EQ Over FF11Follow

Not only did you forget to include *any* supporting arguments for why the creators should be shot for the game (which in itself is a terrible representation of your opinion), but you did it with such terrible written skills it makes me wonder if anyone actually listens to one iota of what you have to say.


As for FFXI, I just bought it myself today and played it some, and it seems like a pretty cool game. Not EQ, but that's not exactly a bad thing. Of course I'm reserving my final opinion until I'm a bit higher level (3 White mage so far).



Edited, Tue Aug 3 22:11:31 2004 by emperorjeremy

I could belive it but not everyone has the same taste in games, some people cant stand RPG's or online games.

That right there is your main problem. "I played it for a few hours, and then formed an opinion."

If you've ever played more than ONE online RPG (or any deep game, really), you should know it sometimes takes MORE than just a few hours of game time to find out whether or not you like it.


A prime example -- How I started playing Everquest.

In the beginning, I was an Asheron's Call 1 player. I played the bejesus out of it for about 3 months, but got really bored with the gameplay (it was pretty bland). Then, I read a writeup on EQ at GameSpot.com, and thought it was awesome. Lots of classes and races.

I rush out to Babbage's and buy a copy, get home, install it, and TRY to play it for about an hour or so. The graphics were CRAP compared to AC, the controls were wacky, and the camera view was absolutely horrid (AC had a very superior 3rd person camera...and still does).

I tried returning the game to Babbage's, but they wouldn't take it back because I had registered it...so I was stuck with something I hated.

Fast forward about a week, and I tell myself "I should give it another chance." So, I forced myself to play EQ, and to learn more about it. That was about May of 2000. More than 4 years later, I'm still playing the game.


So, I really wouldn't rush to judgement on any game, especially something as complex as FF XI. I'm by *no* means a fanboi of the game (and actually, my friends practically talked me into buying it)...but after giving it a chance, and some time, I'm starting to like it.

Graphics - Very nice.

Mobs -- More personality than EQ...even level 2/3 mobs will do some wacky stuff that makes you go "Uh oh."

Controls - Easy, once you get used to them. You can do everything without even touching a mouse.

Quests - Unknown, I'm still fighting low level crap.

Classes - Sorta neat so far, but I like EQ classes better...they
seem more developed.

I'm not gonna turn this into a FF vs EQ thing, or a FF review, but what I'm saying is had I just given up on FF (or EQ) after the first hour or two of playing, I would have missed out on some great times (and times to come apparently, with FF).

I do not know anything about FFXI, never played it...but I do agree with the above, no matter what MMORPG you are playing. I do not know how many times I told newbies back when EQ was young, to just give it a chance. They would be complaining about how it sucked that they kept getting polar bear cub adds when killing gobbie whelps in everfrost newb zone...I would tell them (in what has to be the no kidding statement of the year) "it does get better, I promise!"

As for graphics, of course it is better. A lot has happened in video technology in the 5 years since EQ came out...and even though EQ has had it's graphics updates from time to time, they still have tried to not run way out in front of what the users currently had (although the dx9 upgrade hurt alot of people).

Oh, and EQ does have a major graphics update on the way...it is called EQ2.

Edited, Wed Aug 4 12:29:12 2004 by lhuffman

At this point, I agree about choosing EQ over FF11, the only difference is, I'm going to explain why.

First, the good things about FFXI, because yes, it DOES infact have many awesome qualities.

Graphics. They are quite stunning. The animations are more or less quite smooth, and spell effects are quite detailed. Most are unique, Fire doesn't look the same as Fire2, and so on.

The music is nice, but can get annoying at times. Even the lack of music annoyed me in some areas. I'd be all "YAY A NEW AREA" and then.. "Oh nice..I only hear wind"

As someone pointed out, what mobs do adds a bit of fear to some fights. Goblins for example have a 'skill' called bomb toss. It's an AOE (much stronger at higher levels) and does medium to high damage. Sometimes it drops the bomb looking all cute and dies, but thats just a favourite of mine.

Skillchains, and weaponskills. I'm not going to get into a whole lot with these, only because I'm not writing up a guide ^^.
Each weapon type, has skills associated with it at a certain level. IE a Sword, at skill level 10, grants the skill fast blade. Weapon skills have their own elemental power, so it's a toss up sometimes what weaponskills to use.

Skillchains - when a correct series of weaponskills are used in order, they will create an extra magic effect, dealing more damage. These are important at higher levels, to take on what we'd refer to as Red++ mobs.

Weaponskills and Skillchains keeps the melee characters from just melee'ing, and giving them other things to focus on as well. On a side note, each hit you connect, or take, accumulates a TP%, which when hits 100, you can use your weaponskill.

Magic Bursts: Keeps mages alert. Casting a spell that is the same element of the skillchain being done, does more damage. Yay?

The plot is great, the quests are fun...but still, the game feels empty.

A lot of people think CR'ing is a bad thing, some think it's fun and exciting. I find a lot of thrill in having to CR in an area I explored..FFXI you don't CR. So if you like it yay, if you don't good too.

There is more, but I think I highlighted enough...
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I played EQ from Feb-Sept of last year. I went to FFXI on the day of release, and played it until about 2 weeks ago. I'm back to EQ now with a friend.

FFXI was great the second I installed it. Playing a black mage, blowing things up, and I got it to about 37 when I got bored and tried a thief. Got a thief to 41, got tired of pulling, and being a melee character and went back to my blm. Did I mention I hate waiting for groups for hours on end? So I get mr blm up to level 43 and got bored again. I just got tired of the a) wait for groups, and b) the SAME series of mobs OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

The wait would take between 30 mins, and 4 hours. You can't alt/tab the game either, so you're stuck either looking for a group, or logging out, unless of course you get the windower..

