Discussion for Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XX

[Wildsprite]

Having just recently gone back to FFXI, some of their design decisions were absolutely baffling.
For example, when you start the game even now, you are just plopped down into a city with only the faintest hint of direction. You aren't really given any clues as to how to get around, and unless you look it up, you can get to your late 40s without even knowing Subjobs or Chocobo licenses even exist. The amount of effort you have to go through just for an explanation within the game is mindboggling. I've never used a wiki as much as I have for that game.
Further, some of the job unlock quests were so unintuitive it was baffling, in addition to the Limit break quests being bizarrely disjointed: to get to level 61, you had to do a quest that involved getting past much higher level Notorious Monsters. To get to 66, you had to give a bunch of guys semi-common loot that drops from the mobs you had to get past to get to lvl 61.
And that's before getting into the crap summoners had to go through to get their summons. Imagine if, in order to summon Ifrit-Egi, you either had to solo Ifrit Story Mode, or beat Ifrit HM. And you had to do this for all your egis. Oh, and you don't get any other class features until you do. And this is after a job unlock quest that depends heavily on RNG and seasons
Comes to the point you begin thinking "Why the hell did they keep it this way for 13+ years?!"
Then you realize. They changed it. For FFXIV.
FFXI is definitely challenging. But it's "being forced to climb up a staircase with a wheelchair all the while wondering why they don't just add a ramp" challenging.

this is the unfortunate result from the fact that Tanaka(the producer of XI for most of its life for those that don't know) didn't actually play the game. he had a character but only to show the game off(which for it's time were fairly decent graphics). had he actually played the game on the same level as the players we likely would have gotten an entirely different game. something a bit more intuitive like XIV became with ARR