MMO on rails confirmed!

[Onisake]

The main purpose of the 'rails' was to make things feel more familiar. like has been said repeatedly, they want to bring FFXIV to the mmo standard.

so essentially i'm expecting a 'me too' game. right now, all we know that will really separate it from the pack is that it is final fantasy.

the fact that the game failed and is being relaunched is generating quite a bit of hype. I hear more about the game now than I ever did when it first launched. but, the downside is it's a relaunch instead of an expansion. either way, we can all expect a big influx in the player base while people try out the changes.

there are a lot of MMOs on the market. many of them follow the rails strategy. while it is not my preferred method, I'll have several 50s already. so i'm not too worried about it. most MMOs are also a race to end-game. as that is where most of the fun stuff happens. so again, the rails concept is more the journey to endgame.

and really, a lot of new players ask 'i'm level 15. what do i do now?' and because they are not familiar with this type of game they are lost. rails provide some structure.

If it were up to me, i would do rail quests up to level 30ish or solo. and then force the player into party content/grind parties and have the game be 'open world' after that point. and have a couple story/quest arcs for jobs/classes and of course the overall global story arcs.

What i am concerned about is the endgame content. we all know that the materia system is being revamped. as long as we dont' have some silly wow-like reputation system we have to worry about grinding daily quests to get points so we can get materia, i'll be...content. Grinding things like Caravan and Hamlet I find tolerable. but if i have to do leve-like content every day i think i'll puke.

For the most part i'll be reserving any judgement until i see the actual execution.