Final Fantasy XI: The Return

As I wrote about in the previous post, we've made a return back to Final Fantasy XI this week and the return has been fun so far. Things have changed and yet things have not, though one thing that became apparent to us almost immediately (we decided to try and pair off for a Puppetmaster double team) and attack stuff in Valkrum Dunes.

What is so odd about that? Well nothing really, except that the dunes that was once a hotbed for lower level ups was absolutely dead. Well besides the small army of level 90s in the area, there weren't any lower level people. The same could even be said for Qufim, which was generally the next step in level (or it was back in our time).

Did everyone really ascend to the higher levels? To the point where there were no low level characters left in the world? It seemed so, but something else we noticed was that any low level character that did appear almost always had a power level (higher leveled healer character) in tow.

Perhaps that is what happened?

Either way though, we couldn't complain about this lack of parties in the immediate area. We had the run of the place and thanks to that, we were pulling in levels pretty quickly (more about this a little later). And with the nifty level sync ability in play, my level 23 Puppetmaster and my girlfriend's level 17 Puppetmaster had no issues at all in getting pretty decent exp.

I think what I can't get over is the fact that this part of the game play had actually changed. By this I mean the ability to actually be able to level up without having to have a huge party and all of that. You could very well solo much easier nowadays and even with the two of us together, we were raking in exp a lot faster then a lot of parties that both of us could remember back in the day.

Back then, we'd spend a lot of time in the lower levels face down in the sand and leveling down was a common place thing. My old linkshell was named after a common occurance in the dunes, that being people training (pulling a long, long line usually) of goblins to whatever zone he/she could reach.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but I sure wish we had the level sync at our disposal some years back. I think we'd all be a lot higher level then we are today...