Did Yoshida went a bit too far by cloning WoW?

[Vespar]

so its innovative to implement blue shiny ponys to star trek online too? Innovative? Of course final fantasy evolves in its lore etc. but for me it just shows how they sold the identity for several things.. to make it WoW'ish and to make a commercial success...and thats not just the mounts.

And no, implementing different mount types is no innovation.. since that is done by billions of other MMorpgs since i dont know.. a decade

If everything is so WoW to you. Why arent you playing WoW?

[Gilthas]

(wish he carried "not new person friendly" thought process to crafting lol).

Oh definitely. Seems like they're making gathering and crafting more and more obnoxious with each update.

[Tonkra]

If everything is so WoW to you. Why arent you playing WoW?

because its much more cartoonish and i dont like the lore at all. yea. and yes im about to leave FFXIV.
im quiet tired of that MMO formula of running instances and itemlevel spirals.

i find it kind of sad, as i loved to play FFXI (the game is a little bit outdated for todays standards). they unfortunatley missed the chance to become a REAL final fantasy Online . With OWN Combat System and gameplay mechanics, that actually feel like a final fantasy.

so for me FFXIV is more like standard MMO stuffed with FF things in it.. which kept me playing it for some time.

[SakuraMidori]

Kevin VanOrd a big fan of ff said what was true in back in the day http://www.gamespot.com/reviews/fina.../1900-6280901/ Was any of this a lie? i mean 1.0 was very nice to look at but was busted

[Vespar]

because its much more cartoonish and i dont like the lore at all. yea. and yes im about to leave FFXIV.
im quiet tired of that MMO formula of running instances and itemlevel spirals.

i find it kind of sad, as i loved to play FFXI (the game is a little bit outdated for todays standards). they missed the chance to become a REAL final fantasy unfortunatley.

so for me FFXIV is more like standard MMO stuffed with FF things in it.. which kept me playing it for some time.

Dont let the door hit you on the way out. Because obviously nothing anyone in here says will answer your original question in your eyes. You already made up your mind before you asked the question.

Did SE clone WoW? No, I dont think they cloned anything. If they cloned anything it would look exactly like WoW. The story would be the exact same yada yada yada.
What I do see, is research that was done using other WoW and games and MMO's that was then expanded upon, innovated and implemented in a way that allowed SE to make it their own. However, their story is entirely original, as are their mount designs and methods of obtainment.

Furthermore, If you were to take away the title of "Final Fantasy" what would this game be to you? Would you care that it had elemnts of WoW? Would you enjoy it for what it is, rather than what it isnt? I feel like far too many people put too much stock into a single name. Final Fantasy has always been different for each and every installment.

[Kaedan]

I'm a legacy player from all the way back in 1.0 alpha days. There are many things I enjoyed about 1.x... I was one of the few who actually liked the environments and didn't agree with the hyperbolic "copy pasta" accusations. But ultimately there was a lack of content and it was a pretty ridiculous grind on top of a penalty system that reduced your XP if you were grinding too much.

There were also quite a few mechanical issues and the graphics system was not optimized well at all.

But while I did enjoy 1.x, ARR+ is just better in almost every possible way. And it's in no way a copy of WoW. The people who make that claim don't really understand what they are saying. There are certain aspects of MMOs that are "tried and true" and end up becoming standards that are expected by the demographic. Those are the things the carry over between all MMOs, and WoW was not the first one to implement them, far from it.

[KisaiTenshi]

FFXIV is far from a WoW clone.

I played wow for years and never once did I get this engaged with my character or the storyline. I can be all classes, not just one. The story is presented to me in custcenes and small lines of dialogue. Not walls of text inside a window....

THIS. What I hate about pretty much every MMORPG except Mabinogi and Star Wars: The Old Republic, is that ALL other MMORPG's just throw a wall of text at you and have little to no cinematics to it. Hell I played Archeage and Aion expecting such kinds of cutscenes and there were zero. The cutscenes in Archeage and Wizardy Online were little more than the character's idle pose looping while their arms and mouth moves (Archeage), or just "wobbles" (Wizardry.) SWTOR actually has a storyline, albeit one you might not care for if you're not really really realllllllly into Star Wars. The Star Trek Online was much worse. There was nothing cinematic about it. Mabinogi has plenty of cutscenes, but a lot of were skipped if you were in a party for much the same reason in FFXIV, people are impatient.

So three out of maybe 20 games I tried since UO had "engaging" storylines.

The 1.0 world was extremely lacking in storyline, which for me makes or breaks a game and was the ultimate reason I left wow. (I never bothered to read the walls of text, story presentation is everything here). I can deal with UI issues or graphical errors but if there's no meat on that skeleton why even bother?

While their may be elements of WoW in XIV, I can argue that of almost any MMO these days. Just because WoW was/is the biggest, doesnt mean its the best. And just because they did it first, doesnt mean they did it better.

I love FFXIV, but I hate WoW for various reasons. and it shows probably in my post. Maybe you are the opposite of me and prefer WoW. I dunno. To each their own, but I like FFXIV the way it is now.

I've never played WoW, and a large amount of reason why I never got had the slightest interest in it was because WoW came out at a time I was working at a call center and I knew NOTHING about it other than all the "dudebro" slackers were playing it. Like not the "nerds", but the actual dudebros. So I didn't make the connection. (Likewise I didn't make the connection that people actually used Facebook when I worked at the last call center, just that all the damn facebook game invites were a plague.) The call centers "cut off" access to the WoW forums and it caused an outrage.

