WoW and FFXIV: Two extremes of MMORPG design that I wish could be reconciled in the genre

Community General Discussion
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Final Fantasy XIV is a game that has been lauded for having a large focus on story, characters, and player involvement in the narrative. Player expression, which includes glamour (their version of transmog), housing, and player-driven content has been known to take center stage. However… there isn’t much else. Many players on their forum have complained that their expansions have become painfully formulaic: For the past 9 (?) years, expansions have included the same amount of instances, the same mechanics in these instances, the same amount of zones, the same content within those zones, all on top of an entirely stagnant, unchanging selection of side activities. Class ‘design’ has been so slimmed down that all 21 classes play almost exactly the same as other classes within their role. If FFXIV were a symphony orchestra, it would be a group of masterful musicians whose repertoire only encompassed playing a single chord. It’s a pleasing chord, and it sounds perfect, but there’s no substance.

You all know WoW, I’m sure. Over the years its gameplay has been placed on a pedestal as an example for all other games like it to follow, and for good reason. For all the problems that modern WoW has, its class design is not one of them, with all 39 classes* (13 classes with an avg of 3 specializations each) being unique and, for the most part, fun and engaging. New instances have new mechanics to learn, with even new types of instanced content to enjoy. The endgame hamster wheel is greased and is engaging for long enough to be considered passable. But once one get’s bored of the hamster wheel… what’s left? WoW’s story and characters have always been duds, professions are annoying at best and obtuse at worst, and all content from previous expansions is either painfully easy or completely worthless unless you’re farming collectables. Player expression is in the toilet unless you desire to RP, and even what expression we have is locked behind high currency costs or time demands. One might say there is little to do but run instances, over and over again. There isn’t even any significant community to interact with, because WoW’s community is… well, WoW’s community. If WoW were a symphony orchestra, it would be a single man with a sound system playing Beethoven. Sure, it might sound good, but there’s no heart.

If I had a genie and three wishes, one of them would be an MMO that successfully reconciled the smooth gameplay, encounter design, and progression of modern WoW with the story, metagame, and player expressability of FFXIV… while also boasting the resources and community that the two have. A proper symphony.

Hell, I’ve yet to find one that does this without the resources and community. Probably for a good reason.

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Definitely have to agree about FFXIV activities. Levelling another job is nearly impossible unless you’re really dedicated. People complain about grinds in WOW, but when levelling another job in FFXIV you have NOTHING you can do but grind grind grind since you can’t do the quests again. Grind FATE’s. Grind dungeons. Until your eyes bleed. Then a few hours later find you went from 20-30 and the cap is 90. Yeah, no thanks.

FATE’s themselves are awful too. They’re incredibly boring and virtually all the same (just like the Apexis dailies in WOD). They were neat when they were first introduced, but they haven’t changed them or introduced anything new since then. WOW answered FATE’s with world quests which are far better and have far more variety.

WOW can’t even touch FFXIV’s story, but that does come with an extremely high number of lengthy cutscenes. The story is amazing but there were times where I had to stop for the day even though I wanted to play more, because more play was behind a 45 minute cutscene I didn’t have time for.

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Being frank, there’s a reason there isn’t a game that manages to hit it all. The two games represent two entirely different design philosophies, some details of which are irreconcilable.

I do think they could learn more from each other, but there’s only so much that they could realistically do without starting to compromise their underlying principles.

… though I am a bit biased and would be far more willing to tear more out of WoW to “fix it” and more closely resemble FFXIV.

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Being completely honest, if FFXIV had the class and encounter design of WoW, it would be 100% more appealing to devote time into.

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Class design is… tricky, as I feel a lot of FFXIV players do prefer their more structured rotations. Also, don’t you dare take away the off-GCDs – I hated it when WoW did that.

The options and variability of WoW classes is also quite problematic, not without going back to the older talent system (I think MoP through to BfA, maybe SL?); FFXIV’s level sync system works FAR better than WoW’s scaling, but it needs what abilities each job has at every level to be more or less fixed for it to function remotely well.

The only exception (right now) is BLU, but it’s intentionally un-balanced, though I guess they’ll be adding Beastmaster later this expansion for something similar.

Now, encounter design is easier to get behind. WoW definitely has more variety in locales, though encounter mechanics are… well, the Honey Bee boss in DT’s raid series isn’t the most popular for a reason (or at least I dislike it compared to the others). It’s also the most WoW-like boss encounter FFXIV has seen in a while, and it’s much more chaotic & messy.

FFXIV’s encounters work great if you like the dances and visual puzzles the mechanics present… but it could still use some more variety. Just hopefully not random AoEs being vomited up all over the floor constantly, which is what a lot of WoW encounters feel like.

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The gameplay and world of WoW with the story effort, cutscenes, fidelity, and tech of FF14 would be amazing.

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And a way to level alts (other jobs in FFXIV’s case). They seem to have forgotten that people might like to play other jobs and not have to spend hundreds of hours to level one. WOW has alts down. Sure having every job on the same character sounds good on paper, but not if there’s no way to level them without grind.

