I’ve played both and he is 100% correct. RD2’s story is 100% superior to FF14, but so are a lot of video games. However, I’ve mentioned before that a lot of FF14’s story is bogged down by MMORPG padding. You could likely cook up something spectacular with quite a bit of condensing and editing.
RD2 is art.
The only thing truly special about FF14 is how fun the OST is.
I mean, Final Fantasy has ONE rig for all Player Races. Guild Wars has … six now? If you want to be generous and say that there’s two different body types (the animations are the same) then you’re at two for FF14 and 12 for Guild Wars.
Warcraft has two body type rigs with different animations for: blood/high/void elves, Durotar/Maghar orcs, goblins/vulpera, darkspear trolls, Mulgore/Highmountain tauren, night elves/nightborn/zandalari trolls, Ironforge/Dark Iron dwarves, humans, kul’tirans (they’re the only Allied Race in the game with a completely unique rig), gnome/mechagnome, worgen, pandaren, dracthyr. Looking JUST at Player Races, that’s 13 races with two different body type skeletons for a total of 26. And some of those Allied Races have custom animations, like how vulpera have an animated tail and a special sleep/wake/double jump animation that goblins don’t have.
So it’s totally disingenuous to say that WoW doesn’t have a ton of Player-facing rigs. They definitely do.
As someone who started playing FF14 in January of 2015, and has been around for every expansion since:
I don’t think it’s just mmorpg padding. I often feel/felt like the game didn’t trust me to understand its rather simple concepts the first time. It had to keep beating me over the head with them over and over like I’m some child who’s just learning the alphabet. On top of that, its pacing issues also extend to its long-winded explanations that could be summed up in one or two sentences.
I have many other criticisms of the game, one of which is its considerably extreme lack of gameplay while doing the story (Coincidentally Gw2 actually handles this far better, but in a different way). It’s handled like a visual novel, with very poor dungeon/trial “gameplay” sprinkled in between. I firmly believe that if you tout yourself as a game, then you should lean primarily on what only that medium can leverage over any other form of entertainment. Gameplay. FF14 has very little of that during the leveling process.
I can’t say anything about its soundtrack, I’m not its target audience. I think I enjoyed Ravana’s theme during Heavensward and little else. I often played with game sounds off. Took a 2 year break after Endwalker both bored and insulted me with its (IMO) cheap ending.
The only real flaws in wow is the archaic customisation. Where are the armour dyes? Where’s the player housing? Where’s the customisable weapon sizing and anchor points? Where’s the customisable idle animations? Where’s the additional emotes?
These are the true things that firmly place wow in the 2004 era category.
I’ve been told multiple times that how primals are made being told to you in 17 different 15 minute cutscenes and the final villain reveal with zero foreshadowing over hundreds of hours of gameplay being a depressed bird who can destroy planets with bad vibes is masterful writing and one of the best storylines ever written.
Maybe we just have bad taste.
This is so true. FFXIVs world is just…bland…and feels empty and flat. WoW has big mobs little mobs, lots of mobs…animals living their lives and so on.
Even guild wars 2 which has zones like FFXIV has a lot more lively world with a lot less invisible walls other then around the border of the zones, jump puzzle areas and a few other spots to prevent getting stuck.
FFXIV world is invisiable walls galore and palces you cant land or anything when mounted.
FFXIV story is the best in any MMO as well as the character development. However its world design is…sad. I blame consoles personally for holding it back. They should have dropped PS4 and Xbox Series S with dawntrail. Altho it scares me when Yoshi P says he wants FFXIV to be suppported on teh Switch 2 one day…taht will probs be as strong as a PS4 or a tiny bit more so they are only going backwards.
TLDR: For me, I just enjoy FFXIV more than WoW. Although the latter has better combat, I’m very big on story and class fantasy.
I was a big WoW lore nerd, and especially loved stuff about the light, void and legion. Although Danuser is gone now, the damage done to WoW lore has killed my interest. BFA was a strange mess, SL was boring and did no favors. DF was decent damage control, feels way too lighthearted. I also greatly dislike these recent class/race changes.
Been playing WoW again for MOP remix. It’s quick fun, and the questing has reminded me of how good WoW storytelling can be. It’s goofy stuff, but there is strong messages and it can get a little dark (far better than the all the sugar DF gives) but is a bit annoying how zerg rushed raids and dungeons are, that sometimes people just afk through the whole thing
EQ2 housing is much much better than ESO’s. In fact, that’s the best part of the game.