Quote Originally Posted by Roris View Post
Because exactly of those 5 years. Much of the work was already done and was completed to a certain extent, Yoshida just gave the go to salvage and finish as much of it as they could hence the faster time, everything was already there. Even late 1.X stuff like Hamlet was planned since the very early 1.0 days, and arguably it showed, companies too either Grand or Free if not both were also planned under Tanaka's direction.
It would be incredibly unwise to throw out everything and start anew. Using existing assets ideas was the smart thing to do to keep the costs of salvaging down.

Because it it exactly the same team, I keep bringing it up because some people make it seem like the game is radically different when it really isn't, because much of its core base is still there. Sure 1.0 was a failure for a lot of reasons even if 1.23 did salvage it up and ARR did it even more, but the core ARR base is exactly the same as 1.0 except under a different direction. Some people should at least be aware of that instead of dismissing 1.0 in its entirety, since much of that entirety is still present to this day.
Sure, Square isn't going to fire the entire team and hire new people. That would be cost prohibitive and they would have lost a lot of good people with solid game design and development skills. But the people they did replace were tasked with directing those people how and where to apply those skills. The people leading are incredibly different, and that's important. One good leader is all a team needs to transform itself into a completely new dynamic.

The issue here is that nostalgia and the garage band syndrome are kicking in. The former is easy, and I think someone needs to create a Wall of No for ARR that we can copy-pasta in when someone starts with claiming 1.0 is better than 2.0 (hint: it wasn't, subscription numbers prove that).

It does - ARR got lucky that WoW had no updates for an extremely long time and it had 1.x to build off of, because the 2.0 exclusive content would have cause that, as well to be a massive failure as the only thing 2.0 offered was the main storyline (and a handful of exclusive dungeons to arr) and binding coil of bahamut. This is ignoring the already existing open world dungeons being retooled into instanced dungeons.

So as much as you want to try to say this, ARR only survived because of 1.x (which was actually going to become 2.0 if they didn't downgrade everything to mimick WoW.) Heck ARR woulda launched with less content than even the most mass produced Korean grinder lol, so Roris isn't incorrect, 1.x was the main saving grace for ARR as it provided more than enough assets unreleased and released to offer a great launch.
How on earth is copying what's proven to work and then refining it "downgrading it"? Sure you don't like WoW, fine, but it's hard to argue with the success it has had, and LoTRO proved that a well done quest hub MMO can succeed in a post WoW era. Also, there's more to ARR's success than the length of time between the release of 5.4 and 6.0. For ARR to succeed, WoW does not have to fail.