They’ve got story down though, to the point where they made RP walking up a flight of stairs more impactful than anything that’s ever been in WOW, including the Legion invasion.

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There are other methods at the moment, along with massive XP bonuses… but as someone with every job at 70+ and 90+ omni-crafter? Yeah, it’s a slog to bring all the jobs up.

The one thing I’d like to see them do is add XP to the New Game Plus system; they took away ALL the rewards when you use it, but XP probably should have been the one thing to stay. That way you could (kind of) replay the story to level up again, if you so chose.

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Ffxiv raids are mythic end bosses but you don’t need to get gear from weekly loot casino or 40 mods telling you what to do c:

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Finished the ff14 storyline and it was good but the game got boring quick.

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The story through Endwalker was amazing, Dawntrail was a massive disappointment but the rest of the game is still pretty good.

I really do not know what SE was thinking when they allowed certain people to be in charge of the team for the English version of the game.

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That’s crazy to me, FF14 s encounter design is way better than WoW’s, in my opinion, at least their savage content compared to raiding (wow has more interesting dungeon design). I do think in wow you have more opportunities of building your character unique to you even within cookie cutter builds.

In 8 man savage content, everyone has to know and perform all the mechanics. The boss is a dance where you learn the moveset and perform it with your rotation.

In wow, you can assign someone to a job to handle a mechanic. In fryraks encounter for example, I never even picked up a tear thingy or whatever, other people in the group handled it. I know vaguely you can’t let them get hit by beams or whatever. Or maybe Ghuun I think his name was. I was never part of the orb running squads.

I feel like my performance of the mechanics matter in FF, where as in wow, I could die and lay on the floor all fight and collect loot at the end.

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Class design sure. I do like that in ff14 when you buy the expansion you are given the entire story. I really wish wow would start doing that tbh. We buy the expansion, quest to max and have hardly even moved a needle into the story because it’s all timegated behind patches.

WOW has better transmog, collective features, and flying. I think WOW is the better game

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Yeah, the base expansion is the story. Patch content is a bit of an epilogue and then build up to the next expac.

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They focused so much on the story that they completely forgot to make a fun game. It’s why people say that ‘RPG’ comes first in their MMORPG. More like a visual novel if you ask me.

What, you don’t like speeeen?

Maybe in my eyes it’s the fact that mechanics in pretty much all instances are just the same 6 mechanics shuffled in different ways. Arena AOE, local AOE, stack on player, stack in location, kill add before it wipes the group, tankbuster. I might be stupid, but it feels like WoW has a lot more variety.

WoW has better looking gear, I’ll give you that, but FFXIV has a lot more variety in gear and outfits, especially when you consider the dye system. Sucks that this variety is absolutely crushed with their abysmal excuse for a transmog system.

Never really enjoyed WoW’s collect-a-thon, but I’ll agree with you on that too.

I don’t think modern FFXIV was really designed with flying in mind (other than that one zone in Heavensward), kinda feels like an afterthought to make people not complain about it. Modern WoW zones are built with flying in mind, which gave them more of a reason to flesh the system out.

I can’t tell you if one game is better than the other–to be honest they’re both on par with each other for different reasons.

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Yea I want WoW to stay gameplay focused.

Any developer resources being dedicated towards things like player housing, or weddings, could’ve been spent on creating new exiting combat encounter.

I don’t understand why games should try to appeal to everybody. They just end up appealing to nobody.

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It’s not really a matter of appealing to everyone, I just want my MMORPG to feel like both an MMO and an RPG.

WoW has the MMO, but the RPG feels superficial. FFXIV has the RPG, but little would change if they removed the MMO.

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FFXIV raids and ultimates have extremely varied mechanics which are often unique to the encounter and can’t really be simply described as “soak” or “don’t stand in bad”. A lot of them are basically puzzles to be solved. Saying they have the same mechanics is at best disingenious and at worst completely 100% uninformed yet passed as a fact. Even basic dungeons often have mechanics which are fully unique to them.

The encounter design from FF14 is already seen in some WoW bosses, look at Ky’veza who goes through her mechanics in a sequence and ends with a giant enrage blast that wipes the raid if they’re not fast enough to kill her before she runs out of the cycles.

FF14 job design is at best mediocre and completely reliant on levelling the job to cap, as very often the way your rotation plays changes completely at this point. They do play differently for the most part, but there are clear parallels between some within the roles. However saying that Black Mage plays the same as even the new and improved Summoner is just idiotic.

Overall I cba to address anything more because it just annoys me, but I’m glad you at least took time to watch some videos about FF14.

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hw and shb was the two peaks of xiv story…but
im not in it for the story, the gameplay is garbage
bc of the homogenizing of the classes lol

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gonna say it again. ffxiv clears wow if it had smoother gameplay (even if you get used to how it plays) and a system like M+

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