I play both but I’m currently on a break from FFXIV for another 10 days.
I prefer FFXIV because I can get more done without needing a good group than I do in WoW. I have other games to play and I don’t want to dedicate many hours a week to prog the hardest content in the game and FFXIV allows me to make a lot of progress on my character without doing so, even if it is at a slightly slower rate. I can get all my weekly stuff taken care of in a few hours. I like the gear design more as it’s more grounded and practical and the hats and helmets don’t shave my character’s head and facial hair. I also love FFXIV story and I can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.
I luckily found a very nice guild in WoW which is the main reason why I haven’t unsubbed since DF came out and have been raiding with them on Heroic difficulty. My issue is that I need to do M+ in order to keep up and I’m just not a fan of it, especially as a DPS applying to groups. It’s a good system for people who want to keep running it over and over and over again, but I prefer the FFXIV system (Which was how WoW used to do it) where you earn currency and buy your gear with it.
However, I would not recommend FFXIV to people who don’t care about story because everything in FFXIV revolves around it and you’ll spend a lot of time reading and watching cutscenes, even for side content. It’s still possible to enjoy the game even if you don’t care about the story, but it’s the main focus of the game.
If you can afford to play both, then it’s even better.
I had the complete opposite experience. People explained boss fights to me, and were very kind. Sounds like you got a very rare case of toxicity, and you can report them if so. They will get a suspension. Don’t let one experience sour it all, there will always be a few bad apples in a huge batch of apples.
I’ll take the opposite of this, as I got into Final Fantasy XIV in early 2021 and kept with it all the way through Endwalker’s first major patch. What I mean by opposite is I love a lot of what Final Fantasy XIV is, but as it also requires a subscription price on top of box prices for the game and expansions there just isn’t enough to keep me for that price. Dungeons are done and out once you out-gear them (no Mythic Keystone equivalent), raids are too short (four bosses and no trash, as well as the outdated timed instance model for both raids and dungeons) and released over a long period of time (the main raid of Endwalker is still not done to my knowledge and it was released over a year ago now), and there is little else for me to chase though that may be primarily because I don’t know how their collection system works as well as a comparable website to Wowhead so I can look up things I’m interested in collecting.
Final Fantasy XIV does a lot of things right but to compare it directly with World of Warcraft is a bad idea. The former is a roleplaying game that happens to have some massively multiplayer online elements whereas the latter is a massively multiplayer online game that happens to have some roleplaying elements.
That’s like saying “If you love “SoandSo” in Far Cry, you will love Call of Duty”.
And much like that example, two different games with two different soandso’s because of how they execute the said soandso’s.
Why they have to question why? They can just say “Heck no” and move on and it would just be valid really.
Me personally, i was kind of bored at it by the 4th hour and just uninstalled it. No amount of “Please stick with it, it will get better in 100’s or 10 hours later and–” No. Either it get’s good under 90 minutes, or i’m out. There’s a reason why i stick with other MMO’s like Star Wars the Old Republic or Guild Wars 2 much better. Because they know to get to the good stuff right away.
He means “so and so.” He’s asking for example comparisons. As in, “if you liked so-and-so from WoW, you’ll like FF14 since it does that better.”
To directly answer the OP… (warning: massive post incoming) I actively play both games and have done so for the past 3 or 4 years or so. I’m pretty familiar with both the leveling and endgame process for both. So here’s what I would say to compare the two:
Both games have strengths and weaknesses that the other does not. I play the two games very differently, otherwise I would save myself the time and money and only pay for one sub. The most eloquent way I’ve heard it described is that WoW is an MMOrpg while FF14 is an mmoRPG. FF14 consistently goes out of its way to create moments of spectacle that will leave a lasting impression on you. There’s some boss transitions that are, if you pardon the crassness, “anime as ****” in both style and grandiosity. Even down to the skill animations… they tend to be flashier and more stylized than in WoW. A good example is that there’s a mechanic called a limit break, which typically only happens once in a given boss fight. While they are all functionally the same within a given role, each class has its own unique limit break animation and they are all as extra as you can want. To lend weight to this spectacle, FF14 has custom music for almost every dungeon and every boss fight. Sometimes these musical scores are sync’d with the mechanics. An early example that will stick with you is Shiva, an ice-themed boss. Her first phase uses a sweeping orchestra of strings but during her phase transition she freezes the party and clicks her heel on the ground, at which point the ice shatters accompanied by a drum riff and the music shifting into a hard rock score for the second phase. It underscores the moment quite distinctly.
