Ten Level Test: Final Fantasy XI vs Lineage II Comments by Oli Welsh

Neither of them would get installed in the first place round my place - waste of good hard disk space.

Waste of good monthly subscription fees

An amusing comparison and an enjoyable read ^^

I haven't had the pleasure of playing Lineage 2 but I was horribly addicted to Final Fantasy back in the day. I remember all these feelings acutely and finally learned my lesson after I got to level 33 on my White Mage that it wasn't the game for me. However, I can certainly understand the hardcore appeal to some.

FFXI is almost agonising to play, but has an immense sense of achievement (swiftly deflated when you realise the slog to 20 will be as painful) when you reach level 10. I hit level 17 with my Red Mage before deciding I'd been killed by one Quadav too many. The game does have its charm though, and has a lovely community feel with people helping you out. Am still tempted to play it again. /resist

I got the trial of FFXI, but my old PC pissed itself laughing at it. It was well over recoomended spec, and it ran the benchmark program from their site.

I do want to try it again though, as the only MMO on 360 yet.

FFXI was actually quite good back in the day, and played with good teams at higher levels, very rewarding.

But it is a tough game, really tough. And requires much more effort and teamwork than the average western player is ready to commit. It should be said that it is not all grind, there is a very large component of skill involved too, to be able to complete and master fellowship moves (renzokukens), that in effect increase the damage level of your team significantly, giving an edge in early days, and becoming a necessity later on.

Comparing Lineage II and FFXI the verdict is clear. Lineage II is completely soulless compared to FFXI, which actually has bundles of the FF touch and charm, and great character art and music - albeit somewhat inaccessible.

It is getting old though. Roll on FF online II. There are some rumors floating around about it.

I've tried Lineage 2 a number of times in past, but I'd always end up giving up by level 13-15.

I've always preferred to solo and by that point in game, the grind combined with the lack of enemy variety in the "grind area" to get to the next level requirement for quests always use to start to eat away at my enthusiasm for continuing.

Heh, if FFXI survives a few more rounds this feature will never get finished. Leveling takes so much time...

Then again perhaps my slight carelessness might not have helped my leveling speed. I will say though that when you have a good group the amount of coordination and teamwork required to achieve things makes it really rewarding to play. In most MMOs you get a bit of this but it is the most present in FFXI from the ones I've played so far.

The only annoying thing is that it used to take so much time sitting around etc to get a group, soloing was a total grind and you couldn't even easily chat to people to while away the waits.

FFXI is definitely as an experience better than Lineage 2, but in the first ten levels this is to be expected. As much as I loved FFXI back in the day, and I miss my lvl 75 White Mage/Summoner, it's the time-consuming nature of the game compared to the more instant gratification and appeal of newer titles. At lvl 17, you'll need to get on with the sub-job quest then level that sub-job to 37 to go back to what you started as and level that all the way to 75, not to mention needing to do the class quests to unlock new jobs, which are done at higher lvls generally, and some quests are not doable again so you often need to find people at exactly the point you are at... if it manages to get to 30 onwards then it becomes a case of hanging around Jeuno until you get a group, which takes from 10-15 minutes to five or six hours. In these tests, I can't see this game getting much further.

I miss FFXI as an experience, but I don't miss it as a game - it was too messy, too complicated. The reward for hitting 75? Catching up my quests until I could travel with others to rarer places, where we merely continued to grind Limit Points rather than experience. No "bosses" or anything special, just more grind to end an already painful grind.

That said, SE have already stated we'll see a nice new MMO from their stables at E3 - considering how far Final Fantasy has moved on technically the past years, I actually am rather interested and hope to see how and if they incorporate some of the clever systems they've experimented with the past years...

Believe it or not, FFXI is incomparably easier than it used to be.

Someone really should've given Oli some basic tips starting out, like for example never trying to fight anything above "even match" as its pretty much a death sentence for most classes unless you really know what you're doing.

Under signet (part of the conquest system meta-game) mobs lower level than your char actually take a proportionate stat-hit making them far less of a threat, whereas fighting something higher than you works the other way around.

Also EP (easy prey) and DC (decent challenge) mobs give you a lot more experience than they used to, especially under signet.

