FFXIV has prettier graphics in every aspect, I agree. Outside of graphics though, nope.
I hope it's going F2P, I want to play this again but with fun games that I don't have to subscribe to there has to be something special to warrant a subscription bill from me. Gold Saucer was boring before I even got a chance to check it out.
FFXIV has better bosses and more fun battle system but that is.
On the other hand, FFXIV's battle system is fun but lacks metagame and is too strict, to the point where there's only 1 way to play right... and that players dont have to think a lot to maximize dmg or try harder once they "get it", in FFXI you would always check how could you improve your different equipment macros, f.e in a weapon skill that uses STR, you'd switch to ALL STR equipment, but this equipment is useless when you aren't doing a WS so you want a build for "TP BUILD" which requires to hit certain level of accuracy (it depends on the enemy's lvl, the more lvl the mob the more acc you need). FFXIV is just ->>> Try to get the bis, and if you don't, cap the accuracy for the battles you'll fight and that is :| and it usually follows a very predictable path, and it depends on annoying weekly caps/CDs -_-
And it's not only that, everything IS SO STRICT there's 0 room for trying out things, unlike in FFXI where devs were amazed at the uses people gave to the jobs lol, like using nin as tank.
Also, FFXI battle system was much much slower, this can be seen as negative, but it made people chat more (when waiting for TP we could) and so more socializing, which in a MMO is always very appreciated.In FFXIV everything is so fast, if you type you can screw everything up, so people ends up using voicechat tools like teamspeak and isolates themselves from the world. (Still, i'd speed things up in XI)
And let's not forget how 3 expansions in FFXI came out and they didn't raise the lvl, you had 2, 3 then 4 expansions where to choose to do endgame things, and the new equipment wasnt better than the old, just "different"... yes it's hard and a pain in the ass to get things, but when you came back 3 years later you were still a boss... in FFXIV if you quit and come back 6 months later you are shit already because of the ilvl raise nosense they commit every 6 months
So... in summary, to make an almost perfect mmo i'd just fuse FFXI campaigns + world + metagame and equipment system with XIV's battle system. FFXI has much more strong points than XIV, but the strong points of XIV are really really strong, that's why people like it, i guess.