Exploring is awesome in games, but the added thrill is seeing new mobs. OH LOOK A SKELETON! OH THAT GOBLIN HAS A DIFFERENT WEAPON. THAT CRAB LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE ONE 30 LEVELS AGO...

So yeah..when you're levelling off mobs that you were killing a long time ago..it just kinda gets irritating.

Equipment looks the same until about level 50+. No customization. The developers have a good reason for this, but it's just not worth it for me. I bought a BLACK tunic hoping for nice BLACK animation, but no, it's still whitish grey.

Lots of things began to annoy me in that game, and the party seeking was probably the biggest one of them.

Oh and forget SOLO'ing while LFG, only one, maybe TWO classes can solo, semi-well, the rest? SOrry, your SOL on that one.
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The next part is personal preference as to why I returned to EQ.

I'm a D&D player. I always have been. I'm 22 now, but I was playing paper/pencil D&D since I was 7. Played the old 8-bit games of Pool of Radience, the Dragonslance series, etc. When I got a dialup connection I was about 15 or 16, and I played a MUD, pretty D&D style, but not AWESOME. It was a good time killer for 5 years or so.

I played EQ because a friend of mine talked me into it, after playing the MUD for so long, becoming an admin, I got pretty bored. It was honestly a fun time for me, I played a Druid, and only got annoyed when I realized AA was level 51, and I solo'd my way from 46-50 ><. Played an SK after that to 36, nice and twinked. I quit around time school started, to focus on the MUD more.

Quit the MUD a month and a half after because of school, and got FFXI thinking I could play it on and off. I was wrong. Massive timesink, moreso than EQ if you can even believe that. Just add the inablity to minamize and that just KILLS.

Once everything I stating came into effect, I needed to return to a D&D style game, where I could feel the excitement of adventure, the fun in exploration, not to mention the new graphics engine.

I'm having a blast now, and I regret ever really leaving. Necro/Wizard duo. We're level 18 now, in about 5 days.

I'm Sennin on Karana if you want to say hi.

My friend and I are playing EQ until EQ2 is released, and I'm obviously excited to join a new fresh game. I'll be trying WoW too maybe...but I think EQ2 is more for me.

I hope this helps to get in my head, and see why I came back.
---------------------------

Something I forgot to mention.

When I joined FFXI, I was hoping to play a brand new game, with everyone just new and starting out. They merged the servers and we had both Japanese and English players. It would have been nice if they were BRAND NEW servers with everyone at level 1, but no. The economy was set. There wasn't much new equipment to discover unless you were 60+. So yeah, it would have been more fun to have 'newbie' servers, when we had the NA release.

The blending of cultures and ways of communication was great, but overall I would have preferred to have fresh servers, that might be just me though.


Thanks for reading all that! It was a lot to think up.

Well, I personally have been and still am a pretty strong FFXI player, and I played EQ a bit, but not really enough to make an opinion, but I can say this much. For those of you thinking about FFXI and wanting to try it out or those of you who got tired of it, give it another chance when the new expansion comes out on Sept. 21. It will have new leveling areas from levels 20 - 75, so the standared mob models and areas should be drastically changed. So if oyu wanna try it out, wait until the expansion, I think you will like it a lot more then.

edit: O ya, the name of the Expansion is "Chains of Promathia" for those of you who want to know about it, here is a link:

http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/promathia/

Edited, Fri Aug 6 21:37:17 2004 by Yasuhiko

People who've played the EQ2 beta will naturally have an advantage. Likewise, you'll always have people with no other commitments but to play EQ2 twenty hours a day who'll blow past you. Aside from that, we'll all be on equal footing when EQ2 comes out (assuming we all play ). The class system and game system are far enough removed from EQ that, aside from giving you a basic overview of what MMORPGs are all about, I doubt the average EQ player will have any great advantage.

Milaria,

Ouch

Not to say the pot is calling the kettle black (ok, really I am), but do you mean laziness like not inserting spaces after periods or after comma's? Or perhaps not spelling words out in full like "power level" (I'm assuming thats what pl stands for). Or maybe not using spell check to spell the word correctly like "twink" would have been appropriate over "tweak".

None the less you must not play the same EverQuest that many people do. Most "uber" players are required by their guild to raid a specific number of times a week. And very few, if any, of the really good guilds would let their players stand by and do nothing. Everyone has a role, and what may appear like nothing is actually the players spells getting shut down time and time again from resists from a mob.

That said I have played EQ, FFXI, EQ:OA, and CoH. In no case do I feel a "game" should feel like "work". Oh, and that's not saying I won't "work" at my character, it is just that Final Fantasy has this way of making the most simple tasks take much longer than they should. Take a simple thing like running across the town. It has, no lie, taken nearly 15 minutes just to get from one side of the town to the other side of the town - its just as bad, if not worse, than running through the Karana's in Everquest. Thats a lot of time for people who only have 1-2 hours to play a night. If you have to run across town twice thats' 30 minutes, or 1/4 of your total play time for the night. And tradeskilling in FFXI is unfortunately a very bad process too. Not only do you need to gather the materials to do it (which in and of itself is not a big deal) but you need to click them all together, and the you get to sit there and watch your character kneel down and focus on a glowing ball in his hands for a few moments just to try to get one combine done to see if you can earn 0.1 skill points.

I have no problem "working" on a character like I said, but I enjoy many games, and when I spend 2 hours on one game, I feel like I should be able to accomplish approximately the same amount on each game. So far on EQ, EQ:OA, and CoH I can - even soloing. on FFXI it takes 2-3 2 hour sessions to accomplish the same thing.

Different strokes for different folks I suppose, though the leveling treadmills is no where near as bad as Lineage II.

edited to fix a quick spelling mistake

Edited, Sun Aug 8 22:13:59 2004 by Devilwind