Quote Originally Posted by Asiaine View Post
SW:TOR ran into problem: It took a great premise (Bioware rich stories) and tried to make it a continuous world. A Bioware game takes years to make, and is consumed in a month. To keep people happy they would have to deliver years worth of content every month. This is not feasible. Therefore they add filler content. The filler content is not sufficient to keep people happy.
This is a fair point.

What SE (and everyone else) has to keep in mind is: People don't want a WoW clone. WoW is already out there. If someone implemented a 100% clone of WoW it would not do well. WoW is doing well because it *IS* WoW. It's name is enough to draw in and keep people.
There's a difference between straight out copying WoW and drawing inspiration from WoW and giving things your own twist so that they make sense in your setting/IP. FFXI drew from EQ and gave it its own twist, in a way. The same rule applies here; look at games like WoW do, draw on what works, change things to make it fit your setting and move on. This can be applied to lots of things, from party dynamics to additional things like pet battles or transmogrification.

Strong RPG elements (mechanics).
I'll disagree. Mechanics-wise FF has been very weak. XI alone proved that many of the ideas from the console games simply didn't work in an MMORPG. Thief, Red Mage and Summoner being the poster children of that.

Quote Originally Posted by Nix View Post
I think the only really unique stuff was Ops since the 'hard mode' FPs were exactly the same as the regular ones but with amped up difficulty for some extra rewards, there wasn't really anything fresh about it.
The point of having multiple difficulties is so that the e-peen brigade's feelings don't get hurt when the dirty casuals get to clear the content and see how the story ends. Freshness has nothing to do with that approach to design. The only thing I wish developers would use is mid-encounter triggers for hard modes rather than an on/off button.