This game is not finished - Truth?

[Ouch!]

A typical expansion for Final Fantasy XI added more content than there currently is in FFXIV. They traditionally introduced a number of new quests, missions (including complete story lines), multiple end-game events, dozens of new enemies and notorious monsters, hoards of new gear, usually additional jobs, and other significant content bonuses. An expansion.

Granted, all this was usually introduced over a period of time, but except for the Wings of the Goddess (which took an ungodly two years to complete largely because of the concomitant development of FFXIV), it was over the period of a few months.

It's not completely that Final Fantasy XIV is lacking in content. It was definitely lacking at launch, but I do think it's starting to get there now. However, it's also disappointing that even though they acknowledged the failure shortly after release, here we are about eight months later with relatively little introduced in the way of content. Granted, a great deal of this has been due to the volume of mechanical and gameplay errors that required correction before they could even think about content, but that's hardly an excuse that leads me to forgive the development team.

I don't mean this as a way to criticize you, Bob, but so far as I know, you're pretty new to the MMORPG scene and don't have much in the way of a basis of comparison. Final Fantasy XIV is woefully far behind the rest of the new titles in the genre, largely because Tanaka failed horribly at keeping up with how the genre had changed. World of Warcraft (remember that FFXI is over two years older than WoW and is very much an MMORPG modeled off of the original successes) shifted the MMORPG landscape, and in the development of FFXIV, Tanaka rebelled against those changes which have already been embraced by the majority of the MMORPG-playing community. I recommend checking out the development blogs for other pending releases. Some big names out there to take a look at are, as Omecle mentioned, Guild Wars 2, but also others like Star Wars: The Old Republic or Blade and Soul. Pay careful attention to how much more involved an active community is in the development of these titles (each from established developers). Star Wars: The Old Republic is probably the closest to Square Enix as they don't have much (read: any) experience with MMORPGs. But look how much more they're involved with building a community. I mean hell, they let their fans name one of the job classes. Square Enix and its approach to developing MMORPGs is downright archaic. Yoshi-P is trying, but he can't single-handedly reverse Square Enix's entire mentality about video game development. Boy does that company love their secrets.

The problem with the content is that a large portion of it is glorified grind. That's not the kind of content that keeps most people coming back. Final Fantasy XIV needs end game. It needs more than 20-some NMs, most of which don't pose threats to alliances. It needs goals for high level characters that are difficult to obtain. It needs gameplay mechanics that people can understand and master. I've followed some discussions about exploration of the mathematics behind player stats (whether you're into it or not, the community of an MMORPG is driven by the few who take the time to derive calculation formulas to exploit them, and the ultimate consensus at this point is that your stats are largely insignificant. These types of developmental oversights are unacceptable.

As much as I would love for FFXIV to become worth playing, the game has not yet deserved such optimism or defense from criticism. It is the sore thumb of the MMORPG community right now, and deservedly so. I am cautiously optimistic that, given time, the new development team is headed in the right direction and can salvage the wonderful parts of this game (it's lore and potential therein, mostly). Unfortunately, time is not a luxury that Square Enix has right now. By the time the new battle system starts rolling out, it will have been almost a year from release. They need to step up their game, or the game is going to become vaporware, no matter how spruced up it is by the time they release it on the PS3.

And I think that's also one of the biggest problems. They're overestimating how useful that PS3 launch is going to be to them. Let's be honest. Outside of Japan, the console MMORPG is almost nonexistent. The largest market share for the genre is dominantly computer. The only value of a PS3 release is another potential shot at reviews, and I'm not sure the larger part of the MMORPG community has already been poisoned against the game anyway.