Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW!

[Sandpark]

Except this was a complete illusion and came down to using what was considered the functionally best subjob combination for your main Job, in other words, what abilities and stats it would bring to the table. Some sub jobs did little to affect the most important stats on a main job and some couldn't make use of their abilities (BRD subbed was an example of this - because most songs required a musical instrument which could not be equipped while BRD was a sub job, it meant you could only use a small selection of songs that were actually sung, missing most of BRD's important repertoire). If a player even so much as attempted to set a subjob that the community did not consider worthwhile, you were basically laughed out of Dodge and couldn't get into any parties. There was absolutely no room to experiment at all. All FFXIV has done is accept this and taken the blinders off to see this illusion for what it truly is. Technically you could experiment, but in practice you didn't, you went with the 'established choices' (WAR subbed for PLD, NIN and DRK, NIN for pretty much everything, BLM for mage Jobs, DNC later on for soloing etc) - there was no way around it.

At least there you got to choose from any job what you wanted to sub and got traits from it to enhance your subjob. The inability to equip certain weapons was a design choice, one that could be easily rectified if it was wanted. ESO allows you to equip anything you want. There was all the room in the world to explore, that whole game was about exploration from the world, to the crafting, to everything else. So much so that you had to go to website to learn all the intricacies of most systems. You might be shunned from parties for less than optimal subs or builds, but in that world there were tons of things to do in the open world or with friends who would experiment along with you.

And when the development team comes out and says that a Job has actually been used incorrectly by players you know such a system is broken utterly (specifically: NIN and it's use as a so-called 'blink-tank' in FFXI - Tanaka's team never intended for NIN to tank, it was meant to be an enfeebling DPS class with Utsusemi being nothing more than a 'get-out-of-jail-free-card' when they pulled too much hate. Players of course abused this and used it for tanking, then whined when SE tried to actually stop players doing just such a thing by having enemies that ate through a NIN's shadows wholesale). Current producer Akihiko Matsui actually mentioned this was not their intention just recently during a FFXI-version of 'Letter From the Producer LIVE' that was hosted on Reddit (the transcript is on the FFXI forum):



So it goes to show that players were abusing the Jobs in ways that the development team never intended them for, which is exactly why the FFXIV Armoury System is set up the way it is, it's to stop a repeat of this sort of nonsense from happening again.

That is called Emergent Gameplay and it is one of the best and most likely the future of most open world videogames. You see it in the new MGS, GTA, FFXI, etc.

The trouble with this is that ARR's very design brief right at the start of development was specifically to avoid this - Yoshi-P stated specifically early on that he wanted to move players away from exp parties (seeing the problems this caused in both FFXI and FFXIV 1.0) and onto what he termed "content-based exp", that is, gaining exp through other gameplay means such as quest completion. ARR's very battle system accordingly is designed specifically to stop exp party camping by having enemies 'leashed' to a certain spot (where if you try to pull them away too far they'll de-agro you and run back to their spawn spot with your hate reset). And, given the fact that unlike FFXI ARR is like all good modern MMORPGs and doesn't lock an enemy exclusively to you and thus other players can jump in and hit the enemy even outside of a party, old-style exp parties would rush through enemies more quickly than what you would expect anyway. So basically this concept simply would not work and thus will never be seen in ARR, this was Yoshi decision and he's made sure of it.

As for the OP, Bourne_Endeavor basically summed up my own thoughts on this subject so I have nothing further to add, other than once again reiterating that this game will never be like FFXI - a game that was from a much earlier period of gaming which thankfully the gaming industry has moved on from. FFXIV is a modern MMORPG designed to appeal to more casual time-conscious players. The days of level grinding in the 'Dooms' and exp loss on death and 18-hour straight HNM boss fights like Absolute Virtue have thankfully gone forever. I loved FFXI for the 11 years I've been playing it but I was also not blinded by nostalgia and saw it's many faults and problems even back in it's heyday. The past is passed. Time to move on.

So the future of Open World Massive RPG Games is to remove world identity, complexity from the AI and environment, and global unique enemy tendencies? I understand no one wants other players messing up their instanced dungeons or raids, but in open world? What genius would want more people to group up as easy as possible then turn around and make a majority of relevant content locked behind instances in tiny groups. Isn't the major fad now Open World with Dynamic events and realistic world systems?

I am not sugar coating the game and saying XI was superior than every other game or didn't have faults. But with a design team as big and talented as Square. I am sure with the experience in their elder mmo, they could create or bring over things from the other one and fix all the complaints that arose there.

I don't want to go back to the grind from 2002, but if the future or what we call Modern Mmos are designed to be on rails with no intention of re-visiting and re-iterating what made old games great, then I don't want to be a part of the modern mmo movement.