Quote Originally Posted by drwaffles View Post
And that's a bit of a sad state of affairs, don't you think? Everything becomes the same and originality is stifled, as is the case with virtually all of the cultural mainstream. Practically speaking you're right, of course; it makes sense to go down the tried-and-tested route when your sole motivation is your bottom line. But there's no need to jump down my throat for a bit of articulated wishful thinking.
I don't think its a sad state of affairs. Read what I wrote again: "and everything inbetween". That means that games that copied WoW have died and games that have not copied WoW have survived. More to the point, it means that life has gone on, with or without WoW. Games will live without copying WoW, and games will die from copying WoW, and the opposites ring true. If a company nails a game, it'll stick around. If a company flops on a game, but can fix it fast enough, it'll stick around. If a company flops on a game and fixes nothing or fixes the wrong things, it'll die.

Copying WoW has nothing to do with anything outside of the fact that as the king of both commercial and critical success, others have taken things from it. That fact isn't really special, though, considering that WoW took from many games before it. Games that died were games that were either not fun, were fun but under-funded, or were kinda-fun but couldn't fix their problems fast enough. Every single MMO has flaws; its all about whether the flaws are shitty enough to keep people from paying to play the game. No more, no less. WoW simply slapped a lot of good things into a game that at the time, didn't have any real competitors that could run with it.

Getting back to my main point: what the hell do you want out of XIV? Do you want a souped-up XI? A multiplayer console FF? Put out some real ideas, not the tried-and-true "as long as its not WoW, its cool!" garbage, because XIV wasn't WoW, and XIV turned out to be garbage.