Trying to compare the global launch of FFXIV to the NA launch of FFXI is a completely inadequate comparison for three reasons. First, as others have pointed out, FFXI had almost a full year of live game play and live patches to support it prior to the fall of 2003. I think every serious MMORPG player can agree how terrible of an idea this was in FFXI's implementation because of the constant "us versus them" mentality that was rampant for the first 2-3 years of live NA game play. The Japanese players felt like the NAs, generally speaking, were intruding on their turf, just as the NA PC players felt about the NA PS2 players. Secondly, the MMORPG genre as a whole has evolved tremendously from early 2003 to late 2010. During the development cycle of FFXI there were only a handful of MMORPGs from which to draw upon, the most successful being Ultima, Everquest, and Dark Ages of Camelot. Being as such, the genre really had not yet been "defined," so to speak. The genre now has well defined characteristics which are now considered essentials, such as auction houses, shortcut keys, hotbars, etc. Third, the development cycle for an MMO to be released in 2010 is much longer than the development cycle of an MMO which was released in early 2003. If I had to guess, I would say that FFXI had, at most, a two year development cycle, whereas FFXIV, which I think it's safe to assume was "Project Rapture" had at least twice that, if memory serves me correctly. So no, I did not compare, and will not compare, FFXIV to FFXI when I formed my opinion.
However, I will compare the launch of FFXIV to the launch of two other recent MMOs which I played at launch: Warhammer Online and Lord of the Rings Online. In April 2007, LotRO had, arguably, the smoothest launch of any MMORPG to date. There was a tremendous amount of content ready to go from day one. There were very, very few bugs at launch, and none of them were "game breakers." The servers, of which there were only 10 I believe, were also extremely stable when compared to other MMO launches. LotRO also had virtually all of the essentials which are characteristic of successful MMOs at launch as well. The only feature which I found to be lacking in LotRO on launch day was the easy of search for and finding group members since I came to LotRO straight from FFXI. Another excellent feature that LotRO had going for it was there the development team already had a bunch of content in the pipeline, ready to go, for future updates. Within 1 year of launch, LotRO had added two new landmasses, doubled the epic story questline, and added one new 12-man raid and three new 6-man instance clusters. Given it's successful launch, the IP it was based upon, and the ease of learning and using the UI, LotRO continued to grow and be successful until Turbine decided to make some major shifts away from some of the core elements of the Shadows of Angmar content with the Mines of Moria expansion in late 2008. Since then, the game has had a steady decline in the player-base and the overall "fun" factor.
Warhammer Online released in September of 2008 and had a few similarities with LotRO - a great IP, many of the same essential features, a developer which had previous, successful experience in the MMO genre (Asheron's call 1 & 2 for Turbine, DAoC for Mythic). WAR also has some similarities with FFXIV - a very long development cycle, a fanbase loyal to the developer, lofty expectations. The most important thing that WAR has in common with FFXIV is an extremely underwhelming launch. Even though WAR had a lot of the essentials of the MMO genre, there were a lot of things that were broken and launch promises that had not been delivered on - class imbalances, Elf, Dwarf, Greenskin, and Dark-elf capital cities missing, bugs, unimpressive crafting, lack of worthwhile PvE content. There's the old adage in marketing that an unhappy customer will tell 10 people whereas a happy customer will only tell 1 or 2, or something similar. WAR's lackluster launch doomed the game. WAR had a number of great features, which if properly polished and improved upon, could have made it a serious challenger to WoW. Even with all of the problems, it's still, arguably, the best PvP experience on the market today. However, since the word-of-mouth advertising of WAR was so negative, it never recovered and currently only has a handful servers. The game, by almost all industry standards, was an abysmal failure.
Interestingly enough, after playing the FFXIV closed beta, and seeing first hand and the, shall we say, confusing design choices that SE made, I was cleaning out my closet one Sunday and came across my WAR collector's edition. I was going to through it out since it was a constant reminder of a wasted $80, but I decided to re-install it on a whim to see how the game had changed, if any at all since I had left after my initial 30 days almost two years ago to the date. I was pleasantly surprised, and a couple of months later I've even re-subscribed and still have fun taking and defending keeps in T2 and T3, but the game is definitely a testament to the "what if" sentiment. What if Mythic had listened a little more attentively to their beta testers? What if EA hadn't all but forced Mythic to push an unfinished product out the door due to the years of development and many delays? What if Mythic had done a better job of acknowledging their failures early on and working quickly to address them, rather than arrogantly relying on IP/developer fandom to keep the game afloat?
I feel that FFXIV suffers from the same flaws that ended up being the demise of WAR. I also think the overwhelmingly negatively reception of FFXIV in North America will relegate the game to nothing more than a niche status. Sure, there will be an influx of players when the PS3 release goes live, but how many of them will stick around? In the next 3-4 months, will the game have enough significant changes so that the PS3 player base doesn't have the same complaints that the PC player-base has? Also, FFXIV has another issue to deal with in 2011, (I feel reasonably certain that a majority of PS3 players who would play FFXIV also have a PC) there are two massively hyped MMOs looming on the horizon. Whether they succeed is somewhat irrelevant because they will still draw players' attention away from FFXIV, especially if they are dissatisfied with FFXIV at the time. If either Guild Wars 2 or The Old Republic has any moderate success at all, then those games will most definitely siphon off subscriptions and the dollars that go with them from FFXIV. Lack of funding leads to a lack of quality updates which leads to even fewer subscriptions ad nauseum.
Finally, I think there is one area when you can legitimately bring in FFXI when evaluating FFXIV - Did SE take some of the best elements of FFXI and incorporate them into FFXIV? Did SE take some of the poorest features of FFXI and improve upon them for FFXIV? I think that the answer is that they broke even, at best. In some respects, FFXIV takes a couple of steps forward, and in other respects it takes massive steps backwards. In my opinion, this is completely unacceptable for a company that has both the resources of SE and 8 years of MMO experience to draw upon. Like I said a couple of times before, when I played FFXIV, I felt like I was playing an MMO developed in 2002 or 2003, not 2006-10. It gives me the impression that SE either is completely ignorant of how the genre has evolved or is completely arrogant and stubborn when it comes to their design philosophies. By no means did I want FFXIV to be a WoW clone, I've never even touched WoW, nor did I want it to be too easy, which what I felt LotRO was. What I did want is a game that had an intuitive interface, a game that ran smoothly on my machine, which is very much above average in terms of specs, a game that had enough launch content to last for at least 60-90 days, playing an average of 6-10 hours/week (I do not consider grinding mobs for EXP content), and a game which offered a couple of fresh ideas to the genre. Of these four requirements, when compared to my initial time spent playing LotRO and WAR, I felt that FFXIV only delivered on one of the four, and even with the one thing that it did deliver on, it was a half-ass effort. Compared to WAR and LotRO, FFXIV has a terrible interface, terrible optimization for PC, and a dramatic lack of non-hamster wheel content.
