thoughtful gameplay that adults can enjoy, but because they are marketed toward children they are overlooked.

I have a feeling Rare and Microsoft have different ideas about what they want the studio to be, which is causing a bit of a problem in the way their games are handled. Hopefully Project Natal provides another outlet for the 360 to win over more of the younger market, freeing up Rare to do whatever it is they want. Though from the sounds of it, Rare is already jumping on making games with Natal and will continue their kid oriented games. Who knows, maybe I'm wrong and Rare is doing exactly what Rare wants. At the very least, it’s nice to know they are still capable of putting out a quality title, even if no one is buying them.

Kratos' Inferno

Back near the end of last year the highly anticipated new Prince of Persia came out. It received very divided reviews, some calling it excellent and others calling it crap. Stephen Totilo instead wrote about some of the stark similarities between Prince of Persia and Shadow of the Colossus. I remember wondering how copyright laws for similar media is handled, but just shrugged it off because I thought the games were different enough. I'm guessing Team ICO and Sony did too because no one ever got sued over it.

Fast forward to a couple months ago and you'll find people making these same accusations about EA's new game Dante's Inferno. The only difference this time is the two games, the other being God of War, look incredibly similar. I'd link a video, but I'm still at Squash's house and his internet is far too painfully slow to sift through a few streaming videos for a good example. Anyway, I didn't think much of it until I got to demo Dante's Inferno at PAX. Now I think I can safely be astonished that this game has been allowed to get so far along into development.

After playing for a few minutes it was clear that the art style, while set in hell as opposed to ancient Greece still felt quite remiscent of God of War's fairly distinct style. The enemy design also looked a lot like stuff we've all fought and killed throughout the various temples in our ancient escapades. Clearly, whoever designed that fat snake looking thing has seen the Medusa type creatures rampant in Sony's game, especially the third sister in GoW2. Not to mention the main characters animation, he wields a scythe, but he swings it around leaving a nice blur of whatever and the camera slows down just as he finishes off a powerful combo to add that awesome effect for emphasis. Something we all fell in love four years ago, once again in God of War.

The combat in Dante's Inferno also uses the same QTE's and even the same little glowy ball things that the player must interact with in order to get the needed height to fight the giant monstrosities so typical of the God of War series.

In the games defense, I have no idea what the story will be. I can't imagine it could be very similar to God of War at all seeing as how it's named after a famous book about hell, while God of War is loosely based on Greek mythology. However, after watching a few trailers and playing the demo, I question how much of the source material from The Divine Comedy they used at all. It's been several years since I read Dante's Inferno, but I don't remember anyone running through with a scythe pulling off crazy Kratos-esque action in the poem I read. Still, I doubt the story will be very similar.

As I said earlier, I was left wondering with Prince of Persia where the line for copyright infringement is drawn, but shrugged it off because they were so different. Now we have one game that is very obviously ripping off another game, yet Sony still doesn't seem to care. Is this all legal or what? I'm sure both companies have a huge team of lawyers, and we hear all the time about industry giants suing the crap out of each other. I wonder if Sony is perhaps holding out to demand a share of the profits once the game is released, or they simply don't think it's worth the trouble, or maybe through some series of loopholes all this replication is actually legal? I wouldn't be surprised is there aren't any copyright laws to protect specific gameplay elements, but it is shocking to see just how similar the two are. I'm curious to see what ends up happening, if anything, when Dante's Inferno is released in the coming months. And if any of you know anything about copyright law, leave a comment.

PAX was awesome!

I finally have access to a computer after the last week at my friends house near Seattle. As you probably gleaned from the title, I was there checking out PAX for the weekend and am now a couple hours north of Seattle at Squash's house for the rest of the week. His internet connection totally blows, but it should suffice for blogging. I think a 56K would probably suffice for blogging....