Like to me, there has to be a storyline. It can not simply be "log in to the game and grind in one spot for 16 hours, or until you no longer get experience from the mobs"

The Final Fantasy "Identity" is in the storyline, which borrows heavily from Naussica, which is a "man vs nature/environment" story.
It doesn't matter that the Garleans come in and wreck the place, or that Cid brings the Airship to get you to the next location, ultimately the "big bad" in all the Final Fantasy Games is "someone who corrupts nature to their own ends", be it the Crystals, Magic, or Espers/Primals/God-like beings. It's your job as the Warrior of Light to stop the Big Bad from destroying everyone. I think it was around FF5 that Final Fantasy started to really get it's own identity.

Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest both borrow their game mechanics heavily from Ultima and Wizardry CRPG's, and while Dragon Quest mainly adhered to Wizardy's combat system, Final Fantasy created it's own unique combat system. Every FF game since has refined on it, or threw out the previous system only to bring parts of it back in a later game. Again, around FF5 it started to get it's own identity.

Both DQ and FF, had the same inspirations for their RPG elements. Wizardy and Ultima.

Like, let's say in some alternate reality, SquareEnix had decided to just live with FFXIV the way it was at 1.0 release, and Yoshi-P never came into the picture? What do you really think would have happened?

My guess is that we would get one storyline out of it and then it would have been "changed to a single player game" and re-released offline and they just take a loss on it. Square-Enix may still need to do this just to allow players to see the entire storyline, or just rip a page out of FF7's book and pre-render all the lore scenes and allow the player to import their FFXIV V2.0 character into it.

I'm fairly confident that SE could just back-port all the cutscenes to ret-con the storylines of each Scion/Path-of-Twelve, but they wouldn't be quite as amazing since it seems the current cutscene engine lacks dynamic camera movement (which is what allowed for the amazing openings that V1.0 had)

[Havenae]

I realize the OP is getting much flak. But the OP is speaking some truth... and usually the truth pisses people off. I personally don't car if aesthetically the game is similar to WoW. or if they game has some things that are similar to WoW (dungeon finder, flying mounts ect...) The bottom line is the only thing that can really be attributed to WoW as being an original addition to the general makeup of MMOs is a cohesive, continual streamlined questline. Thats really all WoW ever brought to the table that set it apart from the other MMOs at the time. They took Everquest, and they streamlined it. Blizzard effectively gave birth to the concept of "Themepark". And that's fine, I don't mind other MMOs using that.

What disturbs me about this and many other MMOs is this complete adherence to the design philosophy behind WoW in it's entirety. Games STOP trying to be their own thing and latch on to the relatively shoddy design that was/still is World of Warcraft.

Case in point in FFXIV is this cap nonsense. Instead of trying to legitimize the game as an enjoyable experience we're instead met with a developer crutch designed to prolong content life by forcing players to stick around for subs to acquire gear. This is ignoring the fact that WoW was a decade ago and we're still on the same tired ass gear grind scenario as the entirety of purpose in MMOs. This is the problem. it isn't whats copied. it's that what is copied is never improved, not really; certainly not on the systems and design points that matter.

This is why most games fail. They wants to just copy the success and maybe add a gimmick that they think will distinguish it at the start, but then those gimmicks are never developed because there isn't enough of the game elsewhere to allow it a lifespan of any length to see it occur. In short, they're never their own games, they never have their own identity because they're too busy being preoccupied with copycatting the other presently successful MMO.

Thats why when new MMOs are announced and they promise to be entirely different they get enormous spikes in interest.. but eventually only prove to be the exact same shit but with a small twist. Imagine if an automotive maker said they were coming out with the next evolution in the idea of the car and basically just made the same car from 10 years ago but with the knight rider light on the front spoiler. That's essentially all MMO developers do now.

That's essentially all Yoshida did with FFXIV. That's essentially all SE continues to do.

And before the "Well if you dont like the game why are you here"

Because I hold out hope that eventually someone will remove their head from their ass and change. That's why.

Things never get better if you just shut your mouth and leave.

[Shougun]

I'm a legacy player from all the way back in 1.0 alpha days. There are many things I enjoyed about 1.x... I was one of the few who actually liked the environments and didn't agree with the hyperbolic "copy pasta" accusations. But ultimately there was a lack of content and it was a pretty ridiculous grind on top of a penalty system that reduced your XP if you were grinding too much.

I liked the look of them on a grand scale but I think hyperbolic and accusations is a bit of an intense wording, have you not seen the screen shots that show 20+ exact copy locations?

What would be considered copy pasta if not locations exactly the same within 30 seconds of each other? Just curious xD.

[Tonkra]

Dont let the door hit you on the way out. Because obviously nothing anyone in here says will answer your original question in your eyes. You already made up your mind before you asked the question.

Did SE clone WoW? No, I dont think they cloned anything.

Sorry but get your rosy goggles off.. you cant say "ANYTHING".. i would understand if you say "for me it's like they copied some things out of it". but saying "nothing at all" is completely false. especially when the producer itself said that.

and cloning doesnt mean that you copy the story..

it is a standard MMO with FF things stuffed into it. (lore, characters etc.). i mean if you play an offline fantasy and then FFXIV you see the differences very obviously. That MMorpgs these days can be similiar to their offline titles .. ESO is a good example for that. it made its own combat system and not "click target, click a button" etc. it is more or less elder scrolls online gameplay.

You cant say that FFXIV now feels like you are playing a Final Fantasy game. For me its definatley a missed chance.
FFXI had the main menu of the offline titles in it. it was very slow paced. FFXIV had things like TP bar etc. it was more unique in that way


im not saying FFXIV is a bad game. but if i see it in comparison to the old version or FFXI... it is obviously driven towards wow.