Realm Reborn = downgrade?

[Elexia]

i still don't understand why people wants to have too much realistic games.

It was the one thing going for it, now it will be painfully hard for XIV to stand out when it's just a prettier generic MMORPG lol. Why choose XIV when you can choose a vast library of 120+ MMORPGs from 1996 - 2011 and get the same gameplay?

[lololink]

It was the one thing going for it, now it will be painfully hard for XIV to stand out when it's just a prettier generic MMORPG lol. Why choose XIV when you can choose a vast library of 120+ MMORPGs from 1996 - 2011 and get the same gameplay?

we are talking about gameplay or animation ?

[Preypacer]

It was the one thing going for it, now it will be painfully hard for XIV to stand out when it's just a prettier generic MMORPG lol. Why choose XIV when you can choose a vast library of 120+ MMORPGs from 1996 - 2011 and get the same gameplay?

Hate to say it, but to me, the animation is just another in a growing list of things they're doing/changing/adding to make it look more like "just another MMORPG on the market".

I hope I'm wrong - and only time will tell if I am -but they seem to be falling into the same pattern of other MMO developers out there... "look at what other popular MMOs are doing and copy ideas from them. Those games are popular, so obviously the people must like what they do!". Only as we all know, most MMOs that are designed with that approach seldom ever do very well. A number of them end up going the "F2P" route to try and save the game. Others get shut down altogether.

I know it's considered taboo to bring up XI on these forums... I don't care. I'm going to use XI to make a point regardless. Deal with it.

XI managed to maintain ~500k players even well into WoW's wildly successful "career", while other MMOs that tried to cop Blizzard's blueprint fell way short time and again, managing to keep maybe 200-300k players, if that.

I think SE managed to do this, in part, because of one major thing: FFXI was, in many ways, nothing like anything else on the market. According to "experts" on "what a modern MMORPG must have to be successful", XI did pretty much everything wrong. And yet it thrived (~500k players was quite healthy in the pre-WoW world - and still is, really).

While other developers (notably SOE) were falling all over themselves changing their games around to be more WoW-like, and copying everything Blizzard did, Square-Enix stayed the course with XI and kept going the way they were (pre-Abyssea). Why? Because they understood that XI attracted a different kind of player - the kind that either wouldn't be "pulled away" by a game like WoW, or was otherwise not interested in playing it at all. They found a good niche of players, they catered to that niche, and they were rewarded with a lively and healthy population well into 7 years in service - something almost unheard of for a MMORPG from XI's "era", nevermind one as idiosyncratic as XI.

Now, I'm sure some of you are, at this point, ready to rip my head off and feed it to Jormy (yes, another XI reference... deal with it . But, here's the thing. If what you think I'm getting at here is that "SE should just copy XI and they'll be successful", you're wrong. That should be a relief to you. You can breathe now.

I don't think it would be successful. I think it would bury the game faster than 1.0 did. While XI maintained a healthy population well into its service, it also enjoyed the benefit of having a sort of "head start", launching during a time when MMOs were still mostly unheard of in the mainstream. Times have changed, tastes have changed and demands have changed (I won't say evolved... as I don't think that's necessarily the case). XI was the right kind of MMO for the time. It wouldn't be now, not as it was at launch. My opinion.

The take-away, to me, is that SE can do things differently to make their game unique without flat out lifting elements from other games... and still be successful. It's about lifting the right things and implementing them in a way that is unique to their game and fits within the gameplay/setting/etc, rather than feeling arbitrary and "tacked-on because all the other MMOs have it". Part of why other MMOs feel like "clones of other MMOs" is that the developers do very little to distinguish themselves from those other games in terms of gameplay mechanics, or implementation of game systems.

Now it could well be that that's precisely what they're doing. I'm not predicting anything and I'm not claiming to know what the situation is. Just like everyone else, I have to wait and see how they actually do it before I can give a fair or accurate assessment. Unlike some others around here (and we all know who they are), I don't claim to be able to see the future.

I will say that, while the animation thing isn't a deal breaker for me (though I do consider it a "down-grade" based on what we know per the dev post), as time goes on and we learn more of the direction SE is going in, red flags are starting to rise up and I feel my optimism becoming more and more tempered by caution.