Final Fantasy XI Offline

The topic of an offline version of Final Fantasy XI has been mentioned multiple times by the development team. This article will collect information from the dev team on the subject, whether or not it ever materializes.

In a May 31st, 2021 interview with PC Gamer conducted by longtime XI player/blogger James "milkman" Mielke, Akihiko Matsui and Yoji Fujito field the question of an offline FFXI.

Here's the relevant excerpt:

"We get asked this pretty frequently, actually," Fujito said. “And we understand, we get where people are coming from with that. But we believe that a big part of FF11 is the communication between the players... We feel that the game is the platform, the fertile soil on which we grow these relationships and communications. Even if we were to build an offline version of the game and people might feel, 'Oh it feels very much like FF11,' we anticipate a sense of 'There’s something missing from this.' Something’s off.'"

But how much of that communication is there today on the more sparsely populated servers? A lot of the in-game parties I see are actually solo players multi-boxing, aka subscribing to multiple accounts, and auto-following their main character around and using real characters (as opposed to NPC Trusts) to perform like a full party, even in endgame content. Surely that experience would largely translate over to a single-player game.

Matsui and Fujito chimed in together in response to this. "Truth be told, creating an offline, single-player version of FF11 is something that is very appealing to us on the development staff as well! Just like the players, the development team feels it would be a shame that the creations we poured our hearts and souls into for so long would eventually disappear and not be accessible at all."

"Unfortunately, when we think about it from a logistical standpoint, it’s not as simple as just running our current FF11 data and program source through a conversion tool to create this experience. I’m confident it would likely require a development team big enough for a single, large-scale project of the current generation. As a single player experience, there would be parts of the game that simply could not be recreated faithfully from the original, and even for parts we can recreate, there would be debate on whether we should faithfully recreate it, or whether we should change it up into something more current. More than anything, when thinking about the 'FF11 experience,' [we] believe the existence of other players and a community plays a much bigger role than we may think."

Personally I feel like this point may be exaggerated, but the developers have a broader view of what makes FF11 work than I do.

"When we are working on content updates, we utilize a limited, single-player environment for debugging," Fujito said. "But we all agree that there is this feeling that something is 'off' when we’re using that version of the game, and it almost feels like a lifeless world where time has stopped. How to fill that emptiness will be a difficult task.”

Fortunately, this doesn't mean a singleplayer version is out of the question. "As you can see, there are various issues that we would need to overcome," Fujito said. "However, an offline singleplayer version of the game is definitely an appealing proposal. If we can find a happy medium that is not only satisfactory and meaningful for us as creators, but more importantly something that would be appealing to the players, then we would like to take on that challenge.”

In a We Are Vana'diel interview with Yosuke Saito posted on August 25th, 2021, the subject was brought up again and Matsui comments on it. Saito is the Producer of Dragon Quest X Online, which had an offline version of the game developed, and inspired the topic.

The relevant excerpt:

Matsui: If we were to make an offline version of FFXI, we couldn’t just make an offline version of FFXI as-is. Taking that into consideration, if I were to make an offline version, I’d take what I personally believe to be the exciting elements of FFXI, then make a game that retains those elements but also has its own charm as an offline game.

In that sense, I don’t think it would be the offline game that FFXI players are asking for. Even if we were talking about remaking FFXI, I think I would remake a lot of the game.

Saito: I’m sure a lot of elements will need to change when you turn an online game into an offline game. That seems especially difficult in the case of FFXI.

Matsui: Each person has their own concept of what “FFXI” is, and the elements I considered “FFXI” are probably largely different from what players enjoyed about the game. If we were to set aside what players thought of FFXI, and I was tasked with making what I envision as “FFXI,” that might be fun... That’s basically my current take on it.

Saito: FFXI’s story is also quite popular, isn’t it?

Matsui: Yes. I do want to keep FFXI’s world alive in some shape or form, but that’s not my area of expertise, so I’d like to leave that up to an expert.

In the current FFXI, you can level up on your own if you use Trusts, and you can progress the story, so in that sense, it’s pretty close to an offline game.

Matsui: The current FFXI can be enjoyed even as a solo player, so I hope people will continue to experience the game’s story. However, even if it’s relatively similar to an offline game, I still think that the presence of other players is a big part of the gameplay.