Single Player/Offline Mode?

[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.)