The door is wide open

[syntaxlies]

Companion system in TOR is so excellent that they sd add something similar to FF???

for 2.0 there will be a comp system. i know you'll be able to use your choc as a companion and im not sure if that's what they meant or if you'll get another companion.

[weeble]

Tera and GW2 are looking pretty nice.
Might try Tera if it goes F2P, maybe dance around GW2 if it ever comes out.

All that being said, FFXIV will be fine.

I mean, multiple First Person shooters exist and seem to do alright. Just because a game has more players doesn't mean the other games have none.

these are the 2 i'm looking forward to playing as well. though tera isn't free to play when it launches in NA, it has a method where u can buy hour time with items in game. witch means you can still play for free. seems like your a rmt that way lol, but if it's in game why wouldn't you play free if you have amased that much gold to buy game time with it.

also it will release with a full expansion in NA, witch reminds me of ffxi launch. that just means i will probably love it, or by time we run out of stuff to do there will be another expansion on way...if does well that is.

gw2 is f2p and looks like it will just be awesome to play, and i just truely can't wait to play a frigin mmo with pvp that doesn't have dedicated healers in it. so sick of having to pick a healer class to have fun in pvp unless you roll with a group or have pocket healing asshats with you.

both these will be something to look forward to while i'm waiting for 2.0 ...swtor is fun at moment but it will fizzle out pretty quick for me. already bored of the pvp instances, and i don't like the world pvp at all really. once you get max gears and do all the pve on hard modes a few times then it's all she wrote. it doesn't do what ffxi did for me in wanting to gear every class threw all the endgame and play endgame for years straight. but the best part of any mmo is the hussle and bussle of tons of players doing stuff together. not a day i can't do what i want to do in game, unlike ffxiv at the moment.

Till 2.0. probably get removed from forums soon for not paying. guess end of month? lol, cya's probably at .21 or .22 i will want to try out everything they add. and hopefully still get my gobbue mount. not sure how gobbue works yet but i assuming that limited time offer means later it will cost me 10 or 20bucks to buy it ...so might as well get a month of gameplay for it too.

[NefarioCall]

In general i am most excited about the party search function in 2.0 Allowing players to fill out their dungeon of choice and matching players from across servers is significant.

i think a companion system could be really helpful though. Solo play from battle related jobs could use a bit of propping up after everything that has been done in recent months. Allowing a player for example to call three companions and make a light party would be interesting. I don`t think a full party of companions would be a good idea, but a light party would be enough for exp grinding options and some moderate difficulty questing/missions.

[Northman]

I think mmo's are going to solo direction. Not all people have time for social groups and there are also many gf/bf couples who want play on own. Of course bigger groups will stay also. TOR system is ideal in that that the comp is very good fighter, you must try really hard that you are equal. And they can talk and even... So AI is future. FFXIV and SWTOR are my games but I have my eyes on Archeage too.

[ShinChuck]

But i do recall a year long drama in 2011 about how Star Wars and Rift would DOOM FFXIV. The drama is past and neither game really doomed anything.

Let's cut the bull: FFXIV WOULD HAVE BEEN DOOMED if it wasn't for two things: the FF name and Square Enix. Anything, ANYTHING from a smaller company that had as rough a launch as XIV would have been dead and gone already. There are numerous examples of this.

A simple allegiance to Final Fantasy, from both the community (a staunchly loyal, pre-existing fanbase) and Square Enix (who can't afford to let a main-series title bearing the FF name tank), is the reason FFXIV is still around, and the only, only, only likely and realistic one.

Hey, I'm all for SE turning the game around, don't get me wrong. But any other MMO from any smaller, less prestigious company would have been long gone.

neither game seems to be bad exactly, but then neither even nearly met expectations, let alone exceeded them.

But on the Rift front, Rift was the first game from a start-up company, received numerous awards over the past year, is expanding to Russia, China and Korea, and just over the past couple days it was announced they made over 100 million in revenue and earned Trion another 85 million in funding. It may not be destroying WoW, but for a fresh start-up company on their fledgling release, it destroyed expectations, and honestly embarrassed the legendary top RPG company, MMO experienced, filthy rich SE Corporate.

Rift, if anything, beat the odds and surpassed many expectations. I'm not saying it's a WoW killer or even poised to become the dominant MMO, but for all practical purposes it did indeed surpass expectations. Not sure where you get your numbers and info from.