Great stuff Oli. Brought back some fond memories of good (but not necessarily missed) times in Vana'Diel.

I've played Lineage II for a very short time (I got a free 2 months when Tabula Rasa was killed), and it's amazing to me how much effort NCSoft has put into the character design and animations, and how little into the gameplay. It was fun trying out all the emotes of the female dark elf, though.

FFXI lol.

Couldn't stand that game. I couldn't see any appeal in playing it whatsoever...

shame its only the first 10 levels before you really do any community things on FFXI although FoV has made the first 10 lvls easy to get through lol.

EDIT: think from FoV i managed BRD lvl1-10 in 5hrs

Lineage 2 is really that easy now? Back when I played 10 levels was a weeks work if you didn't have friends.

L2 was my first MMO and I'll alway like it for that. It is much easier to level now but it is still a slog. Once you get to 20 there is no more crazy exp and things will slow down a lot. You can probably do 1-20 in an hour these day. PVP is great but unfortunately getting to the 80+ to join the fun sucks bawls. :( I only ever made it to 70 myself...

I spent 2 years in Vana' Diel in that time i leveled every class to 75 and completed half of the end game content and made a HUGE amount of friends especially Japanese and American...and as an added bonus met my now ex girlfriend(were still great friends) whilst helping a bunch of noobs in the Konschtadt highlands.

There's something about the community in FF that no over MMO comes close to achieving(and i know ive played em all) i don't know if its the difficulty that brings everyone together or just the love of FF as a whole but for whatever reason you wont find a more friendly and more mature crowd than the FF crowd, i loved every second spent in VD (LOL yup it was shortened to that rather tasteless Abbreviation) and half of my friends list still play it on a daily basis and are continually haranging me to get back in something i'm loathe to do as i just dont have the time anymore :(

Yes FF is bastard hard to get into and yes you have to pay a monthly fee (which is nowt compared to one night in the boozer) but i can't recommend it enough all the nay sayers are dweebs with no patience no imagination prolly no money and a huge spoilt western chip on their shoulders (equips the mighty +1 tunic of flame)

/Digs out play online password

Oooh Decent Challenge

I really like these features. Having played FFXI, I know what that's like. There's something to be said for the absolute necessity of groups later on in that game, but ultimately, the incredibly slow pace, harsh death penalties and lack of WHM's killed it for me, before I even got to level 20.

I knew Lineage 2 would get a hammering in this, oh well.

I played L2 for quite a while and I reached the endgame, maxed levels, amazing items and I was one of the first to kill the 'unkillable' dragon Antharas on the Western servers, before even the Korean's!

L2 is a game about conflict and PvP more than anything else. Every resource, every item and every piece of land is limited. You have to interact with others, either sharing and playing together or murdering one another mercilessly to keep the leveling spot and loot to yourself. The game is all about politics, clan wars, territory and ruling the world.

If I were to compare it to other MMO's I would say it's pre-trammel UO crossed with current Eve online.

However I can't really recommend playing it on the official servers as it was ruined by hardcore cheats, mostly Americans. It had a massive farmer problem in the early days too, although they've been largely eradicated by the playerbase on most servers, apart from the servers where the players sided with them of course. Oh and the main European server is dominated by Russian's who have a rather obscene program which allows them serious advantages over other players.

Visually the game is gorgeous and the bosses/sieges/PvP is nothing short of superb, especially compared to hand holding games such as WoW.

If anyone is to try L2 I recommend playing it on one of the many highly populated player run free servers. There you will avoid the cheating scum, the grind will be a lot less and you'll get a far better chance to enjoy the luscious visuals and consequence based PvP.

L2 failed for one reason alone, cheating. They couldn't stop it and it got massively out of control. I've never seen such advanced programs available for cheating for any game compared to those available for L2 and none of them have ever been stopped.

Kind of sad but true, FFXI has been the only mmo to occupy me for more than 7/8 months, I dedicated 5 years to that one, and breaking the habit was an utterly heart-wrenching experience.

