Eorzea Then and Now

[Kittra]

If I had my way, had unlimited resources and was producing the game, my personal preference would be something like:

1.0's Character Design, lighting, and quality

2.0's Level/Area Aesthetics, Dungeon design, Structure Design

1.0's Macro Textures

2.0's Leveling System (Dungeons)

1.0's NMs (Fast spawning NMs)

2.0's Market Wards

1.0's Crafting/Materia driven Economy

A mixture of 1.0 and 2.0's area layout (Right now 2.0's areas are "unique" but every single area is that way which pretty much makes nothing special at all really.)

1.0's Battle System (without skill lock) (I'm sick to death of fighting with the camera zoomed out and with global cool down in every single MMO ever created simply because that's how the battles are designed.)

2.0's 3rd person camera system

1.0's Awesome First person camera system


There's more I'm forgetting (I know I am) but most of these points are what I would put into the game if I had that kind of power.


The major failing of 1.0's area layout was due to a couple facts that have been stated in the past:

First, they needed to conserve memory on the PS3. This is the main reason we got copy pasted areas in 1.0 (although after they dropped the idea of releasing 1.0 on the PS3, the level of detail to content released later became top notch).

Second, the game was pushed out extremely early. I remember reading back in 2009 that FFXIV was originally slated for release in the Q4 of 2013, and I was extremely shocked when they changed that to late 2010.

Even though the game was rushed, if you actually took the time to explore 1.0's landscape, there were quite a few "unique" areas to be found hidden in far away places. It lent a certain "enchanted" feeling to those areas and I have quite a few pictures/videos of my linkshell just hanging around some of them for fun.

That's what adventuring is all about right?