Final Fantasy XI
Final Fantasy XI is the first MMORPG to be released in the Final Fantasy series, and the first in the series to feature online play. It debuted in Japan on the Sony PlayStation 2 on May 16 , 2002 , and was released on the Windows PC on November 5 of the same year. It saw its North American PC debut on October 28 , 2003 , with a North American PlayStation 2 release on March 23 , 2004 , making it the first Final Fantasy in North America to be on the PC before being released on a console system. It is also the first cross platform MMORPG , as both PC and console versions can connect to the same server. Final Fantasy XI takes place in a world named Vana'diel, or more specifically, one of the multitude of parallel worlds named Vana'diel.
As this is an online RPG and each Square Enix server used to host the RPG can only cope with so many players, there are multiple servers, each representing a different parallel world. These worlds are named after summoned creatures from earlier Final Fantasy games (for example, Diabolos, Ifrit, Ramuh, etc.) and there are currently (as of January 2004 ) just over 30 of them. Both PC and PS2 players, as well as Japanese, North American and European players play together on all the servers.
A player is allocated to a random world when they are created, the only exception to this being that a player in a given world can buy a worldpass (a 10-digit passcode), give it to the new player and that player can then enter the worldpass to get onto that particular world. Once on a world, a player cannot move to another world, except via a special character called a World Shifter (put there by the administrators of a server when it has too many players and some need putting onto less populated worlds). This happens infrequently.
The four main cities in Vana'diel are the cities of Bastok, Jeuno, San d'Oria and Windurst. The rest of Vana'diel is made up of a number of outdoor, dungeon, and minor town areas that have a complex topology. While most areas are reacheable by walking, some require the use of ferries, airships, or teleportation points. Each area in FFXI is quite large, and as a beginner much of the game play consists of getting from point A to point B. However, once characters reach level 20, they can receive chocobo licenses which allows the player to rent a chocobo (the ubiquitous rideable bird-like creature in Final Fantasy games) which allows players to travel up to two or three times faster through all non-city or dungeon zones. Other forms of transportation exist within Vana'diel as well, such as the ferry between Mhaura and Selbina (two small coastal cities) and airships which will take you from one major city to another.