I wouldn't advise anyone start FFXI ever, really never pick up a copy, don't ever subscribe, don't play the thing, it is far far worse than WoW, because it demands more time, massive amounts, with 4 level 75s I dedicated nearly 200 days of play time to the game, and I enjoyed the camaraderie of it, but it destroyed me with it's epic grinds, ruthless linkshelss, yet I still miss it even 2 years on, and every now and then reenable my subscription and go and say hi.

FFXII, hard as nails, no real indication what you're getting into, indeed what your actually 'supposed' to do.
Lineage II, potentially hard as nails once you move too far from a town or city, no real indication of what you're getting into.

Already, after only 2 of these 1-10 reports I'm feeling an Oz and James vibe. Will it all end up with....and the best MMO experience from 1-10 is......PG Tips Online, you can't beat a good ol' fashioned cup of tea.

I plauyed both for a while, but found them to be equally soulless and dull. Lineage 2 has some of the most banal combat i've ever experienced, and FFXI's tiresome knack of killing you off with fluffy white rabbits is a pretty uninspiring start. Neither deserved the hard disk space or physical media they used up, because there are far, far better games out there. Opting for FFXI over Lineage 2 feels to me like choosing to have your left bollock chopped off instead of your right.

Oh god I'm reinstalling FFXI after 2 years, damn you Eurogamer, you should have left well alone....

hehe well wrote article,cant wait for next.
i played lineage 2 for some years,but never tried ff since new mmos were coming up(with better graph,features etc).
its done very objective for lineage 2 and seems laso for FF,im waiting for next round.
cheers!

FFXI is an unfortunate game to have in the Ten Level test because pretty much after you hit 10 the game changes quite a bit. Past this point soloing becomes practically impossible so its off to one of the high lvl areas (e.g. Vulkrum Dunes) to get a party of 6 and slog out with some very strong monsters.

It's here that this game can shine or fall completely flat on its feet. If you're lucky and you get a party of you and 5 other decent, nice players, who have the right equipment, have their weapons skills up to the correct value for their level and know what they're doing.... then it's amazing. It feels like a co-operative Final fantasy game which is how it should. The Warriors act as tanks whilst the Black Mages send spell after spell all being supported by the healers in the back. I've had hours of fun with parties like this.

Or you can be quite unlucky. You travel all the way to the Dunes to find it empty or full of already full parties... you finally get a party after an hour and a half only for everyone to then need to go to the toilet and when you do actually decide to fight the BLM casts 5 spells in a row making it impossible for the warriors to pull the enemy back off them.... oh and then he blames you for him dying.... it's here the Asian view of online gaming really shows... they rely too much on every player working as a concrete unit. Little consolation is giving for one player being more noobish than another or needing to take a break for 10 minutes.

But as the article above really showed FFXI is amazing at drawing you in by playing on your sense of ambition. Starting off with wanting to defeat that darn Strolling Sapling in Konsdat highlands you then want to start partying in the dunes. Then you want to get to lvl 18 when you can get a sub job- opening up new styles of play. Next up is the ability to get a chocobo at lvl... 20ish followed by the advanced job of your choice at 30. It was this reason i eventually gave up FFXI. I felt like i wasn't enjoying it at the time i just wanted to get to the next milestone.... although riding a chocobo was pretty darn cool.

Asian MMO's will always end up failing 10 level tests since they are all about the higher levels and have more restrictive character customisation (something I never found a bad thing personally).

Well, if Oli Welsh does in fact read these comments, let me offer a bit of advice to your Warrior: Get a Great Axe. The screenshots of you show you holding a sword, that will turn the tables in your favor if you make the switch (it's a warrior's best weapon).

A lot of you are really impatient with FFXI, which is why you didn't get a good experience from it. You can't play to level 20 or 30 and make a fair judgment of the game really. The reason it has so many members is due to the fact that it's not easy. They don't hand you stuff on a silver platter like most MMOs, you have to work for it, so it makes the rewards that much sweater. I've played FFXI for four and a half years now, with 2 jobs at 75, and 2 more fairly close, I can tell you that there is a steep learning curve, but the end result is worth the effort. I was a little surprised FFXI won, really, since levels 1-10 really suck. The game has changed a lot, and you can really solo up to around 20 fairly well on most melee jobs.

