If you guys are even still around, I’m wondering, do you guys see any similarities to the current situation with players leaving WoW for FFXIV?
It feels really similar to me, but I’m wondering if anyone else who was around for that era feels the same.
Not really no, this is from someone who played eq during the WoW exodus of 05 and as someone who played “retail” eq for 5 years prior to SL.
The main difference was that EQ fractured their own player base with EQ2
Also EQ was a very punishing game back in the early 2000s, xp penalties and death runs sometimes resulting in the loss of ALL of your gear. I just don’t think WoW had those type of issues that really turn off players.
I really like the WoW art which is why I play it. FF doesn’t hit that mark for me.
It is weird to see people just now getting hyped over an older MMORPG - that much is different. I’m used to people on these forums clinging on to the latest MMO and talking about how it is superior to WoW in everyway.
When I played EQ, before WoW existed I wasn’t very active in the forums so I don’t recall what they were like. I think we all tried it and just liked it, the thing that strikes me as odd with FFXIV is many people have tried it already and came back to WoW, it is not really anything new or exciting, it is just another MMO.
I don’t get the same vibe from it, that I did from WoW.
People weren’t leaving EQ for a game that’s already a decade old. I have no doubts a lot of people went off to go try FF14, and that’s only been drastically increased since Asmon’s streams.
But, I also feel pretty confident that very few WoW players will last in FF14. The people promoting on here treat it more like they’re somehow “getting back” at WoW by playing FF14 - not because they actually enjoy the game.
Not many people talk about the pretty drastic differences of WoW vs. FF14… The story lines being much, much, much longer will be the first road block for any WoW veteran swapping to FF14. You can’t even skip to the most recent xpac without paying $$ to skip… you have to go through every single expansion’s story lines, and they’re quite long. The first 30-50 hours or so are quite a slog… With you mostly just pushing your 1 or 2 key on a 2.5 second GCD (Yes, 2.5 seconds!). It’s a different feeling.
I think it’s just popular right now to treat WoW like they’re in a toxic relationship with it, and they’re just saying their dating FF14 to make WoW jealous… But eh, we’ll see!
Some, when I left EQ 1 it was because at that point the game had been out for about 5 years and it wasn’t aging well at all. WoW looked visually better and just a better all around game, so I came over with a group of friends who all played together. I see a lot of the same things happening now with FFXIV. WoW is ancient and it’s age is really starting to show. Add to that some questionable design decisions and a real issue with game balance and it’s not hard to understand why some are looking at the “new hotness”.
What makes it feel similar to me is that major WoW content creators are either starting to play FFXIV or bringing it up in their videos/streams/etc. I remember when the exodus from Everquest to WoW was happening, people in Everquest were talking about WoW a lot and even though there weren’t really “Everquest content creators” back then, lots of guilds were also moving from Everquest to WoW, too.
There have been a lot of games that people claimed were “WoW killers” but I think we all know that was never going to happen, WoW was always going to have to kill itself. But I’ve never seen another MMO so widely talked about by WoW players, content creators, etc like FFXIV has recently, and not even because FFXIV is so much better, but just because WoW currently is so much worse. I feel like it was the same with Everquest, WoW was never really so much better than Everquest, it’s that Everquest as it was when the exodus happened was so much worse.
FF14 is not a very good game and it’s popularity won’t last. People aren’t going there because the game is good, they’re going there because they have a perception that WoW is bad.
I came from EQOA which I still miss but alas, Sony killed it dead.
But like I said, that is ultimately what happened with the move from Everquest to WoW. WoW was never a “better” MMO than Everquest, they were both good MMOs in their own right, it’s that Everquest made some awful design decisions to the point it no longer scratched that same MMO itch for people anymore, despite all the time they had invested in it. But WoW did, so it was more worthwhile to invest your time into it over Everquest.
I enjoyed my time in EQOA, I never got very far with it but it was a lot of fun. The last time I looked it up, it appears people are trying to emulate the server.
I actually still have the PS2 I used to play it on, complete with the network adapter.
Also remember while there were no streamers per se, two of the largest content creators of their time during EQ went on to become WoW devs… Tigole and Furor.
FFXIV is close to 8 years old at this point. It’s also at the tail end of an expansion, so it’s not like it’s even changed recently. If people were truly interested in it, they’d have played it before. It’s not like it’s an unknown that came out of nowhere.
At this point, FFXIVs biggest selling point is being WoW for people who want to play WoW without…playing WoW.
I would love for it to come back as an emulation… I would so play it. I loved exploring (and charming giant squids to parade around the city lol).
All this, tbh. Most people who left EQ for WoW weren’t mad at EQ, the story, or the devs. There were some vocal issues with GoD and OoW, the two most recent expacs, but not the kind of mocking animosity WoW’s players has.
