Rather than long a$$ mandatory flight paths or daze/dismounts meant to slow you down…
The difference being I can teleport instantly for the FF stuff and skip all the RP.
4 Likes
So offering my two cents since I’ve played WoW for 6 years and Final Fantasy for 2.5 (I was playing it long before Asmongold made it cool.)
They absolutely do. They’re just a lot more independent and disconnected. Off the top of my head, Eureka, Bozja, Beast Tribes, Doman Enclave restoration, and of course the granddaddy of them all, the capstone weapon for each expansion. The main difference is that all of those grinds are entirely self-contained. The only reason to grind Eureka is because you want the specific Eureka glamor rewards. The only rewards you get from Beast Tribes are things like mounts or pets… or things like materia, which you can get from multiple sources and having leveled up Beast Tribes just gives you another avenue to get it.
I think that even having all of your jobs on one character is a little deceptive. True that means you have more classes on one character, but classes in WoW tend to be much more complicated since they have multiple specs and you can introduce variance with things like talents or legendaries. There are significantly more ways to customize your character in combat than there are in Final Fantasy. In Final Fantasy, every Dragoon for example will be doing the exact same thing.
The best way I’ve heard the two games described is that WoW is an MMOrpg, and Final Fantasy is an mmoRPG. Literally everything you do in Final Fantasy has some story or dialog cutscene attached to it. Every game system has an in-universe explanation. The way you unlock just about every feature is by playing the main story and the few raid fights that aren’t part of the main story have storylines of their own with their own characters and conflicts. In WoW, it’s very systems first. The story is there, but it’s largely ancillary to what you’re doing.
What WoW does well
Building off that idea, the main difference I have found between the two is that WoW is very focused, and consequently very good, at high-stakes content. Content where there is a performance gradient, a pass and a fail. Content where players who want to be challenged can push themselves ever higher. The raids, dungeons, and PvP in WoW are all much more varied and engaging than they are in Final Fantasy. Dungeons especially are a great example since trash in Final Fantasy does not boast anywhere near the variety in abilities that they do in WoW and players have very few tools to deal with them outside of “AoE them down.” That’s not to say that Final Fantasy doesn’t have difficult content - it does. The Ultimate fights in Final Fantasy are easily comparable to some of WoW’s Mythics. But these fights are few and far between and the difficulty usually comes from a long and intense dance to learn rather than from a wide variety of mechanics that require evolving tactics. Every boss fight in FF14 takes place in a similar featureless square or circular arena and while having universal icons for what mechanics will do (stack, spread, look away… etc) there are virtually no mechanics in FF14 that aren’t purely positional.
What Final Fantasy does well
On the flip-side, Final Fantasy does low-stakes content very well. Crafting is significantly more in-depth than it is in WoW. Housing can easily eat up weeks of your life. The story will take you months and for many is the entire point of the game. While the boss fights are less mechanically complex than in WoW, they are fantastic spectacles. Each one boasts their own unique music and the animations for the players, boss, and intermissions all go a long way towards making you feel like you’re in the middle of a high-powered fantasy conflict. Outside of things related to the main story, there are tons of minigames (especially in the minigame hub, the Gold Saucer) with many of them being complete independent systems on their own. Did you know that FF14 is actually one of the most popular online Mahjong clients in the world? There are people who play the game literally just for online Mahjong! In comparison, the only real independent minigame that WoW has is pet battling. (Which FF14 also has its own version of)
Summary
The summary is that WoW’s focus is very squarely on competitive content that allows players the opportunity to develop and show their skill in a variety of ways. Nearly everything in the game is either high-stakes content, or provides you resources that you need to perform in high-stakes content. For instance Torghast would normally fit the description of an independent fun system that is incredibly common in FF14, except it rewards Soul Ash, a necessary resource for high-stakes content. People don’t run Torghast because they like Torghast, they run it because they like Soul Ash. It’s the same for Korthia dalies and Renown. There are very few systems that exist as something on their own for players to do rather than as a method to acquire something they need for high-stakes content. Final Fantasy 14’s content is almost always about the story line attached to it and all the various forms of content are largely independent - you can interact with them as much or as little as suits your fancy. So by in large the only people becoming powerful Blue Mages, reaching the deepest parts of the Palace of the Dead, or becoming gods of Eureka are people who want to be there and want to do that content. But if your main focus is on the game’s combat system, you’ll find far less variety than you would in WoW. The combat system is simpler with fewer interconnected abilities and fewer ways to tweak your approach to combat, there are fewer difficult fights to challenge yourself with, and the challenges that are there don’t feel as different from one another as fights in WoW do.
I think both games have very different strengths and as a result I play them very differently. 99% of my time in WoW is spent doing one of three things: Raiding. Mythic+. Doing chores to prepare for the above. In Final Fantasy, I barely even touch raid content after I’ve finished its part in the main story and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve done Savage or Extreme fights (their equivalent of basically Heroic) at the level the content was designed for. The pie chart of how my time is spent in each game are very different. If I thought one game was completely superior to the other in every respect then I would just save myself the time and money and only pay for one sub.
