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Something I've been really curious about lately is just what all changed with A Realm Reborn. I never got the chance to play the original release of XIV, and I never will get the chance. So here's what I want to know from people who have played both: What kinds of things were improved with the rerelease? What kinds of things did you maybe even prefer from the original game?
The graphics were better, but not very efficient. Character models were a lot better than they are now, but a ton of areas looked very very bland and copypasted. Some areas were downright terribly designed. There were some great areas (like coerthas), but they were the exception to the rule.
The combat and character development of the game at launch was extremely bad, slow and buggy. The combat in v 1.23 (final version before shutdown) was actually really good, and I actually like it better than the combat of ARR. Too bad that the combat in 1.23 was still greatly limited by the still awful user interface, which didn't just look bad, but also was very laggy and had way too many clicks to do even the simplest of actions outside of battles as well.
ARR retained the idiotic armory system from V1, even though they implemented jobs for every class in v1. I think the game would have been a lot more gooder if they just revamped the entire character progression system because right now it is a bastard of two poorly thought out systems brutally fused into one.
What Mirage said, I agree with. Also...
1.x required you to get parties together in order to beat some of the later job quests. L50 job quests required 8 people.
There was no duty finder or party finder. It was /shout in Uld'ah. Also, no Mor Dhona settlement and no housing meant that pretty much everyone congregated in Ul'dah.
A failed meld would break the gear as well as the materia. The upside to this was a bustling crafted gear economy as people constantly needed to get new gear as a result of failed melds. The economy was considerably better in 1.x as far as I'm concerned.
Arrows were consumable items and had different effects (eg. poisoning, blinding, etc).
In 2.x, it's easy to spam leves and rocket up the levels for DoH & DoL, while levelling your battle classes might take a bit longer. In 1.x, however, you could power level people up to L30 in very quick time, then get a grind party together and camp in one spot killing things in order to level up, still at a pretty solid speed. However, in 1.x, while leves were still great for levelling DoH & DoL, you would be doing about 50 times the number of them per level. It is insane how easy it is to level DoH & DoL now compared to back then. Genuinely bonkers.
In 1.x you got shards for killing enemies and also for mining/fishing/logging any item.
In 1.x you did not choose which item you got from a mining/logging point and just clickclickclick. There was a timing/searching minigame for gathering that would have RNG-driven results. Each node could get you one of 3-5 different results designated to that area.
Maps were huge by comparison to the current maps, even Coerthas. The downside was the copy/paste Mirage mentioned. To get around easier, each outer world aetheryte was linked to various aetherial nodes which you would have to attune to and then could teleport to from the main aetheryte of that region.
1.0 had high ambition and no execution. ARR has no ambition and high execution.
Effectively, 1.0 was an interesting footnote in MMO history that approached (but never achieved due to its early death) excellence toward the end of its life. ARR is just kind of a forgettable, shameless, mediocre game created out of financial desperation. It borrows all of its merit from every other game in the series and its potential is greatly stunted at a fundamental level.