This is awesome... Why couldn't we have this?

[Preypacer]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO2QFM2a8PQ

Original titan cutscene for 1.0. You can see why the Warriors of Light do what they do. You can see that Titan cares about the Kobolds. You can see how angry he is and what a fierce fight this is going to be.

Where was that story in 2.0? Why did it get cut out? It's both beautiful and terrifying. Makes me respect Titan a whole lot more!

Indeed. Not only that, but check out the intros for each city from 1.0 as well..
Gridania
Ul'dah
Limsa

They were amazing. So much better than the "you arrive on a wagon with an old guy and two mute twins", regardless of what city you start in. Excellent introductions to the world, the city and a few key characters.

As much as people like to immediately go to the "yeah but the copy-pasta terrain was horribad!" and all that - all of which was really poorly done (I've always said they got so much wrong with 1.0, that it's almost impressive), it's dishonest, or at best hyperbolic, to pretend 1.0 got *everything* wrong. It didn't.

Also... that was 1.0; the game as it was immediately after release and one or two patches in. It was a very different game.

By the end of 1.23, under Yoshi-P's direction, it had become a much, much better game. The problems still present were due to the hardware and infrastructure being inadequate. I, and others I knew expected, and hoped, that's what ARR would be - a continuation of what they'd created by the end of 1.23, in all ways, not just story.

They'd gotten rid of the 'XP Fatigue", Class level and Character level being separate, and a variety of other things that people really hated

In large part, 1.0 was part bad ideas horribly implemented (which were all removed or altered over time), or good ideas poorly implemented (which were improved and made good over time).

I think it says a lot that there were far more people playing after they'd re-introduced the subscription, than there ever were for nearly a year when you could log in for free (as long as you owned the game). It was genuinely a fun game for the last several major updates.

If they'd continued on with the game as it was by the end of 1.23, just with the infrastructure and graphics engine we have now, I think it could have been a much more interesting MMO, that remained familiar as a mainstream MMO, but also stood apart much more from the typical themepark fare we've seen over the past decade. It didn't feel so familiar to other MMOs on the market.

Alas...