Funny enough about gear textures in WoW...You get to many of the shiny ones and your chara turns into a lightbulb....
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I agree it's not a fair comparison but I wouldn't say it's a stupid one. A new player who has never played an MMO before but decides to start will compare the games on the market. Those are the kind of players that any new MMO needs to win and WoW has the advantage of being a big brand name and having a decades worth of content, it's just a fact. All other MMOs have to somehow overcome that advantage when competing for new players.
FF XI is different than FF XI now... people don't level in regular parties anymore. Nobody wants to do that when the abyssea alliance grindfest way is faster.
As for comparing FF XIV to another mmorpgs... it's going to happen. Particularly to World of Warcraft, as it has been one of, if not the most successful mmorpg ever released.
Having features that have existed in western mmorpgs for years that players enjoy just makes sense from a business perspective. FF XIV was backwards in a number of ways. Being released in an unfinished state certainly didn't help things.
FF XIV: ARR is going to be the mass market FF MMO and that is going to upset some people who enjoyed being in a relatively small exclusive club who played and enjoyed a game that most people wouldn't touch with a 10 ft pole.
Maybe you misunderstood my post, buuuut.. I said from what you've "seen". I even put quotations around it in my OP also. Then asked what comparisons others, including you, can draw up and then I proceeded to mention WoW comparisons from other people in the community. Maybe you're thinking I myself was making comparisons when I only asked what others thought? Hm? Maybe you're saying others shouldn't make comparisons now even with all the info shared from the developers even after they've mentioned influences from other games?
I don't know what was hard to understand about that, but I'm not Japanese so maybe you didn't care to pay attention?
Doesn't matter if you're making comparisons or asking others to make them. It's still comparing an unfinished game, most of which we can't even talk about, with games that have been out or months or years.
And it's no less silly than comparing it to WoW.
FFXIV is FFXIV, and that's all there's to it.
So how would you explain to a friend who's maybe played a couple other MMO's...but not 1.0 why they should play this game and how it works? Would you avoid referencing systems in any other game? Because even though I understand your points, the OP has a point as well.
The fact is, it's human nature to compare things...it's part of how we learn.
So if your friend only knows Guild Wars...or only knows FFXI or WoW...then you would reference those games to explain the similarities and differences. Just as your friend would use their knowledge of how to play those games in their gameplay of FFXIV:ARR.
That said:
What are you trying to accomplish with this OP? I think part of the reason Abriael takes offense with your topic is because with such a poorly worded OP this thread is seemingly only created to cause turmoil of some sort;
1. this is a thread to bait NDA breeches
2. this is a thread that will start bashing/praising blindly
Of course this might not have ever been your original intent. But the reality is, most of the people who could best answer your question, really can't answer it right now. As to what has been released by SE in both gameplay videos and images, nothing screams OMG any one game in the Genre. People naturally draw connections to what they know...and an English Speaking NA audience is most likely to have experienced WoW in some form...hence why it is the ' standard comparison game' for most MMO games in this language/part of the world. Other MMO's that are released in NA typically get the same comparisons. \
In the easiest possible way: "there's gonna be an open beta, try it out and see if you like it".
Comparisons are a crutch, and in the case of MMORPGs are almost always misplaced one way or another due to the complexity of the genre.
People compare single elements and blather on how they make this or that MMORPG similar to others, but the simple fact is that what mostly differentiates games belonging to the same genre is how the same genre-defining elements fit with one another, not what those elements are.