Rapture To Replace FFXI??

http://www.jpbutton.com/?p=2122

Take the time to read the article before posting. This looks like a long way off .... too long.

damnit >.<

Well hopefully they'll support a few servers long enough for me to get a maat's cap. >.>

...Which will be years LOL

I'm sure they'll continue to provide service for XI for a long time yet. I recall an interview from 1UP with Sage Sundi, who said something along the lines of: "As long as people continue to play Final Fantasy XI we will continue to provide service and new content."

This sentence is the opinion or summary of the person writing the article. It doesn't appear in the photo they posted, neither is it quoted verbatim from Square Enix. The sentence that the article mentions does not say "We are developing Rapture to replace Final Fantasy XI". It says they're making another game to take the place of Final Fantasy XI.

This could mean a plethora of things, the most probable of which being they plan for Rapture to become their "main stream" MMORPG. Taking the statement to mean that Final Fantasy XI will be shut down the moment they release Rapture is just silly. Final Fantasy XI still remains to be a huge profit maker for Square Enix. Explain the logic in axing something that's making that much profit annualy? There is none. I'm sure a few people are thinking "Won't Rapture replace it and make as much profit?" Well, Square Enix have no guarantee that Rapture will be that successful. Such a gigantic financial risk wouldn't be undertaken by a company as global as Square Enix are. They're not stupid.



^ Good advice.

Rapture would have to be in full fledged release and service for a few years til SE can actually determine whether or not it's safe to let XI go or not. Considering they have the same development team from XI spread thin to support XI and create rapture... We won't have to worry for a long long time.

Don't show such links D: /shun.

Art, you really need to fix your avatar. Stoned cats saying lol are funny, but stoned cats saying lo aren't :(

Personally, I dont feel XI has to worry about a downfall from Rapture.

Take a look at Blizzard. They have WoW, Diablos, and Starcraft. Granted the fact that all three, in my opinion, are pretty shitty games, they're still going strong, and all that good junk.

In other words...

SE had mentioned that they were working on a new MMO a while back; at the time I'll admit I was a little panic-striken (NO MORE FFXI?!?! NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!) but I've since calmed down about it some. That being said, this article doesn't necessarily worry me too much, but it does give some food for thought.

The weakening of the dollar to the Yen and it's impact on FFXI never really occurred to me, but it makes perfect sense now that it's been spelled out in that article. With every passing day the amount of money SE is making from it's US players is falling, even if the number of players doesn't decrease. Could there be a price increase for US based FFXI players at some point in the near future? Who knows...but it's yet another aspect of our economy going down the shitter that I never thought about...

Aside from that, I remain optimistic that FFXI will be around a while longer. They do make quite a bit of money off of it, and given the great example of Everquest in the article, no company is going to throw away a source of income. Granted, expansions may be a long time coming (if there even are any more), but as I personally haven't explored about 95% of the content we already have, this doesn't bother me too much, either. If anything, I'd be a little glad...it'd give me time to catch up to all the 7 year veterans out there, who had the luxury of doing these things when everyone was doing them...

I'd be interested to see if, as time goes on, SE doesn't try to reduce costs through merging servers. I know that may not be something that a lot of people would be thrilled about, and I wonder what kind of implications that would have on the individual server economies...but as time goes on and we inevitably lose players, at some point it's gotta be done. Logging in to find the number of people online in the hundreds, with half that doing Nyzul runs and other endgame stuff would really suck, so SE would have to do something. Personally, I could care less what server I'm on...as long as my friends all come with me lol ^^

At any rate, time will tell of course. I'm glad SE is still making a decent profit off of FFXI, that in itself means that FFXI will be around for a while...and I am interested to see what their new offering is all about. I don't know for sure if I would "jump ship" (although I highly doubt it, I think FFXI is going to be the last MMO for me, just too much of a time sink in general lol) but I guess we'll see what happens...

There are only so many islands, dimensions, and time periods to explore. Maybe they don't want to make this story (as dumb as it may sound) even more ridiculous while at the same time making some $$ by selling an entirely new game to loyal SE fans.

I haven't gotten around to making it a smaller pic so it fits in the new avatar size requirements, but I might just replace it altogether.

Nice jiko... Pretty much spanked that monkey right on the ***!



Don't spread any vicious rumors until this info is declared True!



In other words...



IF everything is running fine.. Don't F with it! Don't get your panties in a bundle.... YET.. anyways!

Thanks Jiko.. I'm sorry I had to use your pic. Atm I didn't have anything to find and I used your instead!

Now it looks like a jelly worm on the girls face lol what is that

EDIT lol damn it you just changed it to silent bob lol

Wow you caught me fiddling around with different pics I got. I think I'll keep this one though.

Edit: The previous one I had for 0.5 seconds that you saw was the album cover of Thirteenth Step from A Perfect Circle. One of my favorite albums :3

Is someone playing musical avatars?

EDIT: If SE ever did contemplate shutting down FFXI anytime soon, this pic explains how I'd feel about it quite nicely:

I'm sure someone somewhere has had a similar idea before, but I think it'd be cool if they made an FF 11-2 and somehow connected the two games without necessarily allowing players to bring their characters over.

For example, wouldn't it be cool if they "aged" the current characters, making them too old to fight, and you instead played as their offspring in the new games. This way new and old alike would have to start from scratch.

But, players that did bring their old players over would gain some benefits. They could inherit gil for example. Also, if their "parent" was a 75 PLD, they could level that job (or a similar job) at a faster rate than others. Same could be said for crafts.

I dunno, I think it'd be pretty cool. And have the parent character still live in the world as an NPC.

Now I will show my ignorance... what is this "Rapture". Is it still going to be in the final fantasy universe or what? Any good links that describe it?

Well in short, Rapture is simply the "project" name for the new MMO SE has been working on recently. It's going to be host to their new "Crystal Tools" engine and SE was nice enough to release a few photos of it's capacity.

Unfortunately other than that there's not much we can say about it. SE is very good at keeping things in the lowdown.

PS: I really like your ideas Pale. Sounds like something Bethesda would do, and it's definately something SE should contemplate.