Quote Originally Posted by solracht View Post
You keep on mentioning this like it's relevant. I completely agree that having full control over battle is in future for MMORPGs, but there's way more to having control over combat beyond simply not having auto-attack.

The FFXIV engine has shown no hints of being able to offer the kind of dynamic combat that those two games have. Hell, we can't even move during combat while using skills, something that pretty much every single current-gen-MMORPG offers. You're way too hopeful if you think they have the tools to transform a combat system where you're tied to the ground to something like GW2 or TERA have.
Guild Wars 2 has a target lock-on battle system like FFXIV with active attacks. It's the same combat system as FFXIV's present rendition, just more streamlined and less spammy.

And anyway, when the people behind TERA left NCSoft with stolen network code, they allegedly showed it to Square Enix before founding their own company BlueHole Studios. So ... technically SE could make this game TERA if they wanted to go to court for it. LOL.

Lack of auto-attack is not the reason why the combat system in those two games is going to move the genre forward. Stop acting like it is. There's collision detection in GW2's projectiles and spells, for the love of god.
SE isn't incapable of adding in the network coding for such things. They've already shown they can make collision detection between mobs and players etc (from alpha to beta) in a short amount of time. It's feasible they can improve the battle system in this way too, by making temporary colliding assets or something.

The battle system in this game probably lost its chance to compete with that when the engine was finished. At the very least, and for its sake, I hope it has the tools to adapt to this generation of combat systems.
The graphical engine is somewhat separate from the network code, although it defines the limits of certain actions. There is nothing to prevent SE from improving the active-combat system besides the issue of server-to-client latency (due to their global servers)... and also how talented their network programmers are.

Tanaka may have had the right idea (one of the few good ideas he had, in my opinion), but his programmers, whoever was in charge of the engine, and whoever had to implement the combat system, obviously didn't, or at least they didn't know how to make systems that would truly take advantage of his idea.
That's true. But dismissing the idea (which we admit to being good) isn't the best approach. Improving upon the idea is.

Auto-attack might be a huge mistake.