Final Fantasy XI Benchmark 3 Released

Sidicas writes "Squaresoft has released a new version of the benchmark for Final Fantasy XI. The new version includes a preview of the Tavnazian Archipelago from the Chains of Promethia expansion pack. The benchmark is full of eye-candy and makes for one heck of a screensaver!"

Comments

Yet more benchmarks

[OAB_X]

I dont think that this will replace 3dmark anytime soon. Nor will it replace the new HL2, Doom3 or Far-Cry benchmarks. Maybe it will add onto them, but, never replace it.

Re:Yet more benchmarks

[Anonymous Coward]

As I recall, the FFXI benchmark is used to see how the game would run on your system under various settings and duress, not measure the l33tness of your machine for the rest of the gaming world.

Re:Yet more benchmarks

[mausmalone]

The benchmark isn't meant to gague how powerful your system is, but how well your system can run FFXI. They give a list of scores on the page and tell you what kind of in-game experience you can expect. This is mainly the result of a console developer trying to cope with a multi-configuration platform (i.e. you can't complain so much if the game doesn't work on your system, as you could've tried the demo first for free).

Square Enix

[Donoho]

Squaresoft is dead you insensitive clod!

Re:Square Enix

[Crimsane]

we could be so lucky.
if it were "dead" we could put it to rest.
unfortunately its more of an "undead" as it wanders around trying a ghostly shell of its former self trying to suck the blood of those that once loved it.

Re:Square Enix

[Guppy06]

From what I can tell it seems Squaresoft was by far first among equals in that merger. Final Fantasy this, Final Fantasy that, and yet very little seems to be on the horizon in the world of Dragon Quest/Warrior. The old FF games have been ported seventeen different ways to Sunday but we still haven't seen ports of DQ 5 or 6 in English. Going to the Square-Enix homepage, I don't see anything that looks like something that would have come from Enix, and you really have to dig before you see the phrase "Dragon Warrior." You give us an update to Seiken Densetsu 1 for the GBA SP that manages to break the beauty of the ring menu system but you can't be bothered to finally bring Terranigma to North America? It's not like you even have to translate it...

Squaresoft is alive and well, it's Enix that seems to be floating belly-up. Where's Soul Blazer IV? Can we at least get a Chrono III?

Re:Square Enix

[Firehawke]

Well, about the only thing Enix has done that's high profile of late is Dragon Quest, and that series takes even longer than Final Fantasy between revisions.

Nevertheless I wouldn't count them out just yet.. though your point is valid and I agree-- the part of the company that faces the outward world the most is the Square side of Squeenix.

Re:Square Enix

[Anonymous Coward]

Enix:Square::Apple:Next

Just look at who's running the show at Squeenix these days, and look at whose software is getting more attention.

Re:Square Enix

[dancingmad]

Are you kidding? Enix has always taken a long time to put out Dragon Quest games, but they are FAR more popular in Japan than Final Fantasy. DQ8 just came out. At the end of November DQ8 was the best selling game in Japan. According to the Magic Box:

Dragon Quest VIII (PS2, Square Enix) - 2,236, 000 units

More tellingly is that the company is using the game to promote a new franchise, Code Age. SE knows very well that DQ8 is enormous in Japan but won't see much action in the U.S. SE is a Japanese oriented company.

As for the Gameboy, there is a DQ game for it: the Japan only DQ Slime Mori Mori title.

Enix is alive and kicking around as well as it always has.

Re:Hello, jpeg

[obsid1an]

Yea, it is so bad that it's the most popular MMO with the exception of Lineage 1 & 2.

Re:Hello, jpeg

[Anonymous Coward]

And Jessica Simpson is a pop star too. What's your point? Just because it's popular doesn't mean it's any good.

Besides, we have no way of verifying those numbers or knowing how many of those are still active. I know a lot of people with FFXI accounts who were just hanging on until EQ2 or WoW released. Expect a sharp decline in numbers soon.

FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[DJ Wipeout]

Yes, hopefully all the mouthbreathers and asshats will migrate to EQ2 and WoW, so those of us who actually enjoy the game can enjoy it that much more.

If nothing else, FFXI has the best damn control mechanism of any MMOG out there. WASD makes you run in the direction you push, and the arrow keys move the camera. I haven't touched the mouse in-game in over 10 months.

From what I can tell, the people who hate FFXI the most are the ones that insisted on using mouse+keyboard instead of keyboard only or ps2-style controller and keyboard. If I was still using the mouse, I'd hate it too.

