Did Yoshida went a bit too far by cloning WoW?

[Ryel]

And it's a WoW clone because they both happen to have snow-covered zones? Because snowy zones never existed in a game before WoW, right?

Well they are called Blizzard entertainment.

On a serious note there are a large number of things that XIV has done to modernize itself to the current MMO market, a market that was pretty much shaped around the successes of many of WoW's systems, for those coming from 1.0 it's easy to see where it feels like the game has lost some of it's FF identity from a design standpoint.

The game does however try to make up for it by throwing tons of references to older FF titles via NPCs, story elements, and bosses / monsters but at it's core you can fairly say quite a lot of the game borrows from WoW's formula (by developer intent as stated by Yoshida), not everyone enjoys that aspect.