A lot of players didn’t have a lot of time behind their toons in EQ and after a day in WoW, people saw how much easier it was. EQ had only been out for 5 years when WoW dropped, and it really had only been popular for 3, after Scars of Velious was fixed and comfortable and there was a lot to do and more than 2 dragons as endgame.
WoW brought something really new to the table. But only love can turn to the kind of hate the WoW pop feels for the game right now. EQ didn’t have that as widespread.
The current lead dev of FFXIV, Naoki Yoshida, is a huge WoW fanboy, too. He made all the developers play WoW before they started development on ARR.
If there was no World of Warcraft – which is a game we look to as a great ‘mentor’ of sorts, and respect deeply – FFXIV’s strong recovery wouldn’t have been possible.
The original FFXIV was a failure of unprecedented proportions and I was entrusted with the duty of salvaging it. When taking the lead to relaunch a failed project, I don’t think you can afford to have the type of game you’d like to create in mind as your motivation. But I was playing WoW, and used that as a form of study. I deployed what I’d learned through the various teams and together we used that in development.
I’m always keeping an eye on World of Warcraft, Diablo, and Overwatch, but that’s because I’m a Blizzard fanboy! Everyone over at Blizzard has been really kind to us and they’ve invited me to visit their studio on three or so occasions now. When I went in 2018, the main team joined me in a discussion about the development and operation process. They’re all so considerate and I respect them deeply. There was much I learned from them and I made sure to be completely frank when answering whatever questions they had for me. It really was a joy to learn that there are so many Warriors of Light in the WoW team.
In my opinion it’s not a good game if your looking to escape wow. I know ffxiv fan bois will go blue in the face denying this, but ffxiv is a wow clone. The combat is almost identical, it’s just got a deeper story and jrpg graphics.
So all these people “escaping wow” are eventually going to get sick of it, and their actual fans will stay.
If your a jrpg fan ffxiv is fantastic, and it’s really ironic I don’t like it. I mean it has cat girls, yet I don’t like it.
Yes.
I didn’t leave EQ for WoW. I eventually just left EQ because of school and what not.
I’ll also add EQ 2 did scramble a lot of things, but if you use the entirety of EQ 2, EQ and WoW it’s a very similar story.
But I absolutely see the same similarities going on right now. I’ll preface this that if you’ve ever read my posts before you know I talk a lot about Brad and John the two big names of EQ at the time of launch until Verant was bought out. The similarities between these two and Ion and the former team devs is really striking.
I remember though when WoW launched in 2004. I remember when it came out all of us in my guild on Prexus made fun of it. When we heard you could get max level with a month and half of hard play we were laughing about it. Saying that’s ez mode. Then we heard there’s no death penalty, every class could solo level to max level, and all raids and dungeons were instanced. This was ez mode.
Little did I see at the time that the mechanics that I thought made EQ a better MMORPG actually wasn’t true. The easy, casual friendly, accessible mechanics of WoW made the game way more easily accessible for all gamers. EQ 2 launched and you basically had to rebuild a PC to play it on high with decent FPS. WoW could run on a potato, looking back at it simplicity and easy of getting into content is what I think killed EQ the most. Even with EQ 2 splitting the base (a bit) WoW’s ease of play, ease of leveling, and just overall ease of the game made players flip.
Now fast forward to today, WoW seems to be on the other side of this. FFXIV isn’t new, it’s a 10 year old game, but it did have a massive relaunch years ago. Still FFXIV shares a lot of hallmarks that WoW had when it first launched and that’s mainly around accessibility. FFXIV is way more of an accessible game to get into than WoW is. Sure, leveling up to 50 is slow, not hard but just slow, however all the content there isn’t super restrictive. And from what I’m told there’s no major class issues because all of them are balanced within one another without any massive leads going to one class (only example I’ve seen is Blue Mage).
This is kind of what’s killing WoW right now. It’s the fact that the balance of classes, the difficulty of the content, and the repetitiveness of everything is detracting from the once great game. If WoW could see it self now back when it was at 12 million subs it’d be shocked at how inaccessible the endgame has become, how small the expansions have become, and limited in scope everything is right now.
I remember when EQ went down this path. We got expansions like Ykesha, GoD, and Dragons. The days of massive world building expansions like Kunark, Velious, and Luclin were gone, although my buddy told me Serpents was very much in the same vein as the earlier expansions, it was bit too late because the game wasn’t the same anymore.
How dare you forget Richie Truxillo!
Yes definitely. EQ similarly killed itself with EQ2. WoW is doing the same with its expansions and now dividing its players further with Classic versions of the older expansions which are arguably better. FFXIV is picking up its players whereas WoW did that to EQ.
i played EQ for 10 years Wood Elf Druid and loved every minute and i still go back from time to time…but everquest started to die because of EQ2 sadly.
I tried wow and started to enjoy it but it was easy compared to EQ.
WoW now is killing it self because Blizz refuses to listen to players.