What are your favourite games, and what can FFXIV learn from them?

[Kaurie]

Hey, pretty much as the title says. What are your favourite games of all time, and what can FFXIV take away from them to make it better?

My favourites are:
- Starcraft I
- Guild Wars I
- Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

Starcraft
This is an entirely different genre, but there are a few things which we can take away from it

User created content
One thing that kept me playing this game for years was the ability to play "Use Map Settings". Players could create their own maps with their own rules. You could do things like tower defense to DBZ RPG's within the game. It would be great if there was a way to add some sort of user-created content to FFXIV, so that when we are done with the supplied content we will have something to keep us going.

Balance
One thing I think Starcraft did amazingly well was provide 3 very different races while keeping overall balance in check. Of course, there were certain strategies that worked better, or certain units on one race which owned the other, but the overall balance was there. I think if FFXIV wants to get serious in PvP, they need to work on providing this same level of balance. Further, I'd like to reiterate that the 3 races in Starcraft are very different, and you do not need to homogenize things to achieve balance.

Guild Wars 1
Guild Wars 1 had me playing for years, I got every campaign and the expansion and played every class. It was incredibly fun. Things i think we can take away from this:

Healing
One thing that made healing great in Guild Wars 1 was the fact that anyone could get hurt at any time and there was constant damage to heal. You wouldn't go 25 minutes and spend less than 1 minute of it casting heals as you do now. You wouldn't just heal the tank and aoe heal once in awhile, you actually had to prioritize and react quickly to keep your team alive. It would be great if more encounters in FFXIV required this level of healing.

Campaign
This applies to Starcraft I as well, but in both games you can easily replay missions. It would be awesome if in FFXIV we could go back and replay story quests and re-experience the story from chosen set points with our characters.

Cross Classes
In Guild Wars 1 there was a function where you could choose any class to be your 2nd class (i.e. you could be a Monk[healer]/Necromancer). Each class had a set number of trait paths (i think 5) that you got on your main class, and you had this -1 on your 2ndary class. This made it important which was your first, but you got most of the access to your 2nd class. Now I don't think this exact system would work here, I think it would be neat if we could choose our 2ndary classes for cross classes. I am sure many of us would keep the same choice (i.e. who wants to tank without provoke), but it may open up some opportunities for more variation. One WAR secondary class could provide better DPS, but another would be essential for tank swapping while another may provide the best self healing - etc.

Henchmen
I am not sure if this could work here, but in Guild Wars 1 if you couldn't find a group, you could pick up henchmen for free. Pretty much every role was available but you could only get 1 of each (pick up one protection healer, one healer, one interrupt, one caster etc..). Having these in the game would allow people to experience older content without having to wait for long periods, and would allow the dev team to create a more challenging open-world.

Legend of Zelda
I loved this game, but I actually feel like everything that LoZ Ocarina of Time did well, so does FFXIV. For example the game makes you feel like a hero going on a grand adventure.


Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading and I look forward to seeing what things take away from all of your favourite games

[AskaRay]

Well.... it's sort of hard since this is an MMO and all my favorite games of all time are Single Player (for the most part).
Like, I love Zelda but I really don't think it would translate that well into an MMO (at least one where you are the hero). Maybe something could be thought up.

Or like SMT. There IS an SMT MMO, actually, and it was very good but not popular in the west so of course the western version was cancelled. :'(

Hmm what else? Pokemon? Yes Pokemon MMO please. But that is, and would be, a completely different MMO subgenre.
Guilty Gear? It's a 2D fighting game, it wouldn't translate well to MMO.

So I guess my answer is "IDK" because genres are so different.

[Miyha]

Or like SMT. There IS an SMT MMO, actually, and it was very good but not popular in the west so of course the western version was cancelled. :'(

OMG. EVERY time I reference Imagine no one even knows it existed. It was available in the West for a short while via Aeria Games, but they handed it over to Atlas, and it never regained a wide enough playerbase for them to continue it here. So sadly it went away. :< Loved that game though. My Cu Chulainn was a badass.

/random

[Alahra]

After this, my favorite MMO is FFXI, but it's difficult to get more cross-pollination than we already have, since the two games are fundamentally different sorts of experiences.

I still think FFXIV would be better if it eased up just slightly on so-called "instant gratification" and emphasized long-term goals and achievement a bit more, but a lot of the ways to do that don't really fit into a modern theme-park MMO that well, so they'd have to be pretty careful introducing things like this. I'd like to see the Zodiac/Anima questlines expanded in some way or another to include more job-specific gear, sort of like how FFXI introduced ways to upgrade original Artifact and Relic equipment as the years progressed (and the Empyrean equipment too, recently). Raid tiers could probably also stand to be longer (perhaps 9 months instead of 6), so that accomplishments and content in a given tier had a slightly longer "shelf-life."

[Mykll]

This has been said many times before. FFXIV can learn a lot from Guild Wars 2 as far as inventory management goes.

[Anienai]

Beyond Good and Evil
Target Earth
Legend of Dragoon
KoToR 1
Clash at Demonhead
Soul Calibur
Soul Reaver series
Phantasy star 2
Suikoden
Star ocean
crono cross & trigger
Gears of War
Kingdom Hearts 1
FFXI
Castlevania

[Jim_Berry]

DC Universe and Final Fantasy XI.

DCUO and FFXIV are both fast-paced, and have the whole "Hold L2" or "Hold R2" button to use a skill thing. DC does a few things I like:
- Voice chat.
- All characters (excluding YOUR character) have voices.
- Saves your gear as a style, so you can use that style any time without needing to hold onto the item.

With FFXI, I just like the game overall. Content such as Dynamis, Salvage, Nyzul Isle, Abyssea, Sea, Sky (all these before they got nerfed). Then there's the leveling party systems. Also, going from place to place felt like a dangerous adventure. In FFXIV, I never felt intimidated to enter a new area.

I have other "favorite" games, but I noted these two since I have history with them.

[HakuroDK]

- Saves your gear as a style, so you can use that style any time without needing to hold onto the item.

That was my second favorite part about DCUO (other than the combat, ofc). Basically, the instant you equip an item, the style of that item is stored on a list that you can access at any time, change the color of at any time, and save as a style set that wasn't overridden when new gear is equipped.

Anyway, to contribute my own favorite games and the things I would like to see in XIV:

Suikoden II:
-"Cooking Mini-Game" - Basically, the character Hai Yo would be challenged to competitions Iron Chef-style, complete with four judges. I would like to see this as a kind of "Crafting PVP" thing where players are given access to various NQ "Model" Materials that can't be used outside of this "Crafting PVP" area, and they craft. Then, when three items are crafted on each side, the four judges (NPCs, ofc) would give each piece a score depending on a variety of factors such as total quality (with either no cap or a cap of 100000 or something), speed of each craft, and NPC preference towards each item.

DC Universe Online:

-Style System - Pretty much as above.

FFXI:

-Trust System - A series of Adventurer NPCs that can travel alongside you and aid you, much in the same way as Chocobo companions. Perhaps allow combat retainers to fill this role?

[Chasely]

I loved Imagine, too! it was one of the first MMOs I really got into. I think SE could learn a thing or two about making interesting, dynamic pets or allies from SMT: Imagine.

[Yasuhiro]

Final Fantasy VII
Persona 3
Dark Souls
Devil May Cry
Mega Man 3
SMT3: Nocturne
Resident Evil 2

Can FFXIV learn from them? Not really? But they are better than XIV, even simple games like SMT3 have better characters than XIV and it's cast of "literally who?" characters
Will Y'shtola ever be as remembered as say someone like Cloud or Terra? Hell no.