[Seig345]

I was on the SWTOR forums for quite awhile, I was in the continuous beta (as opposed to the one-time weekend betas), etc, yadda, and I don't think I even saw FFXIV come up in any comparisons.

But I do think it's funny that you mentioned this because less than a week ago, I cancelled my sub to SWTOR before my free 30 days was up and came back to FFXIV. I had 2000 crysta points that never got used, so I thought I'd give FFXIV's changes a whirl, and now I think I'm here to stay, for awhile anyway.

SWTOR, after the newness, "OMGLAZURSWORDS!" and the general Star Warsy-ness wore off, it felt just like WoW with voice acting. In some cases, worse than WoW. In any case, sorry, this post was just gonna be a two liner and got carried away, I just thought the "SWTOR will doom FFXIV" bit funny because I left SWTOR for FFXIV after having already been familiar with FFXIV.

[MicahZerrshia]

I agree with the OP SWTOR is graphically amateurish, it looks more like a game created by college students rather than a professionally made game.

[Bahn]

That although Star Wars has amassed over 1 million players very quickly, the game is generally seen as a big failure. Watching a youtube video of some guy running along the most amateurish desert landscape that made my eyes bleed didn't help me to refute this opinion. The problems seem from what i read to run much deeper than graphics. Given of course, we don't know where it'll be in several years, but that was one UGLY desert.

The game's ugly, but you didn't need a top end gaming rig to play WoW when it launched. It's the same thing for SWTOR. They could've taken the XIV route and make you get a top end rig to really see the pretty graphics, but I'm pretty sure BioWare's decision to use lower end graphics was on purpose to keep the game accessible to a larger population.

Also, I don't know where you read that the game is a failure, but many MMOs would KILL to have a population a tenth of TOR's size. XIV at its peak had only 45k players on (and only because it was free). It's pretty obvious the game will stay alive. It's VERY clear what demographic they were trying to appeal to, and it was certainly not for players like us who play Eastern MMOs.

Any farther back and really, we're looking at FFXI, WoW, and EQII ... oh yeah, and Phantasy Star Online. LOL.

In fact, nothing has really become the new MMO standard in the last 10 years.
I don't expect FFXIV to be that new standard, no matter how good it becomes,
but the general lack of gold standard competition right now does help, as disappointing as it also is.

WoW is STILL considered the gold standard. Every MMO out there is trying to topple WoW, and WoW popularized a lot of common MMO tropes that I think MMOs from both the West AND the East should follow. As I've stated many times, there are certain things that make no sense to reinvent, such as the auction house system. But at the same time, Square has plenty of wiggle room to make the game their own sort of thing. I have a bias towards XIV and Japanese MMOs over Korean-made MMOs because a lot of Korean MMOs have too much emphasis on grind=content, which I absolutely hate (it's also the same reason why I was driven away from XI).

PSO was awesome. It was a breath of fresh air in a time when games like Ultima Online and EverQuest were titans. Phantasy Star Universe was an attempt at giving it sort of a new age spin on the series, but it failed in the states due to poor support from Sega of America. The PSP iterations of PSU, Phantasy Star Portable 1, 2, and Infinity, are awesome. In fact - a somewhat XIV-esque situation happened on their end - Miyazaki was the producer for PSU and its expansion, PSU Ambition of Illuminus (he also was the one who did the original PSO). However they used a different director for the PSP series, Sakai (DRAGON SAKAI). Sakai took the original game and made yearly changes to the game through expansions/sequels that fixed a TON of issues with the original game.

Phantasy Star Online 2 uses the same engine as PSU/Phantasy Star Portable, and is basically what I think is Sakai's ultimate dream game - a culmination of elements from the original PSO and more modern gameplay of the PSU series into what I think is like the "final" version of Phantasy Star Universe. It's not going to be a WoW killer, it's not going to be popular, but I'm ready to jump ship to it as soon as it gets an official Japanese release, as the game is more action based and less about number parsing and minmaxing. Hunters can do a ghetto DMC style game, Rangers can play the game like as though it's a simple TPS, and Forces still suck - that's my kind of game.

[Eldan]

=That although Star Wars has amassed over 1 million players very quickly, the game is generally seen as a big failure

Lol no it's not.

Try again.

There goes EA! Electronic Arts stock drops because of SWTOR fumbles http://bit.ly/xMo5Er @massively

[Destain]

This resource is ... as always, going sadly untapped.

Edit: Well, better tapped than in other cases of SE games throughout history, but much moar tapping could be done.

Everyone would be happy with more tapping... Giggity...