Final Fantasy XI Online: Chains of Promathia by Al Giovetti

 

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Final Fantasy XI Online: Chains of Promathia

Summary * History * Company Line * Game Play * Plot * Graphics * Animation * Voice Actors * Music Score * Sound Effects * Utilities * Multi-player Features * Cheats, Hints, and Walkthrough * Journalists * References * Letters

History

Final Fantasy is one of the best selling game series of all time. There are a large number of fans. Final Fantasy was one of the most anticipated of the massively multiplayer games online.

Final fantasy has had moderate success, enough to stay online but not enough to unseat Sony as the largest and richest provider of these services.

Summary

Company Line

Game Play

The game has some wonderful features that make it better than any other massively multiplayer game online. These features were developed by Square Enix when they looked over the massively multiplayer landscape. Like any product their are plusses and minuses, advantages and disadvantages. The overwhelming advantage to Final Fantasy XI is the ability to return to a bind point called HP or home point in the game when you die without loosing all or a part of your equipment. Most gamers and game designers agree that there should be a penalty for death. And most agree that the penalty for death should be a loss of some of the experience gained. Experience gained in a role playing game is used to gain levels, attributes (such as strength) or skills (such as katana skill) which make your character more powerful and more able to kill harder and harder monsters in ever increasingly difficult areas of the game. This increase in skills and access to more difficult areas of the game opens up more areas of the plot or quests that now can be completed for in some cases experience, items and cash.

Most of the disagreement over death penalty is in the area of loosing items. In Everquest, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot and others if you do not go back to your body within a certain time period and recover the body you loose all the items on your corpse. In Lineage you loose at least one item when you die which is randomly selected by the computer. The innovation in Final Fantasy Online is that you do not loose items when you die under any circumstance. All your items are returned to your home point (HP) even if you are never raised from the dead by magic.

In many games the requirement that you return to your dead body and retrieve the items left on it, like looting a dead monster requires many hours to get back into the dungeon and often you died at the feet of a fearsome monster that you could not kill the first time. The task of retrieving your body and the hard one items can be impossible for one player and nearly impossible for many players.

Certainly the one problem with the dreaded corps retrieval is the time it takes. You could be stuck in a very difficult to get to location of the dungeon for hours. With the penalty of leaving and going back to your real life being the loss of these all important items that may have taken hundreds of hours to obtain.

We all have real lives to live and often have to return to them quickly and without notice. We have jobs and family responsibilities to sleep and rest to get ready for. The threat loss of items won with hundreds of hours of time to win can pull us from these other parts of our lives. Square Enix has made a game a little more easy to live a real life with, one that we can get out of quickly without much penalty. This is an important innovation.

Most people enjoy skill based role playing games and most massively mulitplayer games are role playing. Considering that the rest of the United States market seems to be hung up on shooters, the role playing game has found a home in massively multiplayer. The european and oriental market still likes these adventure games including role playing adventures as evidenced by their success on console, PC, and in the massively multiplayer setting.

Plot

Graphics

Animation

Voice Actors

Music Score

Sound Effects

Utilities

Multi-player Features

Journalists

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    References

    Letters

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