this topic is just a bit of nostalgia on my part, A place to tell a story that spanned 11 years of my life and how something silly like an MMO can make you feel nostalgic.

Who would have thought that a random game purchase at wal-mart of all places would as I stated above span 11 years but I guess weirder things can happen? It started in November of 2003 I drove home with the recently launched FFXI with feelings of trepidation and excitement. My only MMo experience upto this point had been Diablo II and well, it just doesnt compare. Once home I relized that my poor 4 year old E-Machines PC with its proud 600mhz celeron processor and 128MB of ram with 0 3d support just simply said "no". Which made me repackage FFXI and sit it on top of my computer desk as a motivation to save.

February of 2004, income tax rolled around and I went all out on a custom built PC to run this game that had stared at me for 4 months, a 3.0ghz Pentium 4 processor 2 gigs of ram, 256mb*biggest I could buy* GFX card and yes a 60gig HDD...after the initial install and hearing the joyful playonline music for the first time all those months of excitement flooded my system....all I have to do is press launch AND!!!

updating............

Such a tease this mistress is...oh well only will take another hour..

It begins: I think I was hooked from character creation. With my Brady games offical FFXI strategy guide in hand I made a long careful and high fantasy choice to roll......hume.....I got scared alright...then came the name box.....what do I call myself.....and so came the name Andrez....a name with so much meaning and depth to me it came from 15 minutes of pressing the random button! Now only one choice button separated me from Vana'diel where to be from....as you can all tell by now i'm the most creative person with my choices, so it wouldn't surprise anyone that, I simply chose where humes were from, Bastok.

At this point in my 18 year old life I had played every FF since 7 and thought I knew what I was expecting in terms of game play and graphics and size of the world but after that first cutscene where suddenly you're on your own in Bastok...I've never felt so lost (inside of a game) Where do I go? who's real? why is this galka wearing nothing but straps and looking at me? Never the less, I had my offical guide with me and set out on my first mission...

Hours passed by that night and before I knew it I found myself in South Gustaberg for the first time. The lonesome yet still forward moving music playing softly in my headphones only interrupted occasionally by the sound of a worm breaking through the surface. After a few battles and that awesome level up music I started to feel bold. Lets see how big this game is! Off I went to explore this seemingly endless zone of S. Gusta.

"hey a lighthouse! hey a mountain! hey a bunch of people standing around a suspicious rock formation in the middle of the zone killing lizards.....ill have to stop back later.....hey a turtle guy!...why did the turtle just growl at me.....why is he chasing me....i'll show him....oh no...oh no...i'm going to die....wait maybe this mighty strikes can save m.....nope....dead...
Before I knew it the sun was up, which would turn into the first of many, many nights in that manner. This however was only a taste of what was to come, I mean I was still after all a lone warrior with a subligar and an onion sword until a group of people passing me asked a simple enough question:

"Hey we're going to kill liz's in highlands, want to come?"

The experience of a party, traveling to our camp, praying goblins didnt turn around or that quadav didnt roam too close....to the joy of whys my screen shaking?....tremor ram? There was just something about it, standing in the highlands with a group of people, the ambient sound effects of wind blowing only broken up by battle music, you felt like you were there, a part of a world. This feeling was concreted the first time going to Valkrum dunes. Everyone had been talking about "dunes" in the party and it felt like we were getting ready to go to some elite mystical place.
/
Zone
/7
Back in 2004 the game still had a ton of low level people..and they used to line up by the signet guy at the highlands entrance big green !'s above their heads like a bunch of kids hoping to be picked for some activity in gym class. There would be a guy doing emotes...people standing, people sitting, and everyone scattering when the shout "GOB TO ZONE" happened every 10 minutes.... .Valkrum just felt dangerous, it had a genuine feeling of being far away from home. I remember the dilemma of "do I set my hp here for the inevitable death or leave it in bastok which would cause a 30 min+ run back. If you were from Windurst your trip to valkrum could take well over an hour, which is funny when you're playing a game and about to leave for some where else in-game and you're making sure you have enough provisions to last since you most likely will not be back in town for a while.

