What did FF14 have right, at launch?

[Arkine]

Graphi- no... the infamouse miqote ears and helms glitch...

They title art is pretty.

[Jocko]

The unique mob behaviors and traits. A complaint about a single mishap and they nix the entire thing. Really hope they bring it back

[Shurrikhan]

The unique mob behaviors and traits. A complaint about a single mishap and they nix the entire thing. Really hope they bring it back

What's sad is that the system to fix the problem without cutting out unique mob behavior already seems to be in place. Just today I constantly AoE'd level 52 mobs without pulling them (doing level 43 leves and at level 40 if those are factors).

Heck, the party leader could just have a Link Difficulty slider that determines whether anything more will be pulled. Gimicky, sure, but cutting out something that makes the game unique for such a fixable reason feels... wrong.
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I didn't start at release, but had been playing a while before Tanaka's replacement. The things that seemed "right" off the bat were the armory system and cross-class usage, even if it could have been better. I enjoyed the ability to stack linear cannons (Puncture, Skewer, Doomspike) on Archer, or even fire an air-fist Haymaker after a ranged dodge.

It didn't feel hugely class-specific, but to me the style of each classes's abilities felt more like the class than the reform's abilities for a long time. Skewer and Doomlance available within 12 levels felt far more Lancerish than True Thrust and Heavy Thrust. With Moonrise and Trammel also in Lancer's debilitation aspect, it truly felt like a Lancer.

That Thaum's already established lore was bypassed almost entirely in order to separate it from Thaum by a basically arbitrary method, or the reduction of original classes early levels into identical abilities with different names. Why dark-side element wheel over Light/Dark/Blood, even though it was already fitting to the Thaumaturge guild and its quest connections? If it was done just for raiding, couldn't a less intrusive fix have been made? And why must DoW classes only differ in only a little over half their abilities?

[This class gets a dodge-stun, this one a parry-AoE, this one a miss-rehit. This one gets Power Surge, this one Berserk, this one Fists of Fire, to the same ends but different enough. Yet True Thrust and Heavy Swing, and Fast Blade and Pummel are literally identical, and the majority of later combo actions follow the same problem.]

[Mudd]

I always fancied the Stamina System

[Relic]

Graphics. Shiny shiny graphics.

[Amherst]

and of course my NPC companion talking about spontaneous orgies and sex with beastmen)

...why do I not remember this? XD; Just what companion did you choose, anyway? Nothing of the sort coming from mine (female Duskwight Elezen).

On-topic, Jinko said it pretty well. I really can't think of a single thing the game had right at launch personally. Whatever may have been there was probably blocked out by how absolutely horrible every single other aspect of the game was.

[Rau]

Autotarget switch after death, for the 2 days we had it

that first patch with the 5 NMs that dropped items you could craft.
IMO, that would have been ideal if the drops were actually meaningful. Instead we got gear that was useless.

The peiste that would never return and would just sit outside Ul'dah front gate owning everyone.

[Mirage]

FF14 didn't do much right that wasn't already done right in a previous game. Even if attaching four wheels to a car is technically "doing it right", I wouldn't bring it up as an argument for a car model doing something right.

If I were to try to come up with something... Uh, job switching anywhere, I guess. Probably haven't had that in an MMO before.

[Catapult]

The music was done brilliantly. That's probably what I have the biggest soft spot for.

So was the lore foundation, although it did need more exposition, which we have been now getting.

I agree that the Thaumaturge/Conjurer lore has been butchered somewhat by giving black and white mage to the wrong base classes, even if there were combat mechanic-reasons to break up the elements.

Being able to craft event-specific items using materials was cool. It meant things weren't all L1 and almost purely aesthetic.


What else hasn't changed that is good... let's see...

Definitely the armoury system - all classes/jobs playable on one character.

The concept behind guildleves being collected from the city counter, commenced at a camp and completion returns you to the camp. They've done some fiddling with exp, evaluations and leve capacity, but the core fundamentals are still in place. It also isn't as central to the game in concept as was originally envisioned, but that doesn't stop them functioning as originally designed.

[Rhomagus]

At first I disagreed with the OP, but then later in the thread I read about taking the RNG aspect out of it. I would've liked that.

I always envisioned XIV's leveling tiers to be that of XI's only the progression emphasis was reversed.

In XI, you leveled a job which had specific "sub skills" that were higher or lower based on the job you were playing. Each job had a specific cap at each level, and the higher the cap on the skills coincided with the skills that job utilized most commonly. You could still level up these skills on other jobs. This created a two tiered leveling system and provided incentives for playing in a particular manner on a particular class, creating job identity.

In essence, you had a "main" level supplemented by a "sub skill" level.

In vanilla XIV the "sub skill" level was emphasized and made more apparent allowing for more individual identity as opposed to creating job identity. Instead of leveling a job or class you were leveling a specific weapon. Basically XI's "skill up parties" became the main leveling system in XIV. Unfortunately the main level was neutralized so much that it became essentially purposeless.

In my opinion, they should have made the "Physical level" the harder to level up and the "Rank Level" the easier. They should have had main story quest availability based on physical level and class/job quest story based on "Rank Level" rather than everything being based off of Rank level.

Attaining physical level 50 was not seen as an accomplishment, while reaching Rank 50 met much more applause and you were given more in game incentives to level rank than you were physical level in the form of storyline progression and battle effectiveness.

The two leveling systems could've been done very well but they weren't fine tuned and imo their emphasis was swapped.

I loved putting my class together to fit the changing contexts of my situation. If someone had to go that was filling a certain role in the party, I could adjust my action bar accordingly, if I had previously earned those skills prior, while still being able to level my weapon class gaining access to yet more abilities and accomplishing what I had originally set out to do. Now if someone leaves in a party it turns into a "we have to replace X now. Time to /sh in Ul'dah or scour your linkshells and friends lists for a replacment".

As of recently I've been spending way too much time standing around putting parties together and not playing the game. In vanilla XIV the party could adjust on the fly without having to stop leveling their class. Hopefully some of this time will be offset when they include the content finder system in 2.0. and/or people actually start using the search function.

I also miss the stamina system. It felt like playing Secret of Mana all over again. In alpha they had a charge system similar to Secret of Mana as well. In Secret of Mana if you waited longer you would get a more accurate and powerful attack. I think in XIV beta, if you waited a short time you got a more accurate attack while if you waited a long time you got a more powerful attack. Unfortunately, the battle system was so lagged and the pacing of battles was so slow that it was not enjoyable. If they removed the lag and sped up the gauge I could see that system being very fun. That's just me though.

Don't get me wrong. While I enjoyed the flexibility of vanilla XIV, I very much enjoy actual combat in the current version. I'm loving the combo system. Still miss Battle Regimens. I love actually playing battles rather than endlessly "preparing" for them.

I don't much care for mage jobs though. Mage class > mage job mechanics doesn't match up with the story (The elemental class not having access to elemental spells), and the mechanics of spells seems flawed (i.e. Fire being AoE only across all "tiers", Thunder being single target only). I wish they would've left classes untouched and greatly increased the effectiveness of particular skills when you equipped a job stone (much like it was in XI), or blocked access to certain abilities when a job stone was equipped while giving access to job specific abilities (like they have now). That way you wouldn't have to worry about the bastardization that occurred with the mage classes. As of now they don't fit either XIV's mold or the traditional FF franchise mold.

But ya, if they removed the RNG from skill acquisition that would've been fine to me. It made you play in an anti-intuitive manner like in Final Fantasy II. You'd purposefully keep monsters alive so you could get more experience, kind of defeating the reason to be fighting a monster in the first place.