[3] The story is set in the fantasy world of Vana'diel, where player-created avatars can both compete and cooperate in a variety of objectives to develop an assortment of jobs, skills, and earn in-game item rewards.

Each expansion pack and add-on brings a new major storyline to the Final Fantasy XI world, along with numerous areas, quests, events and item rewards.

[9] Final Fantasy XI is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), and differs from previous titles in the series in several ways.

[17] Players obtain in-game money known as gil by completing missions, quests and defeating Beastmen, though unlike previous Final Fantasy games, these monsters drop only small amounts.

Popular shared spaces activities include hunting Notorious Monsters, fiends that rarely appear and drop precious loot.

The surprise of the random encounter system is achieved via aggressive monsters, who will attack players based on different factors such as sight and sound.

Players have several means at their disposal, including spells, abilities and items, to build up enmity or shed it to their advantage in battle - a factor that features heavily in group, or "party" play.

This feature allows to tackle every fight with a wide array of different strategies, while encouraging the community to share new, creative ways of handling a certain type of enemy.

Magic spells are available to certain jobs, and in addition to a cooldown period, they often consume MP or some form of item in order to be cast, while at the same time requiring the user to stand still.

Transportation, auction house, item storage, and fees do not go to players; these gil sinks effectively remove money from the economy to prevent inflation.

[30] Square Enix has stated that the trade of items for real currency is officially a violation of the Terms of Service for Final Fantasy XI.

[33] Since 2006, Square Enix has regularly banned accounts found to be in violation of the terms, some of them using third-party tools, effectively removing billions of gil from the in-game economy.

While most areas are accessible by walking, various modes of transportation, ranging from the classic Final Fantasy Chocobo and airships to special spells, facilitate movement across the game world.

Promathia cursed the five races with eternal conflict amongst themselves by bringing forth their darkest attributes: the apathy of the Humes, the arrogance of the Elvaan, the rage of the Galka, the cowardice of the Tarutaru, and the envy of the Mithra.

[34] The creation lore's sentient Crystal, Gods, Children, and the truths behind them feature as major plot points in several Final Fantasy XI expansion packs, while the Beastmen are some of the game's main antagonists.

Players deal with the aftermath of this conflict in the original story, and may travel back in time to aid in the war effort with the expansion pack Wings of the Goddess.

Several of these races are known as Beastmen, a distinction made between fiends who possess higher than average intelligence, exhibiting self-awareness, emotions, culture, and religion.

Nation or governing body affiliation is relatively simple, sometimes requiring prerequisite quests being completed and have several stages of progression to achieve higher recognition and reward throughout each story.

Players begin the game as residents of one of the three main countries: San d'Oria, Bastok, and Windurst, and must help band the nations together against the resurrected Shadow Lord.

Wings of the Goddess primarily occurs in the era of the Crystal War, 20 years in the past from the main Final Fantasy XI setting.

The player discovers and crosses mysterious time portals alongside the Hume/Elvaan mix Lilisette, and are led to help the Regal Feline Cait Sith reduce the suffering of the era.

Rhapsodies of Vana'diel concerns the conclusion of the previous Final Fantasy XI storylines with the threat posed by the Cloud of Darkness and an alternate timeline version of the player.

The idea to develop Final Fantasy XI as an online game was conceived by Hironobu Sakaguchi when establishing Square Pictures headquarters in Hawaii.

[39] The game was developed and ran on the Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti GPU, which the President of Square Yoichi Wada described as the most powerful graphics processor available at the time.

After working with Microsoft to resolve the game's incompatibility issues with Windows Vista, Square Enix released a downloadable version of the PlayOnline client which is compatible with the operating system, although small bugs have appeared.

[57] Only three months later, on December 10, Matsui left the team to work as "Lead Combat System Designer" on Square Enix's new MMO, Final Fantasy XIV.

[59] On June 24, at the end of VanaFest 2012, a festival in Yokohama, Japan to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Japanese launch of Final Fantasy XI, Hiromichi Tanaka, for health reasons, decided to step down as producer of the game and leave Square-Enix.

[105] Other elements receiving criticism include the EXP grind, which involves constant battles to access different parts of the game, and overcrowded camp sites.

[64] While many MMOs have switched to some form of free-to-play model, the base monthly subscription price point for Final Fantasy XI has remained the same at $11.95 since its debut in 2002.

[121][122][123] Final Fantasy XI was awarded the grand prize from the Japan's Consumer Entertainment Software Association (CESA) for 2002–2003 along with Taiko no Tatsujin.