Quote Originally Posted by Voltyblast View Post
On top of that, 1.0 was somewhat fan-servicy...why? Well it tried to recapitulate the shadow of its previous game, ffxi. Again this is all "educated guesses" but think about it: the gameplay was slow, clunky, very menu based, the travelling was mostly on foot despite the anima thing and the world was more seamless...while I haven't played it at all from those videos I saw, the game really looked like FFXI-2 rather than a new installment. The problem was it didn't cater enough for those old school fans either and only the true hardcore fans remained to the end...I mean, I saw people defending that game for how "truly final fantasy-ish" it was. What does that even mean, besides trying to be similar to their old flame FFXI? And look no further than these forums: how many people CONSTANTLY bring up ideas that are taken from FFXI?
You admit you're making educated guesses and speaking from assumptions and guts, and there's not really much I can say to that. But I do feel the need to point out that you are very, very wrong about your perceptions of FFXI vs. original FFXIV. The only real elements FFXIV took directly from FFXI were the races (minus Galka tails) and the ability to play every class on a single character. But a big part of what made FFXIV unique was that you could change classes at any time just by changing weapons (in FFXI you could only do so in town), and that the crafting and gathering professions were classes with their own gear and minigames.

FFXI is very much about picking a job and picking the right subjob for that job, whereas FFXIV was about absolute control of character customization. When you leveled up a class, you gained its abilities for use with any class, and they weren't even assigned automatically on that class. Like, if you unlocked conjurer you'd get the six elemental spells, but you could only put three (I think) abilities on your hotbar. You could pick three of those spells, or three abilities from some other class entirely. Conjurer and thaumaturge did have unique abilities (each could toggle AOE mode for spells, in different shapes), but basically the game didn't care what class you were. Any class could use any gear, though it would be less optimal if it was not "recommended." Instead of leveling by forming a party and killing the same monsters over and over, you were expected to level with leves. You had separate class and overall "physical" levels which determined your stats.

I could go on, but the point is, none of this is anything like FFXI. The game shared none of the same jobs/classes, didn't really have a similar visual style, had an icon-based interface with no support for macros (which were the primary interface for FFXI), allowed you to teleport around without being a high-level white mage. There were no quests, no auction house (despite the general expectation that all gear would be crafted by players), and no recycled FFXI monster models. Indeed the game was filled with totally new monster ideas like coblyns, spriggans, phurbles, new beastman tribes, and so on. It was specifically designed to be completely unlike FFXI.

So, feel free to hate on Final Fantasy if you want, but please at least slightly educate yourself on 1.0 before making grand conclusions based on it.