Calling it a waste of hard disk space is really just a bit ignorant, since there's no way someone who's put effort into enjoying the game would say that.

Really though, FFXI's community is the best part. We're a tight-knit group, and there's not much room for the guys who want to "pwn noobs." They don't last long. I'm glad to see FFXI move on to the next round, though I'd love to know what server the character was on, so I could teach him the art of gearing a warrior(Great Axes is amazing, everything else pales in comparison)

I am concerned though, since once you hit 18-20, people expect you to level a good subjob to a point where it's not going to be a sad combo within a level or two, and you won't get anywhere if you can't handle that.

Round two will shoot someone in the foot, whether that's FFXI or the other Game is still undecided.

FFXI is bastard hard and to reach end game your looking at about 6 months work :P

I played it for a total of a years playtime so yeah..... well maybe 70% othertimes I was AFK selling stuff

Man above speaks the truth. 1-30 is the hardest part of the game, no one knows there job how to gear up how to fight anything but once you hit 40-50 it all just clicks and the second time round for subjobs becomes that much faster.

Loved the game but it demands ALOT.

I couldn't hack the relentless grinding in FFXI. The whole game design is just too old school for me, it's not user friendly and it's bloody hard.

Hurry up and do DDO/GW already.

After playing WoW and being in a high end raiding guild all other MMOs look and feel as inferior as i did when looking at mr manhattans penis for 3hrs.

Tho i cant really talk :P only other MMO's i have played were DAoC, EVE and WAR :)

I lol'd

Well it put me off either game. I don't really want to slog like that.

Ok firstly and most importantly, go into FFXI's config tool and set the "gamma base" to -0.5 (default is 1.0, but the default is very, very wrong )

You can make FFXI's graphics look much nicer by manually editing the resolution settings in the Windows registry.

FFXI is a bit unusual in that the resolution that the game's 3D graphics are rendered at is independent from the actual screen resolution. The game's config tool calls this the "background" (3d graphics) and the "foreground" (the actual screen resolution)

The problem is that while you can set the "foreground" to any valid desktop resolution your PC supports your choices for "background" is limited to 256x256, 512x512 and 1024x1024. Whatever you choose is scaled to fit the foreground resolution.

However by editing the registry you can set the "background" to whatever you want. usually you want this to be exactly the same as what the "foreground" is set to.

This method of rendering is called "render to texture" because it renders the screen to an off screen texture in order to perform post process effects such as glows and other special effects on the image before it is displayed. A side effect of this is that FSAA will not work with FFXI (or any game that renders the screen in this manner). However you can set the "background" to 2x the foreground resolution for a supersampled image which is basically the same thing. Not quite as efficient but on a modern computer it shouldn't make a difference. Say for example you have the "foreground" set to 1280x1024 you would set the "background" to 2560x2048.

More information can be found on this page.

http://wiki.ffxiclopedia.org/wiki/Graphics

The above link also mentions how to adjust the mipmap LOD in the registry but if you increase FFXI's LOD setting in the registry you trade off less "crawlies" in distance textures for more blurriness in closer textures. It's better to just leave the mipmap value in the registry completely alone and instead set your video card to ignore application settings and force anisotropic filtering in 3D applications. This will eliminate the crawlies without affecting the quality of closer textures.

I really love these articles, thankyou.

How did he get to Aht Urhgan Whitegate to take the first picture in the gallery?

The one thing that needs to be said above all else about FFXI is that once it gets its hooks into you, its more addictive than crack or cigarettes. Quitting is one thing (hard), staying quit is another (even harder).

I think the poster who mentioned its mastery of playing on your ambitions really hit the nail on the head. There's always something else you want to achieve or acquire, or simply experience.

I'm really enjoying this series of articles. More in-game pictures of each game would be nice, but otherwise they are very interesting.

Hahahah. What a great article.

Not that I'd install either game.

It's true - FFXI is grind-tastic. However, what really hooked me to it, outside of the skin-deep charms, was the astonishing variety of gameplay the further you progress.

