Quote Originally Posted by Isala View Post
The thing that gets me, is that he literally saved this game by copying what American MMOs, mostly WoW, were doing at the time, and now that the game has become popular, they seemed to have gotten their ego trips of "We know what the players want better than they do!" that caused them to make the dumpster fire of 1.0 back. It's the 11 > 14 transition all over again. 11 good, so they can do no wrong. 1.0 happened. ARR and HW good, so they can do no wrong. The last 3 expansions have happened, leading up to this absolute trainwreck.
I agree the egos there have really inflated since YoshiP took over and copied WoW's formula. We might have a very different game if Tanaka was still in charge.

If you were there back then, you know that Tanaka had the direction of making an experience as "unlike FFXI as possible" - leading to generic classes, generic enemies, generic copy-pasted locations. Leveling up had diminishing returns, and they actually told us that was because they wanted us to play this for a little while and then log out and go back to FFXI. *They actually said that*.

So, the target audience was maybe vaguely 'everyone', but XI players were the folks they actively advertised to and the folks who immediately jumped to it when we had the chance. We were the ones they were trying to hook. And we all told them to take the steaming pile of shit and shove it. It was nothing like what we were expecting, which was an upgraded FFXI experience with maybe some new systems.

Enter Yoshi-P who interpreted our dislike for what was done as us expecting "WoW", and he went after a new target audience. Made an FF WoW clone. And yes, it worked. It's got a lot of subscribers who liked the flashy graphics and new lore to experience.

But I'd argue it's a weaker game with weaker systems and less soul than XI had. He has so many opportunities to improve it even in just small ways, and takes the path of least resistance every. single. time. It's a game without an identity - just an amalgamation of FFXI and WoW, taking systems from both but missing the soul that made each game great in its own right.