20th Anniversary Reddit AMA

Wanting them to spend more on the game does not mean you want him removed. However a producer in a position of power in a company will always want to spend as little as possible, because his position is no longer purely for the players and instead more for the companies bottom line.

The last couple of weeks have been bad, really bad. They need to do better than this.

The last couple of weeks have been average (pre-campaigns) to above average (all campaigns turned on).

I've made progress on Empyreans and Aeonics, cleared a few rounds of Ambuscade, finally earned enough medals in Dynamis-D to get another relic piece to +3, and dragged a mule through the majority of the Voidwatch questline which is going to culminate in my first Provenance run in nearly a decade. I've gotten to master level 13. Still more to do.

Pretty good to me.

The 20 meetings for a gob talk is obviously a joke. Don't take it seriously geez.

Their "dev effort" is mostly the same in 2021-2022 from what I've seen. About 1 content every 1-2 years. Had Odyssey NMs and ML in 2021(?) and empy ML in 2022. This isn't "content drought" by FFXI standard. And it wasn't worse than 2018-2020 with only one content (dyna w3) in 2 years, and w3 had terrible content longevity which made the issue worse.

I don't want a new content every 3-6 months invalidating my gears that fast anyways. New content every 1.5-2 years is the right pace to me because that's exactly how long I need to finish endgame content from the past getting most things that I need, and still have time to take breaks in between.

Someone said XI doesn't have enough content only because community doesn't do Odyssey. People choosing not to do them doesn't make 2021-2022 "FFXI content drought". The content is there, people just choose not to do them.

So idk what's so agry about dev effort. angry about PR disaster? Sure. Angry about dev effort? Idk man.

If you are angry about dev effort then You should be even angrier in 2018-2020 lol. Why NOW? Only because it's the anniversary year?




You are free to comment on different opinions and call them "apologetics".

I can do the same: whoever spammed the "I'm disappointed" comment without a thoughtful reason to back up the claim only because 50 other people are spamming the same things are sheeps. Sheeps are sad!

Didn't you just quit and returned? I mean... of course you dont see the big picture

you have absolutely no idea what developers are working on if you think a 22 year old project would turn them away. this isn't written in some dead language.

since your lane, which you should stay in, seems to be help desk IT, working on ffxi and bringing some life to it would be akin to migrating organization management to the cloud. you could find tons of developers who wanted to prove themselves by working on a game like this, SE just doesn't have a single one.

it's funny because your example of on prem active directory, which is of a similar age(older), is what 98% of organizations are still using as their source of truth while they attempt to migrate. stop giving shitty excuses for why they can't hire. they don't hire and that's all there is to it. they're ***

What's the timeframe for being able to have a valid opinion? Are we talking consecutive months, years, or decades subscribed before we can see the 'big picture'?

it stands to reason that people who have been here longer should feel more jaded by SEs neglect of the game.

given that during the time you were not investing time and money into the game they were.

this is common sense. please try to understand common sense things.

The 13 years I lived scraped by before the game launched were the most jaded of all.


I only understand the deep remorse over not receiving 3 expansions, 1,000 new players per server, and a public trial of Yoshida for warcrimes against Vana'diel.

It's funny the only positions you can dunk on are the ones nobody is making.

you're the type of idiot to get hired at a company and *** about how it was 10 years before you even worked there during your first week.

that's how dumb you look currently. just shut up and take the L. common sense would be people who have been here longer than you will be more upset than you who just returned during an XIV content drought.

sit down child

Feel free to explain the big picture that I am missing to me. I'm listening.

I would agree with the sentiment that people who are subscribed for every month of every year should feel like they're entitled to feel more jaded than someone who plays perhaps 6 months of the year if FFXI's release cadence hasn't been basically the same since 2016, which it 100% completely has. At this point, how much longer do they need to do more of the same before those same jaded people accept reality?

Where can we apply to join this council of entitled jaded people?

People are extra sore right now because an anniversary is exactly the time to make an audience excited. A milestone like 20 years feels like the best possible time to tell us something is in the pipeline. But they didn't. And it came the same week that the people in charge announced that they firmly believe video games are no longer profitable.

I've said that this anniversary is where we'd see what Square-Enix really thought of FFXI. And nothing spoke louder to me than the nothing we got. Even drowning out their own pathetic "yay, it's something's 20th birthday we guess" Tweet with several others about other projects (I don't even have a Twitter account, I just looked to see what they actually wrote).