Valkrum is where you started to make your friends as well, and reputations began to form. Here in the dunes I made an acquaintance that would change my life, partying with people you began to notice some would have a colored pearl by their name, a linkshell, a community inside of a community. I was in a party with a theif named Lunah who offered me a linkpearl for her LS "Again". I almost turned it down because it was purple...everyone in the LS was friendly and suddenly even when soloing you were never alone, light green conversation text and banter started to forge a feeling of togetherness, which would grow to feel like family. It was in this LS that I met someone who would transcend being a friend in-game. A spunky White Mage named Shay. She was always helping others, looking up things for people, and a g-g-g-g-g-irl! No not a manthra....not a "im a girl teheehee" ala RvB, a real one! As an 18 year old MMO player lacking creativity you can understand the gityyness.

I wont go through every adventure I had in-game for this post would end up being 1,000 pages, however, every undertaking and every new zone made you feel like you were in some far off place, or in mortal danger. After getting my Kazham keys and getting on an airship for the first time I felt all high level and i'm traveling to some far-far away place....that forged a hatred of goblin smiths into me. Before that, even the initial run to Jueno used to be a right of passage, and for some, their first big adventure. All along these adventures for me was the White Mage, Shay, and four others from our LS. I has managed to charm my way into an LS set party and every night we tried to exp together. After we had accomplished something for ourselves we would help everyone else through it which ment more kazham keys and ancient papyrus's then I ever care to see again. Being with these people, fighting with them, traveling with them...waiting for NMs to spawn with them, for me anyways the feeling of family really established itself.

After playing for around a year my friendship with Shay began to grow into something else. We had each others Yahoo IM IDs and would message each other while at work, this lead to having each others work numbers, which lead to eventually our personal cell numbers..."just incase something pops or we need your help" yeah, ok, we were IG all the time anyways who were we fooling. Time continued to pass and we continued to play together, eventually i had the opportunity to relocate through my work to the city where Shay lived. We discussed it and decided to go for it, at this point we had known each other for two years, net meeting'd every night and called each other all day at work, spending nearly 12 hours a day together we felt comfy.

so in march of 2007 I moved to be closer to someone I met in-game for the first time in Selbina. Being together IRL we played the game less and less, eventually “ran out of time for the game” quitting around august of 2007. Over the years we tried other forms of gaming, consoles, she would try FTP MMOs like alantica and other MMOs such as SW:KOTR, GW2, WoW etc etc. Sometimes I would try and join but I usually was too wrapped up in my job trying to save for a house, a wedding that was coming and my family had some health issues. From time to time I would listen to the OST and reminisce about being in a zone with my friends. Think about the sillyness of fighting Kirin on darksday and how it took three hours to drop him. *CoP had just launched when this happened* but the thought to return seemed to never surface. Shay eventually got into the FFXIV 1.0 beta and enjoyed it enough to buy the 100 dollar CE…I was skeptical and after a month she said “I’m done with this”. More time passed, FFXIV 1.23 came out and Shay gave it another chance playing it until they turned the servers off to rebuild for ARR.

We both were accepted into the alpha and this kind of marked my return to MMO’s. I think what was keeping me away was the frustration dealing with the rampant RMT invasion of 2006-2007 on Bismarck, so many of my friends were quitting at the time, prices were inflating to seriously stupid levels, and you couldn’t go-to an NM or even HNM spawn site without seeing a tom, jerry, or applexx character. It made me jaded and think FFXI had crashed and burned, but I digress, ARR seemed to have that spark again of adventuring with people exploring a new what I thought would be massive world, and a community I realized I was missing. Alpha turned to beta which we were both accepted into. We were enjoying the beta and I deicided to look into preordering ARR for myself. Amazon didn’t have it available for ps3 yet but something else caught my eye. FFXI: Seekers of adoulin. A New Expansion after all these years? I couldn’t believe it..The release date was even better:
Our anniversary….how ironic that an expansion for the game that me and my wife met on was coming out on our anniversary. I Pre-ordered through Amazon and thought “Thanks for the easy anniversary shop this year SE”. Shay had the same “No way!” reaction to finding out the news about seekers….the only issue we both now faced, two new ultimate edition copies in hand was…….

