Stuff I Miss From 1.0

[Magis]

FFXIV ver1.x was its own game with a mature world and a mature story and I miss that a lot. FFXIV ARR is just another theme-park clone with a miniature toothless world and a story that doesn't take itself seriously (a shallow hero story) that has the luxury of access to the Final Fantasy name and allowed use The Final Fantasy skin on its assets.

This is what makes me regret never coming back to FFXIV 1.0, and what gives me fond memories of FFXI and heck, even Vanilla WoW. The games felt like they wanted to present a world first and a game second. You felt invested in your character and felt part of the world, with real dangers and adventure. Now-a-days it's all about dishing content at you one plate at a time forgetting that there is also the roleplaying part of an MMORPG. Just look how ignored the open world is and everything else is sectioned off into instances, nice little walled off content packs for you to consume. Even the storyline feels separate from the actual world, and one of the points I'll give to WoW for doing, where rather than having a "main story" that progresses through the game, they had multiple stories in each zone that explained the lore of what was going on around the world, intertwining into a overall meta story (in vanilla, the recovery of the world after WCIII, and the tensions between the two factions). This made quests more interesting (rather than XIV's boring fetch quests), and allowed Blizzard to make locations more varied and interesting.

For example, the zone Duskwood had a questline explain why a section of the zone had worgen (werewolf types), and it turned out a npc hiding in an abandoned town accidentally unleashed them after finding a relic of the Night Elves (a race that mostly inhabits the other side of the world). There was also a questline that had you uncover a evil mage, and in it's climax caused a wandering highlevel NPC to path from the bottom of the zone, to the town (killing any sad low-level who got in it's way) causing a fight between the nightguard and the monster (Stitches).

I could see FATEs kinda being that, but why not incorporate them into the questlines and build up to the climax (fate style boss), than just POOF, here is some reason why they are here, go kill with 40 people. Heck, some FATEs don't even have a reason why they are there!

Sorry got a bit ranty there.

[Balipu]

Long talk about story

Sorry got a bit ranty there.

Well the problem isn't really that there is a main story but that the questlines are isolated so it feals less like a world of interconnected stories. I mean, you do the main scenario, the hildibrand questline, the class and job storylines, the profession quests, the grand company quests and soon realise that all of those are completely separate from each other. The way I saw it in 1.0, the individual storylines were more connected. Urianger in the Hildi questline, Sisipu in main scenario, Nael van Darnus in Grand Company quests. It expanded the same story horizontally therefore gave the impression that both it and the world is bigger.

I still think ARR is a great game and it hurts to see most here think it is a piece of garbage abusing the Final Fantasy name, but there really are a lot of things that 1.0 did a lot better. Still it seems the world was not ready for 1.0-s innovations so drastic changes were necessary to make the MMO marketable. Perhaps gradually bringing back some of the old features could occur later. Untill then, enjoy all the stuff comming with 2.5

[Gramul]

Still it seems the world was not ready for 1.0-s innovations so drastic changes were necessary to make the MMO marketable

I feel like 1.0 would have done well if they:
1. Finished the base game and had actual content on release.
2. Had viable graphics settings for lower end systems.
3. Avoided all the awkward anti-bot systems they had that ultimately did nothing but inconvenience the regular player. (the old markets for example)

[Felis]

Well the problem isn't really that there is a main story but that the questlines are isolated so it feals less like a world of interconnected stories. I mean, you do the main scenario, the hildibrand questline, the class and job storylines, the profession quests, the grand company quests and soon realise that all of those are completely separate from each other. The way I saw it in 1.0, the individual storylines were more connected. Urianger in the Hildi questline, Sisipu in main scenario, Nael van Darnus in Grand Company quests. It expanded the same story horizontally therefore gave the impression that both it and the world is bigger.

Neither Nael nor Urianger were part of the 1.0 original storyline. They were part of the 7th umbral storyline, that were identical with the 1.0 GC storyline.
Sisipu was part of the original storyline because of the "let introduce all the guilds in the starter city to the player" part at the beginning. Once you finished the starter city story part with the rank 15 storyquest and joined in the rank 20 storyquest the Path of the Twelve (the Echo support group from Minfillia), you never saw her in the mainstory again.