Make FFXIV more like FFXI and less like WoW

[Hrist_Valkyrie]

It's all in the nose, eh?

Plus the muttonchops

[Sapphic]

I'm the minority

Case closed.

[Gramul]

If you're going to expect to be different solely for the sake not following a "basic setup", you're setting yourself up for disappointment. Speaking for myself, I expected something different from FFXI, and that's exactly what we got.

And by different from XI, you mean similar to WoW?
Like nearly other MMO for the past decade? The very same stagnation that poisons so many other genres in so many other industries? The very concept that defines the word "generic"? This "basic setup" is little more than companies charging head first after the biggest pot of gold.
Don't get me wrong. WoW has made a lot of breakthroughs, but they don't have to be the standard structure of the whole genre.

And no. The little novelties and changes you see in every WoW inspired game does not change the core structure.

[Vandark]

I think ARR is perfect in every way. Nothing could possibly be wrong with this game for it is perfect in everyway and I live in lah lah land where rain drops fill me with rose cheeks of joy and I run in a field on loly pop lain

I already chocobo around and see practically no one outside doing anything in my server, the worlds already becoming a dead zone, something should be done about that.

[Tracewood]

One thing I do like are the nods to FFXI enemies here in ARR. So far I've ran into:

Mandragoras
*Apakullus
Peistes
Urganites
Hornets
Adamantoise
Bombs (though they're a staple in all series)
*EDIT: Derp, forget the Qiqirns
Goobbues
*Soul Flayer
*Imps
Birds
*Colibris
Snippers (With Bubbly Bernie)
*Mamool Ja (ToAU FTW)
Pugils
The brown undead dragon in the later dungeon
and most notably, the Goblins.
Seen some videos of the ghosts/bhoots in the new content

*Kinda interesting many ToAU enemies made it to the game, I wonder if that is the dev's favorite expansion?

One more thing... remember the benchmark trailer with the gianormous adamantoise in the background, what happened to that? I'm still a lowbie 30 something but I have yet to see it.

[Duelle]

And by different from XI, you mean similar to WoW?

Being similar to WoW was more icing on the cake than anything else. All that meant is that I could make a transition from one to the other. This is not counting that I hated most of FFXI's gameplay (gear swaps, refresh-whoring, utsusemi, on/off switches in the form of gear, to name a few) while I did enjoy WoW's take on encounter design, mechanics and party dynamics.

Like nearly other MMO for the past decade? The very same stagnation that poisons so many other genres in so many other industries?

Taking ideas from your peers has been par for the course in entertainment since the coming of motion pictures, and is thus a poor talking point. Specially when it is ideas that work.

We could sit here and condemn the fighting game industry for implementing super meters, or RPGs of old for using turn-based combat, or even recent beat em ups that seem to be taking major pointers from Akham Assylum's free flow combo system (equivalents to what we've seen within the MMORPG genre), but to do so would be asinine and pointless. MMORPGs also fall into this line of reasoning.

[Velhart]

I preferred the older areas because they weren't lifeless, in ARR people only use the outside world to level and gather THATS IT! I'm done leveling and gathering so what I used to enjoy out there no longer exists or is no longer useful in ARR.

1.xx's maps were the very definition of lifeless and boring. To add insult to injury, every region was just copy/pasted, Black Shroud being the worst of them all with nothing but mazes where everything looked alike. Even the current developers admitted it and tried to add things in like camps that did not all look the same. Sure a seamless world was created, but at the cost at heavy technical limitations and couldn't add anything anywhere, they shot themselves in the foot and admitted it. Also interesting to note that I have been treasure hunting and doing dailies every day. To say there is no open world content is pretty false at this point. Can choose to like or hate it, but it is there, and likely we will see more added in the future.

[Gramul]

Taking ideas from your peers has been par for the course in entertainment since the coming of motion pictures, and is thus a poor talking point. Specially when it is ideas that work.

And it's the reason why we get 4 terrible rom-coms a year. It's why most action movies are either Michael Bay explosion fests, or Die Hard ripoffs. It's why every non-major animation studio makes films featuring talking animals. It's why family comedies feature some form of CG animal dancing for no real reason. It's why horror almost always features dumb shaky cam now.