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I can tell, the people who hate FFXI the most are the ones that insisted on using mouse+keyboard instead of keyboard only or ps2-style controller and keyboard. If I was still using the mouse, I'd hate it too.

Wait, you're telling me that because people dislike FFXI because of the controls, and not the sucky gameplay? That's so wrong I don't know where to start.

But let's start with this. We're talking about a PC game. PC interfaces come with a mouse and controller. It would make sense to create a port of the game that caters to this interface.

Instead they basically ported the PS2 version over directly, and poorly mapped the PS2 buttons onto the keyboard. So using the keyboard is a chore.

Simple example: Let's say I want to equip a new sword.

FFXI: Press the "-" key on the numpad, and then choose the Equipment option. Then select the "Weapon" slot. Then select the new piece of equipment. (Of course, you can use either the keyboard or the mouse for this.)

World of Warcraft: Press Shift-B. Right click on the new sword. Done.

Which is easier here?

But ignoring the terrible control for a while, let's talk about the gameplay for a bit, and how this game can be more accurately called Crab Fantasy XI. You level up off of identical crabs, with the same abilities, for the following levels:

12-18 - Snippers
18-25 - Clippers
28-33 - Ironshells
50-60 - Robber Crabs
63-67 - Steelshells

There are a couple of reprieves from crabs in there. 25-28 is done off Mandragora, 33-50 is done off Crawlers, and 60-63 is done off Toramas. In total, you'll find yourself spending most of the game killing the same creature over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. But most FFXI losers don't see this as a problem.

FFXI has gotten "grind" down to a science. There's nothing else to do in that game, except grind. When you're done grinding, you can always change your job to another and start grinding in that!

Almost everything else you'd do winds up being soley to support the grinding. BCNMs, HNMS, and Garrison events = equipment for grinding. Ballista = money for grinding. Quests = abilities for grinding.

Plus, for a "story-based" MMORPG, there's very little story in FFXI. The story in WoW is far more engrossing, which is really saying something when you realize WoW doesn't have much of a story.

There's more to be said, but this post is long enough as it is. Suffice it to say: FFXI sucks and deserves its reputation as a crappy game.

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[DJ Wipeout]

But let's start with this. We're talking about a PC game. PC interfaces come with a mouse and controller. It would make sense to create a port of the game that caters to this interface.

No, we're not. We're talking about a game for the Playstation 2 and the PC, where all players are in the same world system. When designing a game for multiple operating systems, you want the interface to be the same. Apple taught us that consistency is good, yes?

Instead they basically ported the PS2 version over directly, and poorly mapped the PS2 buttons onto the keyboard. So using the keyboard is a chore. Simple example: Let's say I want to equip a new sword. FFXI: Press the "-" key on the numpad, and then choose the Equipment option. Then select the "Weapon" slot. Then select the new piece of equipment. (Of course, you can use either the keyboard or the mouse for this.) World of Warcraft: Press Shift-B. Right click on the new sword. Done. Which is easier here?

Chore for you maybe.

Ctrl-E. Return. Up or Down however many times to get the weapon you want. Return. Escape. Done.

I can do this in less than a second. All without my hands leaving the keyboard. Or if it's a switch I need to do often, I just make a macro for it.

Is there any time in WoW where you have to take your hand off the mouse to use the keyboard? Do you ever have to do it in the middle of a fight? I'm sorry, I hate having to switch control mechanisms, *especially* in the middle of a fight.

But ignoring the terrible control for a while, let's talk about the gameplay for a bit, and how this game can be more accurately called Crab Fantasy XI.

Uh, did you play the same game that I do? I'll freely admit the scaling up of monster models, but it's not like that's unique to FFXI, and I definitely have not spent my entire game levelling off crabs. I think the only time I fought them at all was in Qufim.

Personally, I think playstyle has much more to do with how one views FFXI. If all you think of the game is "Get my job to 75 and sub to 37" then heck yeah you're going to look at it as a grind. Did you ever fish, just for the sake of fishing? Did you ever just hang out someplace with your friends? That said, most of the MMOG experience is tied to the other players you interact with in the game. If you don't find people you can connect with, then you'll lose interest. There are 50+ people in my linkshell for me to hang out with, and I'm "grinding" 5 or 6 jobs at the same time. Whatever I'm in the mood for, I can do. I'm a casual player, so I'm less concerned about when I achieve something and more about what happens along the way. I like FFXI a lot, and I'm sorry you don't share that opinion, since it seems like you've put some effort into it in the past. I hope WoW is the game you're looking for.

