You’re just getting to the good stuff. 
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Yeah I’m enjoying myself so far. I’m really looking forward to Shadowbringers. Granted there are some key things I miss like my rivalry with the Horde and that feeling of knowing someone else is going through something from a different perspective etc. BUT, I am having fun. Graphics are undeniably great. I’m getting used to my class and the way the game works. I love that there’s so much cutscenes and that I’m actually getting to know who the characters are. Plus, the capital cities have been amazing and have felt like actual cities.
I know I mentioned I’m trying it out due to the hype, mostly true, but I also saw the Endwalker trailer and was like, “Okay, I gotta get there.”
Yeah, a lot of your perception of the story will depend on how you perceive your own character. My quixotic dragon man feels different from my brother’s lion samurai which feels different from those dozens of catgirls which feels different from my guildie’s hulking dark knight.
Even though it’s the same story, they give you enough minor dialogue choices that, while they ultimately do not affect the narrative, allow you to keep in line with how you view your own character.
Tldr
Two different games for two different types of people.
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The main one I agree with here is the races. Even now I find them all to be so boring, visually, culturally, and just…everything about them. Many of the models are surprisingly bad, too; the male dragon guys run really weird, the Hrothgar have no expression, and the potato things exist.
The game itself is fun and different from WoW, they do professions so much better, and the story actually flows from expansion to expansion rather than being more or less restricted to one expansion. There are just a lot of nitpicky things that have grown to be more of an issue for me over time as I continue to play it (and get out of ARR, which is one of the worst experiences I’ve had in an MMO good God…)
But the races are definitely it’s weakest point. They didn’t even bother giving Hrothgar or Viera a lot of helmets to wear visibly, which I consider lazy. It was the biggest gate for me to overcome, and I still can’t say I’m happy with my character. He’s fine, but he has no culture or personality due to the universal starting experience, which was me being surrounded by humans for almost ten hours until a cat girl showed up. And even now the story doesn’t even brush on much outside of humans, potatoes, and now a bit of elf stuff. I can’t say I’ve grown super invested in the politics behind the Sultana and all that goes on there. At least the dragon story is cool.
Eh, the game is a decent enough RPG but I often times feel like it’s more of a high graphical version of Club Penguin than an MMO style world. The fact the zones are so broken up really takes me out of seeing it as a world to begin with.
My view of capitalism is that companies and business should provide customers with what they like, so that’s sounds GREAT.
On the other hand we have EA and Activision, no matter how detrimental the product is, they are reluctant to change it even if it cost them money.
Make money out of me but treat me well and act like you care about the product 
Could you imagine that? If Blizzard communicated or listened a little bit in order to improve WoW for both casual and top ranking players?
What I would say that Squarenix messed up was the PC game of FF Dissidia… they made FreetoPlay and very shallow 
(I forgot every other controversy they may had, right now if I see a bug in Halo/EA game/Nintendo I say “DAMMIT BLIZZARD” because of the habit… XD)
Once you have unlocked an actual job the GCD is actually cool, you have to follow rotations that empower the next move and you will have several buttons that are not bound to the GCD
They did a “No Man Sky” move and the playerbase love them now xD
Yeah, they as a whole are questionable and have contributed to… FOMO (pre order next FF expansion to get a item that gives you +30% EXP all the way to the level cap in the next expansion, for example, and one pet) but… even the worst examples we can come up with (like the port of NiEr Automata being a downgrade, but not that much IMO) is 100 times less agreggious than many horrible moves by Blizzard, Activision, EA, Ubugsoft and…
Bathesta
Those greedy bastars are the lesser evil… but now that I think about it… I got all Deluxe editions (even some physical collector editions) from Blizzard, and most of its DLC because “I love this company since my childhood and it treats well HOTS and Starcraft 2 and is better than all other companies so I will support them with my money 
”
They terminate support for SC2, HOTS and are messing up WoW
I hope the FF14 team never does that
Heres my issue, i dont mind these systems, in fact, i think wow should have these treadmills in game, i know for a fact some people like it.
