Single Player/Offline Mode?

[Mirage]

As far as I know, private RO servers aren't running on officially released server software. It's all reverse engineering or an old leaked version of the real servers.

However, RO is still officially running, isn't it? I'm talking about when there's no more money in the game for SE, what so ever.

I seem to recall someone from SE saying that they would like for there to be a way to continue after official support for the game was ended. Can't find the source of that though.

[Aerius]

As far as I recall, Ragnarok Online's implementation was much easier than FFXI. FFXI has such an incredible amount of work that needs to go into quests, events, npc implementations, spell implementations, not to mention all the content and stuff that has to be programmed and or set up, it's a lot more work than Ragnarok Online.

Plus, Ragnarok Online was fortunate to have a whole community to help out as well, and ofcourse Gravity not being that aggressive towards them (granted, the eAthena server was coded from scratch without using any official files/etc, so technically it's legal.)

(I'm not even sure if it's "okay" to talk about it on here, but since the ProjectXI project is gone I'm assuming it's safe, if not, please feel free to remove this post, mods.)
However, emulating FFXI is a whole different thing. Granted the original team of ProjectXI was small, only about 3-4 main programmers, and 2 LUA programmers for events and such, and a community of roughly 30-60 contributors they got it where it was. And that was barely functional (a lot of stuff was not working yet.)
But they were using official data grabbed/dumped right off SE's servers, which was (one of) the illegal part on their end, which eventually also is one of the things that was the demise of the project.

I guess all I'm saying is, I've never heard big companies release their server software, and those who got emulated were lucky to have an incredibly huge fanbase, and or being easy enough to be emulated. Unless some sort of magical group suddenly gets together somewhere in the coming years and decides to get it done, that would be one of the only ways. But once the game is offline, it's going to be extremely hard to get anywhere without reference/etc. (Especially since no matter how much private server developers like to say their stuff is legal, most of them get their data for implementations from analyzing packets that are sent between the client and server, which in pretty much any case, is illegal.)

As much as I'd like to think positive of it, seeing all odds, I really doubt a private server would be made.

(All above is from a pretty rusty memory being away from private server development scene for a whole while, so I could be wrong ofcourse.)

[Mirage]

Well, better hope it'll get anywhere close to what the currently oldest MMOS are at today then, which is like 15 years.

But reverse engineering isn't illegal in many areas of the world. It's what was used in Openoffice to let them view and save MS Office documents, for example. I guess it could be against some EULA somewhere, but EULAs can't usually override actual laws.

[Alhanelem]

ever heard of ragnarok online?

Show me information from the company that made the game (directly from their source) that announced the release of a private server or singleplayer version.

Ah, so there isn't one. Nevermind.

[Amerlyn]

I'll just cross my fingers and hope. Nothing wrong with hoping something happens. But don't get them too high that if doesn't happen you get disappointed. Whose to say (unless you work for SE), they might actually be working on a solution that either keeps the game up and running online, or makes it offline. After all wouldn't the best time to rewrite all that code for offline use be during the time its still making money? Or as I read earlier from another user. Its quite possible SE might use XI as a remake for a later game. They have remade and updated graphics in some of they're older games. I'll just keep my fingers crossed and hope, but not going to let it disappoint me if they don't.

***Edit: Think it would be cool if a mod moved this to "Suggestions/Feedback". I kinda feel this belongs more to that subject than it does General Discussion.***

[NightDagger]

The game will be maintained until 2013 then they will pull the plug ^^

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Go play FFXII, it's the same thing.

[Capn]

If SE ever did shut XI down for good, those C&D letters would be moot, and there would be (hopefully) a load of more kiddies opening private servers. At least I would be poking around creating one.

[Tsukino_Kaji]

Do it liek that one chick that got sued by blizzard for having a pirate WoW server! lol

[Alhanelem]

those C&D letters would be moot,

Where did you get the idea that them shutting down the servers for their game means people suddenly have the right to reverse enginner their tech and make private servers? SE can still shut them down all it wants.