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[falcon5768]

YAY, its someone who's not a EQ reject and actually knows what they are talking about.

Seriously I think most of the fun with FFXI is the fact that you can get overwelmed on what you want to do. Do I want to fish, do I want to farm, do I want to quest, do I want to level.

There have been days where my GF has just sat in her moghouse and talked to our LS. Her freind who blasted past her burned out in 4 months trying to hit 75, I havent come close to it yet.

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[Anonymous Coward]

No, we're not. We're talking about a game for the Playstation 2 and the PC, where all players are in the same world system. When designing a game for multiple operating systems, you want the interface to be the same. Apple taught us that consistency is good, yes?

You realize that's self-contradictary, right?

What Apple (should have) taught us was that consistancy on a platform is good. In other words, all applications on the Apple system should work basically the same. So they all share hotkeys from common tasks.

In other words, the Windows port of FFXI, being a PC game, should behave like a PC game because it's on a PC. I have no problem with allowing it to ape being a PS2 game if you plug in a PS2 controller, but, dammit, the Windows version isn't a PS2 game. It's a PC game. It should act like one.

Do you think PS2 games ported to the X-Box use the exact same control scheme? It would be pretty impressive, because the two controllers don't match one-to-one. Instead they have to design a control scheme unique to each console.

Is there any time in WoW where you have to take your hand off the mouse to use the keyboard? Do you ever have to do it in the middle of a fight? I'm sorry, I hate having to switch control mechanisms, *especially* in the middle of a fight.

Only when chatting, if you don't want to type with only one hand. Just like using a computer normally. Otherwise, all the hotkeys can be used with one hand.

WoW has this neat concept with macros. It allows you to map them to any key. Wow. What a concept. As opposed to artificially limiting you to 20 slots, because it was originally designed as a PS2 game.

Personally, I think playstyle has much more to do with how one views FFXI. If all you think of the game is "Get my job to 75 and sub to 37" then heck yeah you're going to look at it as a grind. Did you ever fish, just for the sake of fishing?

Yes. It was boring as all hell. Fishing in FFXI, and I'm not kidding, consists of walking next to water and then doing "/fish". You then wait for a bit and the game will announce if you caught anything. Needless to say, there are a ton of fishing bots available.

As for FFXI being any thing near suitable for a casual player, I think you need to check your definition of "casual player." Everything in that game requires sessions of at least two hours to complete. Leveling usually occurs in five-hour stretches or more because its so annoying getting a working group going, due to the insanely specific roles of individual jobs.

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously I think most of the fun with FFXI is the fact that you can get overwelmed on what you want to do. Do I want to fish, do I want to farm, do I want to quest, do I want to level.

Words cannot express how funny I find that.

Do I want to fish? No, because FFXI has one of the most boring fishing interfaces ever. If you ever feel like fishing on some machine with Perl, try this:

perl -e 'while(1){sleep(3);$f=rand();if($f<0.6){print "You didn\047t catch anything.\n";}elsif($f<0.9){print "Your fish got away.\n";}else{print "You caught a fish\041\n";}}'

(Hey, Slashcode, any specific reason I had to use HTML entities in "Plain Old Text" mode?)

Do I want to farm? Well, as much fun as competeting with five Dragoons who mysteriously manage to play this game 24/7 and failing to earn enough money for anything, no, I don't want to farm. It's basically just like leveling, except you don't earn experience and you don't have other people to talk with. Very, very, boring.

Do I want to quest? Hm... None of the quests offer much of a reward. So, no, I don't feel like wasting time doing a pointless quest. Especially because most quests wind up involving farming. (See above answer.) Or they involve massive groups. Now while getting four to six people together for a quest isn't that bad, getting the eighteen required for most quests is.

Do I want to level? Well, sure. Except I can't find enough other people with the right jobs to do so. Instead I sit around looking for people just my level, with just the right jobs, due to the penalty you get for partying with people not exactly your level.

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[falcon5768]

Obviously you havent played long enough. Some of those quest pay a lot and are repeatable and not much effort, but you cant be lvl 20 and have to have some fame (IE done some quests) in able to do it.

