Simplicity over complexity, time to change.

[Dannythm]

FFXIV was under development for what, 5 years? Keep in mind the original game still had crystal tools, which means it would have run terribly as it did prior to 1.0's shut down. The servers would still be in Japan, which means we'd be dealing with latency on top of the piece of garbage crystal tools was.

I followed FFXIV dev since the start, and well it could have been 5 years in development so what? As I already stated there's nowhere that says how long any development should be, it probably needed closer to 7 years, and we'd have a fantastic game, or at least a polished game that did something different to the other myriad of MMOs in the market.

We would still have no auto-attack (knowing that SWTOR pulled off a sans-auto-attack combat system tells me it would have worked if people had been a little more open-minded), and the class=>job dynamic would most likely have been similar to what The Secret World did with Decks. We'd still have the copy-paste maps (which means southern thanalan and the black shrowd would still be corridors). I doubt stats would have had much weight since by design it seemed that everyone could wear everything. The only plus to Tanaka's FFXIV is that we'd still have Coerthas as a scottish highlands type place instead of snowy mountains like we have in ARR.

I was OK with most of the systems in 1.0, including the fatigue system, and if the old Armory were balanced it would beat the static jobs we have now at any time (people would have been happy by just getting the armors and looks of the classic FF jobs), and I'm sure 1.0 areas were originally designed to be much more varied and not so copy pasted, but the constraints of the publishing date probably forced the copy pasted environments, oh, and I LOVED the old shroud, I'd give anything to have it back (but I understand why the majority of people hated it with passion).

And we don't know anything about the endgame Tanaka had planned, so we really don't have a clue of what the game would have been if he had the time and resources to complete his vision.

Your mileage will vary. You ask the mob and the mob doesn't know what it wants. Ask me what I want one-to-one and I can give you a clear answer. Hell, my sig has not one, but several clear answers. :O

Precisely why Directors have to take a stance, and I preferred Tanaka's rather than Yoshi's most of the time, but I guess the middle ground would be perfect.