Quote Originally Posted by Abriael View Post
That's much easier said than done. If gameplay could really keep up with cutscenes in most games there would be *no* cutscenes.

The only valid way I've seen used so far is turning a large part of gameplay in quicktime events, and quicktime events are utterly despised by a large part of the playerbase (and I can already see how much hate they'd generate in a MMORPG, as people would accuse the developer of taking control away from them).
There are also finishers, but Age of Conan demonstrated that they really add nothing to gameplay, and they become boring after a very short while.
Take apart the events in a cutscene and you have basic things like: interesting skills with a highly visual animation, battle system where positioning matters, fast response times.

FFXIV battle system is very mathematical. Half the time you're just balancing stats and that's the problem. SE should start looking at their own cutscenes and using that as a model for their gameplay, rather than looking at their own gameplay and using that as their model.