Like I said before, it seems the only people who have problems with the game are either those who subscribe to the EQ style of play and not the original UltimaOnline style. OR who think this is like a normal FF game. I have been playing since May and havent even gotten close to doing 90% of the stuff, heck people have played for 3 years and still havent done it all and they keep adding more stuff (this weeks update fixes your 24/7 bot problem, adds brand new missions, adds new mobs, adds new equipment along with a host of other changes)

Re:FFXI contribution to MMOGs == control mechanism

[Anonymous Coward]

First - you're responding to a two day old post. Let it rest, sheesh.

Obviously you havent played long enough.

I HATE that attitude with games. "Oh, it gets more fun after playing for 50 days." Here's a fun concept: how about it be more fun right now. And the funny thing is, it never got more fun. Ever. But people kept on telling me "it gets more fun after XXX" and I kept playing to play with friends.

So I played from the PC release to the release of the world's worst expansion pack, after which I finally realized I had never had fun with the game and never was going to. So I quit, at level 60.

Let me tell you something - the stuff you haven't done yet - isn't fun. The last thing I did in that game that was even remotely fun was probably... You know what, I can't think of anything. Everything's a chore in that game.

Just wait until you hit level 50. When you have to complete the world's dumbest quest to go past level 50, you'll understand why Square-Enix sucks.

Once you start getting past level 40 to level 50, the quest rewards will stop being useful. So will most of the easier farming places. If I were to continue playing, I would have required four million gil or so in gear - and I think inflation has increased that price up to around eight million or even more.

The biggest quest reward in the game is 10,000 gil. All the other stuff are required abilities and, due to the stupid fame requirements, frequently require doing stupid things like repeating a quest at a loss fifty times or so. That's not fun. That's tedious.

Just wait. At some point you'll realize there's nothing more coming to do, just more of the same. More of the same pointless quests, which all involve killing a given monster for hours on end until you collect enough of a drop. More of the same abilities, but with higher numbers associated with them. There's nothing quite like looking ahead the next few levels and realizing you get one new ability.

On a tangent, WoW has the "collection" quests off drops, but so far, I haven't had anywhere near the trouble actually completeing them that I did with FFXI. In FFXI these quests would involve getting one rare item and would take hours. In WoW it will require collecting five or twenty items, but the drop rate would be fairly common so it felt like you were making progress and not just continuously failing to roll a 20 on a 20-sided die.

Installation fails

[magic]

On Win2k, the installation fails with the error 'data1.cab' is missing :(

-m

Re:Installation fails

[Luveno]

I'm getting the same error on WinXP Pro SP1.

Re:Installation fails

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked for me on XP Pro SP2. I've tried it on two machines so far, and it looked pretty bad on both of them, so you're not missing much.

(Strangely enough the "score" I got indicates the game would run well on both machines, but the benchmark itself was running at 5-10 FPS, so I'm really confused. I hope you guys can get it running to confirm that it's just not the computers I'm using, that you really should get scores that high with performance that bad. One's a custom built machine (scored "Incredibly tough"), the other is a Dell laptop (scored "Tough") that I'm "borrowing" for this test. The two scores are based on the rankings they list on the linked page.)

MD5 of the file I have:
fb43dd55639abac86b253862edafe7c6

Re:Installation fails

[Reapman]

Thanks for sending the MD5... I'm getting:

FB5D1205892381DC8AF9042BBE88A274
which is obviously different then whatyou got, and i've downloaded twice getting that exact same hash mark... going to try it with Internet Explorer later on and see if that makes a difference.

Re:Installation fails

[Reapman]

Sorry for a "double post" but yeah, use IE it works fine downloading with that (IE 6.whatever) Bahaumut vs Airship... Sweetness...

Re:Hello, jpeg

[DAldredge]

Funny, that didn't work on the movie "Final Fantasy: The Spirits that make you very sleepy" ;->

Re:Hello, jpeg

[Anonymous Coward]

Wah! Wah! My name is DAldredge. I am a fucking idiot that didn't understand the plot of the Final Fantasy movie so now I'm making a dumb joke about it.

Re:Hello, jpeg

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, sadly enough, it did.

Of the "Final Fantasy" fans I know, most of them bought the DVD even though they didn't enjoy the movie. I don't know why, but they did, out of "loyalty" to Square or some crap like that.

Re:Hello, jpeg

[DAldredge]

It didn't have a plot. That is what happens when you rewrite the script 50+ times.

