From SWG to FFXI

I cancelled my SWG account, with the current billing period ending in 4 weeks. And I won't even use these 4 weeks much any more. Because I started Final Fantasy XI, FFXI for short, the first online version of Final Fantasy. I'm writing a small comparison here, with reasons for moving.

FFXI is very much a classic MMORPG in the Everquest style, just like EQ or Dark Age of Camelot. It has been released in Japan already a while ago, just came out in the US, and will be out in Europe in 2004. Graphics are comparable in quality to SWG, meaning a lot better than Everquest. The world has a fantasy theme, so you are fighting orcs using spells and swords. That is already one reason for me to like FFXI better, I've never been much of a science fiction fan, and don't care much for laser pistols. Being a Final Fantasy game, FFXI uses some aspects of previous Final Fantasy games, like riding on Chocobos, the names of the spells, Moogles, and such. But the world is a new one.

Basic gameplay will be very familiar to anybody already having played EQ or similar games. You go out and kill monsters (starting with rabbits at level 1 and working up the food chain), you collect loot from the dead monsters, you turn the loot into cash and buy equipment. Look at Progressquest for a brilliant parody of that basic gameplay. But whatevery you say about how simple this basic gameplay is, it is the flawless execution of this that is one of the highlights of FFXI. You can play Star Wars Galaxies in nearly the same way, but in SWG the execution is all wrong. In FFXI if you consider (/check) a monster, and it tells you it is an even match, you DO have a risk of dying, but you also have a good chance of winning. The amount of loot that is dropping is just the right amount to buy you your equipment, money is neither totally impossible to get, nor abundant. If you die, you lose 10% of the experience needed to get from your current level to the next, so you don't get yourself killed on purpose to teleport home, but it isn't destroying weeks of work either. Everything is very nicely balanced.

New to FFXI is the character class system. In EQ you couldn't change your character class at all, without making a new character. In SWG you only had one character, but you didn't really have a character class, just a selection of skills, and you were supposed to master and then unlearn skills. In FFXI you can change character class as often as you like, but only at one place, your house (which is provided to you for free at the start). When you change your level 10 warrior into a level 1 red mage, your stats and abilities will be that of a level 1 red mage. You will have zero experience points, low hit points, be weak, and not be able to wield that axe any more, back to killing rabbits. But whenever you want, you can switch back to being a level 10 warrior, and you will have lost nothing. Later, at level 18, you can do a quest that allows you to have a primary and a secondary job, but you will always only gain xp with your primary job, and you secondary job level will be capped at half your primary level. So if you have leveled warrior to 20 and black mage to level 18, you can either chose to be a level 20 warrior with level 10 black mage support, or level 18 black mage with level 9 warrior support. Very cool system, in fact you are your own "twink". ("Twink" was the term used in EQ for a second character which was equipped using the funds of the primary character.)

Now the main reason I stopped playing SWG was that my character had stopped developing. I had the skills that I wanted to have, and didn't want to unlearn them to be able to become something else. In FFXI I will never have to give up one thing to become the other. And I'm a lot less likely to "max out" one character class anyway, FFXI is more challenging than SWG. Character development is one of the main driving forces that makes people stick to role-playing games, the "I just want to reach the next level" fever. SWG didn't really have that. EQ did have it, but in EQ it was maybe a bit TOO hard to get to the next level, so you easily got stuck for weeks in the same level and got frustrated, if you weren't a power gamer. Again FFXI provides the most balanced approach to character develoment (although DAoC wasn't bad either in finding that balance).

Now I don't want to hide the fact that FFXI has its downsides as well. Starting with installation, account setup, and login. You couldn't have designed a more cumbersome procedure if you had tried. Installation and account setup took literally hours, although most of that was downloading 7000 files of patch to get to the current level. Fortunately you only have to do that once. Login is more annoying, because every time you first have to login to the PlayOnline Viewer, and then start FFXI. Takes far too long, especially if you just crashed and are eager to get back to your group.

Many people complain about the controls of FFXI, but I found a good workaround. FFXI is originally designed for the Playstation 2, then ported to the PC. Both PS2 players and PC players are on the same servers. The interface and controls clearly reflect this PS2 history. If you never played on a console, that takes some time to get used to. But if you are familiar with the way that menus work in console role-playing games, like the Final Fantasy series, you soon get used to FFXI. If you have a PS2, buy an adapter to connect your Dual Shock controller to USB. If you don't have a PS2, or can't get an adapter, buy a gamepad for the PC with two sticks, a directional pad, and lots of buttons, in fact a Dual Shock lookalike. The game gets so much better using such a controller for simultaneous movement and camera control.

