Quote Originally Posted by Seif View Post
XI is just better. The story is more compelling the environments have more variety and the battle system has more depth and the quests are well made with cutscenes.

Is it really any wonder that people want those elements in XIV? I haven't heard of a MMO which has as good storytelling as XI so to me that seems like a fair comparison.

Whenever I tell my friends who play wow and TAoC they just tell me "but MMOs don't HAVE story!"

I pity them =D
Well most people don't play an MMO to simply digest a story someone else has already written for them in the same way they might if they were playing a single player game; most people play an MMO to engage with a fantasy world where others live and to write their own stories, well not only write them, but do them too. In FFXI, you couldn't DO anything, all you did was just sit back and watch it all.

Wow and AoC are bad offenders in some cases, but one thing i like about AoC is the guild city ideas they introduced.

Storytelling is interesting, as is lore, but the first priority should be to create a world around the players. Creating the world and then throwing all the players in as an after-thought is a bad way of designing an MMO and quite frankly misses the point of what an MMO should be about.

Ever since the first Ultima Online game and the original Lineage, games have followed the same generic formula which Everquest started.