It was released in Japan on Sonys PlayStation 2 on May 16, 2002, and was released. Download Final Fantasy XI-Era FFXI Private Server-Install torrent or any. A ffxi community based around the Chains of Promathia era of Final Fantasy XI.
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If you're looking for 'lighter' gaming-related entertainment, try! The goal of is to provide a place for informative and interesting gaming content and discussions. Submissions should be for the purpose of informing or initiating a discussion, not just with the goal of entertaining viewers. I really love FFXI and I go back occasionally and even love the game as it is now (as opposed to the crowd who only loved it at 75 cap). But the thing is, whenever these things come around, I just can't be bothered to jump through the enormous hurdles that it takes to get POL, download the game, deal with Mogstation or whatever, etc.
I mean, it's just a frackin' nightmare to even try to play. By comparison, I could get talked into jumping back into WoW on a lark in a moment of pure impulse and the process is so easy that I'd be in and playing before any fleeting doubts had time to enter my mind. Playing FFXI is more like deciding to run a marathon.
You've gotta buckle in and decide you're gonna invest a lot of time into the training to get to the main event. I'm sure I'll pop back in some time, but I'll never just hop back in on a lark because a free play event is going on. And that makes me sad. I read the title and had fond memories of seeing Bastok and Jeuno again. Even remembering the POL music looping for HOURS while you installed everything is good memories. But I really cant be bothered to come back.
Remembering all my credentials, log ins, and setting up POL (and even windower setup) is such a hassle that I end up skipping everytime they have these. By comparison, if I could get back into FFXI as easy as it is for me to get back into WoW, I'd be in Vana'Diel tomorrow. FFXIV and FFXI are worlds apart in their launchers. FFXIV and WoW are pretty much identical in terms of launchers. FFXI uses Play Online and it's a nightmare.
Getting into your account is several layers deeper, requires a ton of different pieces of information and the downloads take forever. It has been streamlined a bit, but it still takes several clicks and slow loading menus to get into the game even after you've jumped through all of the hoops. Back in the day if you wanted to reactivate you'd need to product codes for each of the expansions and you essentially had to verify them all separately.
And then you to to reactivate mules (inventory was minimal so extra character to manage auctions and hold stuff were pretty much mandatory for serious players). The mules were separate and cost extra unlike just rolling a ton of new characters in WoW or FFXI. To make it worse, you didn't reactivate them directly. You had to reactive 'Content IDs' then navigate a menu to pair a 'Content ID' with a a particular mule.
If you had an army of them (like many did), then this took a very long time with lots of slow loading. Seriously, getting FFXI fully reactivated once upon a time was like a whole weekend project. The download could often take 6-11 hours.
Part of the problem was the slow file checking. If you got disconnected at any point in the middle of the huge download, it would essentially take hours for it to check which files were already downloaded before resuming your download. It's so bad that a lot of people in the community literally just use torrents of the game files to avoid having to deal with SE's servers when trying to reinstall. I'm glad they've done the Mogstation integration to remove a lot of the BS, but it still doesn't fix the fact that you have to use the POL launcher. I don't remember the particulars, but I I think it's sort of baked in in such a way that it's not really removable at this point.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it was essentially built with the PS2 in mind and the whole PC thing is still perched on top of that whole structure. It's just too integrated into the system rather than just being a simple launcher. Since the retirement of console support, the PC version has been able to grow much beyond the dreaded 'PS2 Limitations' that were always the excuse for limited auction slots, inventory, and pretty much everything else. But I think it's ultimately a deep structural issue that can't be fixed now. Or isn't worth the money and effort to do so for such a small subscriber base.