SWG just had the big November patch, introducing mounts and player cities, as well as a lot of bug fixes. But SWG still very much has an unfinished feel to it. Missing features that were promised long ago. Lots of bugs. Big changes to how the character classes work and are balanced, which is kind of annoying if you are currently playing that class. And a great lack of content. The contrast with Final Fantasy XI is striking. Everything works. There is tons of content, in fact the US version comes with the first expansion set, Rise of the Zilaert, already included. Having 300,000 Japanese players already playing this for a year has given FFXI a head start and very smooth release that is really unusual in the MMORPG industry. By the way, these 300,000 Japanese players plus the 100,000 US players make FFXI bigger than Everquest.

What FFXI doesn't have is direct PvP, you can not fight and kill other players like you can in SWG. This will be a relief to some, PvP is causing a lot of trouble from grief players. But unlike EQ, which simply has no PvP at all, FFXI has some sort of indirect competition between players. Players belong to one of three kingdoms. In each zone, the three kingdoms compete against each other, and an invisible neutral 4th side, to kill the most monsters in that zone. Occasionally the score in each zone is tallied, and the kingdom that came out ahead "conquers" that zone, giving it minor advantages like an outpost. The kingdom with the most conquered zones gains more advantages, in the form of better items to buy for conquest points. But as the other two kingdoms then automatically ally, there is no stable dominance of one kingdom over the other. By this system, FFXI has competition between the players, but without players killing each other. I like it.

The quest system of FFXI is very similar to Everquest, and very much unlike the SWG system. In SWG the majority of all quests were randomly generated, and the terminals where you could get them gave you the same quests that most NPCs gave you. There were only a handful of different types, destroy, deliver, survey, explore, entertain, and they were very easy to do. You received a waypoint to a destination, and either had to fight something there, or do something else, to receive your reward. Each quest had a little background story, but those were randomly chosen from a limited pool and you got the same story again and again, so you quickly learned to ignore the story. FFXI uses the EQ system of hard-wired quests. Every story exists only once, a certain quest starts with a certain NPC and gives a certain reward, nothing random about it. That is a lot more fun, in FFXI even more so than in EQ, because FFXI has PCs that are well animated and some quests even have little cutscenes that include you, so you really feel part of the story. The only disadvantage is that you need a website like Allakhazam with a list of quests. If you just walk up to a random NPC and check for quests, you will either find that NPC not giving quests, or the quest is not appropriate for your level, or the quest reward is something you can't use. There are also no waypoints given out, so without help from Allakhazam you might easily get stuck and not find what the quest giver is asking you to find. FFXI also has quests that give rewards that unlock certain abilities, like being able to take a secondary job, opening up new character classes, being able to ride chocobos, and so on, a concept familiar to console players, but new to the PC MMORPG genre. I like the FFXI quests, but I really wished that there would be an in-game way to find an appropriate quest, instead of having an internet browser open on another computer.

Another reason for me to quit SWG was the game economy. SWG has a highly inflationary economy. Since I made master armorsmith there, producing good armor that people actually want, I quickly became filthy rich. In fact, I became so rich, that there was nothing I could buy any more, armor being the most expensive part of equipment. Earning money becomes pointless when there is nothing you can spend it on. The FFXI economy seems better balanced. One reason for that is that unlike SWG or EQ, FFXI has level restrictions for equipment. So while everybody in SWG just wanted the best armor, named composite, in FFXI people are looking for armor appropriate to their level. Add to that the fact that the same character could need equipment for several character classes of different levels, and the demand for lots of different items is there. In fact, while in EQ you sold your loot to NPCs, in FFXI you sell your loot to other players via the auction house. Many things that seem useless to you, can be used as materials by crafters to make equipment. So most money circulates among players, creating a self-stabilizing economy.

I haven't looked into crafting of FFXI well enough to be able to compare it with SWG. But that is one area in which I expect SWG to come out ahead. Collecting resources and making items out them was fun in SWG, and probably the best part of that game. SWG resources were mainly acquired without combat, and they had stats, leading to equipment of different quality. As far as I can see, FFXI resources are mainly looted from mobs, forcing crafters either to kill the relevant monsters, or to buy the resource expensively from other players. And resources in FFXI don't have stats, leading to equipment with fixed stats, every bronze dagger deals exactly the same damage. SWG crafting suffered from the way the crafting skill trees were set up to allow only master crafters to make things that sold, and it suffered from the generally borked economy. But the crafting process itself in SWG will probably remain the best in any MMORPG for quite some time.

But in general I won't miss SWG very much. While SWG certainly had some good aspects, it got most of the basics of a MMORPG, like combat, character development, and the economy, totally wrong. Mix in lots of bugs and a lack of content, although both will probably get better with time, and I can consider SWG only as a failure. SWG is good for players that are totally new to MMORPGs, and of course for Star Wars fans. But for the more experienced MMORPG player, and not even necessarily the power gamer, Final Fantasy XI is the better game.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:55 PM Permanent Link