So PAX was pretty kickass. I'd have to say it was better than TGS '08 in just about every possible way. There were way more games to play, the lines were far shorter, there were tons of talks, live podcasts and best of all, it was all in english! Over the course of the weekend I was able to demo around twenty games myself and watch others demo another twenty. If I was patient enough I could have played all forty, but after watching others play for five or ten minutes I often didn't see the point in playing the demo myself.

The best part of PAX however had to be the atmosphere. Everyone was very nice and incredibly knowledgeable about all things video games. Several of my favorite journalist and podcasters were there and equally friendly. Waiting in lines was hardly a bother because the guys behind or in front of me were always willing to chat about anything and everything they had seen.

If you have the means I highly recommend going. Garnett Lee mentioned during his live recording of 1upYours (which isn't up yet) that PAX is what all conventions should strive to be. After checking out TGS last year, I'd have to say I wholeheartedly agree. By only allowing the press to these events they are excluding the very people they are actually having the convention for.

Anyway, that's probably enough gushing about PAX for now. If I have some time in the next few days I'll try to write up some impressions on some of the more memorable games. Slevin was there with me so maybe I'll get him to write something up, don't hold your breath though.

Summer Slump

So I’ve been in a bit of a summer slump. I’m not entirely sure why, but for the first time in awhile games ceased to engage me. I generally find the summer drought to be a wonderful time to catch up on my giant and ever growing backlog. For whatever reason, every time I perused my list this summer, I found nothing I really wanted to play. Just about every game on the list is a game of at least some note; otherwise I wouldn’t have put it on the list. I just didn’t feel like playing games. There are probably several reasons for this, but I think a large part of it was a general disinterest in most of the games I did play this summer.

The slump seemed to start after I finished Chronicles of Riddick, which is when I started Fallout 3. Fallout 3 is, as far as I can tell, a vast improvement over almost every gameplay mechanic I had a problem with in Oblivion. The leveling system is straight forward and doesn’t require micromanagement, the combat system is much less awkward, and the VATS is a wonderful way of blending real time combat with turn based strategy. With generally hilarious results I might add. Still, it has utterly failed to captivate me for a few reasons I’ll get into once I actually put a few more sessions into playing it.

After that I started playing Majora’s Mask with the Vintage Game Club. This game resulted in a whole hell of a lot more discussion than Alpha Centauri ever did, but it seemed that everyone grew to loathe the title more and more until we were left with around six people that actually finished the game. I came to realize why it is the black sheep of the franchise. Not because of the time limit, it really is a non-issue once you learn how to slow time down less than an hour into the game. It’s because most of the game feels like a rushed and uninspired mess. There is a general lack of polish that often lead to bad game design and, of course, user frustration. That might be a little harsh, but considering the high standards that Zelda and the other Nintendo franchises are always held too, it’s easy to condemn a game that is merely average, especially when it so shortly followed Ocarina of Time.

Moving right along, I played inFAMOUS. The game was fun, but the entire time I just kept thinking I’d rather be playing Crackdown. I love the “sand box with awesome powers to exploit” style games, but inFAMOUS ended up feeling more like a glorified shooter without enough entertaining abilities. Don’t get me wrong, there were tons of abilities to use, but there were only about three or four you actually needed for almost all situations.

Don’t even get me started again on the Gears of War 2: Road to Ruin DLC. On the plus side, it seems like most of the online multiplayer has finally been ironed out. Now I’ve found myself getting owned from lack of experience rather than lack of latency, which is very refreshing.

I also played House of the Dead: Overkill for a couple hours, but that was almost a non-entity considering how fast I plowed through the main story and how much faster I lost interest.

The reason I think my slump in gaming and subsequent slump in blogging was caused by a bunch of games I didn’t really like is because of the last two games I played. ‘Splosion Man and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Both of these games are quite spectacular and helped to reinvigorate my interest in playing. ‘Splosion Man is a charming little sidescroller reminiscent of N+. There is only one button, which causes you to explode. It’s basically jump, but you can do it up to three times. This hardly prevents the game from becoming brutally complex and difficult though it ramps up at a slow enough pace to not be a major turnoff. The game really shines in co-op, the possibilities increase tenfold by adding what is essentially a second set of explosions to the mix. With proper timing you and your partner can reach heights far higher than you ever could alone. ‘Splosion Man also sports a style very reminiscent of that wacky ‘90s cartoon Freakazoid, which naturally is hilarious.