As you level through FF14, you’ll notice that everything you do has its own little story attached to it. There is of course the main storyline, but every class has its own storyline as well. Every crafter class has its own storyline. Even unlocking somewhat utilitarian features such as the barbershop can’t be done without a cutscene introducing you to the feature from an in-world perspective. This is both the game’s main strength and it’s largest hurdle. To be clear, the main story in FF14 is one of my favorite video game stories in a very long time. But it also cannot be avoided. If you don’t like the world or the story or just want to get into the action, you’re going to struggle a bit with FF14.
On the subject of the story, one major difference with the story in FF14 is that you, the player character, are definitively the main character. WoW plays kind of loosey-goosey where they want to acknowledge how strong you are, but the story more or less happens alongside you rather than with you. Not the case in FF14. NPCs will recognize you. Events will happen solely due to your influence. The story will ultimately revolve around you.
I’ve talked a lot about what FF14 does well. For the most part it’s a lot of immersion and story-telling type of stuff. When it comes to brass-tacks gameplay… I think WoW has FF14 beat. Starting off with character customizability. There are no talents or anything of the sort in FF14. While you can have one character freely swap between every class in the game, every member of a given class will function exactly the same with exactly the same skills. What this leads to is some rotations that can feel incredibly rigid. Doing well in endgame is less about making good decisions on a moment’s notice as it is in WoW and more about practicing a given sequence until you can execute it with precision without fail. This goes for both the individual class rotations and for the boss fights, which typically feature simpler mechanics than WoW. Almost every mechanic can be boiled down to “stand in the correct spot.” As you move on, the spots become more precise and you get less warning. This is not to say that FF14 doesn’t have hard content - it absolutely does. But the difficulty is more in learning and memorizing a boss’ pattern so that you can effectively play DDR with them while flawlessly executing your rotation than it is about using your varied tools to solve a puzzle like it is in WoW. On the subject of class tools… they don’t exist in FF14. Think of the more unique abilities in WoW… CC tools like disorients or polymorphs or the like. There’s much less emphasis on that in FF14. While there are a few scattered generic skills that will inflict stun on enemies, your entire kit will be almost entirely devoted to your role’s throughput or to increasing the throughput of others. CC and the complexity it brings is barely an afterthought in FF14. Best you can do is some classes have a single ability to raise the party’s defense for a short time. But let’s talk about that bolstering of your party-member’s throughput some more since it’s another major difference… The majority of classes have an ability that benefits the entire party on either a 2 minute or 1 minute timer. Instead of bloodlust like in WoW… party-play is defined by 2 minute burst windows when every class’ buff tool comes up together and everyone uses their strongest abilities inside the burst window. This repeated in a minor form on a 1 minute CD. What this ultimately does is enforce precision in your rotation more. If you start to drift, your CDs will be misaligned compared to your party-members and your buffs won’t stack with them or your burst abilities won’t be available during the burst window and the group’s throughput will drop severely. Sticking to that 2 minute cadence is very important. This focus on party buffing is so prevalent that the few classes who don’t have any way to buff the party (Samurai and Black Mage) are notable because of it. Dubbed as selfish DPS, those classes are tuned to deal more damage on their own than other DPS classes. That’s actually a design point. Classes are designed to deal more or less personal damage depending on how much their support abilities buff the rest of the party. This could come as a shock to a WoW player where absolute parity between all of our DPS classes is of frequent contention here.