The issue becomes when i HAVE to participate. It burned me out in BFA and it caused me to bounce from SL super early.
These treadmils should be seperate content like WQ use to be just there for you to finish up rep, get a few levelling gear items, or a transmog while doing other stuff…thats where these time gated treadmills can shine…
Their big mistake in SL was integrating all major content loops into this treadmill time gated mechanic…and then attaching mandatory stuff for SL to it all.
Its worse than BFA pathfinder was for me, and i LOVED the WQ in BFA up to that…it ruined it for me. Now that same mechanic is in SL three times and all three occurrences is attached to mandatory content (aka dont bother playing SL if you dont do it)
There’s significant overlap.
And the fact that FFXIV caters to a much more diverse playerbase inherently draws me in, even if WoW caters exclusively to my preferred playstyle. WoW, you can play with people that like WoW, loot treadmill and all. FFXIV has its own (limited) loot treadmill, in addition to people that are here exclusively for a good story, gives RPers much more leeway, allows those Animal Crossing fans to work their magic, gives WoW’s “goblins” much more control over their economic engagement, gives that one weirdo that likes chocobo breeding his own endgame, and so on.
There’s so much there, and the fact that I can play with people diverse tastes - and dabble in that “side content” not out of obligation, but because it is legitimately novel and even enjoyable on its own merit - will increase my engagement with the game a dozen times over.
Yep. The individual systems are awesome. But they all funnel you to a specific end. And they will inevitably be discarded and rebuilt for the next expansion, so why invest your time?
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RPGs are all about story, which FFXIV wins hands down.
Races have plenty of depth, you just have to do the story. At first, sure… there isn’t much leading into what each race is / what their part is in the world.
The lack of PvP is one of the biggest benefits to the community of FFXIV IMO. There isn’t a “gladiator or gtfo” mentality or the incredible amount of toxicity that follows the eSports style gameplay. Sure, the world “doesn’t feel dangerous at all”, but it is still pretty fun.
“The story doesn’t make me think” - At first, it isn’t great, but it is still much better than WoWs. I would say that it starts getting good around Heavensward. Just because there isn’t an internal PvP conflict like with WoW, doesn’t mean that the story isn’t there. The story is PvE related against various “bad guys”.
The class system is amazing in FFXIV - no need to level 12 different characters. All your progression is done on one character. In WoW, I’ve capped out my character limit on several servers trying to play different classes and factions. In FFXIV, I have two characters… and the only reason I have the 2nd one was to replay the story, which they recently added a feature to do that very thing on your main character, so no need to have the 2nd character at all.
For RP, I am pretty sure your character “talks” when you chat in FFXIV and there are A TON more action emotes / facial expressions / poses / etc. You just have to do the relevant emote action and give a much more “real” feel to your conversation than the default 2 second action loop that WoW has.
Moreover, the FFXIV community is MUCH better in general with little / no toxicity unless you start being toxic yourself - then people jump on you and tell you to go back to WoW. The community there overwhelmingly supports the devs because they actually listen. They don’t try to direct their game into a money milking eSport.
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Dorkadin seems negative on aspects of FFXIV. As someone who has the opposite view…gearing is GREAT on FF14. People here are so used to the stupid “rng drops, never reaching full endgame gear” that they identify this system as good and its not…its terrible and killing wow. In FF14 they removed RNG determining if you’ll ever see endgame gear or not by raid drops weekly or 10+ or 20+ M+ drops after said amount of dungeons+tons of valor form. I’m tired of this rng system Ion believes works. It doesn’t, it creates frustration.
If we’re gonna go on the greed train I could tell you quite a few things about FFXIV just the same. Tell me those mount prices again in their store? or how the mounts are the only ones with that many seats, or how every holiday item goes on the store and becomes unobtainable after that one time except through the store?
You’re holding FF14 on a high pedestal, using arguments against WoW and then conveniently not holding FF to the same standards when they very much do the same thing.
Well i’m glad you can admit it’s pretty much a singleplayer rpg then, as for housing if you wanna talk about entrapment and greed it’s right there. If you want to join the (poorly managed) housing then you are forced to keep subbing if you want to keep that house or it gets auto-demolished. And the raiding environment in FF14 is poor, it’s 4 boss rooms you teleport into and that’s it. The only other raid is LFR style catch-up stuff.
