[Avonej]

With all the questions and rumors about FFXIV going about, I decided to write this about what new changes are occurring in FFXI.




SE announced the release of three new add-ons for FFXI that are to be released throughout 2010. The first released add-on (Vision of Abyssea) is planned for launch at the beginning of this summer. The release date for the next two add-ons has not been announced but the price is $9.99 and requires the add-ons Wings of the Goddess and Rise of the Zilart to play.

While not much information has been released on the two later add-ons, the first one (Vision of Abyssea) is described as a parallel world populated with new more challenging monsters to fight. SE has announced that over-populated battle areas and large time investments will not be a factor in these add-ons. This may coincide with the new server mergers that are to come as well to FFXI. The monsters are described to be the strongest yet so odds are we will see something much stronger than Absolute Virtue in the near future for those seeking a challenge. There is a lot of new content being released in these three packages over the remainder of this year as SE dives players gradually deeper into the new world of Abyssea.

Some things I find disappointing though as an MMORPG fan from my understanding of the new content, while monsters are to be stronger and require more knowledge and skill to beat, will most likely be easily beatable by veterans and anyone else who puts effort into acquiring the newly released items. SE is creating content designed to exist on a time scale with the year, so no matter how much testing or debugging odds are we will see exploitable content appear. All in all what I’m seeing is Content goes up while Difficulty goes down. Hopefully SE can pull together an awesome ending for FFXI and who knows, maybe *Heroes of Abyssea* might imply a final event or battle that could affect your character creation in FFXIV.

The Official Abyssea Website
The Official VanaFest 2010 Website

What are your opinions on this.

[beoulve]

Well considering they're also raising the level cap, they will of course have to make things harder. My current opinion is that these new challenges will be pretty hard at first but once people reach the new level cap of 99 it might not be as difficult.

Also, having SE make another equivalent of AV is not what the fan base wants, every time it's fallen SE has managed to make it unbeatable again. It'd be a much better comparison to have monsters like Pandemonium Warden than Absolute Virtue. And on that note, the level cap raise might also give players the chance to actually beat AV as intended to...

This post has been edited by beoulve: Mar 2, 2010 - 10:21 PM