And if I am so stupid why do you respond to me?

Re:Hello, jpeg

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't respond to you. Everyone here knows that you are posting AC in order to make it look like someone is actually replying to your idiotic posts.

Re:Hello, jpeg

[Anonymous Coward]

Just admit that you wanted to look at the images of the main character in a bikini. It is the best way to save face.

Re:Hello, jpeg

[DAldredge]

No, that can't be it as most of the posts have all the words spelled correcly and I don't bother. ;->

Re:Slow, Uninteresting, and Blurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, no, they won't answer. Instead they'll just mod me as flamebait. Sorry, but the "benchmark" really did run that poorly and give me a score that high. And the graphics really did manage to look blurry - like I mentioned, I used FRAPS to get a true score, I have screenshots.

The graphics seriously are blurry. And it's not just because I'm using an LCD, the screenshots are blurry even at normal resolution. It's weird, it almost looks like someone took a larger image and scaled it down to fit the screen size (but not 2:1, something like just a little off), which could help explain the poor framerate.

Someone else posted a topic that says "Hello, jpeg" and it's kind of funny - there are artifacts in the image that almost look like JPEG artifacts. Seriously. Some one else needs to run this "benchmark" and corroborate this - it really does look like crap. (In the starting scene, look at the kids riding on the yellow birds, it's really noticible there and in a section where they show some trees later.)

Re:Hello, jpeg

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know, somehow I don't think saying I wanted to oggle a computer generated character when I have the Internet available for far better material really would save face. :-P

huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Ballista = money for grinding" .... no comment

Re:huh?

[z-pak]

Correction: Ballista = Never Play Tested By Devs Its just a sleep fest (in game AND out if you're anything but a mage).

Re:huh?

[falcon5768]

I have fun like crazy beating the crap out of Mages with my Monk... The key to balista isnt range, its stratagy, if you dont co-ordinate with your players on your team yeah your going to get your ass handed to by a mage, but if you can get a member to play around with a mage, they wont see your raging fists pound their ass into the ground.

Re:Slow, Uninteresting, and Blurry

[Reapman]

Just downloading it now (looks like it's an IE only download experience >:/) anyways if it's anything like the second one, yes it's designed to stress the computer more then what the game is (in the second there's a scene with dozens and dozens of little annoying taru characters all doing some emote stuff) as for the graphics, yeah it's definitly not the most beautiful game, but it's far from ugly (personal opinion anyways) it' no EQ2 thats fer sure. So no, if you ever did play this game don't expect 5fps, unless you max the details (on an ATI 9600 it ran fine except in extreme in game weather conditions)

Re:Slow, Uninteresting, and Blurry

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that seems kind of stupid. It's my first introduction to thier graphics engine and they purposely gimp it to make it look slow? I figured the benchmark would give me an idea of how the gameplay might really run on my machine, but I guess it doesn't, really. The demonstration should be more representative of how it would play, I guess, and that did run much more smoothly, so I guess that's the idea. But it still kind of seems a sour note to introduce people to the game with.

(Not to mention holy bilinear-filtered pixels - the textures they use are really low-resolution. Please tell me that's to reduce the download size or something.)

Time?

[Ganondorf Dragmire]

After watching this benchmark, my system is indeed sutible to run this game. The question do I have the time to play?

Re:Time?

[Anonymous Coward]

That depends. Do you have 5 hours a day, as follows:

1 hour to spend looking for a party
1 hour to spend trying to find a place to camp
3 hours to earn XP

And can you do that on a daily basis?

Unless you don't mind spending LOOOONG stretches of time with the game (like five hour long sessions), then no, you don't have enough time to play the game.

There's really nothing to do in that game that doesn't take at least an hour or more of preparation and then several hours of execution. Some of the quests take eight hours or so to complete.

Re:Slow, Uninteresting, and Blurry

[mausmalone]

So I'm curious. If this is a new engine, then I guess that would explain why it ran so poorly - but it wouldn't explain why the graphics looked so vanilla.

Well, here's the catch-22. If it's a new engine, yes, that'll stress your computer and make the framerate drop as it will most certainly have all sorts of added graphical stuff (things like depth of field or glow, which can be added afterward with no need for new textures or anything). The reason why it looks so vanilla, though, is that the characters, environments, and textures were all designed for an engine from a few years back. They're always going to look just as vanilla, no matter how much the engine improves. (Think of Tenebare, except in a much less extreme case.)