Which MMO looks and feels better? In terms of these things:
Art design and Aesthetic
Music department
Zone design
Raids and Dungeons design
Armor / Gear Design
Quality of Life
Smooth gameplay
Questing experience
Character Models
5 Likes
WOW is obviously a better game overall but people like to hate WOW recently .
Nobody had interest in playing FF before WOW reach his lower state , so it answer everything .
10 Likes
Art design and Aesthetic - Warcraft hands down
Music department - Warcraft, again, hands down
Zone design - Definitely Warcraft
Raids and Dungeons design - I like both. (for different reasons)
Armor / Gear Design - I like the way armour sits on characters in FF; big flowy skirts, mini skirts, etc. The armour seems separate from the character skeleton, and as such has so much more variety
Quality of Life - Warcraft
Smooth gameplay - Warcraft
Questing experience - Warcraft
Character Models - FFXIV, but I prefer WoW Races. I think FF models are more adaptable; better dances, poses, character customisation and facial expressions. The FFXIV Characters are truly amazing.
7 Likes
Art design and Aesthetic - Both, for different reasons. They have their own style.
Music department - Both have pretty iconic music
Zone design - WoW hands down. Actual open world
Raids and Dungeons design - Some of both. It really depends. There are some I love and some I hate in either.
Armor / Gear Design - FFXIV
Quality of Life - There are some things FFXIV does better like flying. And they kept the multiple ways to gear (crafting, drops and currency) while WoW’s crafting needs a lot of work, they don’t always have currency, and they sometimes over-nerf drops.
Smooth gameplay - WoW
Questing experience - WoW
Character Models - FFXIV except their elves. Their elves are fug.
4 Likes
This is going to be very opinionated based on the individual. People feel the cartoony stylized aesthetic of WoW is superior, others feel the more Japanese-realistic-but-not-quite-anime look of FF is better. I will say FF does give attention to a lot of smaller details that WoW will conveniently overlook.
FF14 without a doubt. There’s a number of tracks one could use for this, but listen to the best raid music you have in WoW in mind, then play “To the Edge” from the Warrior of Light trial, or “The Twinning”. It’s kind of a nobrainer. Albeit one could argue FF14 loves to remix a lot of its tracks which is true, anyone that played Endwalker through is probably very much acquainted with the like 90 versions of “Answers” we had.
Both are kind of the same quality but excel in different ways. I will give that FF makes zones a lot better about feeling like their own thing or more immersive, while WoW is good about making them look really pretty but having zero soul.
Going to depend on player taste for this one. I can see arguments some fights in WoW are better designed because they try to do more elaborate things as time goes on, while FF sticks with what they know works but expands upon basic ideas over time and uses them in very creative ways. Me personally, I feel Pandaemonium Savage despite being four bosses was easily a much better constructed raid than Castle Nathria on Mythic.
The fights in 14 can seem “easier” but a lot of that is because fights are tuned to be killable at a minimum item level that is lower than the crafted gear. WoW fights are tuned around you having BiS heroic and a fair chunk of Mythic loot to pull your weight on some of the dps checks. WFR’s early days most of it was spent doing gear farming. In FF14 it was “buy your crafted gear, pentameld it, and go through.” Wasn’t any gimmicky crap like a second legendary behind a daily grind. You just did the fights.
FF14 hands down. There is a diverse range of aesthetics available to players, most of the really good looking pieces can be used by everyone even at level 1 provided you had a job able to unlock them. I.E In Shadowbringers we had the 2B set, you could only get it on a level 80 doing the Alliance Raid’s first wing, however once you got it you could switch jobs to a level 1 and still use it for glamour as you leveled.
This is too vague to really answer. WoW has a lot of things you can consider Quality of Life, as does FF14. Though Square won’t really chase QoL at all costs, if they feel it causes damage to the game they’ll avoid doing it. WoW also openly supports addons which bring a lot of QOL to the game without Blizzard having to lift a finger as well.
Both when you’re acclimated feel about the same. FF14 it’s easy for it to feel clunky early on in combat because of the higher GCD timer, but a good way to also tell when someone has never experienced the game at cap is that the gameplay gets much faster as you level and have to deal with double weaving. WoW feels better out of the box, but 14 is an acquired taste you really appreciate the more you experience.
