Quote Originally Posted by Atoli View Post
I was fine with 1.x, but that's because my tolerance level is just really high. I play MMOs for the people in it and how much I feel at home in that world, how many feelings of wonder I experience when exploring and stuff like that, and no amount of slow or repetitive combat can stop me - but that's not the regular type of player nowadays
Everything has to be fast and actionpacked now, just look at FF15 - it's a straight forward action RPG. And if you look at the players coming in from other MMOs into ARR, they already complain that ARR combat is waaaay too slow and sluggish when I find it annoyingly fast sometimes.

Hm. Maybe that's why I'm more and more switching over to strategy games and classic-style handheld JRPGs
I'm getting old

Anyway, no matter how enjoyable many 1.x things were, no one should forget what a horrible mess 1.0 was. Nearly all of the things that made 1.x great in the end were added AFTER Yoshi-P took over.
You know when the combat actually got somewhat enjoyable?
When we got rid of the stamina bar and combat became slightly closer to what we have nowadays. Most people just remember how the game was in 1.2x and completely forget that story was incredibly sarce, quests were non-existent and combat consisted of hitting the monster 3-4 times and then standing there for a full minute to regenerate Stamina even when your TP were full at the start of 1.0 and a few patches beyond.

Still there is one thing I can't forgive - what the dev team of ARR did with Gridania's forest
Why?
Just why?
It was a wonderful place, mythical, magical, reclusive, very fitting to the mind of the people living in Gridania who were extremely wary of others.
But now, it's this cheap-looking run-of-the-mill friendly flowery open-to-all-travelers forest >_>
Every FF game since at least 6 has moved towards "Active Time Combat" and some other SE titles like Parasite Eve already had the "dodge AOE stuff" parts.

Like the #1 complaint with FFXIV 1.0 (aside from being incapable of running on ANY computer at any reasonable performance) was the copy-paste scenery AND copy-paste props. Had those two things never happened (and Yoshida not been a fan of WoW,) there would never have been a call to build an entirely new game.

Like the parts I miss the most from V1.0 are the far more cinematic cut scenes and the seamless transitions from town to overworld, and overworld to outdoor dungeons. While the Gridania area certainly was more of a hedge-maze in V1.0 was just as copy-paste bad as the rest of V1.0. V2.0 reduced the "maze" bits down to just the beast tribes area.

As V1.0 vs 1.23. Yeah the initial combat system was way way way too slow. https://youtu.be/YufDSf3cGQ4?t=71 , Like what should take 10 seconds takes 35 seconds.


Though ... in 2005 Take a close look at this scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgtZvn5c4e4 and you'll see something familiar from the FFXIV OP


At some point the locations were probably even larger. FFXIV essentially just suffered from "last minute" crunches and that's why the map is so full of copy-paste. Like you can get a feel of the development timeline by instead of looking at the map as "copy paste" as "placeholders that never got finished", there was likely another years worth of work required to finish all of that, and then the game wouldn't hit it's release date. But once you release a game, you can't really go backtrack and change half the content. As it is, just how much content was in V1.0 vs V2.0?

Going by the musical score. Garuda, Ifirit, and King Moggle Mog were in the game somewhere. http://news.mmosite.com/content/2011...dungeons.shtml , And only "The Thousand Maws of Totorak" (4-man) and "Dzemael Darkhold" (8-man) , which were added AFTER the battle system was changed. Yes, those were the raid dungeons.

The Music score in V1.0 is actually similar to V2.0, there are different tracks for day and night, for each zone. The tracks also changed depending on activity (eg harvesting, combat.) There's several tracks from V1.0 that aren't in V2.0 at all.