I'm a very optimistic person. I'd even go so far as to say I'm naive. But that light dimmed ever so slightly on Monday.

Nobody would be over-reacting if they hadn't announced since 2019 that something interesting was expected for the 20th anniversary.

I would like to give my opinion, it is most likely WRONG but just for fun.

The canceled FFXI Mobile project. No comment

Crowd sourcing improvements to the game:

For large servers like ASURA which has 4000 people online on average. Yes... Channels are needed for escha, abyssea, lv99 dynamis and apex-mobs areas. I would like 4-5 layers in those areas.

Graphical overhaul / 60 FPS / Engine upgrade.

A remake is impossible, sadly.

Option 1. If it is a remake, it would be an FFXIV-VER 2. From FFXI it would only have the name. It would be nothing like what we play now and for obvious reasons many of us would continue to play this old version.

Option 2. If they make a remake with the same areas, enemies, combat system, story, etc. It would be a huge failure unfortunately, it is not the type of game which can recover the 175m-200m of dollars invested in a remake.

Option 3. A remaster, same old game with better optimization, this is possible and future content could be made with reduced costs.

A new expansion pack

An expansion like SoA or ToAU is difficult, as square enix doesn't want to invest anything in FFXI. The company goal is to keep the game alive investing as little money as possible and keep emptying our pockets. What I see as a real possibility are DLCS like abyssea or Escha, that's why we're disappointed. I don't see the problem of creating x3 new abyssea areas each for 15 USD for empy + 2 / 3.

offline version. No comment

Level 75 aka "Classical Server".

This would leave them extra money, having 3 classic servers. One server at lv75 ToAU, One server lv 75 WoTG, One server lv 99 during VW, Legion, Neo dynamis. Those servers the first 3 months would be a bombshell but after that they would keep 500-750 active players, as happens with WINGS or EDEN private servers.

The reason why classic servers die a few months after their release. It's because "No one can bathe twice in the same river", I leave you a video of ASMON giving his opinion about that.

Reason kills nostalgia very quickly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPkYDdVcqgQ

Is SE tight on money? Is it poor? What's their true reasoning for not pumping money into this game to make more money? Do they not believe it is possible to make a further return on investment with FFXI by creating another expansion? Are we correct in believing that another expansion and continuous (quality) content will profitable for SE?

These are all serious questions I do not know the answer to. I don't know the numbers.

Sometimes I believe that SE views those of us "left behind" in FFXI as gross. Perhaps the use of windower/ashita / exploits / bots has left them disgruntled and perhaps feeling disrespected? I don't know. I'm spit balling here.

There's still money that could be made, but for the same work, there is more money to be made on other projects. They're incapable of doing both. (unwilling)

Simple economics, invest a thousand hours for X, or invest a thousand hours for X^Y

A reasonable person would say, why the *** wouldn't you just do both though!? That IS the question. Isn't it.

I honestly think them creating stuff more akin to the add-on scenarios would be their best bet to create paid content.

They're already doing most of what a paid add-on would provide in Voracious Resurgence. So I'm surprised they opted to make it free when people have paid for similar content in the past.

Probably because add-on scenerios were panned heavily when the game was alive, noone wants to pay 10 dollars for 7~ hrs of content, potentially more for the poor saps who wanted to farm those rng accessories with rng augments, ontop of a regular sub.

Don't need this anniversary. SE already said what FFXI really is over and over again multiple times in the past. FFXI is not that important for them. But it generates good enough profit so it's being kept alive. They expected FFXI to died WAY before 20 anniversary. But it didn't. So SE let it live.

Operational teams tried really hard to keep players around. So FFXI somehow survived for 20 years. But it's not going to become daddy's favorite boy just because of that. This game was made with low expectations to begin with. If playerbase continue to decline, I honestly think SE will shut down the server with no regret.

SE never cared about FF14 either. The game was a disaster, SE never bothered to do market research before release and the game suck.
FF14 launch was a PR disaster 100 times worse than FFXI 20 anniversary hype. That PR disaster almost killed SE. So SE had to save itself, by saving 14.

So yeah, 14 become the daddy's favorite boy, because daddy needed to make him the favorite boy to save himself. 14 is that boy that's lucky enough to be there on the right time.

If 11 shutting down actually brought PR disaster that will kill SE, then maybe SE will reboot 11 and give it a 2nd chance too. Otherwise this is quite unlikely tbh.

