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- Oct 12, 2010
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WoW e.g. has talent choices, but my experience there and in other MMOs is the choices you have to "make your character unique" aren't really all that unless you're okay essentially sabotaging your character. The choice you have instead with FFXIV is making a character who has a sense of personality and fashion you find meaningful on a personal level; admittedly meaningless if you only care about the numbers and abilities, but it clearly strikes a cord with a lot of people.
I actually really dislike the new wow talents as they've moved tons of stuff that were baseline for specs before to the talent tree, and much of it is mandatory. So they've very much created an illusion of choice.
The irony is the Pandaria system, although much shouted as being dumbed down, actually did give you a fair amount of choice as most of the fundamental choices were generally within 5% of each other performance-wise but usually supported different gameplay styles. For example, Death Knights could pick between three different rune generation systems that suited different players but were all ultimately very close in numbers if played well.
I guess my illusion of choice argument is actually relevant to most MMOs that allow you to spec characters, as there is almost always going to be a far numerically superior cookie-cutter build over anything a player is going to pick (as you yourself allude to).