Thursday, October 30, 2008

Tales of Jeuno

I’m amazed at the site of such a beautiful environment that Final Fantasy 11 provides and yet with the people that live in it must appreciate the same. Abundant cities of avatars doing as they please to make their adventures more entertaining and worthwhile lies usually three to four large areas where avatars can roam. The place to find the most people of course would be the shopping areas. There are many different ways to interact with another avatar. Interacting with other avatars is very different from interacting with NPC just like interacting with someone in real life is different from interacting with someone in a virtual world.

As I gaze through my avatars eyes, I see a city filled with avatars doing all sorts of things. Standing around, looking for groups, browsing bazaars, flooding the auction house with items and fulfilling quests is what brings joy to most avatars in this world. Heading north through Jeuno’s stoned streets, avatars are everywhere. To the right you have your group of bazaars people who stands there selling items from they’re inventory to make some money. To the left you’ll see the auction house windows, waiting on many people to sell items to the highest bidders. Further down to the left you’ll see many synthesizers using their arts to create new items from just scraps and crystals. Then you have those random people standing around away from their keyboard or looking for a group or a teleport that sometimes would take hours at a time. The liveliness of every city in this game lies near the auction house. The auction house is where social economy booms. Avatars are selling and trading their goods to other people to make money, just like an online auction site, like EBAY. Down the street from the auction house would be the in-game shops with synthesizers lined outside the doors. The bazaars right across the cobblestone causeway from the auction house would be the downtown market and avatars would shout throughout the city for teleports somewhere outside of the city would be the taxis.

There are so many things to do and so many different types of avatars to interact with. I met a Taru Taru avatar named Ninjaru that really never played the storyline of the game; he only played to craft items. Being an amazing bone-crafter he traded me a couple spiked necklaces for some large fangs I picked up in the Jugner Forest from killing black panthers. Kittenmitt, the Mithra, was another cool avatar that I met on my journey that loved to bazaar. She would clean out her entire inventory and put everything that she wanted to sell in there that she had gathered from unusual places. Countless people would come up to her and browse the bazaar. By the end of the night she would have sold nearly everything. Some of the stuff looked completely useless to me, but I guess someone needed it. Stonedelf was my best friend in this game. He was a young Elvaan, like me, inspired by achieving glory by going out of the cities and fighting alongside me. Stonedelf and I would group up and take long journeys out to the Altepa Desert and farm death scorpions together. Like real life, finding friends in the virtual world can be a little bit difficult depending on how social you are.

Although most interactions are friendly in Final Fantasy you do occasionally have your quarrels. Usually the bickering is only about political issues happening in real life or how some players lost experience because of another avatar. People do tend to be very rude in virtual worlds. Due to the thought that mostly everyone in this world are random people with random names, no one can find each other and the true nature of the avatar comes out because he or she is free to do what they want and not bound by the nature of real life. There are some consequences in the game that will prohibit an avatar from doing certain things and constantly harassing other avatars. The game jail is where monsters instantly kill you if you leave the cell and your experience will be lost or a suspension from the game due to misconduct. I’m sure that interactions would be different if those two avatars met that same avatar in real life. I don’t think they would get into a fist fight from talking about Obama and McCain, due to the fact that there are much more dire consequences than being in virtual world.

It’s very different interacting with the actual game than another avatar. With other avatars you could get a variety of different responses. From emotes that give out hugs, kisses, comfort, and claps of excitement to other responses that disapprove, feel angry, make rude gestures and even slap the other avatar are given responses that avatar could use to feel more interactive. Some of the motions of the interactions are visible and others are not. Interacting with the game however is usually straight forward or gives you a couple options to choose but all leading to the same response give or take. Like most MMOs or RPGs for that matter, NPCs usually give the same prompt unless the story is progressing. This makes the game less responsive as it could be.

Very much so like a real city, many avatars are attracted to buying and selling goods. You could see the same interactions at a downtown marketplace or a mini mall. In this marketplace, since there is a majority of avatars there, many interactions occur. Like almost every MMO I’ve seen, there is a limit to what the avatar can do based on the content and objective of the game. NPCs won’t interact with the other avatars very much unless the story has progress to that NPC. The responses to other avatars could be unlimited to whatever the user’s imagination can see. Interacting with the avatars in the game would be very different from real life due to thoughts and consequences of being in the vicinity with that person.

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