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- Joined
- Sep 18, 2024
Exploring XIV's older cousin makes sense imo, they are build on very similar DNA.
I have played through all the story some time ago, completed one of the REMA weapons and tried to dip into the endgame content. I am fairly split at this point over the experience.
First and foremost: you need to mod your game to make it playable imo. There are two 'engines' you can use, Asahi and Windower, with the latter having more mod support. With that you can make the experience not completely suck, I even found an addon that adds XIV style hotbars to the game. (you will need to put some work in how to parse and write .lua files for this). There are also texture packs that improve the graphical quality of the game. You will also get intimately familiar with one or both of the wikis of the game, because it really doesn't explain anything at all.
The story was the reason I started playing the game, since people kept telling me how incredible it was. And... it was very mixed. To actually play the Missions (each expansion has more or less a standalone story with a new cast, with the final bit of story XI introduced -Rhapsodies of Vana'diel- wrapping everything into one context) has some issues. In an ideal world you'd complete each set of Missions in the chronological order they were released Vanilla-Zilart-Chains-etc, however, all the quality of life additions they added with the final Mission set Rhapsodies are more or less mandatory to even enjoy the game. A lot of the trust system is shackled to that and you get passive experience gain bonuses for progress in that. But since Rhapsodies references every single previous Mission set, it also expects you to at least have met and befriended some of the cast of those plotlines. So for the smoothest experience you just start each mission set until you befriend the poster girl of that mission (It is all young girls yes I know Prishes is a hundred year old child character for every single mission set...), until you can advance Rhapsodies til that one stops you again because now you need to meet Arcia so go start Seekers... just to culminate into a giant "Everyone is here and helps you defeat the ultimate evil", which is nice if you actually finished all story sets before, but the game QoL really wants you to go for Rhapsodies.
Those grievances aside: I found the story of XI to be a very mixed bag. Vanilla (where you join one of three city states and do their story) was pretty bad, but introduced you well enough to the game and its concepts. From there it got better with each expansion, a lot of people will tell you Chains of Promathia was the Highlight of XI but I disagree. It was good, but the absolute Highlight for me was Wings of the Goddess, and not just because we meet a flamboyant dancer-man who has a hillarious gay lips in the english translation, thank you based Koji Fox. I will even go further and say for me personally the Windurst chapter where you join a Mithra mercenary company during the great beastman war in the past was the best bit of writing Square Enix ever brought forth.
Playing the story will stretch your patience a lot. A huge part of that is travelling the huge zones. Back in the days this was very, very dangerous, but at this point it is very easy to avoid all combat and just run past anything, meaning you are mostly wayfinding, probably having a wiki open on the side because the Missions never explicitly tell you where to go. I can not overstate how much travelling is involved. A lot of it is also very mean spirited (To go from point A to B you have to do a detour over C, D E and F), the devs genuinely hated the playerbase of the game. But that is not even the worst part, the zones are beautiful and the music holds up amazingly, you can even mount in most of the zones! The worst part is: Come back on the next day. The later expansions finished the Mission story during the games patches. If you now reach one of these points where a patch Mission begins, the game tells you to return the next ingame day. If you are unlucky this means you have to wait for an hour. And these missions are very short, gameplay wise. I can't overstate how bad it gets in Treasures and Seekers, grinding your progress to an absolute halt.
If I compare it to XIV, I'd say your character in XI is more or less what the WoL was in early ARR and most of DT: a mook that beats up bad guys and does errand jobs but is not a character in the story (it does get way better in the later Mission set tho). The game does suffer of replacing its cast a lot imo. You have very few reccuring characters like Gilgamesh or Aldo, but you never get the kind of comeradery that you have with a normal FF party or the Scions.
Leveling is insanely easy, if you have a BLM friend you can max level a Job within 1 hour, no need for any trust. The Merit and Mastery grind is still an insane time investment, and so is the farming for REMA weapons (relic weapons). The endgame is... very, very hard to get into if you start out. XI has been horizontal in its gear progression for the longest time which is a blessing for people with old characters and an absolute burden for new characters. To put this into context: If you want to perform you need an addon that changes your equipment on a milisecond level. This game snapshots everything, and you can change gear at any point in time. This means you have an ideal equip set for each stage of casting a spell/ability. Precast set to get all the spell speed bonus, once you cast the spell you switch into your casting set which gives your spell all the potency/ignores enemy resistances and back into a 'survival set' which gives you surviveability. And for every skill the exact loadout for these stages is different, this says nothing for 'TP gain' equipment..
The game is fun, and if you have some friends to try the higher level stuff its a nice experience, but the minutia of having to write all these gear macros and farming the damn gear just made me check out. If you want to experience the story retail is worth looking into, and exploring the huge world is amazing. Where it is absolutely better than XIV is the Job fantasy and execution. BLU is crazy cool, you can customize every single thing about your blue mage using monster abilities, you can be a melee or a caster it is total freedom. THF not only upping drop chances but also being responsible for aggro management is great, every Job in XI feels more or less unique and fun, something XIV is dialing back a lot.