Depends what you want in a questing experience. FF14’s story is much better than WoW’s, though the issue is going to be how people define “questing experience.” To some that means quests are fast and easy, no hassle. To others it means that quests actually feel important. If you want the former, WoW. If you want the latter, 14. A good example of this was at the end of Endwalker’s MSQ you had a long cutscene of people you helped in the past, some were optional quests. If you did the Four Lords for example, you got Tenzen’s Sword, if you didn’t it was just kind of listed as some random relic they donated to the cause.
Characters from FF14 you really grow to love and are delighted when they return, like Sadu.
This goes above with Art Design. Base models in FF14 are pretty dated as of the moment, but are getting updated in 7.0 so like a year and a half to two years down the road, whereas WoW has had fairly recent updates to character models. In WoD they updated most races, then in BFA they finished off Goblin and Worgen.
Really will boil down to preference, as much as I miss my goofy little goblin, I prefer my lalafell more on 14 as a character.
14 Likes
vs
Yeah okay. . .
11 Likes
Art design and Aesthetic
Wow 100 percent.
Music department
Equivalent. They tend to do different things though. ff14 music is a lot more pop and electronica. Wow is a lot more atmospheric and instrumental.
Zone design
FF14 is better at zone design generally. Topography in wow is a mess way too often.
Raids and Dungeons design
Wow. Obviously. There isn’t a contest here.
Armor / Gear Design
FF14 has wow beat here for the most part. The gear is often simple but highly customizable with dyes. Class gear looks like it belongs to the class.
Quality of Life
I think both of them are pretty bad at this but they both seem to try to improve at a glacial pace.
Smooth gameplay
Equivalent.
Questing experience is highly variable. I don’t enjoy when ff14 becomes a cut scene fest.
Character Models
FF14 has better human models. Wow has better everything else. Better fantasy races and better beast races.
1 Like
Everyone’s tastes are different. I doubt the intent of this post was to be judgemental of others’ opinions.
To me, Tides of War, Dazar’alor Marketplace, Storm peaks, Arthas my son, Grizzly Hills and Sylvanas’ Lament, are unparallelled in their beauty and power! 
4 Likes
Art design and Aesthetic: FF
Music department: WoW
Zone design: Some Zone WoW
Raids and Dungeons design: WoW
Armor / Gear Design: WoW
Quality of Life: WoW
Smooth gameplay: WoW
Questing experience: FF
Character Models: FF
I’m not a fan of these threads. To me FF has its merits, and wow has its own. The better game is highly subjective.
I prefer WoW, elitist meme butt munches and all. FF is just too cringy for me (And I still play it regardless).
I’d also like to add, writing is vastly different between the games.
This is the end of a 20 year arc supposedly.
Spoiler below
This was the conclusion of a 10 year arc. Admittedly it probably won’t have nearly as much of a hit if you haven’t played through the game, but it evokes a lot of emotions if you have. Personally I couldn’t stop sobbing when you’re having the flickers of the places you had been through and I was immediately brought back to when I started playing the game and experiencing these zones for the first time as the story progressed. It’s an experience to say the least. It just fills you with a ton of emotion to kind of realize the story at that point is finally wrapped up.
7 Likes
WoW.
FFXIV easily.
Both I’d say, though WoW pulls ahead by a bit personally.
Both.
FFXIV.
FFXIV?
I would say both.
FFXIV
Both? WoW has that race diversity and FFXIV does customization better.
2 Likes
I think I need to reiterate that I think Final fantasy’s biggest failure is its highly detailed human models. Because of the amount of detail and expression they put into them, they can’t dedicate the same amount of attention to fantasy races. And without proper playable fantasy races, your game isn’t an interesting or immersive world worth playing for me.
Hrothgar are the poster childen of this-- they find making expressions for their one nonhuman race to be such a herculean task that they downright neglect them.
1 Like
To be completely fair, Viera and Hrothgar were both scuffed. Viera in the lore initially were written to basically have no males that you’d ever see, it was very amazon-esque. However in Ivalice they made Fran who was a Viera and a call back to Final Fantasy Tactics, the playerbase went ballistic demanding playable Viera. Not really much different than what we see in WoW with every damn NPC race.
