Brian vs. Final Fantasy XI

I've always had a fear, looking into an MMORPG, that it'd consume my life and distract me from everything else outside of it if I were to get into it. I was lulled by certain people into believing that this game was worth the risk, though. That it was a fantastic online experience that could not be passed up and had to be enjoyed. Others suggested that it might have been different.

I caved. I decided to find out for myself.

The reality surprised me.

The installation of this program is daunting, to say the least.

You start out with five CDs. Not being interested in Tetra Master online, I skipped it, and tried to run the installer off of disc one.

Surprisingly enough, it won't install unless you've already got Play Online installed. Well, okay, then. So I install that. After that's done, disc one, disc two, disc three, disc one. Then you have to manually install disc four.

Five CDs for this game?

Crazy.

So we finish that, and then it turns out that to play FFXI you need to go through the Play Online interface, which is basically a stream-lined Square oriented AOL. It does http-access (for data on the game) e-mail access (for the e-mail address they give you with the game) and it gets you into the game, as well as hosting its own chat services and buddy list.

All of which are features that don't do a whole lot for me. But you can't proceed without registering the Play Online client. I don't know why, since it's not like you could do anything with it you couldn't do without an internet connection anyway, but they require it. So we finish this up, and have a Play Online ID.

Great.

But you can't do anything with a Play Online ID except register a 'handle'. Which is linked with your ID, and your e-mail address.

Okay, fine. So I do this, then I poke at their system a while. Dunno if I'm ready to play online, so I toy with the chat feature. You can't chat without creating a 'nick' and linking it to your handle. Er.... Okay. I'm guessing that the handle is the one that would be on the buddy list.

So I do that, see that it's basically a dumbed down IRC ... that's fine. Time to play the game.

But you have to update, first. I'll be honest; you expect this from an online game. They've got tons and tons of patches. So I figure, DSL, 20 minutes of patching at most, since the game has only been out for a week, we should be set.

Two hours later....

Yes. Two hours later I actually get into the game.

Whoo. Character creating was kind of amusing. You get different theme music for each race/gender you can pick, and the honky-tonk human female's music was second only to the cheezy disco lounge/80's porno music of the frolicking catgirl. So I pick my character (a white mage) and get into the game.

First off, I don't know what's going on with the interface. I've played a small handful of online games -- Everquest, Asheron's Call, Ragnarock Online, and Earth and Beyond. All of them have what ultimately amounts to a clean, managable, and usable UI.

The UI, for me, really makes or breaks a game. That's what determines if you can even play it. There was an amazing lack of explanation for how to handle even simple movement controls, the mouse-directions for moving your character and the camera were unintuitive, and (as far as I could tell) unconfigurable. I eventually managed to get the keyboard into a more comfortable configuration for me, but the way that the game dealt with focus (like Windows programs can) was just insane. You click, a menu pops up. But nowhere near the cursor, and now when you click, that tiny window is just shifting from preset a to b, while you're trying to figure out how to chat with another player.

This one could be my fault for having the resolution set really high. It's possible that with a lower resolution, that pop-up menu would be more obvious. Regardless, the control scheme does have the appearance of something that's really powerful if you take the time to learn it. I'll give it that much.

However, the game was unable to convince me to invest that time.

I played for about four hours, which, by my reckoning, means that I spent about as much time installing the game as playing it. Unfortunately, despite all the hype, the game comes across like most other MMORPGs. It's IRC with a really shiny interface, and a lot more numbers.

It couldn't distract me by being cool enough to get around that. The character models were limited, there just seemed to be a general lack of effort to the whole thing, and there was pretty much no one online on the server I got stuck on (you can't choose which one you go on, you know) that spoke English.

Poor luck of the draw, maybe, but color me unimpressed. Here's to hoping that Square-Enix issues refunds, though I doubt that this is the case.

Oh well.

I might go shopping for new clothes today. I could use them, given that I start a new job tomorrow.

Hmm.