Did Yoshida went a bit too far by cloning WoW?

[nuyu11]

No comment, I to play WoW over 6 years, from my personal perspective there is no different because both are mmorpg. People grind, waste time and argue.

[Blackweaver]

Here's my thoughts. WoW was plagued by some majorly bad decisions. Bad writers that replaced the writers in wrath of the lich king, couldn't come up with a unique story, so they went out, and got "inspiration" from other games, tv series, or movies and adapted those stories to each zone. So every single zone, was one big easter egg. One early zone was CSI: Miami. Another was Rambo. The list goes on and on.

The flying mounts at first in WoW, mainly burning crusade and wrath of the lich king, you had to reach level cap first to be able to fly everywhere. Then after a new expansion came out, bam, lowered the flying restriction. Suddenly you can fly in outland at level 60 instead of 70. Can fly in northrend at level 70, not 80. And cataclysm was the biggest offender. No more need to walk, just fly from point a to point b while doing quests.

Now in heavensward, do we got griffons? Yes. And they are spelled properly too. They also look 1000 times better than WoW's. Griffons have been in previous final fantasy games I believe, and it makes sense they'd be in heavensward. Flying though isn't a 1 time fee and you fly anywhere and everywhere. You have to unlock flying zone by zone, which means you need to finish every quest, including the main story quest, and find the aether currents littered all over the zone to unlock flight in that zone. I actually prefer this system over WoW's, because you have to travel by foot through the lands first, experience the lands story, before you can actually fly.

Story writing in heavensward runs so many circles around WoW, that WoW got dizzy and threw up. That is to say, FFXIV's story telling is top notch, and what I expect in a final fantasy game. All MMO's this day and age, aim for a combat system that is easy to use. FFXIV's combat system is fine. They give us all the tools we need. And thanks to no mod support, we aren't seeing elitists getting out of hand by spamming damage meters, which are against the tos in this game.

Overall, I don't think they went too far in cloning WoW. I think they went far enough in taking things WoW did, and making them better. WoW did the same thing with it's vanilla game. Their developers went out, got all the (at the time) best MMO's, played them, and took bits and pieces from them game, made them better and yet simpler, and it resulted in an industry changing standard on MMO's. Suddenly mmo's that require you to memorize every single key on your keyboard and quickly press them for x action, can be done with mouse clicks. You could move via mouse, and you could tell there was a quest by an icon over the npc or object's head.

Somewhere along the way, WoW lost track of themselves. And that somewhere, was around the time activision bought them. For me FFXIV filled my MMO void after I left that game during mists of pandaria. They had stopped caring about what their fans wanted. One buggy feature, was breaking the game in more ways than one and myself and others kept complaining and giving full bug reports. Their lead developer literally in a blog post, told us we just wanted a single player game and should go play skyrim instead.

But Yoshi-P, and the developers of this game, they actually listen to their fans. They saved a game that failed miserably, and made it epic. I heard we are up to 5 million subscribers. They obviously did something right as WoW lost almost 3 million subscribers in 3 months after warlords of draenor shipped. Square-Enix for me, has always given me top notch quality products. Yeah there were bumps in the road. The original final fantasy for the nintendo entertainment system for example, felt all over the place. I never really got to grasp that games story like I did Dragon Warrior. But they learned over the years, and I been quite happy with their games for a long long time now. FFXIV is my home. I'm not going anywhere, as long as they continue listening to their fans, and never going down the greed pit that WoW went, this game will last for more years to come.

[Akiza]

Its similar to WoW because whats an WoW became standard to all MMOs. If Yoshi didn't base this game on WoW they would have nothing to build on.

[Felis]

It's very similar to WoW because Yoshi-P said he based 2.0 on WoW (Trinity, Raids, etc). If only I can find the article/quote.

Trinity have nothing to do with WoW. The holy trinity is much older than WoW, maybe even much older than Ragnarok Online or FF XI.

Someone who pull the enemy attacks away from the party members, someone who keep the party alive and someone who punch the enemy down.
defending - healing - punching. Even those games that say not using the holy trinity sill have it within a single character.

[Krissey]

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...

You do realize that's exactly what they did right? And that this game has the second most subscribers of any MMO out there? But yeah, enjoy railing for a dead game that was closed because it was trash. Have fun playing FFXIV alone in the dark because literally nobody else wanted to.

I'll keep playing FFXIV:ARR and HW with 4.9 million other players.

[zipzo]

Obviously we have different views on the subject, the world had detail a sense of purpose. It took time to get from one end to the other, the monsters were dangerous and smart. Technical limitations aside the open world had a purpose in the world unlike 2.0.

Right, because the same 32 sqfeet of land copy/pasted across every single grid of the in-game maps just with grass, dirt, or plants (depending on which major region you were in) was totally immersive.

Seriously? Gridania was simply a collection of narrow green hallways, basically no creativity whatsoever. Than and La Noscea could only be moderately considered open, and they still used the same copy/paste routine there, not only that, but there was a dearth of any interact-able NPCs, enemy or not, outside of the scarce amount of aetherite camps. You could walk through an entire zone and not see any enemies if you looked the wrong ways. If 1.0 is your version of a world with a sense of purpose, I highly question your taste in what constitutes having a purpose. The environment was pure shoddy design to say the least.

