Lionx: What do you mean by the camera zooming behind your character as you dash into battle? Just curious.
What i meant, was the sense of epicness you get when your character can run/dash quickly into battle all hyped and ready to do something.

Remember how Blade and Soul had that Camera that followed you epicly when you ran...? Things like that can really entice or keep a player playing. Little things like that. Similarly, if you know WoW, Warriors can Charge, and the Camera tries to catch up quickly to the Warrior.

The feeling of doing a Shout then Charging straight into battle really amps the player up unlike the feeling of FFXIV or even FFXI's system of battle. Then the battles are quick with multiple button presses (think of FFXIV's battle system before auto attack and think of yourself pressing your buttons every 1-2 seconds while paying attention to surroundings). Even more fun is the freedom to jump off a cliff going whoaaa!! then target a mob, and hit Charge, letting you do dive in mid air safely without fall damage right into an enemy engagement 15 feet away.

Warrior charge - YouTube

Basically, if MMOs don't have that action oriented feel, and the excitement you get from engaging something in such a manner, most people would not care as much.

Just look at Tera, or even Phantasy Star Online 2 for example:

PSO2 -- more combat - YouTube

Intricate juggle systems, movement etc.. FFXIV unless built from scratch, won't be doing something as fast paced as this. And i believe that, it will be a huge factor in the future of this game in terms of getting people interested in this wide market with so many MMOs.


I hate this, seriously. No MMO will give WoW a run for it's money. It is so insanely far ahead of the pack in profit that if you get 1% of the profit that WoW makes, you're doing well. The rest of the world's MMOs should not be compared to WoW. WoW is a different thing, and until a Pokémon MMO comes out I honestly can not see what MMO will challenge WoW. It's like saying that a new mp3 player is an "iPod beater". No mp3 player will ever be an iPod beater - and this is in no way down to the lack of quality of a product. It's simply because the market is already 90% iPod, and you would have to get far too many people to give up their iPod to get an iPod beater and they simply won't do that. To get a WoW challenger, you would have to get over 5m subscribers at least, let alone 16m. To be a successful MMO, you do not have to give WoW a run for it's money. You simply have to make a decent profit.
While true that you only have to make a profit to be successful, what I believe the point of the matter is, unless you can show people you have something better that WoW doesn't have, then it won't turn any heads.

Honestly though WoW has lost i think..at minimum 20% of its userbase due to stagnation. It tries to be everything but doesn't excel in anything so people move onto games like Rift, Aion, the new Star Wars MMO... However, WoW did revolutionize MMORPGs away from the EQ era, and ignoring that in your design like FFXIV was foolhardy. You don't have to copy or supersede it, but don't ignore it altogether like the dev team did. This is where the comments of "SE does not understand MMORPGs" come from. Things didn't just stop after FFXI, MMOs evolved and the initial devs didn't pay attention to it.


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If the PS3 launch fails, then i suggest they go the micro-transaction way with a free game like many other titles that made more money than subscription fees had.