Originally Posted by
Jennestia
Few reasons.
1. Final Fantasy. If you can prove to me that no FF followed the same design ideology, then you'll have a point.
2. Every FF game built off of the previous one or we would still be playing the Warriors of Light storyline and crystals would still be our governing source of life.
3. The latest FF games built off of FFX - i.e the Sphere Grid, 4 games utilized the system in their own way because...as much as this may shock you, it was a good system they decided to use again. You can go as far back and say the Junction system was the predecessor to the sphere grid.
4. Evolving from FFXI would have put this game in a better position. Don't you think the basic search system from XI would have been amazing if they, you know..built off of it? I can go to search, have numerous categories to search from, I can even /sea all (insert) and get results, I can throw a party flag when I want to be found for a party and so on. Stuff that's going to take almost a year to implement into XIV when it should have been done from the start.
5. The linkshell system - The ONLY thing XIV's did right was allow for multiple linkshell chat, everything else was a step back from FFXI, not forward.
The fact both games uses a linkshell system kind of proves while they tried to ignore XI, they still utilize the same features in various ways, but they also took so many steps backwards instead of forward it's ridiculous.
Actually, their original idea was to make the game as familiar as possible to FFXI players so they can create their "XI avatars" in XIV and start anew. They also wanted to ignore XI's existence which, as we know, Square admitted was a mistake since they said they tried too hard to make it not like XI that well we have what we have now.
Ironically, every MMORPG the past few years have literally been a Generic MMORPG - 2, Generic MMORPG - 3 etc, basically the same MMORPG with a different storyline. It's why Rift did well, because it was WoW with FFXI herb and spices.