FINAL FANTASY XI is celebrating 23 years of service

Online gaming just wasn't a big thing on PS2. FF11 was the only online game I was even aware of at the time. I wanted to play it but it wasn't realistic.

FF fans weren't PC gamers by and large at that point. I'm kind of amazed the game survived at all. It was far ahead of its time and not well aligned with the market.

They definitely were a barrier to entry for console, but given WoW has never had a console release, and FFXI for Windows was released before PS2 in NA (Oct 2003/Mar 2004), I’m not sure that’s completely the case.

I always thought it was more to do with FFXI being menu based (and slower to begin with) rather than using a simpler system with action keys like you get with WoW and later MMOs.