Stucco wrote:
Very interesting. Hopefully they get it worked out and it gets better. Square hopefully got a good taste of reality when FFXIV 1.0 launched and it fell flat on its face for the most part because they were trying to sell the name/franchise and not the game and respect the player base following.
I don't really think that SE was being
lazy, per se. I think it was more that they were living in a bubble and were wholly out of touch as far as MMOs that are popular around the world goes. They seemed (at least during Beta) to not "get" why people weren't receiving it well, which gives me the impression they were simply living in a bubble, mostly unaware of what was going on outside of their bubble. The western world was used to more modern MMOs like WoW.
FFXI was really nice during its time, it sure beat Everquest and its clones hands-down.
But being a Japanese company, they probably did not know much about WoW, I'm assuming... but then after FFXIV 1.0 was floundering like a fish out of water, I think they started reading some of the player inputs and I wouldn't be surprised if WoW kept coming up, so they were like "OK, let's go take a look at WoW and see what they did...."
And BAM. FFXIV ARR happens. You can see the huge influences that WoW had on ARR. The UIs are very familiar, the general gameplay shares a lot of similarities, but yet they somehow managed to keep the Final Fantasy spirit behind the game, and it wasn't "just a WoW Clone" as I've heard some people accusing it of being.
It has similarities but that doesn't automatically make it a clone. FFXIV stands out in several ways, and it innovates the WoW formula, doing things that WoW doesn't even do to this day (like built-in threat meters, that you can use to target enemies? Last I checked, you can get threat meters but they can't be used to target enemies in WoW) or the targeting arrows that zip from one entity to another when they change targets.
And then, FFXIV did low-level dungeons via Level Sync way before WoW ever got around to attempting the same. Did they ever implement that? I heard they were talking about it but I quit before that ever happened. Either way, FFXIV did it first.
Edited, Apr 5th 2017 10:59pm by Lyrailis