Quote Originally Posted by Gunspec View Post
It always feels like there is nothing to look forward to when it comes to my character.
FFXI did honestly have vertical progression, too, but that progression typically only happened once every several years. The game was originally cappped at level 50 (like this one) but by the time it released in NA, the first expansion had raised the level cap to Level 75. Four or five years after that, the level cap was raised to 90 in a series of mini-expansions, and then sometime after that (I can't remember exactly how long) the level cap was increased to 99. A few years after that, they instituted item levels mostly as we understand them here (which is where the game now stands).

For all the time in between those periods, the game has been horizontal (even now, after they tried to make it more directly vertical, they've had to go back and reinstate most of the old horizontal aspects through upgrade quests for old gear and the like, because that's what their playerbase, small though it is, wants). And a big part of why horizontal progression worked in FFXI was that leveling was essentially the vertical progression, not gear. It took a very long time to get to 75 during the first expansion, and you had all those Limit Break Quests getting in the way, Missions to do, and so on. What that meant was that, by the time someone hit 75, there was just a metric ton of content to gear up that job, whether it was their first job or a newly leveled one, and everything took tons of time (the kind of time that makes our current Anima questline look like a joke).

Something like that could never work in FFXIV mainly because of time. The game's already set up in a way that the endgame is where they want people to be, which is why we can level so fast, and so on, and no matter how long content lasts at the level cap, it will never be able to meet demand when people can get to 60 in a week or two and when they can then gear up a job at a basic functional level in another week or two. There's not going to be any room for real horizontal progression in FFXIV and the people clamoring for it honestly don't understand that a game has to be built from the ground up for it to function properly. They want a different game.

Yes, you can add what I normally call horizontal aspects to the game (like more gearsets at the highest item level for each raid tier), and that's something I'm in favor of. But those aspects wouldn't actually result in horizontal progression in any way. The overarching progression would still be massively vertical, just as FFXI's progression was still largely horizontal despite it being punctuated with periods of intense vertical progression.