Quote Originally Posted by Ath192 View Post
I also want to make a point that FFXI is about to celebrate its 20 year anniversary and in large part that game is alive because of how difficult it was, and the bonds the players formed with each other to overcome obstacles and work together.
IMO it's not the game's difficulty that has kept FFXI alive. It's more that it's an MMO that still has a majority of staple or classic RPG mechanics in it. They took a majority of what you would expect in a single player offline JRPG at that time and made it an MMO. Hence it's style of classic FF Menu based interface. It had that vibe of being an FF game you could play along with your friends. For the most part I'm sure it's had a stable player base the entire time because it also essentially had long term goals players could aim for where as most if not all of the current "top" MMOs have frequent player activity fluctuations due to lulls in content to keep players entertained or active as it generally only takes a few days to finish everything in a content update and then it's just a question of how much they want to repeat the content to obtain loot. This isn't to say FFXI didn't have repetitive content elements either. However the game did offer a number of options for "endgame" gear ranging from crafting, hunting NMs and HNMs, doing side quests, Dynamis, Limbus, etc... For an extremely long time the game kept with a sort of horizontal progression where expansions and updates just gave players more options to play around with gear wise without invalidating the gear the player had already obtained.