Tanaka was Right!

[ADVSS]

If he was so good, he would had made FFXIV into FFXI remastered lol instead of remaking an entirely new game.

Afaik he was told to make it as much not like ff11 as possible- Personally, I think he would have been better off making an IP, more specifically an mmo that nobody has ever seen before - something more mech like a frontline mission, or xenogears related instead of a final fantasy. Imagine an mmo where at level 30 you get to pilot/build a mech that could span across specialized roles for team play(or just do whatever) that wouldve been pretty cool.

[TaiyoShikasu]

Anytime someone says they miss 1.0, just stare at them for a minute and ignore them.

Give 'em the ol' Kubrick Stare.

[Ramesses]

This made me laugh so hard my staff and team all stared at me in disbelief!

[Ramesses]

Yes indeed... Uncle Emet has the right of it.

[Gwaeron]

1.23b was awesome. Admittedly built on the broken infrastructure and engines of the initial 1.0.
It grinds my gears when people lump all of 1.x together. No-one will argue that 1.0 sucked. But I, and others that I know, definitely loved 1.19, 1.21 and beyond when all of the systems were pretty much completely remade.

1.23b was full of potential - all of those dangerous areas with level 50-99 enemies, all of those locations, such as dungeons, that clearly had been added for some reason but later were never realized.

Open world dungeons.
Notorious monsters.
Movement inertia (debatable. Inconvenient sometimes, but it's never FELT so good just running around in any other game).

A wide and varied difficulty range of content, some which was progress by grinding and some which was progress by skill, all the way from solo-grinding Toto-Rak to attempting to beat Rivenroad (Extreme) which was hard as hell, or getting Darklight gear by grinding semi-difficult dungeons.

Faction leves that actually had interesting bosses and interesting missions (such as the one where you needed to split the party into two and ride different ways across La Noscea to kill two cyclops).

Interesting quest storylines with amazing cutscenes. Job quests weren't pointless solo missions about hitting a button for five minutes, they were actual battles. DoL and DoH quests weren't just "get me 10 of this thing". They actually had instances. BSM/ARM had a completely separate zone, an island in La Noscea where a Siren resided. You and Mimidoa were wearing earplugs, so the entire quest was kind of a mystery/puzzle where you couldn't hear the NPCs talk (but they tried to trick you to remove the earplugs). MIN had a quest where you had to dig traps for pursuers while an NPC tried to escape.

People like to say that there was nothing to do in 1.0, which is pretty true. But I think there was way more to do in 1.23 than there has been ever since. It wasn't just dungeon-and-FATE-spam. Basically all (battle) content we have now, except for FATEs, existed back then. And in addition we also had factions, caravan, Hamlet Defense, Skirmish, behests.

Some of these challenges were poorly implemented (Ifrit's eruption lag), some of them were nice ideas on paper but could use some improvement (Hamlet Defense), some of them were amazing (GC quests). But near the end, the biggest problem was with technology, not game design.

It was far from perfect, but it wasn't all bad. Many things have gotten way worse than they were in terms of story, variety, selection and quality of content.
Rant over.

[Enkidoh]

Personally, I think he would have been better off making an IP, more specifically an mmo that nobody has ever seen before - something more mech like a frontline mission, or xenogears related instead of a final fantasy. Imagine an mmo where at level 30 you get to pilot/build a mech that could span across specialized roles for team play(or just do whatever) that wouldve been pretty cool.

Actually, SE did create a MMO set in the Front Mission universe - by all accounts it was not very successful (apparently it was planned to be realeased in the US but never was); either way it's long since shut down due to low subscriptions. It even used PlayOnline to connect to it's game servers. A Xenogears MMO was never going to happen though given that IP is forever stuck in legal limbo with the team members who left and joined Namco and adapated it to become Xenosaga.

Really, FFXIV came about because SE didn't want to spend the time and money merely updating FFXI to a newer graphic engine and thought it would be best to make a whole new FF MMO. Of course though Tanaka dropped the ball well and truly with 1.0's development as is well known now, and only it's complete replacement (and his own replacement as producer by Naoki Yoshida) finally accomplished that.

1.23b was awesome. Admittedly built on the broken infrastructure and engines of the initial 1.0.
It grinds my gears when people lump all of 1.x together. No-one will argue that 1.0 sucked. But I, and others that I know, definitely loved 1.19, 1.21 and beyond when all of the systems were pretty much completely remade.

1.23b was full of potential - all of those dangerous areas with level 50-99 enemies, all of those locations, such as dungeons, that clearly had been added for some reason but later were never realized.

I've said it before and I'll continue to say it. FFXIV 1.0 did have some good ideas, but for everything it did well, it did so many more things wrong, and horribly, horribly so, thus only by bringing the axe down on it completley and replacing it with ARR could save that. 1.23 was a good game, far better than 1.0 at launch, but it still had far too many problems to save it (many of the 'additions' being merely things Tanaka had already developed or planned for it but never bothered implementing at the start out of laziness and stubborness), and it showed all too well that fact in it's last weeks.

FFXIV 1.23 was a diamond in the rough, but a diamond with numerous cracks and imperfections that not even valiant tinkering by Yoshi could fix even after cleaning away all the flith off it, so it was broken up for drill bits and a new larger diamond unearthed that shone far more brightly, called ARR....

And I think I pushed that metaphor too far...