Single Player/Offline Mode?

[JagerForrester]

Took me a while, but I just thought of this. What Square-game had multiple characters that you could use to create a party with? Chrono Cross. Build a FFXI (Offline Version) around that game mechanic?

[Vivivivi]

This remindes me of how Sega Team did all of their Phantasy Star series. Because you could go on Offline mode and use the saves people were able to hack into the game and dupe money and items using the offline method.

Yeah if this ever did get implemented, I'd be fine with it being after the online servers go away to prevent exactly what you mentioned. It'd just be great to experience this game again in another 10-15 years much like I have I and IV

[Mirage]

I'm still hoping for a public release of the server software rather than an offline version.

Am I the only one? Think about it, how cool wouldn't it be to run your very own FF11 server where you were the head GM and you could play with all the people who were in your old LS on the official servers?

[Vivivivi]

I'm still hoping for a public release of the server software rather than an offline version.

Am I the only one?

Nope! I'd be happy with either. Just some way to play the game in the distant future.

[Alhanelem]

It does beg the question though: What happens when FFXI eventually goes dark forever? Will FFXI only exist as a memory after that?

Yes, it will just disappear. No single player mode. SE won't have control of the game anymore if it's still able to be played.

The game will run until such a time when it doesn't earn them any money, and then it will stop for good. MMOs disappear when they die, they don't turn into offline games. You'd be basically asking them to spend more money to change almost everything int he game so that it can be done single player, which is A lot of work and money investment when they are no longer collecting money from players.

I'm still hoping for a public release of the server software rather than an offline version.

Will never, ever, ever happen and I would bet my life on it. All the known unofficial server projects have also been shut down by SE so there's no chance of that either.

Releasing the server software potentially means someone else can make money off SE's work.

[Mirage]

Don't be so negative! It has happened before.

[ValronXI]

Yes, it will just disappear. No single player mode. SE won't have control of the game anymore if it's still able to be played.

The game will run until such a time when it doesn't earn them any money, and then it will stop for good. MMOs disappear when they die, they don't turn into offline games. You'd be basically asking them to spend more money to change almost everything int he game so that it can be done single player, which is A lot of work and money investment when they are no longer collecting money from players.

Will never, ever, ever happen and I would bet my life on it. All the known unofficial server projects have also been shut down by SE so there's no chance of that either.

Releasing the server software potentially means someone else can make money off SE's work.

ever heard of ragnarok online?
zzZzzZ

its deja vu~

[ValronXI]

except Ragnarok i think still keeps its servers up and running?

[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.)