It’s the 28th, Final Fantasy XI day. Ever since I played Asheron’s Call during its early days, I’ve thought it would be great if Square or Blizzard were to throw their hats into the MMORPG arena. Well, it turns out they’ve both done so, with Square having successfully released Final Fantasy XI last year in Japan. As with all things Final Fantasy, we had to wait for quite a while here in the US (those of us not willing to import a copy and play with a dictionary on our desks, that is). From what I’ve heard from folks that have been playing it, it may almost live up to the hype.

Expected problems are the same you’ll find in Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, Earth & Beyond, and Shadowbane…

1. There will be complaints of lack of content (this will be allayed by the fact that the underlying game is over a year mature in Japan, so there’s a lot of content already present that other such games have lacked at launch time).
2. There will be obnoxious power-gamers who will abuse the game mechanisms to create insanely-powerful characters that will spend months complaining about the lack of high-level content.
3. There will be obnoxious wannabe power-gamers complaining about every minor glitch that you, a more reasonable gamer, would have passed without batting an eye.
4. There will be mooches running around trying to beg equipment, advice, and emotional support from you.
5. There will be tedious combat in which one presses an attack button and waits for the critter to fall over. The critter will then be looted, and the cycle restarted.
6. The gaming company will react to any complaints about game mechanisms by changing rules. All players that had an advantage under the old mechanisms will cry bloody murder.

There are other likely problems (ah, system requirements…), but before this game hit the US market the underlying system had been in use for over a year across the Pacific. It was made to be used with 2002 hardware by a fairly broad market. It requires an 800MHz processor and 128MB RAM. Oh my.

And so it comes to pass that I’ll be purchasing another MMORPG. I fully expect to enjoy it greatly for at least several months before the other players drive me away. Some day I hope an MMORPG will come along that doesn’t coddle problem players. Some day I hope that the makers of such a game will let the game stand on its own merits rather than give in to the demands of a vocal minority of whiney and abusive players. Perhaps Final Fantasy XI will be such a game. My Japanese isn’t up to the task of checking out the existing FFXI forums, so I don’t know whether this will be the one. I’m cautiously optimistic.