I think having quests at all is different from having WoW's design of a quest system. FFXIV made the quest systems EXTREMELY bad. Requiring a player pick up a quest in the city and then starting it in another location where they do not even bother telling you where to start it is bad design. Also, those quests are suppose to eventually lead you off to new locations, but FFXIV, you end up talking to this random crystal spire thing at random locations. FFXIV stifles what should be really fast and interesting in a quest system, so it's nothing like WoW's quest system.Spire said:FFXIV tries for every one of those feature sets. I know they renamed quests "leves" but let's not pretend they're anything else. FFXIV wants to be WoW but it doesn't know how.
And FFXIV's combat is a far more like WoW's than AoC's is, and they both depart from WoW in a number of ways (although FFXIV seems to only because of the features that haven't been implemented yet, whereas AoC actually tried something new).
Oh, and DDO is absolutely nothing like WoW.
WoW's combat is super fast action-based. WoW's combat considers positioning as a huge part of it, and its cooldowns on abilities are fast. That's not FFXIV. I felt like FFXIV's combat is so slow that it was pretty much like playing a turn based game. Doesn't really help that the first ability you have is pretty much an auto-attack. Might also be attributed to the leveling system and getting a lot of skills quickly, because every level up to 10 gave you really good abilities to work with.
I'm pretty sure DDO uses the same quest-based leveling, UI, controls, and some combat. I've played it.