Final Fantasy XI-Bundled PS2 Hard Disc Explored

Thanks to IGN PS2 for its article discussing a hands-on look at the U.S. PlayStation 2 hard drive, bundled with Final Fantasy XI, which launches on March 23rd for $99. The article notes: "What's the big deal? ...well, let's just say that the Network Adaptor was the first step for players to get online, and the HDD is the next step... But in the short run, the HDD really only has one main purpose, which is to get players online playing Square Enix's potentially enormous MMORPG." The drive also comes with other advantages, as it's explained: "Players... can copy data from the (SCPH-10020u) memory card to a folder on the HDD", and it's speculated (although this is unconfirmed), that "SCEA might give gamers the choice to save data with games that require HDD use to either [memory card or HDD].

PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be applauding Sony if they decided to support this hard drive with the PS3. It seems rather late in the lifecycle of this system to be releasing such modifying components, so having the ability to carry it over to the next would be great.

Re:Double check FFXI...

[Creepy Crawler]

They may be profit-greedy, but they're not stupid.

If they charged by a "month", I'd wager that they would not count it if you signed up even 1 day after Month X, Day 1. If you do that, you risk pissing most of your gamers off.

Linux Hard Drive;

[polyp2000]

I've had a hard drive [linuxplay.com] in my Playstation 2 for, must be nearly 2 years now. The only question is; will this hard drive be compatible with the linux one; Also , will other games support it? ...ooh and yes does this mean we'll see more unnofficial distro's for ps2 like black rhino etc?

Curious

[Lorien6]

I wonder if FFXI or the hard drive upgrades will cause problems for anyone with chipped systems... Anyone know?

Shame SCEA took out compatibility

[Millbuddah]

The HDD would be a much better investment for me if more games supported it over here. From what I understand, many games released here have had the HDD save feature removed by SCEA. Anyone know if there's any patches that'll be available so that you can save to the HDD ingame? I know that Xenosaga and many other games had this feature stripped out when they crossed the pond.

Re:Shame SCEA took out compatibility

[PKFC]

Well, Xenosaga still has an HDD.IRX file on the disc. It claims to be a linux package (iirc) and also says that it can read ext2, ext3 and some swap variant. I'm very curious to see if it comes to life upon detecting the HDD or if it was just disabled and left there (talk about lazy).

Game saves

[Masem]

I don't play on getting FFXI (not very interesting in the MMORPG aspect), but I'm getting very annoyed at the fact that the PS2's memory card feature has not been improved at all. While an 8meg card is good for probably the average PS2 user, I'm trying to juggle cards around to find space for all my saved games; add to the fact that 50% of the PS2 games have no clue about any other memory card slot besides the first one (at least most RPG games recognize this). Even if the HDD was seen as a memory space for games outside of FFXI, you'd still run into problems with games not recognizing that it's there. I'd also love to see a PS2 card that can have a PS1 memory block partitioned off so that I don't have to switch back and forth when going from PS1/PS2 games.

The GC has a really good-sized mem card option (the 512 block one, yet to fill that for about 20-30 GC games), and the XBox has the hard drive which seems impossible to fill with all the Xbox games out there (and while that's gone in XBox2, the mem solution is much better than the PS2's 8meg card). It's hard to believe that the 8meg card can't be improved to reach 16, 32, or even more memory space without a bit of tweaking. I knwo there's 3rd party solutions, one that I'm using that requires a 8meg card to initialize to the PS2, but this really is something Sony needs to look into, particularly with the PS3 so far off on the horizon, and with games like SOCOM and GTA taking huge chunks of space.

Letter to PS2 players (offtopic)

[djdanlib]

Hey, I'd like to welcome all of you PS2 people to our world a little in advance.

We have worked hard to promote friendship, fairness, and community in our world. Please observe some basic guidelines of etiquette while you enjoy this beautiful world. It's not all "don't"s, so please read and consider carefully.

