FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Puremallace]

Blizzard doesn't understand personal progression. SE is starting to head down the same path.

The Blizzard team never understood RPGs. They only had Diablo which is barely an RPG, more like Gauntlet with gear and a few story elements. They just had a good interface which was from there experience with RTSs. As RTSs go they were not nearly as good as Westwood, in the gameplay department and their interface design was already standard in the genre (colorful buttons that make everything clear). The RPG elements that made early wow pretty good were just lifted from other RPGs. But since the team didn't really understand why they were important the game quickly degraded. I remember comments from them like "that's just and RPG element" as reasons for removing them.

Personally I hate role quest and find them as cheap replacements for job quest. You might be able to justify them in Shadowbringers but stripping them from Endwalker seems like a case of cheap penny pinching and slowly killing RPG elements of the MMO.

One big fear a LARGE amount of people have with FF14 is job homogenization and using broad generic terms to describe jobs and also only doing role quest does scare me when it comes to job design in FF14. It is an RPG and they are watering that down.

Cecil in FF4 was Paladin not just tank job. You remove job identity by attempting to save some money because making job quest is hard. This is one big area that is a red flag that I see Square Enix copying Blizzard.

It becomes far to easy to start going down the road of generic borrowed power abilities to save even more money and be even more lazier with job design. WoW is famous for having a bunch of class trainers standing around in every zone that literally do nothing now and serve no purpose.

The next step that will actually make me unsub as the writing will be on the wall is if I EVER see Square Enix start tying new abilities to these role quest instead of being job specific. You cannot claim the MMO is at its most successful ever then go down the penny pinching route when we all know they are making bank off this cash cow.