A lot of people saying that FFXI is atually better than FFXIV.
How come? Give me the elevator speech lol
Also, does it have Triple Triad?
It's kind of simple really: FFXIV is a close copy of World of Warcraft in a lot of ways with a Final Fantasy twist. What was the attempted successor to FFXI was FFXIV 1.0 and that failed spectacularly due to a whole bunch of bad game design decisions.
FFXI is from the pre-WOW days of MMO design, and it shows. Instead of on demand player gratification things like flight points, the old FFXI design was you had to sit and wait for your boat and airship, which usually meant socializing with friends or those nearby. FFXI is also from a period of time where you were expected to carry multiple sets of gear, you lost experience points when you died and you were expected to group up to go anywhere. In addition to that, party lines are a lot more blurred than the modern MMO trinity of tank, DPS and healer, with plenty of support jobs, different styles of tanks, different styles of DPS, so the job design in FFXI really runs the gamut. Also, you are expected to level more than one job because you have access to another job other than your main one to compliment your jobs set of skills. This can be seen in the Paladin job, a tank that uses Warrior for single target thread or Blue Mage for magic mitigation and AOE crowd control, for instance.
Another thing that sets FFXI apart compared to contemporary MMOs is the flat level cap. The max level in XI was 75 for years, with multiple expansions releasing and the player never losing a sense of progression. Now the cap is 99 and it'll never be higher, but there is still a lot of progression to be done once you hit 99, almost too much.
While XI has streamlined a lot over the years to make the game less frustrating than it used to be, such as adding NPCs you can summon and fulfill parry roles for you called trusts so you can solo, it invariably has that old school MMO design in a lot of things. A good example of this is that each job still, to this day, has at least two abilities on a 1-2 hour cooldown, which means use them wisely.
FFXI also does a lot of cool group mechanics that simply do not exist in other MMOs. A good example is as follows and is still present in groups with other players and NPC trusts:
Your group tank will pick up a mob much higher level that the group, which your group thief and dragoon will then hit. When they each have enough TP from hitting the mob, the dragoon will use an ability called Wheeling Thrust, specifically chosen because the Thief can follow that up with a move called Trick Attack and Shark Bite. Trick Attack dumps all the Thief's hate on whoever is between the Thief and the monster, so the Thief dumped it all on the tank.
Except, Wheeling Thrust plus Shark Bite, when properly timed, create an explosion of elemental light. For a few seconds after this explosion occurs, the group's mages can all cast spells aligned with that element (such as fire) and it'll do 300% extra damage if timed right. If all of it flows together properly, the super tough monster goes from a 3 minute fight to a 20 second fight and everyone gets a giant chunk of exp. If that monster died fast enough compared to when the monster before died, the entire group gets bonus experience (an experience chain) which encourages the group to play off each other even more.
That kind of whole group interactivity doesn't really exist in FFXIV, or well, many other MMOs and is part of why XI is so special and beloved.