Don't get me wrong - the backbone of this game is grind, and remains grind. But as you progress through the game, more and more side paths open up, and these are very varied. Missions with lots of classic Final Fantasy story and quests with lots of flavour are both options to be explored, and vary from must-do (such as sub-job unlocking) to important (some spells or equipment can only be received by quest), down to pure entertainment (Star onion brigade, anyone?).

Then there are world NMs to camp for fun and profit, BCNMs (instanced boss fights), level cap-breaking quests, artifact armor quests (which is basically job specific equipment that makes your character look like the classic FF archetype), assault missions, advanced jobs to unlock, campaign and besieged battles, and at endgame: HNMs to camp, dynamis, limbus and all manner of other things to do.

Coming from WOW, it's refreshing that there is so much to do, rather than just raiding, battlegrounds and arena, but it's also quite overwhelming in many ways. One of the nice things about it is to be able to step out of your door in Whitegate ( the current hub city ) and pick and choose from the various event requests being offered depending on what you want to do that day. Another nice thing that you won't pick up on in a ten level test is: your one character can level any and all jobs (you need at least 2, for subjob purposes), which means that all the progress in terms of gear youve gathered, missions you've completed and so on, doesnt go to waste when you decide you want to be a black mage instead of a warrior.

One last thing I'm going to mention is crafting: like the rest of the game, its painfully slow, and prohibitively expensive - it costs more money than you will ever likely make back from it - and yet it is enormously compelling. The promise of getting to a high level and making a high quality +1 version of some ridiculously expensive item of armour - well, its a kind of motherlode when it happens, since while a regular crafted item sells for less than the cost of the raw materials (as they are coveted by crafters for those elusive skill points), the +1 versions sell for 10x the regular price. It also helps that many of the most sought after items in the game are crafted only, and transferable, which makes gil rather a hard commodity to come by - compared to many MMOs where it's pretty easy to gather more money than you will ever really need.

All said and done, FFXI just has a lot of things going for it - I never have less than about 20 items on my to-do list. It can be a total PITA to actually DO them though... I've quit twice already for long periods (1.5 years+ each), and reactivated twice. Azeroth is a great world to kill things in. Vana'diel is just better to live in.

I tried this again, on my new PC. The game skips ever few seconds. No other unusual processes running, every other common sense thing done, the few sugestions online done too, but nothing. Still annoying skipping. I'll pass.

Though to be fair, those few frames in betwen the spurts of skipping look fantastic.

I have stopped by to say that a lot of Final Fantasy XI players have read this article and were pleasantly surprised.

Many people quit after the first 10 or 20 levels because they feel the game is too difficult or unwieldy. Beyond that, many who play the game feel that it is not given a fair chance in reviews and on gaming sites and magazines. Between these two things, FFXI players have come to expect the worst from anything even mentioning the game.

Comments on forums regarding this article have been pretty positive though. People are saying that Oli has reminded them a lot of themselves when they started - annoyed perhaps with the inflexible UI and the lack of clues the game gives about what to do, but compelled by the atmosphere and sense of accomplishment to go on. People are recounting their own newbie stories from up to six years ago as well.

Most people who play FFXI also agree that games that hand everything out for free like Lineage II cannot hold their interest for very long. The people who play FFXI generally do so because the dedication required and accompanying sense of a accomplishment are more fun for us than getting to run around easily defeating anything that comes our way.

Never played Lineage but I tried FF for all of 10 minutes and HATED it!! Waste of money BIG time. I understand not making the beginning to easy but no reason to make it IMPOSSIBE!!

when is next article.... i wanna see it!!!

Uhhh... yeah. Where's the next article!?!

come on EG!! Next Article!!

Hello? Are we ever going to get any more of these articles? I was enjoying them, but the last one was in March!

Both games are all about leveling grinding. You could go to a moderate level somewhat fast in FFXI, if you knew what you were doing... if. Hardcore or not, in Lineage 2 it'll take you at least half a year, even with friends. Speaking of grinding, with the upcoming Final Fantasy XIV (and maybe the KOTOR MMO), I hope that there will be some grinding involved... sure both are aiming for casual gamers but if it was that easy, everyone would be at max level in no time. Then again FFXIV != FFXI.