I have a hard time with this angle - a lot of people seem to think you need to endlessly grind stuff “just to keep up”.
My take with it is that FFXIV gives you two play options, the super casual players (tomes, Alliance Raid, Normal Raids, crafting/farming/glam) and the savage content raiders (Exponentially more difficult than the casuals in just raids with limited rewards, but otherwise the same as the causals)
You’re either a super casual or a hardcore savage raider, and there’s no gradient in between.
In WoW, sure you need to be grinding daily all the time to be “on top”. But nothing says you need to be.
The game has a very wide range of skill levels for people to play at and to continue to grow/challenge you in that skill level.
Maybe you’re just a LFD/LFG hero. The game lets you be that. Maybe you’re a low-key Mythic dungeoneer or normal raider. You can do that. Maybe one day you want to go higher than that, get into the big boy keys or heroic raids. You can do that. Or maybe you want to be super competitive and try for record keys. That’s available to you.
It has a much wider range of playstyle options and you get as much (or little) into it in a progressive manner as you want. Play an hour a day or an hour a week, and still find other players and content of comparable goals.
In contrast, 14 has as I mentioned, super casual or hardcore, with nothing in between.
Yeah that’s all true that WoW has a wider array of content difficulties. I suppose that I didn’t clarify that I was specifically talking about Savage Raids/Extreme Trials. I’d certainly rate Savage as higher difficulty than normal WoW raids, but I’m not sure I’d call it hardcore. That’d be more appropriate for Ultimates.
I find the difficulty/payoff from the amount of time that I have to put into Savage/Extreme encounters to be more agreeable to me than WoW’s counterparts. The leap in time investment from Normal to Mythic is just too big for me.
The way that Blizzard has implemented progression systems for the last couple of expansions is designed to trap you into the game. You have daily world quests with random rewards to do, chase down specific azeroth traits, titanforging, curse affixes, etc. I prefer the much more static approach of earlier WoW expansions, and now FFXIV.
For people that want to spend that much time in-game pursuing gear, it’s great. It’s just a design that encourages a play style that I dislike. I like to do my business and then get out. But if I want very challenging raid content in this game, then I can’t really do that.
I like the dungeons/combat and stuff better here than XIV. Too simplistic and I’ma dungeon crawler. I have way more fun with PvE things here and I like crafting.
I said it before but people were actually shocked I liked the bit of WoW’s story more than I do XIV’s which is much but like 2 expansions that were any good HW/SHB…Kinda weird, but SE hasn’t really made a riveting tale of a FF story in years and FF16: ARR+R looks boring too soo…
Sorry, just think XIV’s story is really boring but the music is good, don’t kill me!
FFXIV offers a lot of friendly systems that respect their players’ time, rather than making systems that feel more like a means to bleed our time rather than to enjoy the game.
That’s debatable, the raid content over there can be said to be superior, and even harder then WoW in terms of difficulty. Its also way more rewarding with unique mounts. Why? Because its easy to mess up and wipe in trail and ultimate and savage fights. Standing in the wrong area is instant death. In WoW’s heroic raiding you can stand in many bad stuff and you won’t die, just lose some hp.
Both are fantasy MMO’s and FFXIV followed quite a bit of the WoW model.
Quests
Tabbed Targeting
Never ending threat to the world
Hero with super special powers
Relics
Multiple classes
Some specializations
Guilds
Structured / Unstructured PvP
Structured / Unstructured PvE
etc. etc. the list can go on.
Currently I play 3 major MMO’s at a semi-casual pace; World of Warcraft, FFXIV, and Elder Scrolls Online.
They each scratch a different itch but they are all fairly similar to each other in terms of available systems but all three are capable enough for a player to go “all-in” and invest a significant portion of their time on it.
To get to my final answer here; individuals compare because we have wants. FFXIV and ESO have systems that WoW just doesn’t have yet.
We didn’t have MSQ (Main Story Quests)
We have an aging boss-model
Extremely limited combat telegraphs
PvP systems that collide with PvE systems
Profession systems that are inconsistent between expansions
Equipment gearing that is inconsistent between expansions
Class designs that are inconsistent between expansions
No player housing
No guild housing
No guild alliances
No leaderboards for PvP
Limited leaderboards for PvE
No sense of “permanence” of gameplay systems
These other MMO’s really are competitors, and the only really “saving grace” that WoW has is that their core-combat loop is quite good and their story is fairly well known to a wide audience of players.
If Blizzard isn’t careful they could very well be dethroned; mostly because their competitors are watching them closely and it’s much much easier to improve upon an existing system that has had public feedback over push the fold.
They really need another development team to come in and basically “shore up” those innovated expansion features and get them to a point where they can be forever main-lined and expanded upon.
Sorry for the big post, but it’s frustrating because not just as a long-term player but also as a software engineer I see a lot of poor decision making occurring lately. It’s one thing to innovate and change up the game, it’s another thing to keep doing that just for the sake of it.
Where did you get that from? Some random comment on the internet/review? WoW has ERP too…just look at goldshire on moonguard and basically any RP realm. And in my near 1 year playing FFXIV I have not seen any “rp/erp” anything, thats bs that your making up. Yes it exists but its somewhere not normally seeable. Your just holding prejudice against FFXIV based on false facts for some reason and refuse to acknowledge WoW has erp too(in plain view), but also you refuse to check if what your saying is true, your biased.
Great news, for a while now you been able to do New game+ where you can replay the story.
Because GW2 was great during its time but nowhere near a wow killer, and SWTOR…well thats a whole different matter but lets just keep it at “company’s greed ruined it”. FFXIV did not label itself a WoW killer nor does anyone say it is, its just another MMO that does its own thing and doesn’t try to compete…and by coincidence became #1 MMORPG thanks to Yoshi-P reviving it(post 2.0 release, 1.0 was trash), and listening to its players…the other factor was WoW going downhill since Cataclysm and making terrible decisions. And its going to continue thriving through our shadowlands because Ion is convinced covenants will workout like garrisons, artifact grinds, and BFA systems did…