FFXI was good =) Just hard.
Here's a conference with some of the devs:
http://e3.gamespot.com/story/6210518/sq ... t-hardware
Things to note are:
"As with WOW, they're aimed at the casual user. We're aiming for more casual users. However, we don't want to make a copy of WOW. We want to be unique."
"FFXI was originally designed based on party battles. With FFXIV, we'd like to have content for solo players, as well as extremely large battles for players to play together." (Thank god, the only main thing I didn't like about the game was that you couldn't solo)
"For FFXIV we want to make it so that if you want to play in a party, you can, if you want to play solo you can, or if you want to play all day, you can. We will have game systems and content there for all types of people."
And "We are considering all options at this time, including Microsoft hardware."