i decided to re-post my response to Jim Sterling's opinion article earlier on not talking about FFXIV.

Jim's story can be found: here.

I must mention that my response was in no way meant to bash Jim for his opinion, I was merely responding with my own opinion + some facts. Keep in mind that while I was writing this, even though Jim's post sparked my comment, I was thinking about the general mass of people that have been complaining about the game. Parts of my comment also refer to the comments of others on his story.

Here is my response:

@Jim Sterling - I love reading your articles, at first I was skeptical of you, but I got used to full pages of your sarcasm and now can\'t wait to laugh at your reviews. Even this post made me laugh, however, I would like to respectfully disagree with your opinion, sort of.

While I soundly agree that Square takes a ridiculously long time to develop games, and that the entire FFXIII saga is ridiculous in every way; FFXIII and FFXIV are developed by two completely different groups of people.

Final Fantasy XIV has, too, been a 5 year long project, which is pretty normal for an MMORPG. I think one of the reasons that FFXIV was announced before FFXIII has been released is because the audience for an MMO is a lot broader than that of a standard RPG. Not to mention, as I believe someone else already stated, with the current MMOs out there (WoW, Aion, etc.) Square has to generate a decent amount of hype if they want FFXIV to catch up to the forefront. That being said, it would have definitely been possible for them to announce it at a later time and still create lots of hype... the game is set to be released in 2010, quarter unknown, and that doesn\'t leave much time left.

FFXIV will be appearing at Gamescom next week, and after that the only other thing I can think of before the end of the year is TGS; which doesn\'t leave much time for them to hype up the game. They also plan to have a 4-6 (I believe those are the right numbers) month beta. So given the time frame, it makes perfect sense for them to have announced XIV before XIII has been released.

Now I understand that it is SquareEnix\'s decision, as a company, when to announce their games, but seeing as how XIII and XIV have different development teams, the games are going to be created a different paces. Created at the same time, yes, but by different people. In fact, the development team for FFXIV is mostly the same team that developed XI.

To address the comments/complaints about \"wah wah wah, why are the MMOs part of the numbered series;\" it\'s because they\'re a STILL Final Fantasy games, they STILL have a story, and they use characters/lore from previous Final Fantasy games. I\'ve yet to see a valid argument as to why they SHOULDN\'T be part of the main series, if someone could supply me with one, please do.

To conclude, is it strange that Square announces later numbered installments to the FF series before previously numbered games are released?... yeah, kind of. But is it completely out of line/non-sensical? No not really. XIV needs to be talked about to really get people interested, a lot of time is invested into the development of an MMO, and there is still a beta to be held.

I still await the day when people stop complaining about silly little things like this, but I know it will never come.

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I would just like to see some other peoples' opinion on the matter. I don't understand why people have been bashing FFXIV... most of them don't even have reasons besides "it's stupid." For those that just don't enjoy MMORPGs I understand, there's nothing wrong with that, but some people just seem to be saying that the game is stupid, without even giving reasons.

I know that Jim was only stating that he doesn't understand why Square talks about FFXIV before XIII was out, but I think he is wrong and that FFXIV needs to be talked about, as I stated.

Most of what I have to say right now has already been stated above in my response to Jim's post, so for now I would just like to see the opinions of the community.