Quote Originally Posted by Zumi View Post
I really don't understand all the hate for ARR. It still has all the Final Fantasy themes, chocobos, moogles, story, the familiar races that were in FFXI. A lot of people bought this game because it was a Final Fantasy game and they are Final Fantasy fans. All the story and lore that type of stuff will still be in the game I am sure. Last time I checked the only Final Fantasy themed MMO was FFXI. ARR looks a lot different then other MMOs. The characters and style in the game look nothing like Tera, WoW, Star Wars or any other recent mmo.

They are trying to clean up the game's systems to bring it up to the standard of what a mmo should be and how is this a bad thing?
1.0 had all the Final Fantasy things too.

It doesn't matter what style it puts itself in. What fresh coat of paint it wears, what story it tells. It's the same game I've been playing for a decade and often for free. The same games that have long been forgotten by most.

Some people, myself included, are just sick of the MMO standard. We find it boring. The rush to endgame, the painfully generic quests, the action spamming, the dungeon rush instancing. It's all just so mechanical and bureaucratic. It feels like no life to the progression. It's all just systematized for the sake of convenience and that's very offputing to me.

Now it may not be totally true from what little I could experience of XI (only ever just got beyond a chocobo license but experienced a great deal within that frame), but it never felt that way to me. Nothing was ever so obvious. I had to rely on exploration or talking with the comunity to figure things out. The quests didn't exactly lead me down a path to various hubs. They where hidden through the cities and required you to do all sorts of crazy stuff. It didn't always demand you solve it one way or another. Girl wants a ring? Buy one, find one from a drop, trade it with a friend or craft it yourself. It just told you what it wanted and it was up to you and your company to figure it out. Here you have to investigate one certain spot and kill a specific foe to get it to drop the ring specific to the quest. XI at the start just felt so much more...free I guess?

Now, I never made it to endgame, so I can't vouch for that. But the MMO's these days seem to want to string it all in a convenient line for you to follow till the end and while you're free to stray from that line, you won't find much outside of it.

Who knows. Maybe I'm just being nostalgic. Maybe it's all flip flopped and the freedom (or at least illusion thereof) comes at the endgame now. In any case, I can't summon any more emotion beyond curiosity at this point.