It took the release of FFXIV to be so bad, it made FFXI look somewhat ok

[cosapi]

Who'd have known right? The verdict is in, FFXI is actually a somewhat okay game now! You still need a lot of time if you want to play it though. Long gone are the days of SquareEnix's little experiment to see how far they can torture their non-japanese userbase (they have FF14 for that now). You can easily solo most of the missions even Chains of Pro-hardkore-straightedge-whatevermia. And there's even a built in windower for all your help website needs every microsecond of the way. Leveling jobs is -EASY-, making gil is -EASY- and most of all a lot of things in the game are easy to do now. You can actually solo if you want hell you can even solo hard things when you're at a high level of equal or greater level. The story for missions = decent. But because they were wasted in an mmo they're also borderline total shit.

Final Verdict.

The story would have been decent if it was reused in an offline game. 2/10 because it took the release of an even shittier game to bump this up from 1/10.

[Raze]

 I don't know, like everyone who had a love/hate relationship I wanted SE to tone it down in ffxi. But hearing the words soloable and easy being thrown around makes me think the shark has been jumped, even if those are things I wished for when I played it. For better or worst ffxi was built around being a slow paced, carrot chasin', group based game. And if it's not anymore then what's the point?

 It's not like ffxi is going to compete with other games on the solo combat front. You walk slow. You attack slow. And everything you do has a long cooldown. And if everything is easy and there's no sense of accomplishment in what you do, well again, what's the point. You may as well just play wow or the wowclone of the month.

[Agent D.]

Welcome to early abyssea, start of 2011. Abyssea made the game easy, gave a new method of super leveling, and turned sucky people into egotistical asshats because they hit 99 in a week and got decent gear doing it. The original ffxi stuff is easily soloable now, straight up to the first set of add ons, and even then, more or less doable solo til the final fights. Even most of the gods of ffxi are easily duoed and soloed by certain classes. Abyssea stuff is the only group centric activity atm, though new nyzul isle opens up next week, level 99 only. Not suggesting to avoid this like the plague as if you wanna pay for an mmo, star wars sounds like a safer bet, ffxi went from being terrible to meh to decent now. If only they had started out like this...

[Tenchi-no-Ryu]

I somewhat agree. I think there's still plenty of group carrot chasing in XI. Abyssea made the grind infinitely more bearable, but trying to finish all your atmas, the missions, your AF3+1/+2 and your Empyrean weapons all required groups large and small. It definitely revitalized the game, which I don't think is a bad thing. You can read my review for more detail on my thoughts. Tragically, SE seems to be trying to pull more rabbits out of its hat with this game in the hopes of having lightening strike twice instead of building on what really got people motivated to play with Abyssea. Regurgitating Nyzul and rebranding Einherjar as Legion isn't the way to go imho. I think Voidwatch is also kind of a joke, unless they actually made the effort worthwhile (last I checked nobody gave a shit about the Inca armor). Don't get me wrong, i'm glad they're looking at old stuff that wasn't working and revamping it (Dynamis) but they need another battle expansion like Abyssea with more carrots and more storytelling to keep interest high. The level cap has been reached, they need to focus on a realistic gear progression system instead of all this situational/horizontal upgrade shit that's going on now.