To be honest, I'm saddened that they kept the character models intact in almost every way except for adding in jumping, because it reminds of what this game used to be, an abhorrent frankenstein of some of the worst design decisions an MMO has ever seen. In my honest opinion the character models still slightly stink of a worse time for the FFXIV development team, and better looking "life-like with a slight anime touch" models exist in other square games.

To desire anything from that version of the game to return is to literally be the enemy of all gamers. It was an utter train wreck in every sense of the word.

[Terribad]

I've played WoW and Aion. FFXIV is in no way shape or form even close to Aion. Aion actually requires work, the combat system there is standard point and click but there's a way better combo system.
However I do think FFXIV is a more easy version of WoW.

tthis game has the second most subscribers of any MMO out there?

Not arguing or saying this isn't true but can I have the link to where you found this information? I remember towards re-release they said they had 300k active subscribers. Then everything else just turned to "Accounts" and or "registered users".

[KisaiTenshi]

To desire anything from that version of the game to return is to literally be the enemy of all gamers. It was an utter train wreck in every sense of the word.

Oh please. There are two things that were proverbial stakes-in-the-heart in V1.0:
1) The Copy-paste scenery (that everyone who played it in Beta warned SE about, and SE ignored)
2) The way V1.0's combat system worked, character level (which is what enabled the storyline) , and the need to rest otherwise you get significantly less experience.

Those are the two, and ONLY two points that people rightfully can complain about V1.0 that made it a major joke. There was a lot of other stuff that was more nitpickery than real gripes like...

- Too many damn menus
- Bots overran the world in less than a week by taking advantage of a levelquest chaining (bug?)
- It took damn forever to cross a map, and players speed-hacked their way across the map
- The original harvesting and crafting system was stupidly slow and far more RNG based. Like if you thought the current system was slow, V1.0 actually threw RNG's and time limits at you.

Like all things considered, what "broke" FFXIV V1.0 was trying to repeat everything that worked from FFXI and just make it bigger. Like the most pointed example of this is the races in FFXIV all match a race that was previously in XI, only slightly different. Like for all intents, XIV may have started out as a sequel to XI before it got it's own identity.

But what's been said quite a bit over multiple threads is that the V1.0 wasn't "better" than V2.0, but rather the maps and combat system (And overly menu-dependant UI) gave players who tried it a much inferior experience compared to games that had been released in the previous 10 years. XI's combat system may have been fine in a time when the only other successful MMORPGs were Everquest (1999) and Ultima Online (1996). But current MMORPG's UI/UX draw from Everquest (the compressed inventory) and Diablo(1996) (the "belt" of icons that correspond to number keys) and not Ultima Online (though the "paper doll" gear equipment is still in use and has it's origin in Ultima 7 (1992).)

The WASD control scheme ironically comes from one of the first Multiplayer CRPG game (Moria) for the PLATO in 1977, and was used with Wizardy in 1981 (another predecessor to damn-near-every-CRPG-and-MMORPG) but fell out of favor with the introduction of computer mice in 1984, and didn't come back into favor until Quake (which is... *drumroll* a multiplayer game in 1996.) FFXI and XIV (and PC ports of FFVII, FFVIII) all had development targets for game consoles which didn't come with keyboards. So the game had to be able to work with a controller alone.

So everything that we complain about from V1.0 are management missteps. There was a lot more care and thought put into the cutscenes, lore and supporting quests, while where they really struck-out was with the maps and antiquated combat.

So is V2.0 better? It's better in MOST ways. Combining the Miqo'te gear with the Hyur gear (and hence the often cited "Miqo'te butts" comments) was definitely a step backwards, and so was nerfing the opening cutscenes. But you have to also understand that there was no way of putting those opening cutscenes into V2.0 because most of it was was rendered in real time against the MUCH larger Gridania (Forest) and Ul'dah (Entrance) maps. (Limsa's Opening takes place on a ship, which was an actual thing you could ride in V1.0, but had to wait for.) They would have had to redo them entirely.

[Aegrus]

First, if you are going to compare a game to AION with screenshots, USE SOME DAMN AION SCREENSHOTS TOO. Hell, i wish some more games took advantage of the way combo's worked, as you could bind a default combo chain, and just bind the branch offs on other keys.

But not as mounts.. since in FF you ever had chocobos as mounts.. and no flying mounts.. no its because of the LOOKS it has.. when you compare it to older screenshots..

and if you compare it to the offline series it has less in common with typical FF's. thats my opinion on that.

Just....shut... up. Seriously, you obviously need guidance, so I am telling you. Whatever rattles around in your head, just let it stay there, don't share it with the world.

[Krissey]

Not arguing or saying this isn't true but can I have the link to where you found this information? I remember towards re-release they said they had 300k active subscribers. Then everything else just turned to "Accounts" and or "registered users".

http://m.ign.com/articles/2015/06/05...-final-fantasy

According to this article. I don't know if it's true or not though. On the other hand WoW has 7 million and this supposedly has 4 million so I just assume its second most. Maybe SWOTR has more? I dunno. Most MMOs are free now with no sub model.

Might just be here say that everyone keeps repeating like its truth.