After a 4 month hiatus, I reactivated my Final Fantasy XI characters and returned to Vana’diel. When you spend years building up a character, you get a little attached. So it felt good to be home! Not only that, there have been a lot of changes to the game will make it more fun for players like me who don’t really have the time for the traditional grind.Â
Playing on my PC, Vana’diel was as beautiful as ever as I set out to explore my new, old world. The first thing I noticed was that the mobs weren’t as tough as they used to be. FFXI was originally a game in which solo players were doomed to lowby-hood. To advance you had to form parties. But as the game aged and World of Warcraft came along with its more solo friendly gameplay, getting a party became more and more difficult. FFXI has about 500K players, but heavily skewed towards higher level players by this time which leaves new and lower level players in a lurch.
Apparently the mob (ie monster) levels have been adjusted downward to allow faster solo leveling. Another new thing introduced was the Field Manual which is a book found in many areas containing training exercises that reward gil (money) and xp (experience points). This is like the quest system used so successfully in World of Warcraft. I spent a couple of hours doing one of these last night and earned more xp and gil in that time than I could have in 6 to 8 hours in the previous revision of the game! I still like partying, but just getting a party could take hours before because of level restrictions and needing the right mix of jobs.
While I haven’t experienced it for myself yet, the party system has also been opened up via the new level synch feature. This allows higher level players to level down to play with lower level players and everyone stills gets good xp. And rather than losing higher level weapons and having to reequip (a hassle), higher level weapons are scaled down to the lower level. I’ll have to find a party to try this out, which may not be too hard given the traffic I saw in the Valkurm Dunes last night.
So I’m pretty happy to be back in Vana’diel!