Quote Originally Posted by K3KW4RCHILD View Post
Evidently, this is a very profound subject. I suppose it's a philosophical discussion as to where ones priorities lie, but customization seems less and less relevant the more I see comparisons to (ahem, trying not to chuckle) XIV 1.0, Aion, and World of Warcraft. This thread also has a strong undercurrent of people trying to out "tech savvy" each other. Whether the decisions are philosophical or technical or both, I'm certain the XIV design team(s) are not worried about justifying their decisions to an extremely devout fan base, which is growing faster than it ever has.
FFXIV favors storyline. That is how they design everything, they write the story first, and then figure out how to "play it". This I believe is the primary trait shared with WoW and SWTOR.

SWTOR and FFXIV have a lot more cinematic quality to cut scenes, and it may ultimately have cost SWTOR development costs because they voiced everything like they would in a single player game. FFXIV meanwhile is more selective about the voice acting, and there are cutscenes for not only the storyline, but the jobs, the dungeons, and many of the sidequests. That voice acting requires being able to zoom into the face of ALL characters and have them be expressive and show emotion.

If you play with the character height slider in FFXIV, you'll note that it just scales the body entirely, it does not stretch it.