Is FFXI Dying?

I miss Ludoggy. He was funny.

Edit: He also owes Gaea 10 gil now.

Wait, we have a porn section?

FF7R is an illuminating example, since players asked for FF7-HD, but SE delivered an entirely different game with a story and modern combat mechanics inspired by the original. If they ever do "remake" XI, the end result won't be what the players currently advocating for SE to re-invest in retail have in mind.

In other words, "will SE ever remake XI" is really two different questions:

• Will they overhaul the existing XI retail game, or add a modern client?

• Will they re-use the XI story, setting, and characters to make an entirely new game?

Option 2 might happen eventually. Option 1 never will.

I'm mad already thinking about Square remaking ff11, this is the same company that thought FF14v1 was going to be accepted by FF11 players.

No ty, just make new content.

why wouldn't they, it was ALSO Tanaka's baby....

Something I notice when I'm playing on other servers is people seem to just play within their means, there isn't the same massive expectation they need to have the best gear or 20 rema as you see on Asura. Which is why the auction house situation doesn't matter that much.

Other servers are often like XI used to be 15 years ago, as in most people have decent gear and only the top 10-20% had good gear.

Asura is really only the way it is because of mercs.

Odin's odd because of the JP/NA split, yeah. It has the AH of a well-populated server but for Western timezones it's a very small world where I keep seeing the same ~50-100 people across a couple different linkshells with different purposes. There's also essentially no western PUG scene for anything despite the server size, though there's a healthy amount of JP PUG shouts. Getting anything done as a western player involves either having a static for it or bringing it up in DKOB (shoutout to the leader there) and hoping enough friendly people pick up on it.

If I didn't have a good thing going in a couple of LSs I'd 100% move back to Bahamut, I only came to Odin with some friends that have since fallen off the game but I managed to find a nice corner while I was here. If/once people inevitably drop off (before I do, should I), it's back to Bahamut for me.

I noticed in threads like this one and other threads, people have to tendency to point out allllll the reasons something wouldn't work (I'm not trying to center fillerbunny9 out or anyone else for that matter).

Apply your creativity and point out major hurdles and then how one could possibly overcome them.

For example: RMTs are a major problem. One solution which I've seen implemented in FF14 is to add a bonus to more veteran players that bring along someone new to particular content. For example, a static of 5 brings someone who hasn't done sortie yet. Everyone (including the new person) earns a bonus% to muffins earned.

Issue: Real Engine takes a 5% cut over 1 million dollars revenue. Solution: maybe have a conversation with Real Engine to design something more economically feasible, such as a sliding scale?

I'm not saying these solutions are the best. I'm just making the point that yes it's important to find limitations to an idea. But what is the point unless you're offering a viable solution to the problem to make it work?

The actual solution XIV took to combat the RMT problem is to make gil inconsequential to the main power progression path. Character advancement in XIV is done either through weekly-locked tokens that you can gain via easy public queue content (think the equivalent of doing your daily DI in XI) or via weekly-locked drops with bad luck protection from doing difficult content (think Omen drops), though with bad luck protection. Gil in XIV only serves as a very, very light consumable tax, a way to circumvent the grind for rare or RNG cosmetics and mounts, and for crafted gear which is the weakest gear in any given content cycle but valuable to players that want to push the content ASAP. For a more casual player, gil has very little value. Mercing content is also harder as player power scales much lower than it does in XI and the hardest content is designed assuming all 8 players are actively participating in all mechanics. That's not to say you can't merc via either account pilots or having the carry be a dead body in select fights, but there's much less room or incentive for hangers-on in XIV in the way you see Aeonic carries or Ody carries in XI. Even for all that, there's still RMT, it just affects the average player much less than it does in XI.

Meanwhile, gil is, if not everything in XI, then a significant part of things. You can derive a huge amount of player power from just having gil to throw around, from SU5 weapons and JSE necks to all sorts of HQ accessories and ammo, and that's all before buying loads of currencies to get or augment REMA instead of hand-farming them yourself. Player power in general is also a much stronger motivator in XI compared to XIV, where many players are motivated solely by the story, or cosmetics, or a social atmosphere. Makes much more sense why there's more drive to RMT in XI and more drive for mercs to accept gil instead of cash.

