Balance, Homogenisation and Encounter Design: The Problem.

[TcomJ]

Wow, I would never expect someone would literally have the same issue with the game direction as I do. Thought I'm the loner here.

But to add my take alittle bit, linearity and homogenization are the bane and a disease to any RPG.
FF12 and 13 are the biggest clearest example of that.

FF12, with no job distinction among characters whatsoever, the game becomes ridiculously bland. No thinking required, reward for being strategic is non-existent. This has to be fixed by Zodiac Edition.

FF13 is where the linearity for casual friendly taken to an extreme. You can basically just spam the same ability over and over and walk....straight to clear the game. lol
It was the worst FF series no argument among FF fan community. All RPG dies because of it. FF14 won't be any different.

So I hope they stop with the homogenization and simplification. It's pretty clear as a bard main.
And I hope, these ideas of homogenization and linear no longer take root. Especially if it's coming from WoW players that flocks to this game recently, should reject this suggestion of homogenization, simplification, and linearity entirely and immediately.

[RyuDragnier]

FF12, with no job distinction among characters whatsoever, the game becomes ridiculously bland. No thinking required, reward for being strategic is non-existent. This has to be fixed by Zodiac Edition.

You still needed strategy to get through vanilla FF12, you couldn't just auto-attack through the game and expect everything to turn out fine. You needed to buff, debuff, adjust strategies on the go. The only homogenization with it was that all the characters could do everything and had very little stat differences, so there wasn't a need to use everybody. You could use just one team the entire game with no problems. Luckily, Zodiac Job fixed that nonsense.

FF13 is where the linearity for casual friendly taken to an extreme. You can basically just spam the same ability over and over and walk....straight to clear the game. lol
It was the worst FF series no argument among FF fan community. All RPG dies because of it. FF14 won't be any different.

Except just like with FF12, you didn't spam the same ability over and over again. Doing so led to death really fast. Again, like FF12, you had to buff, debuff, adjust strategies on the fly, you couldn't just use COM/RAV/RAV the entire game. FF13 was not homogenization, characters could only use certain roles in the game until a specific point, and excelled at certain ones more than others (which is more than we could say about vanilla FF12).

[Dzian]

Except just like with FF12, you didn't spam the same ability over and over again. Doing so led to death really fast. Again, like FF12, you had to buff, debuff, adjust strategies on the fly, you couldn't just use COM/RAV/RAV the entire game. FF13 was not homogenization, characters could only use certain roles in the game until a specific point, and excelled at certain ones more than others (which is more than we could say about vanilla FF12).

Not really. Outside of a few paradigm shifts here and there on some of the hunts or side bosses you could pretty much clear the entire game running down that long linear corridor just pressing auto battle over and over again. while it might not be the same skills it pretty much is the exact same button. So it's not like he's wrong. you can spam auto battle endless and have an incredibly high success rate going through the game.