The JP FFXIV Twitter account posted some pics this morning..Follow

That seems strange to me since FFXI was reasonably successful and FFXIV was.. well.. not. Did they think that XI brutally murdered XIV 1.0 with its then eight-year old game mechanics and PS2 quality graphics? Yes, that would have been quite embarrassing for them. I suppose it's important to overlook the provable fact that 1.0 was a failure. And I think, by now, most people have been disillusioned of the idea that the Final Fantasy name automatically means quality.

It actually makes even less sense now considering ARR has about as much to do with FFXI's design as Eve Online does.

Well one of my chief complaints with 1.0 was that the dev teams for XI and XIV were exactly the same and XIV had problems that XI had solved years before.

So maybe the problem wasn't so much that people wanted the game to be more like XI so much as they wanted to original dev team to demonstrate learning.