That's somewhat besides the point though, the main reason to me why modern XI's endgame feels unfriendly to bring people into is the strict 6-man size combined with daily lockouts. If Ody or Sortie is expecting you to do it 150-200+ times to get everything you'd want out of it and is capped at 6 people and takes specialized jobs and strategies to get the most value out of, there is very little willpower to want to risk a valuable daily entry on someone unknown and who likely doesn't have the player power to contribute properly (except maybe on WHM). Meanwhile, there's also largely not enough new players in a critical enough mass to get a proper party setup going to start the process of farming these events, as I feel the average new/returning XI player these days is a nostalgia tourist that wants to go slap a NM that stole their lunch money when they were 13 years old and maybe see the new stories and then promptly forget about the game forever again. I don't know the solution to that one. I got around it by being good at WHM and PLD but that's not necessarily something everyone can do.

Ambuscade is probably the healthiest model they've figured out for this sort of thing, endlessly farmable content with difficulty tiers that everyone can self-select into and that rewards things at all stages of an account's progression that can get new people on their feet and veterans a small pile of gil for the trouble. If something goes south or someone isn't up to par, you just lose the time that pull took and not a whole day's potential.

If only the NMs only stole my lunch money when I was 13...

They took way more man hours than that! That would have been a bargain!

That would be $1m over what time scale? I mean if its a month XI is home free. If its a year XI might have to pay something.

The real issue is the development hours to port it. If XI gets minimal content today they are not about to put in the hours it would take to switch.

As to the topic question, the XI I signed up for died a few years before I quit many years ago. I am happy to see it survive to this day and see people still enjoying it.

Hokay, sure.

Problem: SE management thinks FFXI is too complicated and confusing to have broad mass market appeal.

Creative solution: Simplify game mechanics and attributes, implement gearscore for player rating; Add a helpful AI assistant for making macros and helping players master their new 1-2-3 rotation.

Problem: SE management feels a simple subscription business model doesn't offer enough profit potential.

Creative solution: Change the business model to support more profitable monetization; Gacha mechanics, paid battle passes, NFT weapons - the sky's the limit! Update progression systems with dark patterns to push boosts and other paid services.


Gee, sounds great. /s

Sarcasm aside, the biggest impediment to any kind of new investment in XI is SE's growth over the past 20 years. There might be people working at SE who would love to make new XI expansions(or classic turn-based FF RPG's), but there's no compelling financial incentive for SE as a company to let them when they could be making the next XIV expansion or big AAA gamble.

Epic's website is vague, and states that "a 5% royalty kicks in only after your game has made 1 million USD." as well as there being more comprehensively supported corporate licensing options. it would be safe to assume that it would be profit earned once development using the engine is completed and on the market, though I would wager this is all uncharted territory with regards to remaking an existing, live service model game in their engine. the point was more that it isn't just free for SE to remake a game that they have shown for years to have little interest in further developing, instead happy to coast on their monthly sub fees.

It's based on lifetime gross revenue. If your game is out for 3yrs and you hit $1,000,001 you are now subject to the 5% royalties if your game is using any Unreal Engine code regardless of how much it cost you to make or maintain the game. This is only for independent publishers using the bog standard Unreal EULA, a big company like Square Enix can and will absolutely negotiate a custom licensing agreement with smaller royalty cuts and honestly a company as big as SE probably wouldn't have to pay royalties at all and may just have to pay a one time fee to license an individual game or set of dev kits.

https://gamerant.com/dragon-quest-12-unreal-engine-5/

So theres already atleast one SE project using UE5. KH4 is also supposed to be built using UE5.

really what it comes down to is manpower. engine cost is a drop in the bucket. remaking a game as massive as XI would take so many hours of salary that it's probably hard for them to justify especially since there's no guarantee they'd be able to sell enough to recoup the cost. consider the size of XI compared to just about any other FF game.

IDK, didn't you see that video posted of it running in the Unreal Engine? That's just one random guy!

/s

That alone doesn't solve rmt problems completely. Since it has been a long standing "tradition" of Chinese RMT studio offering power level service(by logging into the buyer's account) or selling an account that is done with the grinding.