Draylo will probably hate me very much for what I wrote here so I'm gonna run!

Companies are valued by their expected future earnings.

SE investing in FFXI and releasing an expansion will make us happier, but even if it increases the number of subscribers by 100% (and it won't), it doesn't contribute to a story where their future earnings are higher in 2 years than that initial bump, which probably trails off unless they keep feeding us content.

Imagine that instead they reskinned FFXIV (already a dominant MMO, but rather olde at this point). Now you have a story where FFXIV is the true successor to WoW, but it's never letting its numbers wane and it's doing things to bring in the next generation of MMO players.

When they released FFXIV v1 and then doubled down on it, they were telling us that FFXI was not part of their story to investors. They could have released a PC-native client for FFXI and modernized the graphical assets, but instead they spent a comparable amount of money producing a piece of ***and then many times that saving it.

I love how everyone has become an armchair marketing strategist, They have shown they have artists integrity and they are always revamping and remastering older titles. Its not always about maximum profit or they would only make mobile gacha games. They did XI dirty plain and simple

FFXI got large scale updates for nearly 15 years. They didn't do FFXI dirty at all, you're just salty.

SE, a large Japanese gaming corporation? Yeah, no.

They do these as calculated endeavors where they know they have X amount of suckers who will buy them, no matter how lackluster the ports are. They've yet to ever release a real definitive edition end-all be-all port of any prior game that is undeniably better than any version before it. There is always something inferior because there is a lack of care put into it or they outsource it to someone else who is just after a paycheck.

But X amount of people who make at least just enough money or more to buy it will buy it regardless. They'll pre-order it. They'll spend $80 buying a single low-tier piece of merchandise.

This is so right, and ever since that point, ffxi became unwanted additional baggage. That was the exact point where they abandoned us as a long term viable consideration. And, being who they are, they couldn't (and never will) change that stance.

The only reason the game is still alive, is because us, the players, didn't let them write it off, and so they couldn't just not do anything.

Thanks to all of y'all, I can still play FFXI lol.

Yea i am definitely salty, this game deserves better. Not everything has to die simply because it's old.

I agree, but FFXI isn't dead. It just isn't getting what you want, and because what you want is unrealistic, you're unfortunately just never going to be happy when it comes to the game, and that is a sad thing.

***they told us they aren't shelving FFXI anytime soon and we get new prime weapons. I'm looking forward to casually playing this game with the 3 people i play it with until they all quit.

Not to mention empy upgrades and new slots on ody gears.

The game is still fun if you were crazy enough to enjoy it to begin with.

Right. I wouldn't say SE will 100% shut down FFXI without a reboot if population die either. There are entirely too many factors that we don't know in the future.

I just expect the worst.

SE remastering older titles isn't artists integrity. It's easy money business decision. It's a game that they already made once and it has 70%-90% of the work done. Now they do little work and release again, they get to sell this single player game twice.

I know more than one hardcore FF6 fan who brought every version of release/remaster. They paid SE so many times for 1 game.

MMO doesn't work that way. Most MMO players play 1 or 2 MMO at one time then stay in that game. Release a new version of this MMO, the old one will die. When FF14 released some 11 player left and never came back. Or they came back, as they take a break in 14.

You can't remaster a MMO over and over to make money multiple times.

If I'm SE ceo, will I remaster FFxi if it dies? I will need a lot of info for the market and company situation at THAT TIME to make the decision. But the chance of getting the NO answer is high, and I'm mentally prepared for that.

You should too, for your own sake Draylo!



I agree. I would be sad if it dies. I would maybe even play on a private server if it dies.

But I wouldn't expect FFXI to stay alive and never die. It last for a long time. 20 years is long. What about 40 years? 60 years? I don't even know if SE still gonna exist at that time!

When majority of old FFXI fans are old and no longer in this community and new guys don't come in often enough to replace us, it will die.

Maybe SE will reboot it when it dies, but for gamers 40 years younger than me, not us. So it's not like I'm gonna play the reboot FFXI if I'm still alive that time. It will be a different game.

I was so excited for FFXI Mobile. I knew it'd suck, but I really really wanted to see the zones rendered in HD.

Places like Garliage Citadel, Crawlers' Den, Bastok, Windy, Sandy. They'd have looked stunning in HD.

I hope we one day get more of an asset drop from the mobile game, but I have a feeling it really didn't get very far.

I think one day we will see a game set in Vana'diel. The stories are rich and engaging, but seen by too few.