How will we stand out?

[NefGP]

How about an engaging story worthy of the series name sake and a true successor to FFXI. In fact, it's written by the same person who wrote XI and XII (as well as Yoshi).

Also, has anyone noticed that they finally got rid of the sailormoon-esque gear swapping? Stuff just changes now, you don't disappear briefly and then magically pop out of nowhere again with new duds.

[bobbygunz]

Going over what we've seen for ARR. We've taken a lot from other standard MMO's. WoW-esque gameplay and interface are some of the biggest changes we're facing right now, but how will we show off what separates this game from what people already have? How do we keep from being labeled World of Fantasy?

I want this game to succeed, but we can't do that by making the same mistake that nearly every other MMO has made sense WoW's creation. Copying without sufficient innovation to draw an audience.

Main draws so far:

• Job system that lets you change on the fly without having to make a whole new character
• New summoning system, details are a little fuzzy at the moment
• Brand name (references, lore, story, etc)
• Limit Break
• Chocobo raising and fighting
• Combat (Position, Combo system)
• Visuals
• Deep and useful crafting system

crafting+ graphics are probably the only two significant ones listed.

Combat in ffxiv probably isn't a great drawcard, for example. Most MMOs coming out excel at combat systems, more so than FFXIV.

And in fact, crafting may be in danger too if SE seek to oversimplify crafting and make it superficial or marginalise crafters as they increase dungeon drop rewards.

Compared to feature lists of games like Guild Wars 2, and ArcheAge, FFXIV really only has the crafting/graphics to fall back on. Really.

Yoshi sought so hard to "standardise" the FFXIV experience, and they probably just ended up making it forgettable in the process. Needed more innovative content for players.

[faris]

Without any intent to make people angry or whatevs, I don't think FFXIV at launch will stand out from "current gen" MMOs, or the ones the dev team were told to play while working on 2.0. I'd put money on that being the harshest criticism from external sites when the game launches again (unless, somehow, server lag's even worse / beta testers don't tell the devs about problems when they play because they're not being critical enough.)

Saying that, I don't expect FFXIV to stand out at launch. While I can see why people expect that, I don't think that's entirely reasonable given the fact they've had 2 years to build a new game from the ground up, and that's what they've done. I know they've had a lot of people come in to help and the team's been enormous, but the scale of their work's been enormous too. I expect future patches, updates, expansions and such in months and years to come to give it it's own content to make it it's own game and give it it's own identity. Such can't be expected from the get go.