I still wonder what happened.

Look at how well the jobs are distributed. there isn't a giant blob of any one kind, nor are any completely ignored. Tanaka made xi amazing (even with the grind fest) because it was still challenging and winning a fight FELT like a victory.

ya but to make content on that level now, there will be so many screaming and whining. Let's face it the days of uber battles and difficult grinds to earn something are gone. In comes the very casual inclusive approach and many of us cannot do a thing about it.

its very simple really, the game was not in active development for 5 years, that was an exagerration, probably for publicity purposes, they may have decided they wanted to do an ffxiv, and done planning for awhile but a simple look at the facts

crystal tools
Stable release 1.1 / September, 2009

means they couldnt have begun any meaning full or actual work until 1 year from release. They probably could have created things they could port over, like models, skins graphics, and animations, but aside from that the actual meat of the game, couldnt have entered real development or testing until sept 2009. And even now they claim that the stable version is still tricky and hard to work with.

What was mostly in development was the overall plans and ideas, and probably some of the transferable or basic things common to all engines, graphics, animations. I mean look at nobuo uematsu, he said they didnt give him the game to play just pictures, why? probably because they didnt have a game to play.

As to why they didnt make ffxi, its probably because ffxi was not that marketable a product any more, as well the fact that they never really remake the next numbered ff titles. they probably should have strayed further from ffxi, so people would not have expected as much similarities, its all good to make a new game, but when you make the races so similar, people will expect more similarities.

And to be honest, if ffxiv was ffxi-2 it would have killed ffxi pretty quickly, or possible failed and ffxi would have retained its audience.

I agree with everything said here Roughgalaxy. In FFXI you knew when you had a good "grind" party, which I don't think the word grind should be used. It was only a "grind" when the party didn't work well together or have the right pieces. When the right pieces were in place for a party and you were rolling over mobs with SCs and good hate control it did not feel like a "grind". There was some sense of accomplishment when everything in the party was running smoothly. Good tank who uses abilities well for hate, good DDs who don't over power and steal hate until the right moment, good support that gives the right balance keeping mp pools up and giving haste or attack, and a healer who didn't over heal, use too much mp or had the balance of regen in check. That's whats missing from FFXIV every fight/leve is just unload on something and have no fighting dynamics, just kill and kill quick...and anyone can do it, there is no need for certain jobs to be there.

While I don't mind easy, there's a limit I have to draw. Lower level nm gear shouldn't be something you have to spend days camping for, just to be the best you can be going from it's equip level and beyond. Once you hit the cap and you're looking to improve beyond that, that's where your challenge should start.

I was looking forward to looking at the FFXI census. But part of the way looking at it, I realized I couldn't really look at it. It actually disgusted me. The census felt more of "who did what in Abyssea?". Hundreds of Empryeans completed in the last year? I remember looking at a census and seeing only in the 10's digits at best who had a relic/mythic.

I'm going to quote something from the movie The Incredibles. "If everyone is special, then no one is.". This is how FFXI feels now. It's easy, but it's too easy.

The one thing from the census I got a kick out of? A goblin smithy being 69th on the list of monsters with all time high player kills.

http://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

if anyone not read this, it's a dev from warhammer and why he said it failed with perspective of working for a company till he got fired. if all true i believe this is basically the type of things that keeps happening in corporate mmo world up top and it is ruining all our mmo's.

also no offense to casuals but i think that is ruining it too ..trying to satisfy many types of gamers instead of chosing one or making multiple servers, or like some new mmo's are doing, giving half and half solo and half hardcore/party rather then all of it mediocre for both, it is ruining games. yoshi even said in that interview they tried to take on way to much.

i think they should of "stuck with the formula" like some said, improved all the things that worked in ffxi and made them work way better, things people enjoyed they should of double and tripled the amount of. end ffxi with campaign battles ..start with a world full of them. stuff like that but i they defenetly started launch when they shouldn't of cause they were probably being pushed to like that link mentions happens. and the people up there probably don't know what they doing or are pocket healers for the phat cats with the money.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dreamer

Everything about this game screams that it was pushed to released far before it was even remotely finished. It had nothing to do with Tanaka...

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Gotta agree with this. It does no good to blame Tanaka, because we cannot speculate as to what his team would have done had they been given adequate time by the SE bean counters.

i agree eekid, i wonder what this game would of been like if they acually had that time to complete it without rushing. i think it would of been pretty good game. (though misssions were fail to me compared to ffxi) but i'll give benifit that it would of been different by the end lol.

http://ealouse.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/hello-world/

I think Sandbox MMOs with strong cooperative play in various forms are going to be making a return soon. I think Tanaka saw that and wanted to get started right away, I can only guess what could have happened internally but it seemed like they overreached themselves and tried to reinvent too much something that can take a very long time, longer then going with already known and established concepts. It really should have been a step between what FFXI was and a more open approach, they went too far in one direction and ran out of their alloted time.

That's my guess anyway.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dreamer

I have to disagree with the consensus here.

Everything about this game screams that it was pushed to released far before it was even remotely finished. It had nothing to do with Tanaka, or even resources (other than time). It's simply what happens when you have upper management who think that your brand name alone can carry your product, regardless of the state it's in.

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I agree with this.