First and foremost: you need to mod your game to make it playable imo. There are two 'engines' you can use, Asahi and Windower, with the latter having more mod support. With that you can make the experience not completely suck, I even found an addon that adds XIV style hotbars to the game. (you will need to put some work in how to parse and write .lua files for this). There are also texture packs that improve the graphical quality of the game. You will also get intimately familiar with one or both of the wikis of the game, because it really doesn't explain anything at all.
The story was the reason I started playing the game, since people kept telling me how incredible it was. And... it was very mixed. To actually play the Missions (each expansion has more or less a standalone story with a new cast, with the final bit of story XI introduced -Rhapsodies of Vana'diel- wrapping everything into one context) has some issues. In an ideal world you'd complete each set of Missions in the chronological order they were released Vanilla-Zilart-Chains-etc, however, all the quality of life additions they added with the final Mission set Rhapsodies are more or less mandatory to even enjoy the game. A lot of the trust system is shackled to that and you get passive experience gain bonuses for progress in that. But since Rhapsodies references every single previous Mission set, it also expects you to at least have met and befriended some of the cast of those plotlines. So for the smoothest experience you just start each mission set until you befriend the poster girl of that mission (It is all young girls yes I know Prishes is a hundred year old child character for every single mission set...), until you can advance Rhapsodies til that one stops you again because now you need to meet Arcia so go start Seekers... just to culminate into a giant "Everyone is here and helps you defeat the ultimate evil", which is nice if you actually finished all story sets before, but the game QoL really wants you to go for Rhapsodies.
Those grievances aside: I found the story of XI to be a very mixed bag. Vanilla (where you join one of three city states and do their story) was pretty bad, but introduced you well enough to the game and its concepts. From there it got better with each expansion, a lot of people will tell you Chains of Promathia was the Highlight of XI but I disagree. It was good, but the absolute Highlight for me was Wings of the Goddess, and not just because we meet a flamboyant dancer-man who has a hillarious gay lips in the english translation, thank you based Koji Fox. I will even go further and say for me personally the Windurst chapter where you join a Mithra mercenary company during the great beastman war in the past was the best bit of writing Square Enix ever brought forth.
Playing the story will stretch your patience a lot. A huge part of that is travelling the huge zones. Back in the days this was very, very dangerous, but at this point it is very easy to avoid all combat and just run past anything, meaning you are mostly wayfinding, probably having a wiki open on the side because the Missions never explicitly tell you where to go. I can not overstate how much travelling is involved. A lot of it is also very mean spirited (To go from point A to B you have to do a detour over C, D E and F), the devs genuinely hated the playerbase of the game. But that is not even the worst part, the zones are beautiful and the music holds up amazingly, you can even mount in most of the zones! The worst part is: Come back on the next day. The later expansions finished the Mission story during the games patches. If you now reach one of these points where a patch Mission begins, the game tells you to return the next ingame day. If you are unlucky this means you have to wait for an hour. And these missions are very short, gameplay wise. I can't overstate how bad it gets in Treasures and Seekers, grinding your progress to an absolute halt.
If I compare it to XIV, I'd say your character in XI is more or less what the WoL was in early ARR and most of DT: a mook that beats up bad guys and does errand jobs but is not a character in the story (it does get way better in the later Mission set tho). The game does suffer of replacing its cast a lot imo. You have very few reccuring characters like Gilgamesh or Aldo, but you never get the kind of comeradery that you have with a normal FF party or the Scions.
Leveling is insanely easy, if you have a BLM friend you can max level a Job within 1 hour, no need for any trust. The Merit and Mastery grind is still an insane time investment, and so is the farming for REMA weapons (relic weapons). The endgame is... very, very hard to get into if you start out. XI has been horizontal in its gear progression for the longest time which is a blessing for people with old characters and an absolute burden for new characters. To put this into context: If you want to perform you need an addon that changes your equipment on a milisecond level. This game snapshots everything, and you can change gear at any point in time. This means you have an ideal equip set for each stage of casting a spell/ability. Precast set to get all the spell speed bonus, once you cast the spell you switch into your casting set which gives your spell all the potency/ignores enemy resistances and back into a 'survival set' which gives you surviveability. And for every skill the exact loadout for these stages is different, this says nothing for 'TP gain' equipment..
The game is fun, and if you have some friends to try the higher level stuff its a nice experience, but the minutia of having to write all these gear macros and farming the damn gear just made me check out. If you want to experience the story retail is worth looking into, and exploring the huge world is amazing. Where it is absolutely better than XIV is the Job fantasy and execution. BLU is crazy cool, you can customize every single thing about your blue mage using monster abilities, you can be a melee or a caster it is total freedom. THF not only upping drop chances but also being responsible for aggro management is great, every Job in XI feels more or less unique and fun, something XIV is dialing back a lot.
