Yet another interview..Kotaku however.

[Duuude007]

I'm hardly an advocate of XI 2.0, but you can't and shouldn't reinvent the wheel when a perfectly good and fully functioning wheel is sitting right in front of you. You aren't going to do better than the wheel. There is no better design there. Just dress it up to reflect your style and move on to areas that have room for innovation.

Airships seem to be better than wheels

...just sayin'.

[Genjuro]

aside from UI...from the videos and screenshots so far, do you feel it is WOW in disguise? hope some veteran WoW players can point out...

I've played World of Warcraft, FFXI, This game, Star Wars: the Old Republic, AION.

Honestly I can say that I didn't see a lot of aspects that followed that trend. Granted there are the usual UI of "WASD" controls and "Spacebar" for jump and all, but I think those things are pretty standard these days even with FPS games.

I'm a little unclear about the whole "Wow in disguise" term as I think that each game has it's own presentation. Understand that there WILL be aspects of the game that are universal with any game such as: UI (wasd controls, spacebar to jump, 1-0 hotkeys, macros, etc), repetitive mob kill quests, some sort of gathering or crafting or way to make income. These are just to name a few things that will be universal regardless of MMO or stand-a-lone RPG.

But again each game seems to present these aspects differently so therefore it changes up a bit. SWTOR for example has you killing mobs over and over again, but instead of having to stop what you're doing and head back, a droid updates your quest and you just continue killing in the area till you're done. In WoW, you kill mobs, head back and talk to NPC and go kill more mobs etc. This has changed from recent days, but again there is a little bit of a different presentation.

In the end, I guess everyone has their own definition of what a wow clone is so I guess we'll just have to wait till open beta to be sure.

[Zumi]

I played WoW since the first one came out. I don't feel like typing a lot but here's the jist of it... I liked the game a lot. Burning Crusade came out (first expansion) still loving it. Then Wrath of the Lich King.. why is this so easy? Oh well, maybe next time? Cataclysm. Everyones standing in town teleporting to overly easy dungeons.

The only thing that kept me for so long were the friends I made during the years. The game deteriorated in my opinion. I'm dying for something new and NOT like what the current WoW turned into. I haven't tried Mists of Pandaria though.. They brought back world bosses so that should take care of some of the standing-in-town-teleporting thing, at least a little bit (BTW THAT IS SERIOUSLY FREAKING BORING GAME DESIGN).. but it's too late for me.

That's my barebones explanation. Obviously there's more to it, but I'm not going to sit here writing a page long essay because it's pointless and I'm not in the mood. The game continues to be popular because it started out amazing and nearly perfect. Plus it has a crap ton of people on it, that counts for something, popularity is attractive to people. Now it's more like a casual social hangout kind of thing. Feels like an arcade or something. That won't last unless Blizzard starts changing their mentality. If not, people will move to the next well made MMO. Thing is, nothing spectacular has come around yet. Everyones just trying to make another WoW which won't ever freaking work.

idk that's how I see it.

I can tell you about MoP, Everything from cata was kept, IE, dungeon finder, raid finder, queue for battlegrounds/rbgs/arenas for pvp. However they added a really expansive daily quest system. You have to go all over the world to do daily quests ever day to unlock Valor point vendors to buy gear from them. These quests also earn you coins which can be used for extra rolls on loot during raids. World bosses were added so you could be questing and see a boss spawn and a bunch of 90s rush over to kill it.

Now then the playerbase as a whole hates doing daily quest because they rather just sit in town and queue for stuff but instead they have to go out in the world do quests every day just to unlock the vendors who sell gear.

Turns out all the complaing about sitting in town and queuing up for stuff was what people actually liked doing now that your forced out of town to do other stuff people aren't liking it, guess they were lazy.

[Zumi]

We do know what happens when companies copy word for word what WoW does into their 'new' games. However I do hope they take the ffxi=everquest part and make ff14=wow in the same sense. In so much as, ffxi and everquest are completely different games, but you can tell the influence somewhat.

I don't want to see wow=swtor=rift=eq2=ff14, people will play for 1 month and realize 'I am just playing wow, that game I played forever and was awesome, but I'm bored with and want something new.' It has to be Final Fantasy with MMO standards added. Take what worked in ffxi, and that was the content. Killing trash and then a boss then more trash over and over every week for years is not acceptable content............ even when it's a new raid from the newest content patch. You still only do 1-3 raids per content patch and NEVER return to older content.

Dynamis-Limbus-Sea-Sky-HNM-etc are all completely different content that made ffxi amazing. Everyday was something new, instead of-raid-raid-raid-raid.. boring.. I don't want to do what I do in wow, where I log in just to do a few hr raid, then there is nothing to do (even after 3 expacs) except wait for the most current raid's timer to tick down.

