🎮 I tried Final Fantasy XI again! 🎮

I played it a few months (or is it a year?) ago for the first time because I was curious how it is played in contrast to Final Fantasy XIV (which I’m a big fan of).

On reddit and other social media everyone praised the story. That was enough to convince me trying.

I bought it on Steam where it was on sale. I think it was for 25€.

Boy it was already an adventure to setup an account after that. Such clusterfuck and I thought FFXIV was already a fucking nightmare.

But I did know what I was get into. This game will be hard to play, not because of the difficult but the missing QoL features that the MMORPGs nowadays have. I did play World of Warcraft before dungeonfinder, integrated Questie and stuff came.

After I made an account it was another horrible step to get it to run properly on a modern 4K system. I needed to use windower to just get it started somehow. And that patching with PlayOnline was long. Very long. Steam fucked it up and broke the game once. Needed to patch everything again. But I got a lot of patience and shroug the issues off.

It was harder as I imagined after I created my character and played a few days. Sadly its so time consuming and difficult to keep it running on my system that I lost the interest in it. But I saw the potential and stubborn as I was I wanted to try it someday again.

That day came with my SteamDeck. I googled if the game could run on it and read a lot of positive feedback. Patching was horrible of course but It really runs awesome and without any first time installation hiccups! First you need to install it through steam. Then I configured my gamepad (via the launch option when starting the game). There is also an community made SteamDeck controller layout that works great after some experimenting which button does what. Some specialitys:

• X -> Opens Menu
• L1 -> Automatic running
• Right stick: Navigating through menus; Camera movement
• R1 -> Opens the Steam keyboard. Very handy especially in PlayOnline! Anything other is pretty simple and mainstream: A select, B deselect/cancel and so on.

It’s the first time I’m playing it longer then a week and after some gameplay struggles I really enjoying it now!

Best part is that the Steam overlay is working. So yay to screenshots and uploading them! 😏

One big issue currently: Sadly after some days the PlayOnline launcher starts somewhere out of bounds of the viewport so all I see is a black screen. But sound and music is working.

To fix that I need to start the game once in desktop mode and then return back to game mode. No Login needed just start PlayOnline and exit right after via the “Exit” button. But after my gaming session the issue will repeats itself. Hopefully I find an fix for that, it is the only thing thats annoying.

I try to keep away from desktop mode or installing Windows 10 on the SteamDeck because I want the full linux mobile console experience from it. And I don’t get into trouble on breaking something :)