April 2026 Version Update

I guess maybe 119/13 was the final update, though that quote does say January and it took them until April update to do it. IDK why I still felt like it was supposed to go to 15 (13 is a weird number to land at), but if this is the end of Besieged updates, that's fine.

It was originally scheduled for January, but they delayed it shortly prior to that update. I seem to recall some dev message about it around that time, saying they needed more time to make further adjustments to deal with issues that popped up. Then the i119 update actually released in April.

I'd love level 15 beastmen (maybe CL 122 for lv14, and CL 125 for lv15 or something like that?), and agreed that it feels a little awkward to end on 13. But doesn't appear that further updates are currently planned.

Besieged is a content broken in its concept, if you ask me I think the community as a whole would've benefitted way more from spending their extremely limited time resources into something else. Not necessarily new, but the simple things they did to what always was a broken content in how it was implemented doesn't seem very... wise.

At least we can hope it cost them very very very very little resources so that it didn't "steal" too much from anything else.

I like Besieged, always have.

The problem it has as content is the game engine can't keep up with that volume of information, and the UI sucks donkey balls.

Whatever happened to that XI remake with a new engine while keeping same play style and mechanics..

On the contrary, I think the updates to Besieged were practice for future server-wide content. It's very likely that some of the things they learned or optimized there also show up elsewhere, like Limbus and future stuff yet to be released.

Either that, or they were doing work on some of this stuff in connection with Limbus, then realized that for relatively little additional effort they could apply some of that to Besieged to give it a revamp too.

Idk, aside from connection limits(which apply to anything populated in this game really) the event itself was fine. the worst part of besieged was the time it took to finally begin along with its random starts, both of which could likely be adjusted

New besieged just lacks any real incentive, old besieged you had coins that still sold very highly, later gear options like the perdu line, attachments etc. New besieged theres just not much there, best thing might just be the craft cards or rr3 scroll. The gear itself costs way too much for what lil it provides

Because theyre all about dangling that carrot 500 feet infront of you when you can only cover 100 feet of ground per day

FFXI's story reimagined with voice acting, new cinematics, ability to *** jump over obstacles, and what not would be great.

Or FFXI-2, played from viewpoint of Beastmen, developing that lore more.

Never gonna happen, but entertaining the idea is nice.

While they can still at any time add a 50k+ item thats really good, right now that carrots really moldy and smells bad. They usually at least start you off with a normal looking one to chase

I didn't quite catch on to the main incentive for a large chunk of the target audience at first, but now I know: it's the exemplar points.

I play with a lot of people who don't bot exemplar. Some are more casual, some are solidly endgame-capable and well geared. I don't bot EP myself - no value judgment here, just not something I personally do.

Among that crowd, if you're just hanging out in-game and don't have anything important going on, and you see Besieged is coming up, it's a VERY efficient time:EP ratio. 10 minutes of work for 10k EP? Can't really beat that. Low stakes and can f around with friends. Or for me, I often just track the Besieged status while I'm at work; if it's on the way I go sit in the zone so that when the mobs arrive I can look up and take a little 10min break to beat up some beastmen.

Lot of those people I know might use Besieged to quickly regain some lost EP from deaths, for some weird job they don't love to actually go grind out points or do events like Limbus/Sheol on, when you're close to a ML (heck, I dinged ML35 on a job in there last week, I was close and just brought it into Besieged a couple times to hit my level).

I appreciate that people for whom EP comes... "easier", that might not be a big draw. But to be fair, those people aren't exactly playing the game the way the developers designed it, so yeah, you might not experience the content the same way a more vanilla player will.

Besieged is casual content intended to get people who like doing things just to do them together. It doesn't have to be more than that. People who like besieged will run into other people who like besieged there.

10k EP isn't some amazing reward just because you don't bot. You can still make a manual party with a decent job spread and crank out 200k in an hour with no bots whatsoever.

Cerberus has the smallest population (according to the numbers), so Besieged is a rare moment where I get to see and potentially team with players I usually wouldn't interact with.

We did two wave 13s back-to-back the other day. It feels a lot like the old days where there's some actual peril. I imagine bigger servers are still steamrolling this content in minutes, but on smaller ones, players are having to band together more to defend the capital. It helps that we have a player who has been announcing the start (with time remaining) of Besieged for years now, otherwise we could lose out. He is a legend for that.

And yes, I agree that the biggest incentive is the points, along with the monthly Silver Voucher. I don't bot EP and never intend to pay anyone to bot for me, so I get all my points through other means. I love bringing DNC or RDM as they are self efficient.

I imagine somewhere down the road (level 15 maybe?), the devs will introduce gear that can actually be used in endgame for a steep price. This would entice ML50 players to keep showing up.

Check task manager/processes and see how much ram XI is using after playing for a while.

For me changing characters caused a small memory leak type problem, but it took an unholy number of swaps and time for it to be a problem (like 20+ swaps a day and after a week). Restarting the game every day/couple of days stopped it happening cause I never hit the 1.3 gig danger zone (that's the danger zone for me since I use a lot of mods, it's way higher if you don't use a lot of mods).

Black zone is just where the game tried to load the dat file for the zone and failed.

The problem with Besieged is you have no idea it's even happening most of the time, would it kill them to have an announcement in Unity chat or something.

Exactly, and it's a pretty big problem.
Granted it's not as bad as it was during the TLOU days (thanks to less people and packetflow) it's still incredibly bad.
Is it "fixable" without completely re-making the network communication protocol? Not entirely but there's a lot of stuff they could've done for a "serious" attempt at revamping Besieged, but they did absolutely not, maybe luckily so I guess lol
Whichever way you want to look at it, it is a "problem". When you have these issues with how the server<>client structure works, you need to know you can't make this sort of content and make it work right. They learned too late about it with TLOU and that's fine, but then going back at it with a revamp? Seriously?


And here we come to the second part.
You make a ccasual event that happens every once in a blue moon, it's hard to know it's happening and to take part in it.
I guess given how MMOs worked in 2005 it was fine for the time, but in 2026? Really?
They could've fixed all these parts I presume way more easily than the previous one I mentioned, yet they did absolutely nothing about it.


So we're talking about a content that happens randomly, you don't know when it's gonna happen but it's pretty rare, it gets announced a certain amount of time before (with no visible timer anyway) and it's utterly lagged and slowed down to the point you can hardly see targets on screen, engage, disengage, see what's even happening or not happening, mobs die (or you die) and you didn't even know what happened.

I mean, they seriously raised the ilevel for a content like this for "casuals"?
If you ask me, plenty of better ways to spend dev resources than revamping a content like this that really has no place in FFXI's meta for pretty much nobody, imho.

It could have, if they fixed it right, but they didn't.

If it was unity chat, no one would see it.

If you beat TVR you get that bot chat thing that does announce it.

...what "we" (not me idgaf) need is a lua that displays the region menu for besieged screen full time. I can't imagine that's excessively difficult, but may overburden the servers. Probably limit it's pings to hourly etc


The large address patch fixed it (so far!), which is a ram issue