FF14 combat this problem by selling level boost/story skip items themselves.
https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/tales_of_adventure/#job

so new and returning players can skip the time consuming part of the game and experience what they want to experience faster. Which is one example of game studio using microtransactions to fight RMT.

You owe us all 10 gil.

But we still have RMT advertising /shouts in XIV.

And speaking of gil ...
I'll take mine in XIV gil.

Can I have it in WoW currency? 10 copper please (Alliance required)!

Adjusted for inflation since 2009 (when that was posted), they'd owe us like 100,000 each. :P

XIV solved a lot of the problems of an mmorpg.

They made gil so worthless that it's barely worth farming and selling for RMT (they still do but it's not a big RMT game), what's it even good for...housing?

They made the core game very simplistic and make it more simple every year, they made progression very quick and casual, there are no real long grinds and most serious players that play for progression cap in a month and then wait for the next patch. This means you can attract far more players, and there is almost no filter at all because nobody has to catch up and there are no big differences between players. Your mom can play XIV and take pictures while dancing in her disco or whatever and do some dungeons too, and she will pay a sub to do that. They even market the game to middle aged women, XI was always marketted at teenagers. Even most of the dungeons are simple and have a low bar of entry, all the jobs are practically the same so if you take a break you still know how to play all your jobs when you come back. There are no player gods of the server, pretty much everyone is as well geared as everyone else.

Because there is no real sweaty culture, there is very little prestige from getting things via working for them and so buying things on the cash shop is far more accepted, in a way it never would be on XI. Also because they appealed to the wider audience they are far more accepting of this too.

XIV is a perfect MMO if you want to make money as a company. The only negative is it's incredibly expensive to update, but the cash shop offsets it.

XI in many ways is an awful game if you want to make money (at least for a public company), it was great back in the day because the only people who would play an mmorpg were nerds and the only people who would pay money to play it monthly were turbo nerd teenagers and these people want to earn things and hate cash shops. The world isn't like that anymore.

Square won't remake 11 for a long time and if they do it won't be like the game currently is, it's fundamentally a bad mmorpg for a modern company like Square Enix.

The next MMORPG will probably be some kind of Genshin Impact clone, except with more social aspects. Cause that's where the money is.

Housing, mounts, minions, glam, and crafting. There are a LOT of people who like collecting, and quite a few items are 10m+ for those kinds of people

Raid food/pots

Do you mean expensive compared to XI, or has SE gone on the record about how they need the cash shop to keep the lights on? 'Cause that sounds like BS to me. They just want MORE money.

Kinda like the growing trend of video streaming sites trying to push people to paid plans WITH advertising, even though the subscriptions alone are quite profitable already.

Additionally, crafted gear for early raiding or latecomer catchup. The prestige in XIV doesn't come from doing something 200 times until you get the respective currencies or get lucky with RNG for a boost in player power, the prestige comes from figuring out the content and doing it first in as minimal gear as they tune for it to be doable in. Or from having a shiny weapon that the hardest prestige content drops, or speedrunning the content and doing the highest DPS to post on a third party logging website. The equivalent to Master Trial weapons over in XIV are very coveted and the draw to doing that content is both the experience of doing the content itself for the sake of it as well as having a shiny weapon to show off.

It's a very different game model that puts the content at the forefront and not the job or equipment. As sort of an exaggerated example, if you don't have an Aegis in XI, there's just going to be some content that you can't expect to do regardless of how good you are at PLD or know the content in question. Because in XI's model, having that Aegis in the first place is considered part of being "good at PLD".

There's benefits to both approaches and it's largely a subjective matter of taste. I will agree that it's cheaper to throw some new stats and math and a singular gimmick on an otherwise mostly reused NM and put it in a box instead of design a wholly new 10-20 minute encounter with a new mechanic happening every 30-60s when you need to design more fights. XIV's model demands bespoke content and encounters while XI can just reuse the Vagary NMs like 5 times with a slightly different twist each time and it's content, especially if you ask people to do it 200 times.

FFxi is like the god-emperor of 40k

if they just let it die it would *** come back better but no you scrubs gotta make a prime weapon

Bah in FFXIV the prestige is hanging around town wearing raid only cosmetics.