Thought about SWTOR vs ARRFollow

The golden rule isn't really "not WoW", I just don't have zero interest in clone games. WoW is a pretty good game and I don't think it's so wrong to take inspiration from it, but I don't want to play a game I've already played in a new skin.

It wouldn't be a themepark World of Warcraft game where you're on rails all the time moving from quest set to quest set where you have to play almost exactly like the developer intended.

I would probably put a big focus on exploration and rewarding player curiosity, with lots of easter eggs for the players to find (little hidden camps, secret quests, secret monsters, etc.) and trophies for finding that stuff. There would be easy to use grouping tools.

I would have a seamless open world, no zones (which break immersion).

I think it would be cool if you got to make some choices throughout the story which made you feel like you had some impact, even if it didn't necessarily change the outcome (I'm thinking of The Walking Dead).

Also, I would probably try to make the nations much more distinct from each other than they are currently. I mean, if one nation was supposed to be a bunch of savage pirates, one more spiritual (I think that's what Gridania is supposed to be?), one more rich, there would need to be a lot of elements in the environment to drive those ideas home.

For combat, I would go with building up TP to unleash devastating attacks.

I don't think FFXI's combat was bad on a technical level, it just needed to be more fast paced and have cooler graphics.

it just seemed like an unnecessary jab at the end.

The information is all public at this point.

Hindsight is supposed to be 20/20, because after you've gathered all the facts, you can see the big picture. This is what you come up with? I really wish you would have posted something more intelligent. Strange as it may be, I do love hearing a really good differing opinion. I know you post those things with the intent of getting some White Knight to run to the game's defense. It detracts from it. That aside, I have some thoughts.

Hindsight being a wonderful thing, I've learned from FFXI, that an MMO doesn't need millions of subscribers to be profitable. What do you think they spent the money on exactly? You seem to have a wonderful imagination, you should make some more assumptions. I don't care for Star Wars, but I did hear they had quality voice acting/story. Maybe some of the money went there. I've also heard that they lacked things to do at the end game stage. That leaves me wondering what else could have taken up all those development resources. You seem to know though.

There has never been a company that took a failed MMO and rebuilt it from the ground up. Even you can see that as a huge financial risk. We all love to talk ourselves up and profess/imply that we know what's best, or what would, and wouldn't work. Running with that train of thought, would you take that risk? If yes, how would you feel about failing? Have you ever failed at something? If yes, when you try again, do you try twice as hard? Three times? How hard? The most beautiful thing about ARR, is its "people" inspired development. There is no "stick up the ***" person doing whatever he wants. I'm more worried about Final Fantasy XV, than I am ARR. At least Yoshi knows what not to do, and shows interest in what the majority wants.

If ARR fails, it wont be for the reason you stated. It seems like everyone is aware how badly ARR's failure is going affect SE, but never factor how that impacts the way they handle it. For some reason, people like you think that the company's just going to sit on their ***, and just go down without a fight. You over simplify everything. I can see it now, "ARR fails because fans found out that it spent too much money in development." Genius right?

If this were a new dev team trying to making it, I'd be less optimistic. Luckily, some people can afford mistakes, while other's can't. It's also fortunate enough to carry the "Final Fantasy" name, mostly likely the only reason they might pull this off. The only thing ARR needs to be successful, is to be a fun game that people actually want to play. No one is going to ignore it just because it had a bad launch, while every review site is saying how great it is. Obviously, if the reviews are bad, they wont come back. That pretty much makes their path forward very clear. If they put more than 50 million or more into the right areas of development, that just might be what they need to attract people. Seeing as we have no idea what they're developing in great detail, I'm going to assume your negativity is a personal issue, not a logical one.

Try and recall how the name "Final Fantasy" came to be. If failure means the end of the company (Which I hope it does ), that might give them good incentive to stop all the bad ideas they've been spending money on for the past decade. Perhaps snap them out of this complacency "we" enabled. I do hope they pull out all the stops, so they don't fail again. That's what I would do. They even asked fans for input, which never would have happened without the failure. (I hope interacting with fans continues) If it fails again, maybe it's time to move on.

P.S.

I miss early 1.0 days when the negativity had real merit. It was an anti SE field day! White Knights were slaughtered daily!

We're bored at work.

I'm not baiting anyone. I can only discuss the huge amount of information provided by Yoshi-P.

Regardless of how much content is released, it's fair to say that the basic architecture of the game isn't going to change, right?

Combat doesn't change when you get to a new area, and neither will the themepark game design of shuffling between quest marker to quest marker.

Do you really find it that hard to believe that I wouldn't like that, when over a dozen new MMORPGs using that design come out and flop each year?

I'm not baiting anyone. I can only discuss the huge amount of information provided by Yoshi-P.

Regardless of how much content is released, it's fair to say that the basic architecture of the game isn't going to change, right?

Combat doesn't change when you get to a new area, and neither will the themepark game design of shuffling between quest marker to quest marker.

Do you really find it that hard to believe that I wouldn't like that, when over a dozen new MMORPGs using that design come out and flop each year?


Edited, Apr 16th 2013 1:46pm by Killua125

Um, if only 20% of the content has been released, how can you make any kind of assumption as to what the other 80% will be with any kind of certainty? The answer is, you cannot. Until you play it, you have no idea other than the 1-2 paragraph blurbs that have been released about it.

And actually, the basic architecture of combat could change pretty significantly between now and launch, and it has been stated that it WILL change considerably. Not to mention, combat and questing are not the only aspects of the game. They are parts of the game, and if they share similarities to WoW, so be it. They also share similarities to a bunch of other MMO's NOT named WoW. I'm still waiting to be overwhelmed by all this information confirming that ARR is a WoW clone. Care to provide some links?

I made this thread because people are tired of that system. Star Wars couldn't even make people want it. People argue that it wasn't the World of Warcraft stuff that made SWTOR bad. Then what about all the other hundreds of themepark quest MMORPGs which have flopped?

That should tell you something.