Okay, so it's probably the most predicable thing that happens every year, but we've burned out on FFXI again. Both me and Haud completely gave up on the whole thing before the expansion pack even came out. But again, this is likely the most predictable thing that could happen. So as the sun sets on another episode of "why I hate and love this game at the same time", we look back and reflect. See what I did? There's a picture of a sunset.
I feel it
Me and Haud had a fairly decent jaunt through the world of vana'fuckin'diel. Our main objective was to complete the old story content before the new expansion pack came out. Well, apparently all those fuzzy memories of the game were through rose tinted glasses, because fucking hell that was just tedious. No words can describe how utterly boring the story missions actually are. It would honestly boil down to 2 hours of walking with a 2 minute fight at the end of the walking. All of the delusional thinking about this game actually being anything but terrible is exactly that, a horrible fantasy that we constructed way back in the 2000's. It was like a form of escapism that we used to just bury ourselves in to forget...I dunno school? We were like fucking 15 years old why do we need to escape from something?
"But there's more than just the story to take part in, Echdah" you may predictably say. Hah, yeah fucking right there is. FFXI is in this weird state of MMOs where unless you're on the top, you're not going to find other people to help you get there without sucking a dick, or owing someone a kidney. Not to mention the fact that the steps to get up to that top tier I mentioned are arduous as hell. Getting decent gear is like pulling fucking teeth. Involved in this horrible process include waiting around in port jeuno all day, and shouting for people to come with you to kill some mob. Then when you're there, you better hope you can actually kill it...Then there's the drops, oh god the fucking drops. I've never seen something so good in theory fall so flat. It's worse than communism! And you're not a commie, are you? ARE YOU? If you are then whatever I don't really even care anymore. So even if you do manage to get your drops from the motherfuckers, it's really not much of an increase over what you previously had. And, as much as I hate to say it, WoW has this aspect down pat. Every other fucking second you get a new kind of purple item that makes me pitch a tent. Whereas in FFXI, I work for weeks, and weeks to get a single item, and at the end of the road I got blueballs. BLUEBALLS I TELLS YA!
What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, video games. If I had a point in writing this, then it'd be that the great hope in all of this is FFXIV. The game has completely abandoned the stubborn ways seen in FFXI, and instead decided to adopt a more pragmatic approach to the whole being a fun game situation. So far the beta is, dare I say, playable. Further than that, it can be downright fun at times, and with the prospect of getting more classes and shit it should be even more fun in coming months. The point of all of this is that the category of MMO that FFXI belongs to is a dying breed. More and more games are becoming geared towards a WoW model, and who can blame them? It basically set all the new rules for making an MMO. We are currently in the world of warcraft era, anything before this time was the pre-wow days....Anything after is the post-wow days.
So it is now that we bid farewell to that shitty fucking MMO for another god damned year. Next year I will forget how much I hate it, and fall for it's siren song yet again. Or maybe I will find this blog and be all like "Oh shit son, I ain't going there again fuck that."