If anything I want them to make ff14=ffxi and just add in the new features people are accustomed too. FFXI best game all time. I played it for 17000hr, I played wow and all it's clones for less than half of that and it was all because of contentcontentcontent. You either have it or you don't.

Difference between FFXI and WoW and its clones is. FFXI has horizontal gear progression, everything seemed like a side grade most of the time, which kept you doing older content a lot longer. WoW has vertical gear progression, the newest raids in the patch dropped the best gear once a new raid is out there is no reason to go back and do old content. Unless it drops a vanity item like a mount and you can solo it.

But for me I prefer getting upgrades over sidegrades.

[reefo]

Difference between FFXI and WoW and its clones is. FFXI has horizontal gear progression, everything seemed like a side grade most of the time, which kept you doing older content a lot longer. WoW has vertical gear progression, the newest raids in the patch dropped the best gear once a new raid is out there is no reason to go back and do old content. Unless it drops a vanity item like a mount and you can solo it.

But for me I prefer getting upgrades over sidegrades.

Ya I completely agree and understand that it's important to feel progression, and if there was a better way to upgrade while keeping away from just simply raiding the current patch's raid, then I'm all for it.

I don't really think of it as sidegrading though, there was tons of very hard options to get amazing things, so I felt like I had options to build my char. Obviously once you had everything you wanted... There was always an alt to get gear for lol. There was always something to work for, so I always felt like I was progressing.

I hope they find maybe a balance of the two. WoW's new xpac means my last 2 years of raiding gear are worse then greens in the xpac and I have to start from 0 again. I feel like I'm just starting over from scratch every expac, instead of expanding my character I'm just getting a higher gear score. That kinda seems the opposite of progression to me.

[Felis]

Difference between FFXI and WoW and its clones is. FFXI has horizontal gear progression, everything seemed like a side grade most of the time, which kept you doing older content a lot longer.

True horizontal gear progression would be if a lv 30 gear is equal to a lv 75 gear. And only what you put in the gear would make it better than the another gear. Like in Ragnarok online with the card system.

[Ricky]

WoW is the best MMORPG on the market and the most successful in history. It has outlived every other MMO that tried to compete with it and still has more subs 8 years later than most MMOs will have ever seen
There is a reason he references it a lot, you guys are just blindly writing him off for that

[Joji]

WoW is the best MMORPG on the market and the most successful in history. It has outlived every other MMO that tried to compete with it and still has more subs 8 years later than most MMOs will have ever seen
There is a reason he references it a lot, you guys are just blindly writing him off for that

It may be the most successful mmorpg, but the best i disagree with. Popular is more the right term. There's different people wanting different things It's not about what is best.
I think any developer of any mmorpg today have to make references to WOW because there's certainly lots to learn about why it became so popular.

Me? I cannot stand the thought of playing WOW. I tried it for 2 weeks but i was instantly bored with it. Only reason I continued to play it after day 1 was because my brother was bored playing it alone.
I think it became popular because of it's simplicity. Let's face it, WOW wasn't very hard to learn to play.

[Zumi]

It may be the most successful mmorpg, but the best i disagree with. Popular is more the right term. There's different people wanting different things It's not about what is best.
I think any developer of any mmorpg today have to make references to WOW because there's certainly lots to learn about why it became so popular.

Me? I cannot stand the thought of playing WOW. I tried it for 2 weeks but i was instantly bored with it. Only reason I continued to play it after day 1 was because my brother was bored playing it alone.
I think it became popular because of it's simplicity. Let's face it, WOW wasn't very hard to learn to play.

Easy to get started yes but hard to master. Heroic (hard) mode raids are brutally hard in WoW. Currently there is only 2 guilds in the whole world who have beat the current raids on hard mode, both of them are from Eurpoe too nobody from the US has beat all the raids on hard mode. They have 10m+ subs so that is a lot of people who can't do the hard modes.

People do raid finder easy mode raids and say the game is too easy but then never touch normal or hard mode. Common misconception is that people say WoW is too easy. But when you only play on easy mode its going to be easy.

[Joji]

Easy to get started yes but hard to master. Heroic (hard) mode raids are brutally hard in WoW. Currently there is only 2 guilds in the whole world who have beat the current raids on hard mode, both of them are from Eurpoe too nobody from the US has beat all the raids on hard mode. They have 10m+ subs so that is a lot of people who can't do the hard modes.

People do raid finder easy mode raids and say the game is too easy but then never touch normal or hard mode. Common misconception is that people say WoW is too easy.

Well, of course there is challenge in WOW. And i'm aware of these hard dungeons. But the game overall is what i'm talking about. And that is what threw me off the wagon.