Quote Originally Posted by Musashidon View Post
people repeat this but it means nothing if the game was so good and just needed some touch up how would a few small patches to make things better get 490k players to join and stay?(a number to match ff14 arr at its lowest ever) i mean the content was already amazing as you said so what was the big thing that stop people from enjoying the game like you did?

there is only 1 excuse i can truely see as *game breaking for most people* that stop people from playing and that was you needed a great computer to play the game but would just lowering the graphic for bad computers (not even consoles just computers) so more people could play would that have saved the game?
Depends on what SE's goals for the game were.

With a property like Final Fantasy, SE can pursue a wide variety of goals with their titles. They can release AAA original efforts that remind people of how great the franchise can be. They can revisit older titles, remaking them or offering expansions. Or, they can milk the franchise name and release uninspired content cheaply and rapidly.

If SE's goals for FFXIV was the latter, then no, the only way to fix FFXIV was to re-release it a la 2.0. If their goal was to create a AAA original effort, I don't think XIV 1.0 was all that far off, with their primary issue being the utterly atrocious job they did on the game's graphics engine, UI responsiveness, server code, etc. Put some time into resolving that (not killing the polygon counts and reworking the graphics engine; simply optimizing it), and XIV 1.0 had a really solid foundation. Give it a Zilart-calibre expansion and fix the back-end problems, and the game's off and running as a natural successor to FFXI.

Also, as an aside, people are far too harsh, generally speaking, when they judge MMOs at launch. Virtually every MMO in the world really takes an expansion or two before it comes into its own. In that respect, FFXIV 2.0 was really like XIV's first expansion, just a very ambitious one; a lot of the work was already done, so the team was free to mostly focus on content and polish. It also took quite a while for ARR to find its footing, despite its unique advantages (pre-existing user base from XI and XIV 1.x; membership in a big-name franchise; easier development than many MMOs due to its reduced scope).