Reflecting on SWTOR and XIV

[Abriael]

I don't view content as making it different. Of *course* the content is different, that’s a no brainier. I'm talking about it's structure and the way it operates.. if you remove all artwork and content from both games and add stick figures in... do you think you could tell what game you were playing in the first 30 minutes? The really nice part about XIV 1.x is that it was without a doubt NOT WoW, so I'm hopeful that SE continues to break new ground adding fallbacks to common mmo conventions if and when they make sense to do so.

Too bad that the heavy focus on storyline, the branching dialogue, the companion interaction et cetera aren't just "content". They're integral part of what you call "the structure of the game and the way it operates".