I was with WoW before I tried playing SWTOR when it just started.
SWTOR has amazing action cinematics. The solo story of your toon is also awesome. However, i find their zones small. I dont find their World big. Wow’s zone are way bigger. Also, it’s hard to get a group on its dungeons while leveling due to low population. Even after I maxd my level, I struggled to find a group for 4-man.
Like WoW, I need a guild to do raids. And there were guilds in there but not that many. I really felt that SWTOR is not as Massive as WoW. It didnt take long and I came back to WoW. And I never left WoW again.
WoW is the best now for PVP & PVE, but Evercrack was the best PVE MMO, still. (Evercrack and Everquest are very different, people who played know what I mean)
Does this really matter, though? As someone that still loves wow and hated the ff experience, I couldn’t care less if it is peak mmo or not. I will play it as long as enjoy it and at the end of the day, that is what matters. What is it worth for me if another game is the top 1 if I don’t enjoy it? Nothing at all.
And to be honest, most of the points you raise are totally subjective. Looks better? Subjective. Better story? Subjective (and I don’t think any mmo has a good story, to be fair. Want a good story? Pick a book. A good one.) Better rp? Subjective. Better movement and combat? Subjective. Better solo content? Subjective.
It all comes down to enjoying the game you are playing or not. And that is a very personal experience.
There is no Mythic+ content. Raids are 8-mans though so you get to enjoy the close-knit feel of a team that way.
Anyways, AFAIK, new raid tiers usually only have like, 4 Mythic raid bosses. Sometimes they’ll also release completely stand-alone Mythic bosses outside of raid tiers. And then they have “Ultimate” bosses who are designed for the absolute cutting edge end-of-tier type difficulty raid bosses, but you only get one of those per expansion.
The game is much more concerned with casual players. There are LFR-only 24-man raids for instance, and playing through the main raids in LFR is mandatory as part of the story - very story-focused / casual focused, not really progression player focused.
You need a large playerbase for MMORPGs to work, and because of the extreme cost in developing and maintaining games in this genre, if a game starts to falter, it can quickly spiral downwards. WoW is too large for that to ever fully happen, but the mindset the current devs have has killed other games in the past that actually had extremely good starts.
We’re actually seeing that on WoW right now; Alliance is having massive participation issues across the board in all levels of mid to high level play. I’ve watched more Alliance guilds flat out die this tier than I did back in WoD between both Horde and Alliance, and trying to do any sort of PvP content on this faction has pretty much killed everybody I know’s desire to keep playing.
What’s happening there could potentially happen on Horde side as well if the game continues on it’s current path.
If you have a set group of people, it’s fine right now and will continue to be fine until it’s not.
Some people want to enjoy the game, but because everybody else they know aren’t enjoying it, their options start to turn into “pay more money to transfer servers or factions”, and at that point, people are making the choice to leave for a game that doesn’t have that as the choice at all.
None of these games are publishing sub numbers, but engagement metrics and social media presence is actually a good indicator of what’s going on.
WoW’s still high on the list, but the engagement for the most part is not positive. Whereas other games are at similar or slightly lower levels, but it is positive. This should be concerning and it’s doomsaying, it’s a fact and something that can be addressed.
What’s interesting to me is that the FF14 forums don’t have nearly as many posts trying to justify their worth opposed to WoW, or even threads mentioning WoW. GD is honestly just a bunch of dudes asking for female Hrothgar, bunny-boys, and better headgear transmogs for the furry races… They don’t, by and large, try to compare themselves to WoW. They just have fun.
Why is the WoW playerbase so attached to defending WoW against a game that’s just doing it’s own thing and trying to please it’s playerbase?
FFXIV is not going for realism at all whatsoever, and it’s hilarious that you think it is. It’s just a different flavor of cartoony.
Outright wrong. It’s okay to not LIKE FFXIV’s story. That’s incredibly subjective. But the way they focus on the story and properly flesh it out over time is objectively better than the disjointed way WoW does storytelling, especially since we know they’re basically told “ok we want this, this, and this to happen because it’d be cool, figure out how to link them together”. That’s not how good stories are written.
I’d say it’s comparable, because, like you said, it depends on the players more than anything.
In terms of tools available to the players… it’s, again, kind of comparable.
FFXIV has MUCH better options for emotes and persistence stances and facial expressions. FFXIV has actual 3D armor and many, many options for more “casual” clothing. FFXIV has playable instruments. FFXIV has player and guild housing that’s highly customizable, unlike the Garrison. For all intents and purposes, these are all large boons for FFXIV’s RP Community that WoW does not have.