Red Faction: Guerilla is the other game I played and is a perfect example of the “sand box with awesome powers” type game that inFAMOUS failed to be for me. As a player you don’t even have super powers, unless you count being able to tear down skyscrapers with a sledgehammer, but everything they allow you to do is hilarious and most importantly fun. The game is also absolutely gorgeous. I often found myself just looking up to see the constant motion of the Martian sky. I have no idea how open world games keep getting bigger and prettier with every new one I play, but I’m all for it.

Anyway, that pretty much sums up the last couple months of my gaming exploits. I suppose it doesn’t look like month of a slump considering I mentioned seven games, but I spent a fraction of what I usually do and as you are well aware, wrote a fraction. I hope to end the blogging slump by writing about whatever cool shit I do at PAX next weekend, but since I no longer have a laptop this might prove to be more difficult. At the very least, I am now very much looking forward to trying some new games, something I haven’t felt since the end of June.

It came from the FETID WATERS!

Maybe I didn’t give House of the Dead: Overkill a fair shot, but light gun rail shooters, or whatever they are called (first person rail shooters according to Wikipedia) haven’t seemed to offer anything new since I first played Area 51 in some bowling alley when I was 9. After playing through the main storyline, a feat that only took two hours, I think I am fairly safe in my assumption. I only even considered Overkill after hearing a few of the bloggers I like raving about it earlier this year. Now that I think about it however, all the praise I do remember hearing was not about the gameplay so much as the over the top characters and purposely clichéd scenarios.

This brings up an interesting point. When can a games’ presentation and style be enough to keep players interested? That is essentially what successful action films like Transformers 2 do. Anytime you hear someone say, “Well, I didn’t watch it for the story” you can rest assured that they watched it for something else (hopefully the mindless action or visual effects and not Megan Fox in slow motion). The same applies to games that people don’t play for the story, but are there any games people play just for the story? Off the top of my head I can think of several games I grew tired of near the end, but finished for the story, but only one that I grew tired of fairly early on and trudged on solely for the story.

That game is Yakuza, one of the last few remaining decent franchises of the once great Sega. I played through it last Thanksgiving after it gathered a bit of a cult following in the U.S. and almost immediately grew tired of its combat. The game has a decent sized city to explore among other things, but as far as gameplay was concerned, you were either running errands from place to place or brawling. Sadly, the combat wasn’t nearly as deep as a game this focused on it needs to be. Still, even with my early disinterest with the combat Yakuza’s intricate gangster family storyline had me intrigued enough to continue mashing Square, Square, Triangle for another six hours…. I’m kind of a sucker for gangster movies, and I’d never really seen a compelling one about the Yakuza. Who would have thought I’d find it in a video game? Take that Ebert!

Anyway, I’m guessing the reason I could only come up with one game on a whim is because this doesn’t happen that often and honestly, it really shouldn’t. First off, games generally have terrible stories. More importantly however, they tend to have at least ten hours of play in them while only telling a few hours of story. Games have to captivate with interesting play mechanics first, otherwise you might as well just go consume some other form of storytelling.

I wonder how long the critics who liked Overkill actually played it? I can totally see what they were raving about, Brainy Gamer sums it up perfectly. Yet after two hours, I had seen and played enough. It was a fun two hours, especially the parts I played with a friend, but the ridiculous humor and style wasn’t enough to hold me for long. In defense of the critiques I’m referring to, none were official reviews of the game as much as comments in passing about what they liked about it. If forced to talk about lasting power I imagine everyone would say something a little different. Or maybe I’m just way off base here and people still like first person rail shooters, while the excellent parody of over the top horror movies of yesteryear was just icing on the cake.

Either way, I kind of want to add, “Motherfuck” to my collection of commonly used swear words now.