Ultimately I find FF14’s combat to be less interesting than WoW’s. It’s much more rigid with absolutely no way to customize or shake up your gameplay. The Savage and Ultimate fights are difficult for sure, but they all take place on a featureless Soul Caliber arena complete with a ring-out and you’ll see a lot of mechanics over again. (Many use standardized indicators so you’ll recognize immediately how a mechanic works even if you’ve never seen if before… most of them are some flavor of “dodge this.”) I think that the fights are less mechanically creative. But the flip side is that I find it much easier to “get hype” in FF14 and easier to lose myself in the world. In fact, I would say that it’s best to think of FF14 not as an MMO, but as a JRPG that you can play with friends next to you. You’ll find it has more in common with the JRPG genre than with WoW. Certainly FF14 has no test of skill similar to WoW’s M+ dungeons (dungeons are notoriously a joke in FF14). So which MMO you prefer will ultimately come down to which gameplay aspects you prefer. Or you could be like me and enjoy both games but for different reasons and so you play both. If you have the time and money for it, that’s certainly a very valid option. They’re both seasonal games so I find it’s pretty easy to swap between them as content for each ebbs and flows.
Thank you for such an in depth post (and to all the others that have posted).
I watched a few videos last night comparing the two and read a few articles.
I read above where I can pay to skip the story and get into gameplay. Is that accurate? Not saying I would do it but Im not the kind of guy that even reads wow quests and rarely watches cut scenes, so I think I would get really bored really quickly and just move on like so many have stated if it is REQUIRED and a long journey. Ill look into the skip today. If it is possible i will still try and play through the story line, but nice to know I have an “out” if needed.
You can buy story skips but to say that they “get you into the gameplay” is a bit misleading. The most recent expansion is Endwalker, you can buy a main story skip to bring you directly to the start of Endwalker. However once you get there, the main story is the gameplay. The story skip doesn’t give you a level 80 character (required to start Endwalker) and the best way to level up is the main story you just skipped. So assuming you bought a level 80 boost as well the next thing you’d have available to do is… play the Endwalker storyline. Something which would take 50 hours and you would be horribly lost on since that story assumes you know the story of the previous 4 expansions. You won’t be able to play the endgame raids and bosses until after completing Endwalker. The story and cutscenes are such an integral part of the experience that FF14 is infamous for the “after talking to this NPC, several cutscenes will play in sequence. Make sure you set aside time to view them all.” message. That message is not a joke. The first time you see it is immediately before a fifty (50) minute cutscene.
It is a very daunting ask since the story is cumulative and if you start from the beginning and rush as fast as you can you’re still looking at somewhere like a 250-300 hour investment to get caught up. Even if the story is worth it (I think it is), that’s a pretty tall ask to make of a new player and it will only get worse with each new expansion. It’s been one of my most difficult hurdles when trying to recruit friends to the game. It’s made worse by the fact that the story starts off… kind of rough. The base game story was over 10 years ago at this point and it looks it. It gets more modern as you go on but it doesn’t start amazing.
If you do end up skipping the story and decide later that you’d like to replay it, there is an option in game to replay the story for no rewards. So you won’t permanently lock yourself out of anything. But from a practical perspective, you do deprive yourself of by far the best leveling option if you skip. But personally I think the skip is a trap and you’d be better off manually playing through while skipping the cutscenes if you truly don’t want to see the story. But also adding in a word of caution that the story is literally the reason to play the game. You do unlock dungeons and boss fights as you go through the story, and most of those fights still hold up and are very enjoyable. They actually just recently redid a lot of the really jank older fights so the gameplay through the early story is pretty good even if it’s harder to get invested in the story early on. I would say that it’s a bit of a necessary evil though.
If it affects your opinion, with the free trial of the game you can play through the entirety of the base game and Heavensward. Which is quite a lot of content. (Around 100 hours) So you don’t need to commit to a sub for a while and by the time you get to the end of Heavensward you’ll know pretty solidly what your opinion of the game is.
Just dont admit that you story skipped - or else you will get ostracized by the community. For some reason, a lot of the playerbase dislike story skippers outside of the usually being clueless to class playing.
I forget what exactly the restrictions are. I think you can’t join a Free Company (guild) but other than that, yes the free trial is basically exactly like playing the game normally up through Heavensward. Any content that is from Heavesward or earlier you have free access to.
I haven’t seen Anything that FFXiV has that is substantially better than ESO. I figured that many WoW players are also anime fans, hence the reason of it’s popularity on the forums.