1) Don't cheeze. Seriously. That means: Powerleveling, botting (including fishbotting), using cheat utilities, purchasing and selling gil/characters/use of characters/powerlevels from anyone, and the extremely low and dirty tactic of setting Follow and going AFK while you're in an EXP party. This just hurts you because you won't learn to play properly, and might just anger a lot of people. Your reputation will be ruined if you try this - be careful what you do to save time. Oh, remember, purchasing anything in-game, using cheat programs, and botting are violations of the EULA. You don't want to get your future 75th level Beastmaster deleted, now do you?

2) Don't beg for money!!! There are countless people who know how to make gil (the FFXI currency) legitimately - ask around in front of your local auction house and someone will gladly tell you their favorite ways to make some fast cash. There is no real reason you need to get that extra 5k RIGHT NOW other than laziness. And expect us to laugh at you if you ask for money for a kit (complete set of equipment) when you start over with a level 1 job. Your old job can go stomp some newbie mobs (monsters) for money real fast.

3) You have all the time you want. The game doesn't end at any specific date. Don't complain about how you don't have enough time to make that last trip to get items, or level properly, or do quests for small change. Do learn to enjoy each session and be patient. You will be partying with the PC players before you know it, so hang in there!

4) Choose the name wisely when creating your character. You don't want to run around with some name you'll hate later - after all, who wants to have a name like "PhatL33TBuddha", "Sl1m3M0ld", "Somebody" or "TehSUX0RZ" after the novelty humor wears off? No, I haven't seen those names in-game or looked to see if they existed. I suggest EBON, the Everlasting Book of Names (sorry, no link), or perhaps some random name generating website. Oh, please don't pick the names of previous FF characters - they are almost all taken anyways. This is your avatar. Let it represent you.

5) Please set fair prices when you sell items. This includes all current players - don't abuse the new[bie] players' wallets. It's very tempting and simple to cause market inflation, but we trust you to have good judgment in this regard. And on the other side of the same issue, don't purchase things that are overpriced. It just encourages the greedy. Charge a reasonable amount for a teleport - and expect to pay for a teleport. Do not charge for a raise, heals or buffs!

6) When seeking a party, use the Comment field. You can tell who's looking for what kind of party by looking at the little colored dot next to their name in the search function, if any - and see what they have to say about themselves. The "Edit Comment" function is poorly documented but please use it and read others' comments. Japanese players who don't want to talk to English players, and vice versa, will usually say so in their comments.

7) Learn your role in your parties. This is very important! One puller, one tank, and one healer: these are the base ingredients for a successful party. Macros are the key to skillchains and magic bursts - discussing these are not a waste of time, contrary to what some impatient players will tell you. Listen to your teammates and stick together as a party when travelling.

8) Select subjobs wisely. Watch the interaction of the stat bonuses to see which combinations mutually weaken each other, and avoid those. No warrior should have a mage job subbed. At the very least, if you must sub a mag

Maybe, probably not

[Artifex]

I'm hardly going to buy an overpriced drive in order to play a game with an additional monthly fee, or worse, throw out the game entirely just because I want the drive. Especially with a Playstation 3 due out in just a couple of cycles that will likely (hopefully, as this is old tech) be incompatible. But I've been interested in adding a drive to my Playstation 2 that games might see (instead of the ones that comes with the incomplete and crippled Linux sets) ever since it was promised, when the console was released, years ago.

However, according to the article, the utility disc will allow you to format the drive and run diagnostics, etc. Has anyone had experience installing a standard hard drive with the network adapter (standard IDE and molex power in standard spacing, just begging for this) and using the disc to get the drive working?

Alternatively, has anyone decoded the format and ripped the partition data from one drive to another? (Note to the gathering sharks: again, I'm not interested in copying the MMORPG, which would be understandably illegal. I just want my Playstation 2 to recognize hardware I install to work with games I have paid for.)

Re:Hmm...

[602]

Around January 1, Square Enix announced that there were 500,000 subscribers. Divided among 20-25 servers, that's about 20,000 players/server. At this moment, on my server, there are 2134 people logged in, which is typical. So, there are plenty of people playing.

One important point is that the PS2 players are going to need a keyboard. FFXI is a very social game; players will want and need to type to talk to other players.