Quote Originally Posted by DPZ2 View Post
WoW has been resting on its laurels since Cataclysm.
There are a lot of criticisms I would level at WoW and Blizzard, but that's not really one of them. If anything, they go too far in the opposite direction where they often want to act like they can develop their way to total market capture or something. While Cataclysm was very much a copy and paste of Wrath in many respects, both MoP and Legion showed a ton of innovation on Blizzard's part. What did them in was more losing touch with the playerbase and choosing a business model that attempts to capitalize on the fear of missing out, rather than just developing a really good game people don't want to put down.

FFXIV's releases are far more formulaic, which is where I think the concerns about resting on their laurels come into play. Part of this is that SE is a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard and that SE is a normal game company on top of that, whereas Blizzard likes to be weird and focus intensely on like 5 IPs represented by a single persistent flagship title each, but part of it is definitely just on the developers for this game and the choices they make and don't make.