So Fran was basically made to be unique, the playerbase wanted it so badly the developers rush jobbed it through, but because Viera was intended to be female exclusive, they made a male exclusive which was Hrothgar to keep it even. Both of these races were poorly implemented. This is why neither of them can wear hats, they cut a lot of corners and are getting around to fixing it.
So it isn’t like this is a Hrothgar exclusive issue of being neglected, Viera have it as well and Viera is one of the most popular races in the game.
True, FF writing is so far above WoW it’s like comparing The Lord of the Rings to The Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree!
5 Likes
I will give credit where it’s due, WoW’s lore is kind of ad-libbed, whereas Square approaches it with they have a set destination and checkpoints and just kind of carry on with it. Square has changed writers as has WoW, but they in Square kept them to the plan and allowed their own touch. When they announced that Ishikawa was going to be the equivalent of Danuser I was extremely excited because the stories in the game she did were widely loved. Danuser I was like “who the hell is this guy?” It’s like watching Doctor Who announce Chris Chibnall whose contributions prior were two of the most hated episodes in the reboot, everyone was like “Oh dear lord why this clown?”
Blizzard kind of just lets them do what they want unchecked and we see a lot of weird crap for no reason on a whim. In other words, I very much doubt the Jailer was ever even conceived of as a character prior to 2016, and I give that generously because there’s vague hitns there was something out there with Helya hinting it. However it also really feels like “Uh we need a villain for the new expansion that’s original, quick grab these plot threads and make something grand!”
WoW’s theme is Villain of the Expansion, whereas Square always intended for the big villain to be Zodiark at least visibly. I have no idea if Meteion and Endsinger were BS’d on the spot to add more to it or not, there’s evidence to support both of these being true though they fell in seamlessly.
I kind of knew when we were going to the moon at level 83 that we were about to experience a huge rugpull on who the actual main antagonist is. That said, I’m so delighted Yoshida in a recent interview said they aren’t doing a villain that’s even bigger, they deliberately wrote Zenos at the end of 6.0 to bring us back to our adventurer roots and the stories are going to be more self contained, no DBZ style stuff like WoW does. Especially with the Jailer’s “A cosmos divided can’t defend against what is to come” or whatever it was which is just saying “Hey guess what, something even bigger!”
4 Likes
Anyone who thinks WoW wins in any of these categories, ESPECIALLY in the music department, is a freaking idiot.
5 Likes
I tried FF14 last October. The only thing I liked was the music.
The zones were super forgettable. The dungeons were even more of an AOE fest than what we have in WoW, and the most annoying part was that they are full of cutscenes.
The raids are full of cutscenes. The quests are full of cutscenes.
I made it to 70 then decided between the constant interruption in gameplay and the fact that the class I was playing (dragoon) had a 40 button rotation-I figured nah. Not for me.
Also the story that people lose their minds over? Boring AF, and it’s forced all over you whether you want it or not.
Yep WoW has some issues. That said, it has genuinely good gameplay around every corner. Ff14 has good gameplay, when you get to play.
I enjoyed it for a week before coming to the realization that I preferred WoW.
3 Likes
I agree with your assessment however not necessarily with the presumption at the end. People do have different tastes, and while I agree FF to me wins in almost all of these, I do address people do have different tastes or dealbreakers no matter how silly (like not having enough furry races). I.E Art Style and Raid design. I still feel raiding in 14 is vastly superior and far more engaging, but I understand some people feel WoW raiding is better.
Though it does make me laugh in other threads when you have that comparison and a discussion breaks out, usually the guy screaming WoW raids are so much better aren’t even doing them on Heroic difficulty, hell even Normal is a stretch for some. Don’t see how LFR raiding is engaging but more power to them I guess.
1 Like
Almost like it’s a game that advertises itself on being a Final Fantasy title first and an MMO second and further emphasizes its story in advertising over all else. Dungeons are meant to be AOE fests, they’re not meant to take time because they’re not relevant to players outside of XP and quests usually. That’s always been their design, the story things are meant to be super easy and very fast for players, while the hard stuff is purely optional (extreme trials, savage, ultimates, etc)
For some reason, I feel compelled to ask you story related questions up to Stormblood but I have this suspicion you skipped all the cutscenes and thus couldn’t find the story engaging. I wasn’t the biggest fan of it in ARR given it was world building and was skipping it all then when I actually sat and watched the story it was mindblowing.
2 Likes