What are your favourite games, and what can FFXIV learn from them?

[Yasuhiro]

Final Fantasy VII
Persona 3
Dark Souls
Devil May Cry
Mega Man 3
SMT3: Nocturne
Resident Evil 2

Can FFXIV learn from them? Not really? But they are better than XIV, even simple games like SMT3 have better characters than XIV and it's cast of "literally who?" characters
Will Y'shtola ever be as remembered as say someone like Cloud or Terra? Hell no.

[Shurrikhan]

Can FFXIV learn from them? Not really? But they are better than XIV, even simple games like SMT3 have better characters than XIV and it's cast of "literally who?" characters
Will Y'shtola ever be as remembered as say someone like Cloud or Terra? Hell no.

Which is sad to me, given that I really love her basic characteristics. I just don't feel like we've really progressed/seen much beyond that. If anything, I felt like I saw more of her in the 1.0 La Noscean story, and that scarcely gave a glimpse either.

On topic:

Not a favorite through and through, but:
(Parts of) Wrath-era WoW
---> Rotation-affecting meaningful stats, with some optionality therein (I went "subpar" stat/talent routes that were often outdone in dummy fights but consistently outperformed in more varied scenarios). I honestly feel like a few tweaks here and there could go a long way for XIV as well, especially given our very window-ed gameplay. We just need a few more dependencies enough to make us feel our secondary stats, without scaling out of control as certain "late-game" jobs did in Wrath.
---> Some decent "hybrid" classes, at least for dungeoning purposes. Single-player FF games are certainly a better example of this, but Feral Druids, Ret Paladins, and most Warrior, Death Knight, and Shaman specs remain some of the most cross-role fun I've had in an MMO. And I've tanked most dungeons on DPS jobs by now, favoring DRG if I have another melee with me, or Ninja, Monk, or an overgeared Bard otherwise...
---> Not everything needs to be tank and spanked. People seemed a bit more willing to CC, kite, trap, and threat-pong back then, and the non-tanks still seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what it means to tank, and the tanks of what it means to dps or heal (at least we have that first part down)... probably because we still had decent cross-role abilities at that time.
---> Did enough to create these rose-tinted glasses, at least.

Heroes of the Storm: (The moba I play most often lately, largely for its quicker matches)
---> How to make each class feel pretty damn to utterly overpowered, and yet, in the larger view of things, not actually be overpowered at all, nor even exactly niched or especially composition-dependent.