I am going to get a lot of hate for this thread but I am going to post it anyway because a lot of people on these forums seem to think this is another one of those “wow killer year” whenever a new MMORPG launches. FFXIV is seeing an influx of players and it is not because they released a new patch or new content. In fact, there hasn’t been any new content for months now. The game is basically in the last patch before their next expansion.
I started WoW in Vanilla. I’ve made tons of memories in this game over the past 15+ years. I made many friends over the years and still log into TBC Classic because I have friends that play the game. I gave Shadowlands a fair shot. If I could say some positive things about Blizzard, it would be their art team and music is always top notch. The Shadowland zones were fantastic aside from The Maw. The raids are always great and so Castle Nathria was fantastic. Although the main story has been pretty terrible since BfA, some of the newer characters were great like Denathrius.
Now I realized quickly Shadowlands was a lot of promises but deep down under the fancy covers of a new expansion, it’s still a game with the awful BfA-style systems. I had tried other MMORPGs on the market like GW2, Runescape, Tera, and even BDO but all of them were lacking something WoW had. Runescape questing and professions were nice. GW2 did mounts better than WoW. I also gave FFXIV during MoP or WoD and I didn’t play past the trial because WoW was fine but the content droughts were getting to a lot of players.
I decided to give FFXIV another try few months ago and I actually understand why a lot of players have swapped over or are swapping over. One of the primary criticisms modern WoW gets is that it doesn’t respect your time, and it’s obvious that it doesn’t. It’s a game that forces you to log in so you don’t fall behind. The biggest problem with the game is its current development philosophy, meaning the current Devs and the ones making the decisions about the “core systems” in this game. If they made a quality product, they wouldn’t need to force players to log in to their endless chores. I mean Torghast looked so promising but there is a reason why people call it “Choreghast”. Ion and his team have been trying to implement their “core systems” since 2016 but they have yet to work. These core systems are basically the same systems we had in Legion but renamed over the years. We’re in 2021–some 5 years later just to give you guys some perspective.
Artifact power became Azerite and now Anima. Then we have these other terrible systems like Renown, Stygia, Conduits, Covenant Powers, etc. They can’t even balance the game properly yet they’ve flooded the game with these awful systems. What happened to making the game fun without these complicated systems? There is a good reason why TBC and Classic are so popular even if they are 15 year old versions of the modern game. It’s because they have simple systems that work.
Yes, we had these WoW-killer posts on the forums back then but the difference was these “core systems” were brand new to the game. They were massively disliked by majority of the community but people like me waited and gave them the benefit of the doubt. They failed us over these past 5 years and it’s just got a point where we’ve lost hope.
Then there is the question of quality. Legion was launched in its alpha testing stage. It was full of bugs and not even the “core systems” were thoroughly reviewed with the players’ best interest in mind. Yes, Legion did improve over the months after its launch but that was only because they reintroduced what they had taken away from the game during the development phase between WoD-Legion. The mage tower patch saved Legion from being a total failure but that was only because they reimplemented what they had already taken out of the game. The mage tower also remains one of the best type of contents they had added in years–we were promised mage tower in BfA but that didn’t happen Why isn’t Torghast similar?
BfA was launched in the same state as Legion. The game was unfinished and it felt like the classes were incomplete because they were not ready at launch. Player feedback was again ignored regarding Azerite gear because Ion and his team know best. I am not even going to get into all of the reasons BfA was a failure from the story to game design, but it was in fact a failure of an expansion.
Shadowlands was believed to be an improvement but behind all the false promises, we still had these same “core systems” in place to punish players. If they had made this game for their players instead of their shareholders we wouldn’t have these threads about FFXIV. Just watch their Dev interviews, you can see the difference in their design philosophies. The SE Devs seem passionate about making a game for their players. The difference is night and day.
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FFXIV’s sub count is estimated to be the highest in the world since April 2021. This was before big streamers swapped over and the sub count is even higher now. There was a massive influx of new players in June/July 2021.
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FFXIV broke Steam records for most played game EVER and this was in the midst of a content drought without any new patch or expansion launch. Steam is also an alternate platform for FFXIV players which many FFXIV players don’t use. They use the Square Enix launcher instead of Steam which is not taken into account in this player count. The actual count is MUCH MUCH higher.
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FFXIV also recently broke Twitch record for Asmongold’s stream with over 210k viewers for a single stream and he had 7k new subs. I know many people dislike Asmongold here for whatever reason but he is known for his WoW streams. He had more viewers during his single FFXIV stream.
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Gaming news and info sites have started placing FFXIV above WoW in MMORPG ranking, two recent examples are mmorpg(dot)com and IGN both of whom ranked FFXIV Shadowbringers above Shadowlands.
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And lastly, FFXIV has been improving since Realm Reborn. Heavensward was an amazing expansion which improved everything about Realm Reborn, and then Stormblood, and now Shadowbringers which is arguably the best expansion yet. Square Enix listens to player feedback and make their games for their playerbase. Do you get it? FFXIV has been climbing in popularity ever since its launch and its actually been getting BETTER every expansion because the Developers are MAKING THE GAME THEIR PLAYERS WANT TO PLAY. The development philosophy is much different here. They’re making the game their Devs want to make and they have already stated that in their Q&A, going as far as to say WoW players are not game devs lmfao. You don’t need to be a game dev to provide feedback about systems in the game that you are forced to play with. You don’t need to be a game dev to say that the systems do not work.
In closing, FFXIV is another fantastic MMORPG on the market that does a lot of things better than WoW in terms of its PvE content, story, and the RPG aspects of the MMO genre. WoW does have its positives but the game design is at its absolute worst state that its ever been. The core systems makes the game into a chore. The Devs do not care about player feedback and have not cared since before Legion alpha. If you like PvP you probably won’t enjoy FFXIV but everything else about FFXIV is actually much more enjoyable. It feels like a game instead of a job and it respects your time and because of that the MMO environment is much nicer.
