The truth is we need a remastered XI or a follow up

[Enkidoh]

I wanna give some appreciation here - This week I started playing XI for the first time.

I'm blown away - everything about the game is amazing and extremely engaging. I never wanted my hand held in XIV, I never wanted choices made for me, I never wanted my rotations pre-planned, and I sure as hell never wanted a visual novel forcing itself on me for hundreds of hours.

XIV has kinda just felt like a museum of FF, which was OK but difficult to get truly immersed. Mostly feels like I'm watching a movie of FF where they just stole old FF assets and put them in new stories.

XI has challenged me in almost every way possible so far, and it feels like an actual open world Final Fantasy mainline game. It's pulled me directly into a universe of it's own design.

If you've only played XIV like me, but absolutely love FF - Do yourself a favor, push past the initial install/setup woes and experience it. (Use a controller)

That's great you're loving FFXI... except, one small thing. You're clearly running addons/mods such as a minimap to impove the experience, which FFXI does not have by default (to say nothing of you may want to remove that image too for that very reason, as even with FFXI SE are very strict when it comes to showing images using mods). Deactivate those addons/mods and play it the real way, and I'm certain you'd probably quickly change your tune (to say nothing of you getting a potential ban for use of mods). Yes FFXI should have those functions, but it doesn't and never has.

Modern FFXI is also nothing like 'classic' FFXI where you were stuck in the 'dooms' for ten levels facing five hour+ long waits for EXP parties. Nowadays it's much much easier to level, the EXP climb is much more forgiving and the hated "EXP loss on death" has been neutured so that it only starts to really have an effect later in the game. And Trusts completely killed EXP parties, or parties for any story content save for Adoulin content.

FFXI is an amazing game, and I have some wonderful memories playing it since I first began my journey in it at the start of 2005 (current playtime is over 365 days), but I also remember the grief and frustation of it - the infamous 'dooms' and the struggle to find EXP parties (I once wasted an entire night waiting for a party invite that never came), that goddessawful EXP loss on death aspect which is still in the game, and many other issues we just accepted as 'part of the experience' back then, but nowadays show just how long in the tooth FFXI has become, despite the improvements like the Trust system.

I can't be too hard on FFXI though - I met my boyfriend while playing it back in 2007, and we're still together after all this time, so that counts for something. We moved here to FFXIV long ago and are happy here - XIV is now our home. XI started our journey, but XIV is continuing it.