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The Mog Log: Another course
For this week's Mog Log, I'm going to start off by making an analogy about what Final Fantasy XI needs for the future. Picture, if you will, a restaurant in which you can order any food imaginable. Sometimes the food takes a little while to get prepared, but it's always cooked just to your taste. It's expensive, and all of the chairs are broken, but it's your favorite place to eat because the virtue of getting whatever you want outweighs all the detriments. Now, let's say you go into that restaurant, sit on one of the broken chairs, and get on the phone to call Square-Enix and tell it to make another expansion for freaking Final Fantasy XI already. Seriously, Wings of the Goddess is practically fossilized at this point. We're on the game's eighth year of operation in North America -- midway through the ninth in Japan -- and boxed editions of WotG require a team of university archaeologists and possibly carbon dating to identify. I never claimed it was a great analogy.
The Mog Log: Playing in the epilogue
We still don't have a roadmap for the future of Final Fantasy XI, but now seems like a fine time to start speculating. Yes, the February update was nice, but it was only a patch on certain issues -- it makes leveling lower-level jobs far easier without giving players much of anything new to do. And while the game is at an age when running out of things to do is pretty darn unlikely, we're still going to need some content on the horizon, something to look forward to. (Especially since a lot of the older content we can do has been somewhat invalidated.) I've said before that I'm hoping for another boxed expansion, but I've also said before that I have my doubts about whether or not that's actually viable. But even if we just get another add-on trilogy (which seems more likely even if it's not what I want), we're still going to be dealing with a massive shadow that Final Fantasy XI has been living under for a very long time now. To put it very bluntly, we're running out of a resource that's far more valuable than PS2 hard drive space -- story.