We could sit here and condemn the fighting game industry for implementing super meters, or RPGs of old for using turn-based combat, or even recent beat em ups that seem to be taking major pointers from Akham Assylum's free flow combo system

I can and do.
Why do you think regular JRPGs are so rare these days? Why did Adventure games fade into obscurity for a decade, only to be brought back by essentially one company? Why do you not really see rhythm games anymore? What happened to film noir and Italian Westerns? The genres burnt out.

Hell, one of the newest JRPGs coming out is a novelty because it uses an old style system. Because that what happens when you overexpose something like that, any attempt to revive it can only be seen as a novelty. People get tired of seeing it again and again. It happens in every industry throughout all of creative history. You have to really mix it up before you drown in the stagnant swamp you've created.

[Ahzarhuuk]

And by different from XI, you mean similar to WoW?
Like nearly other MMO for the past decade? The very same stagnation that poisons so many other genres in so many other industries? The very concept that defines the word "generic"? This "basic setup" is little more than companies charging head first after the biggest pot of gold.
Don't get me wrong. WoW has made a lot of breakthroughs, but they don't have to be the standard structure of the whole genre.

And no. The little novelties and changes you see in every WoW inspired game does not change the core structure.

Things are similar to WoW because WoW is the most successful MMO that ever existed.



It's a game that has had incredible influence, and continues to do so. And at the same time it maintained it's success by taking elemetns from other MMOs.
This is how innovation works...you don't reinvent the wheel each time and you don't deviate from things that are proven to be very effective. Especially not for the sake of pandering.

[NefGP]

Okay, it's late at night, I can't sleep and I'm bored so on to ranting! Job design is still my single greatest peeve in this game, as I despise the armory system (or at least what YP changed it to - Tanaka & Komoto's original versoin had a lot more freedom to it) and what it's done to ruin the core of what is otherwise a fine spiritual successor to XI. But before I get into that, I want to start with a few other comparisons beginning with enemies & basic combat.

Back in XI, players basically had to watch the chat log like a hawk to see what ability an enemy was readying. Thankfully, you usually had just enough time to react to compensate for this. Now, this isn't exactly something I'd prefer to go back to, but I do feel like the constant AoE markers on screen detract a bit from the game. Where XI forced players to really pay attention and react accordingly, XIV is just pattern recognition and a lot of clumsy dodging of often cheap/over-powered attacks. Some of my favorite examples of special attacks from XI include Bomb Toss (which you'd recognize right away as it had the longest charge time), Odin's Zantetsuken (you were dead if you didn't /kneel to him which was cool) and Proto-Ultima's Citadel Buster, where 1 poor person got randomly singled out and had to say behind and die while everyone else fled the room.

There's some cool stuff in XIV too, like Ifrit's jumps, but for the most part it's "run from the big red circle" and that gets old fast. Then there's also resistances and damage types - we have the same 3 basic damage types as XI did, but they don't seem to apply in the same manner at all. For example, Piercing weapons did more damage to bird family enemies in XI but less to skeletons who were weak to blunt. I've yet to really notice anything like that in this game. The elemental wheel is a sham as well and of the biggest mistakes YP made IMO. We basically have the same elemental system now that XI had, minus the extra cool stuff like the elemental day and weather affecting things; elements only determine resist rates. 1.0 actually had the more traditional elemental wheel (though some of the relationships were bizarre like Fire beating water but being weak to wind) dealing bonus or reduced damage. YP's reasoning was he didn't want people excluding jobs based on elemental weaknesses, but 1) people do that already anyhow as BLM is still the #1 dps role and 2) it removes a crucial and fun strategic element both of battle in general and job design as well. The primal weapons for example all should have been equal in performance but each offering a different elemental damage type to encourage collecting the whole set for each class and giving physical attackers something to keep them competitive with BLM (and BLM's role has always been about exploiting weaknesses in the first place and I really, really hate the move away from that).