Quote Originally Posted by Gramul View Post
And by different from XI, you mean similar to WoW?
Being similar to WoW was more icing on the cake than anything else. All that meant is that I could make a transition from one to the other. This is not counting that I hated most of FFXI's gameplay (gear swaps, refresh-whoring, utsusemi, on/off switches in the form of gear, to name a few) while I did enjoy WoW's take on encounter design, mechanics and party dynamics.
Like nearly other MMO for the past decade? The very same stagnation that poisons so many other genres in so many other industries?
Taking ideas from your peers has been par for the course in entertainment since the coming of motion pictures, and is thus a poor talking point. Specially when it is ideas that work.

We could sit here and condemn the fighting game industry for implementing super meters, or RPGs of old for using turn-based combat, or even recent beat em ups that seem to be taking major pointers from Akham Assylum's free flow combo system (equivalents to what we've seen within the MMORPG genre), but to do so would be asinine and pointless. MMORPGs also fall into this line of reasoning.