a group of adventurers on an epic quest
[Final Fantasy XI] The information from the October update has been slow in coming but here is some more.
Two of the new pets that will become available for the beastmaster ability “Call Beast” in the October version update.
Exciting!
Thieved from the FFXI Developers webpage.
Yeah, I think this update may be just a hold over until we can get some more information on the expansion. Because so far we have a quest that only level 70 fishermen can do, and jug pets. Woo… hoo…
ringthree
[Final Fantasy XI] Square Enix annouced the new Final Fantasy XI expansion at the Tokyo Game Show yesterday. Treasures of Aht Urghan is the title (which was guessed long ago when a trademark search was done on SE and it was the only title that didn’t already have some already known information) and it looks fantastic! Sorry, went a little fanboi there for a sec.
SE’s official announcement:
Images from the new FINAL FANTASY XI expansion, “Treasures of Aht Urhgan,” have finally been released to the public at the Tokyo Game Show (September 16-18)! And soon, players will be able to view a sneak peek of the new content from this site!
This page will continuously be updated with the most up-to-date information on exciting new content from “Treasures of Aht Urhgan,” so keep your eyes peeled for more!
The most intriguing thing is that in the video I have seen, there is obviously a new job that follows the classic Final Fantasy Blue Mage character.
ringthree
PS: Linkage, you ask and you shall receive!
Video
Pics of “Blue Mage”
More pics of the expansion
[Final Fantasy XI] From the wise sages at SquareEnix:
The FINAL FANTASY XI development team is currently working on the next version update! Adventurers can expect additions to the Fellowship system, new areas, and several other changes. Details will be posted to the Topics section as soon as they are released, so keep checking back for more information! The version update will take place in early October.
More NPC quests, though not that appealing to me, seem to make the player base quite happy. The other changes so far seem to be only slight modifications. There is nothing that is standing out as any huge difference so far, but in the last patch they announced a radical changing of the ranger job just days before the update was released. So we shall see.
ringthree
[Final Fantasy XI] The Promyvions (Promy’s for short) are the first set of quests to get through to open some of the new areas that were introduced in the Chains of Promathia expansion. An expansion that was introduced 9 months ago.
I would just like to know what has caused people to think that the promy’s are difficult? Last night, I led a group to beat Holla (my third successful run) which is thought to be the most difficult Promy. The party was war/nin, war/nin, sam/war, drg/war, blm/whm, whm/blm. This is a basic xp party for lvl 30. No smn, no rng. Oh, and we broke the server record for Holla.
The really sad thing to me was that of the people that I was taking through the promys one person had failed Holla 4 times, and one person had failed Mea 4 times and Dem 4 times… I mean, come on, Dem? The Dem bosses special attack is “Makes silly faces!”
Do people just not know that animas make the run incredibly easy? Do people not have strategies for the bosses? Do they not come prepared?
I mean the lack of understanding extends outside the bosses also, some people think that the mobs on the final level of the promys are some undefeatable foes, when in fact they are only T-IT mobs that you would be leveling on if you were in an xp party.
Any insight into this would be appreciated.
ringthree
If you are a practioner of the nerdly arts (I just recent received the rank of Grand Poobah Nerd from my local lodge) then you will appreciate this: Ninja Radio.
The intermingling of anime, J-pop and video game themes is so beautifully cobbled together into a play list that I believe I experienced an autoerotic nerdgasm.
Initial D 4th Stage theme FTW!
ringthree
[World of Warcraft] I pose a question to our readers. A simple question that I will use as the basis of my next post.
What is different about WoW that has caused it to get so many subscribers?
A plain question, but one that has many answers. 3.5 million subscribers is more than any MMO ever. What about WoW has caused this explosion? Is it sustainable? Was the MMO market truely such an untapped resource? Are we the new Korea (including the millions of players dying in front of their computers after 60 hour marthon sessions)?
Thanks ahead of time for you input, and I can’t wait to tell you how wrong you all are! ^^
ringthree
[Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft] This is my mantra. Yes, I am going on to bash World of Warcraft again. Well maybe not bash, but point out why it is not all what it is cracked up to be. Last night, I completed Rank Mission 5-2 in Final Fantasy XI. Rank Mission 5-2 was the last mission of the original release of Final Fantasy, and is the beginning of the first expansion. After completing the battle at the end of Rank Mission 5-2 I was treated to near a half hour of amazing cut scenes. I can’t really describe just how epic they make the game feel, and just how involved they make the player feel within the online world.
Sadly, WoW has none of this. There is nothing beside the scratching of a quill to make you feel involved in the world, to make you feel that you are not just a part of the world but also have some impact on the world. Now I have heard that Blizzard is working on cutscenes to be introduced in the expansion, but I dont understand why they are not in the original version. Another example of a rushed product that shouldn’t have been on the market for another 6 months to a year.
FFXI should have set the standard for MMO’s by using cutscenes. Truthfully, I do not know if another game used cutscenes before FFXI but the level of detail and writing involved in the cutscenes in FFXI are just amazing. They are so vivid and deep as to make you feel like you are actually playing a game in the Final Fantasy series rather than just a break off MMO that stole the name. Why other games, especially a game like WoW that was developed to eliminate the weak points and emulate the strong points of other MMO’s, didn’t pick up on this is beyond me. Maybe the cutscenes are too far into the FFXI for other developers to grasp the importance of them, maybe they were deemed unnecessary for a game built around the ADHD generation, but in the end WoW is less of a game for it.
So to Blizzard: get working on some cutscenes. From what I understand, Blizzard used them in most of the Warcraft games before this one. Why stop now? Why stop with your biggest creation yet?
ringthree
[World of Warcraft] Well I have been busy. You know how it is, playing day in, day out. Well, just recently there was an 18 hour downtime for physical server maintence to the Final Fantasy XI servers. These happen about 3 times a year and since I knew it was coming I was planning to play WoW for a little while. I should have just read my new Harry Potter book…
In the time that I was playing, I would say about 3 hours, the game crashed out to the desktop two times, and the freaking server went down! Just my server… How often does crap like this happen? I mean the game crashes to the desktop with some regularity, so the software appears to be a little unstable. But how can just one server crash? Not all the servers but just one! If this is something that happens as often as I hear how do people play this game?
Maybe it was a bad day, but with Blizzard’s track record on “stability,” I dont think that is likely. Blizzard needs to stop giving empty promises of what is coming and get some people working on the “stability” thing. Every time they add something new the game becomes less stable. I mean have you ever stopped to read the patch notes for most items? Its not new things they are adding, its all fixes. Why release a game that has so many problems?
I understand that a company as big as Blizzard can have people working on content AND stability. This is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the stability of the new content. Any time new content is released the next three patches are fixes for the new content. If they had just kept the content for those three weeks and fixed it on the test servers then I would be a happy lad.
No more empty promises. Test your crap before you release it! Know what the issues are before you dump them on the players base. Everything with Blizzard is “rush it to the public, it doesn’t matter if it works, the hype machine solves all ills!”
Oh and my guess is that you are not going to see an expansion anytime soon OR you are going to get an expansion but you wont want it… neither of these are good options.
ringthree
