10.04.2009 - Terrence Marks:

Final Fantasy XI - I got a free trial. I downloaded the 500 MB installer and ran it. Half an hour later it finished. Then it updated. The updating took ten hours. The game didn't look like it should take ten hours to update.

The website mentioned a new tutorial quest. I couldn't find it. It took me five minutes to figure out how to walk (you hold the mouse button down and drag in a direction. Dragging it too far moves the camera). The interface is entirely mouse controlled; I couldn't get the keyboard to do anything. After half an hour I figured out how to open the map (clicking the scroll wheel opens a menu - what a country!). The town was large and the town map was mostly featureless. After another half-hour, I found a weapon seller. He had one item, a pickaxe. It cost four times the starting money. Either I didn't get any money from the enemies or didn't know how to pick it up.

To their credit, this was the first game without gold spammers. I credit their proactive GM staff.

I got a few missions. You get told what to do by an NPC. Once. No quest log. If you don't remember the exact fantasy name of the NPC you need to talk to, or if you put the game down for a week, you're out of luck.

I fought a huge wasp. After a few rounds of punching it, it said "you cannot see the enemy". Did it blind me? Did I press a button that did something? Did it just move out of my field of vision? No idea.

Anyhow, after two hours, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. Talking to NPCs took about three tries. Walking involved bumping off walls and having the camera spin lazily around me - no, I couldn't find a "lock camera" setting. I'm sure that the game is playable; there were a few people there and the game seems to be moderately popular. It's possible that the retail version included very good instructions (which makes me wonder why the free trial didn't go out of its way to do the same). There's a "tutorial" in the launcher program; however, if you switch to a different window the game ends. This was actually useful; I never found out a "quit" button, so I gave up and hit alt-tab.