But WoW has a larger community in general. RP is still niche, but it’s more available and accessible on realms like Moon Guard and Wyrmrest than it is even on Balmung in FFXIV. On top of that, the addon support WoW enjoys is a colossal deal. While Profiles aren’t inherently a requirement to RP, they REALLY help, and things like ‘At a Glance’ are basically irreplaceable. Then there’s things like Tongues (for languages/accents), GHI (for custom items - I think TRP can do this too maybe?), and a number of other optional addons.
So FFXIV has much better innate tools, but WoW has a lot of expanded functionality thanks to addons, and a generally more active RP community, IMO.
I can’t say for sure, as I’ve not played SWTOR and have no desire to, but WoW has consistently been the most responsive MMO I’ve played when it comes to movement. I seriously doubt SWTOR does it better. (although the freedom of movement that comes with double jump and aerial mobility like in Wildstar was fun, not necessarily better though).
I get the impression you haven’t actually looked at what’s available to transmog in FFXIV. Yes, they do have some very Eastern options (not all Japanese), but honestly it’s only a couple in-game and a couple in the cash shop. There’s plenty of more normal, or just generally “fantasy-casual” options, and if I had to choose a game solely and being able to make my character look like I want, FFXIV is by far the winner here. Still subjective, but your description seems way off.
Guild Wars Transmog is awful and costs money.
Both have dye systems, which is a pretty big boon that WoW will never have, but I understand WHY WoW won’t get it.
Agreed on the grindyness of those games. You have freedom and no clear path you’re being funneled into, but most of what you do is just grind mindlessly. At least in Runescape.
As for the comments on sub model + cash shop? Eh. You’re right, but I feel it should be mentioned that RS3 is a lot worse about it than OSRS. But OSRS still has “bonds” which act as the WoW Token does, and it totally obliterates the early-midgame economic progression. And in a game like Runescape, that actually matters. It’s like 50% grind 50% economy. In WoW, it’s a bit frustrating, but having money doesn’t really give you much of an advantage (outside of player-controlled stuff like carries, I guess).
Don’t think anyone has ever once compared FO76 to an MMORPG.
Does it need to be THE peak mmo for it to be addressed, though? Hardly. The discussion of which one is the better has nothing to do with the game having enough people to keep healthy, and the problems of participation on the aliance side comes from people going to the horde, not to other games.
It often feels a lot more like people fighting because their toy is the best toy and they are better for playing with it.
WoW has lost its MMORPG aspect to me… It is a theme park pigeonholing AARPG at most. In Blizzard defense the industry went this way. Need to bring back the MMO (Social) and RPG aspect back to the industry. Get away from ESports and the Go Go Go mindset.
I don’t think anyone has any kind of personal issue with the GAME FFXIV or its devs.
It’s the ex-WoW players that stir up this kind of frenzy. So many people burn out on WoW after, you know, 6, 10, 14 years of playing and then have to justify all of that “wasted” time when they move on to something else, that you end up with people spouting off about how much BETTER FFXIV, or SWTOR, or ESO, or Wildstar, or whatever they moved to is than WoW. This happens most often with FFXIV at this point, since we’re past the era of new “WoW Killers” popping up.
If people would just quit and move on to FFXIV, people wouldn’t get so worked up about it. But people throw out their emotionally charged “bye losers, going to FFXIV because x” posts and it automatically puts people on the defensive.
People on FFXIV don’t really have a reason to do the same thing. Most people aren’t ditching FFXIV for WoW. They’re either long-time FF fans even before the MMO, more casual in general, or have less time investment to begin with to get so worked up over growing out of the game.
The social aspect is stronger than ever, you just want it to be in the game’s text boxes instead of being willing to use the plethora of superior social tools that have come out since the genre was founded.
Blizzard can’t FORCE anyone to play or talk with anyone else. But they can design content and systems in such a way that it encourages it.
Look at Classic leveling and compare it to Retail leveling (even before the SL streamlining), for example. People actually communicate and group up in Classic, because it makes things easier and is almost a necessity at times. There’s zero reason to ever do that in Retail because of the design of the game.
I’m not going to comment on specific changes I think should or shouldn’t happen, but the design of the game directly affects how likely people are to bother interacting with others.
They’re probably on blizzards pay roll. You can’t post anything critical of the game on these forums without being attacked by dozens of accounts that don’t even play the aspect of the game that they are defending.
There is no longer a social aspect, people are scared to ask questions in the game. No one believes in learning by doing and they are all scared to fail. Go watch video Go watch stream Go get this addon Go pick these talents et al. This has caused nothing but toxic behavior and made the game less of an MMORPG. I barely see anyone chat anymore. Even in guild ya Discord wutnot but people just want to race and treat WoW as a second job. This is the industry today.
It is the industries aka (Meta) mentalities of gamers today’s fault, I would rather have more random mobs, affixes, etc. in a MMORPG today than a bunch of how-to’s.