It’s a reason why many people are calling FFXIV best current mmo ever.
Going to explains the reasons on the bullet points
The main character is personalized in the story and not just going calling you a vague names. Shadowbringers best written story of any wow expansion ever.
Best dialogue story written game, they use old english from FFXII
Characters are way better written in FFXIV Alphinaud, Alisaie, Y’shtola, and Thancred. These characters are consistent throughout the expansions. Jania, Malfurion, Thrall, Anduin, Tyrande could not even compare to these characters and are inconsistent throughout wow’s life cycle and frankly have boring archetypes.
There are many more other reasons like FFXIV raids are more exciting and connect old ff lore in them.
If I could have Blizzard’s writers take away one thing, just one thing, from FFXIV it would be humanizing their characters more instead of making them basically plot devices for epic moments.
The Scions actually feel like friends of mine. When they’re in trouble I want to save them. When Jaina calls me “this champion” instead of my name as if we’re strangers after I’ve been helping her for literal years, it’s jarring as hell.
Have me work with these characters instead of working for them. I don’t like standing around while the plot happens around me, I want to actually be part of the plot.
As a player of both mmos, warcraft story is basic but, the public of both games are WAAAAY too different, most ppl that play warcraft are focused on getting to max level and do end game things, ppl in XIV want to feel the story and do things in their own pace. if you do a story like FFXIV that binds every content around it, you would see a flood of the forum like the likes of the flying vs non flying that happened back in Draenor.
what I mean is that it not only a problem from blizzard part, but from the community too. blizzard is improving their skills with story telling, shadowlands leveling story is alot better compared to bfa’s and even legion’s.
and unfortunately if 80% of the community of the game don’t care about the details of the story, why would blizzard change their philosophy? it is working and the game is selling.
and let us not pretend that FFXIV is better than wow. for as much as I love that game, the end game content is a joke, pvp is a joke. the game right now even after a big patch launch is ‘‘empty’’. you barely have anything to do outside eden’s farming and Bosja farming.
Their endgame methods I’d argue are different but neither is better than the other, it really just depends on what you like. For example, I far prefer XIV’s jank but barebone gameplay loop than anything I’ve done with WoW for years and Shadowlands not asking me to do world quests every day is really the only reason I’m still willing to log in.
With that said, OP isn’t wrong and I’ve been beating that horse for years it became clear how absolutely effing stupid BfA’s story was going to end up.
XIV’s story is a more tightly focused narrative with a smaller cast that allows the player to become invested in said cast and their place in the story. It also helps that the player character is an actual character in the world and not a faceless nobody which makes all the incredibly stupid crap you get into make more sense.
I’ve been banging on for years I wanted WoW’s cast to shrink dramatically and have the players interact with a tighter cast so players can feel like they have a connection with the NPCs they are interacting with beyond just “This guy told me to murder X, he’s gonna give me gold.”
I agree that Shadowbringers is the best mmo story ever written but the endgame content is meh. I didn’t even stay past a month because I got bored real quick, at lest I’m not bored with Shadowlands yet.
I no’t talking about the quality, but of how many things the game can offer at end game.
Wow: M+, Raiding( 4 lvls), Pvp( arena and BG) and thorghast, world content is joke and i agree about doing world quests. i hate that too.
FF XIV: Eden and Bozja if you want to level some alts and with much ‘‘ifs’’ doing roulette and opening maps if you have a nice FC.
do you see what i’m getting at?
I do know that the writing is waaay superior in FF 14 still the public of both games are loyal to different tenants.
you can’t really argue with square loyalists, they live for that game and that scares me, and I have 4 houses dedicate for RP, so I know what i’m talking about.
Alas i hope blizzard keep improving the story telling and expanding the end game scenario cuz that is where they shine.
Then you are arguing quantity, to which I’d still say sometimes less is more. Using myself as an example, 4 different levels or raiding is meaningless when I could care less about even one. I have a whole bunch of issues with the Mythic+ system in general, and prefer the badge grind that this game did away with years ago (thus I like doing daily dungeons in XIV, but find them more of a chore in WoW). Which again, call comes down the preferences. Everything I just said, flip the them around and my all the reason why my buddy loves WoW.
But gods help me the story is where this game makes me want to break my face against my keyboard. And I’m not even saying XIV’s story is ground breaking. I like it, but I like Anime shlock.
Because this leveling experience has been very good, and I won’t knock them for that. But I also thought BfA’s leveling storyline was great too, and so on and so forth. It’s just with WoW it always feels like the leveling experience is telling a vastly different story than than what we end up getting at end game. To use Drustvar as an example, fantastic storyline. And none of that mattered once I left the zone, until the drust randomly appeared in Shadowlands, two years later.
If the story is only meant to be window dressing for the raids, then at the I don’t see why they try and put so much effort into something that ultimately doesn’t even matter to the game, cause damn if they just didn’t try we could have avoided most of the narrative problems BfA had.
But but but, don’t you understand? Those world quests aren’t gonna do themselves! I have to do them, every single day!! The entire Shadowlands is depending on me doing out and killing fifteen skelly men, skin fifty thousand bugs that I murdered for ten special secret hides, and to cook up a nice meal!!
I might not be the champion Azeroth deserves, but I am the champion the Shadowlands needs.
FFXIV writing is definitely way better. I never had a moment in that game where I went ‘my character wouldn’t do that’. I kept wanting to see what happened next. And the characters all felt like actual characters instead of shifting around personalities. Plus, never wondered ‘where are they right now’.
I love KH but you do not need words to express how messy and confuse the whole history of this game is.
Sometimes but not this time, the game literally has just ONE viable option of end game that is Eden+ the patch trial that are the same thing just with another name( raid and trial). i raid on both games and I tell you i see alot more ppl leaving FFXIV after reaching the end game than ther other way around.
talking about the lore, I like how traditional FFXIV story telling is, i feel in a single player game the whole time, for good or bad it works in XIV. But I miss the days where my character was a nobody. a simple adventurer, a soldier, a bounty hunter hanging around the cantina on tatooine, living the WORLD and making my own path on that universe, not the Maw walker, the warrior of Light/Darkness, vestige, Outlander and leader of the alliance against the Zakuul empire.
still that days are gone. we are all champions, special snowflakes in the center of the story be it a device like wow or be it like ffxiv where you alone can take on all bosses by yourself.
Conversely do not force Horde players to help Jaina, Anduin, and Tyrande and vice versa. Going from raiding Jaina to being BFFs with Jaina is lazy and stupid.
