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

[Duelle]

From FFXI: How to do pet classes.

Erm...pet classes were horribly gimped in FFXI. SMN had next to no actual damage scaling for years before the devs remembered to make Avatars scale with summoning magic skill (not to mention the terrible Blood Pact timers and the fact they only became relevant after Alexander + Perfect Defense entered the game). Beastmasters were screwed from day 1 because of asinine penalties and lack of scaling/utility. Let's also not forget that Puppetmasters were largely a joke and needed an exploit to do even half-decent damage, even after the numerous buffs that job received.

From SWTOR: A story with branching dialogue trees that actually have consequences. Now granted, in the SWTOR storylines the endings are basically always the same but a few of them do drastically change the path to get there and the dialogue that happens at the end along with the possibility of killing off certain NPC's. I'd have loved the option to punch the Fortemps son instead of letting Thancred do it.

I can agree on a little more weight behind choices

[Khalithar]

Snip

Allow me to clarify as I did in another thread. My point for pet classes was making the pet actually matter rather than being a glorified DoT, I think summoner should be be about the summons, I think if they ever add beastmaster, it should focus on the beast's you tame, etc.

Edit: I know MMO design moved away from that in recent years, but that doesn't mean I have to agree with it!

[Ash_]

Xenoblade X: A recent example that any MMO developer could learn things from; both good and bad. I wish FFXIV adopted XbX's design ethos when setting out to make new zones; areas that are not just large, but genuinely fun to explore with something new to always discover, and should take a very lengthy amount of time to see everything along with having a real element of danger added to that exploration. The game also handled it's version of hunts called tyrants significantly better and tied it into the exploration element. tl:dr; a diadem that works :/

Also seamless connected areas something people have always wanted to see. The Wii U only allows 1 gig of ram for use by games but XbX did it so well. The sooner we ditch the PS3 so they can start really making use of the ram in both the PS4 and a modern PC the better.

Phantasy Star (any version): Elemental and enemy type weaknesses/attributes. Someone already touched on this but it would add a nice amount of depth to this game.