Quote Originally Posted by Shurrikhan View Post
Agreed with the main point, but...

1.x had Chocobos.
It also had jobs (the post-level-30 names), starting in patch 1.8 (out of 1.23) -- regardless of whether that was actually for the best (since it essentially marked the end of the customization / build-your-own-job / incentivized multileveling model, after which ARR/HW's Additional Skills would be mere lip-service and the bonus stats mere bloat).
Left at identical graphics levels, 1.x's fps typically fell only some 2% to 10% short of ARR's fps. It bogged badly in player-dense environments, but so did most setups in ARR until having a sufficiently powerful CPU (as the game still gets badly CPU-bottlenecked in player-dense areas). Shadowy environments performed slightly worse (but, heck, they typically looked a little better, too) and certain weather effects like heavy gusts obviously taxed systems further (but we can't compare those because those effects were outright removed; no bushes blowing nor twigs and dust being thrown atop dense volumetric fog), but otherwise the optimization issues were badly (almost suspiciously) overblown by Yoshida's live letter.

Again, though, agreed that it's not as if 1.x's story was what drew so much criticism.
And to be fair, 1.0 released 4 year b4 2.0. The averages users had a big leap in CPU performance between those years.