Thursday 6 March, 2008

GameLog ~ Last entry

Gameplay2:

The next day I logged onto the game and my shell had nothing scheduled planned. So that made me excited and I wanted to do something that I don’t normally get to do, Merit. Meriting is a type of experience points you get once your character is level 75. It is different from regular experience points such as, every 10,000 xp u get while in merit mode you receive 1 merit, with a maximum on holding up to 10 total merits. These merits are used to buff your character up in certain attributes like upping your strength, a job ability, and many more.

So I wanted to make a merit party (group of seven people get together to kill monsters to gain merits). After about 30 minutes of making the party with a few friends including myself and two other complete strangers who were seeking for a merit party the party was complete. The process of creating a merit party is very hectic for me. I generally don’t like to make the parties, since it is very stressful but this time I had no other option of wait some 2 extra hours to get an invite.

The party consisted of Paladin (me), Redmage, Bard, Thief, Samari, Warrior. We decided to party at Bhaflau Thickets and kill sea puks and Mamool Ja’s. The style of merit parties is very different from endgame, the concept is the same but the style is entirely different. In merit parties you want to kill the monsters as fast as you can. It is a nice rush in the game. Because every mob in a merit party is only alive for an average of one minute, and the next one is there and ready when the one you’re fighting dies. I like the rush, and I was most certainly getting one while parting.

The party lasted two hours and we each got about 3 merits. Making that about 15k exp an hour, which is pretty average to today’s standards. Some parties get up to 20-25k an hour. It is very interesting how people get such insane amounts of experience points per hour. It drives you to obtain better gear and up you skill at your job to do better in the experience point area, because if you are good at that it makes the game so much easier. I am not all the way and am driving myself to be better especially for a paladin.

Design:

What I like a lot about FFXI is the free world environment. How you can basically walk anywhere you please with no level restriction applied. And what makes the free world environment even better is the 3-D graphics that FFXI comes with. The movement in the game I would say is pretty good. I have never had any complaints and don’t see how the following aspects could be improved.

The interaction between people in the game is amazing. Because you can talk to them specifically with a /tell “name”, to a group of people in your party by /party, talk to your linkshell with /linkshell, to a group of people within you region with /say, and to anyone that is on the map with /shout. So it is pretty nice how they set up the chat functions in the game.

Some things I would change about the game are I would like to see some jumping action put in. It is nice entertainment to see my character jump while running etc. The main one would be the balance of jobs in the game. I know each one has its own advantages and disadvantages but some jobs that are in the same class as others have more advantages.

Like say Dragoon compared to Warrior. Warrior has the most strength in the game with Dragoon pulling up the 5th highest. Warrior is a far better Damage Dealer than Dragoon could ever been. A really pimped Dragoon could keep up to parse with a decently geared Warrior. But if the Warrior was really pimped out the Dragoon would have no chance. And because of this people lean towards more jobs than others and basically make the other jobs extinct in the game anymore. So that would be a nice change, to balance out the jobs in FFXI.

One thing to think about however, with your Warrior v Dragoon analysis is that while the Dragoon has less strength, s/he also has their Dragon to deal damage with them, which is where the real damage dealing potential of the Dragoon comes in. Just something to keep in mind.

And my big problem that I would fix (as if you want to hear my opinion) is that finding quests can be somewhat hard. There is no indication of whether or not an NPC will give you a quest until you talk to them. While this does foster a sort of "talk to everyone" mentality, which can be good, I would much rather see a WOW style of quests where characters have some marker if they can give you a quest or if you need to talk to them to complete a quest.

Cheers

Nice Work! -Trevor Prater(grader)