No, no it’s not. Why are you even defending their lacking open world and that you pretty much sit in cities teleporting into everything? That’s very much a point that FF14 does worse than WoW, there’s no ‘world’ feeling, it’s not very RPG and certainly not massive.
Classic has more of a community sense than FF14 ever will, I’ve already adressed this, because of the teleporting into everything and the fact that people burn out of content too quickly you end up with unstable FC’s. There’s no sense of community like the Horde and Alliance players, no real gameplay interactivity that happens while leveling or doing stuff out in the open world (again because there’s nothing to really go out there for in FF as mentioned) it’s all very disconnected and without much player interaction. People leave FF too quickly and play it for the story/a quick mount farm each patch and then it’s done again. You defend every little point like it’s a boon but it’s really not, it makes FF14 feel hollow and barebones. And that’s without me getting into the lacking and restrictive systems all-round again, such as the gearing which is far too bland and has only gotten further simplified over time.
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Basically industry standard.
You can get at least one multi-passenger mount through gameplay.
When has WoW allowed you to earn a store mount through gameplay before putting it on the store?
FFXIV has stuff on its store to maintain availability, by and large. Whereas that Brutosaur decision was entirely enforcing artificial scarcity to drive token purchases. Full stop. Where was the design value in that decision?
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I’m not negative about it because FFXIV has a definitive BiS, that’s fine and I think WoW could do with scaling it back a bit to that again.
I’m negative about it because the gearing and stats is just about the most bland and basic system you can think up. There is absolutely nothing special about the gear, no cool effects or gameplay related stuff to them. Certainly nothing like wow trinkets or tier set bonuses, or crafted special effects. Take for example a shaman in my guild, he recently got the axe from herod while leveling and has been having a super fun time with it because it makes him ocasionally go whirlwind and do great extra AOE damage. He is super happy about having that axe and loves using it in dungeons. Stuff like that just doesn’t exist in FF14.
That and there’s no good incentive to even gear up in FF14, there’s no pvp or world content where you can really feel its impact. You may as well just not bother and get the easy gear next patch and you’re good again.
Yeah I agree. I recently learned they force new players through BFA and Exiles Reach and I’m like wtf? I love the new zone but people shouldn’t be forced into it. One of WoW’s strengths was highlighting the differences between all the races and really finding one you identify with in terms with beliefs and aesthetic etc. Idk, I guess that’s why I’m also giving my experience because “maybe” Blizzard made it streamlined like FF14 due to FF14’s popularity? Idk. But I definitely think players should be able to go to their unique zones if they’re new.
Exactly. People go to FF14 with the mindset of wow “I can just jump into the action!” “its probably very similar to wow” or “Im not going to like this because of what ive heard” and they already dislike it due to things they hear. As someone who has played the big 3 to endgame extensively(wow, ff14, ESO) - I went into each 1 with a blank mindset, NO expectations and enjoyed it all
See, this is where the philosophies diverge.
Gear is ultimately your ticket into the next tier of content - content that you should be doing not because of how rewarding it is, but because of how inherently enjoyable the content is. They’re not strongarming you into the loot treadmill.
And while I would like more unique gear… I understand that this is the price that must be paid for the rest of the game to actually get any attention at all, and to allow me the time to explore different facets of the game once I’ve put my time in on the loot treadmill.
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“Sometimes simple is better” and FF14 has proven that in comparison to wow where overcomplexity has ruined gearing. Also you can pug endgame extreme trial fights/savage raids in said new gear.
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It could be better, but they need to change their stance on 3rd party addon support.
Slippery slope. And they do tend to lend a blind eye to their use regardless…
But WoW fell into the trap of the playerbase weaponizing addons against each other (DPS meters, raider.io, etc.), and subsequently designed their game with the understanding that all serious players will have addons informing them of every possible condition, so someone playing “vanilla” is at an extreme disadvantage.
I will take the more moderated experience any day.