Quote Originally Posted by NefarioCall View Post
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.