What was my content id?.....

It’s silly how those four letters and numbers came back to mind for us instantly, and there they were, Andrez and Shay staring at us against the La theine back drop that I hadn’t seen in years. We had no idea what to expect coming back, would the game be dead, how much had changed? 99 level cap, omg that’s going to take forever *we made it to 75 pre-CoP so yeah we were scarred* I logged in to my moghouse for the first time in 6 years, hearing that soft melody I felt like I was home. As I explored the new game I found things were mostly unchanged at this point. GoV and FoV were how to level now which I quickly became addicted to in gusgen and CN glad that the days of struggling for 7k-10k an hour were long gone, but missing them all the same. In my new explorations I found many were coming back and suddenly old friends began to send tells with the “OMG NO WAYS YOU’RE BACK TOO!” becoming common place. All of my old linkshells were dead sadly but we were quickly invited to a new one and the community I missed was back. Since so many of us were newly back it was fun exploring abyssea together and the greatness that is 100k exp an hour. Getting our Empy gear and upgrading it, leveling jobs that we long wanted to. The adventure was back….at least on the surface..I think most of the people returning had the same idea that I did, play FFXI between closed betas for ARR. Our adventures back continued up until ARRs official launch, deciding that we didn’t want to pay for two game subs or play two MMOs at the same time we left the world of vana’diel again.

Bright eye’d and bushy tailed we jumped into eorzea on Malboro with a group that decided to stick together from open beta. From the word go it seemed like it was a race…get to 50 get to 50, skip the CS you can watch them later, gogogogogogo. We formed a free company Crystal Vanguard with our LS leader from beta and he set the tone for ADVANCEMENT FORWARD! People didn’t want to run the same dungeons for gear, most of them didn’t have access to the dungeons as they were just fate grinding, sure this wasn’t everyone in FFXIV but it sure felt like it. Tensions from the leaders forward, forward why cant you guys beat this!? Attitude started to really strain everyone. We had only beat Ifrit HM once *three weeks after launch* and he was all WE GO DO GARUDA NOW….after many many many attempts at garuda we finally killed her and it was of course NOW TITAN WHO CARES ABOUT GEAR GET THE CLEAR!! I WANT US TO BE FIRST blah blah.
Long story short I eventually became fed up and left forming Insanitorium which still thrives on Malboro under the leadership of Kelic Ustinov, someone who graciously accepted leader when I decided FFXIV wasn’t for me, as well as the fact that me and Shay have our own TaruTaru and playing an MMO full time with a little one now isn’t possible as I want to spend as much time with her as possible.

So I find myself back in vana’diel whenever shes taking a nap or when she goes to bed at night, slowly chipping away at the story with Shay, soloing my BLU before work, or running VW with a few old friends. I can’t help but wonder as I stare at an empty “past zone” how it must have been when WoTG launched, or the excitement of going into abyssea for the first time as a level 85 and having things gnaw on you as you try to figure them out. Which is another thing I loved about FFXI and hated about FFXIV ARR…in XI no one ever told me to “watch the video” before a boss fight or dungeon run. Yeah you did your homework and learned what the bosses can do, however they were dynamic, you didn’t have to just watch for the glowing things on the floor while pressing the same three buttons endlessly. Some things in XI were so hard it would take alliances….SE even was sued over how hard things were. At the end though, at least for me, you didn’t feel like you simply beat something, you felt like you won, you triumphed. The open world content in XI is what made the communities great, LS’s lived and died by their reputation as we weren’t just transported to some cross realm server with people we would never see again.
And now after this announcement and looking at my daughter, my wife, my house, our pets, my job and even the car I drive today I would have none of it, if it wasn’t for a silly game I found at Wal-mart, that became so so much more…

After the November update im sure that my heart will be heavy as FFXI is essentially put out to pasture, as the game comes ever closer to that one day where they turn off the servers (long way off I know) wondering what happened to so many old friends, knowing that I will never probably talk to them again, I do however, find solice in the fact that im glad for the memories I have IG and IRL and am grateful I had the chance to make them.

TLDR: FFXI rules everything else drools.

-Andy from Bismarck