10 Likes
Cause WoW never did something like this? Does nobody remember old chains like the original Legend of Stalvan? So much running around half-way across the world talking to people. And that stupid curse on top of it.
I agree with this so much and it’s a lesson I wish WoW would learn. For a few years now it’s felt like every single piece of content in WoW has its role in the game defined by what reward it gives you. Torghast isn’t Torghast, it’s the Soul Ash farm. Nazjatar in the previous expansion was all about those pearls to get the special gear.
It feels like WoW is worried that if content doesn’t give a worthwhile reward, then no one will want to do it. So every piece of content they make becomes a necessary interlocked piece in the grand scheme of player power progression. If you want to be the most powerful character, you must do EVERYTHING and do it frequently.
But FFXIV proves that this isn’t true. People will happily play content that’s not required for anything else so long as it’s fun. What truly baffles me is that WoW actually nailed this once with the Mage Tower. The Mage Tower wasn’t required for anything. The only reason to do it was because you wanted the specific appearance or because you wanted to do the Mage Tower. I would have done the Mage Tower if it offered no rewards whatsoever, because doing it was fun for me. If the threads I see frequently on the forums are to be believed, the Mage Tower is one of the more fondly remembered features of WoW. I think that independence is a large part of it.
When you force people to run things in order to do other things it becomes a chore. They’re no longer doing it because they choose to, but because they were told to. No matter how much I enjoy rogue-lite tower crawls, Torghast is still the vegetables I have to eat before I’m allowed to have my raiding dessert.
11 Likes
Ignoring your gross exaggeration, you’re missing a key point. In FFXIV I would have to do that anyway. The result of those actions stays. Every player who begins will also have to do them. Me chasing aether currents so I can fly will stay, anybody who wants to fly will have to do them too. There won’t be an item from a vendor for a couple hundred gil that unlocks them. Granted story skips come with flight in the area unlocked, but not many people actually boost in FFXIV.
WoW on the other hand will say “Oh, well we just kind of let you skip all that now, sucks to be someone who actually had to do it when it was relevant but that’s not fun.”
WoW is really good about spitting in your face when new content comes about. How many new players today do you think will bother doing Nathria? The gear doesn’t matter for crap. The only reason to do it is legendaries that will probably be made easier to attain for players outside of the raid.
How about Wrath? “Oh, you actually leveled, did all the raid content and farmed it until ICC? Yeah well, new players are just now hitting 80 so we made it so they can spam Heroic dungeons with LFD and build the tokens to buy their full tier 9. Sucks that you actually had to raid for it, but they deserve to be in ICC too without having to actually play the game.”
Or how about literally all the work you’re going to do in this expansion that’s going to be meaningless going into the next one when they reset the bar as to not alienate newcomers and put them on the same footing as you. Their boosted character at 60 might have less item level, but they’re just as ready for 10.0 content as you were despite spending 1000+ hours doing Shadowlands content.
WoW sure values your time right? But hey, at least you get achievements that they’ll also get when they go back and just one shot everything!
5 Likes
Isn’t it crazy that they literally just ripped off Palace of the Dead, threw a WoW coat of paint on it, changed pomanders to ridiculous damage increases, gutted all difficulty from it and made it mandatory, then somehow one of the better features of FFXIV got turned into one of the worst aspects of retail WoW?
Like literally just had to copy Palace of the Dead and make it optional. People would have liked it. Instead they turned it into Choreghast and people hate it.
If you don’t like POTD in FFXIV, you don’t do it. It isn’t like you need to for story progression. It’s side content.
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Torghast is as mandatory as anything in FFXIV outside of the MSQ. Why do ya’ll insist on these hypocritical arguments? You claim WoW is doing something bad and it’s the same thing in FFXIV.
The MSQ is literally the only obligation you have in the game. I went through all of Stormblood not doing the raiding, or Alliance Raid and wasn’t punished for it.
MSQ is the only thing you need to do in that game. After that point it’s just “Do what you want now.” 90% of the game is entirely optional.
5 Likes
Okay, with that same ruler, what is the only mandatory thing in Warcraft?
90% of the game that isn’t the MSQ?
The MSQ makes up most of the entire game from when I was playing it. Every single dungeon, every single Trial, just about every raid, it all ties into MSQ. Zone fates were like the only thing that was optional, except that there were parts of MSQ where the game was basically like “okay billy, go grind some XP” and given you’ve already done everything else, the only thing left to do were those fates.
1 Like
Could you expand on that? Because I honestly don’t understand where you’re coming from.
Torghast is required to get powerful legendaries and legendaries are required for basically all endgame content. Someone brought up the analogy of Palace of the Dead in FFXIV earlier. If I swear right now that I shall never touch Palace of the Dead then the other content that I lose access to or needlessly handicap myself in is… absolutely nothing.
If I wanted to raid Savage in FFXIV there are a million and one differrent ways to get the tomestones needed to buy the catch up gear, or I could get that gear from Bozja. For anything that doesn’t directly involve the game’s combat system, it is largely independent and ignoring it won’t impact you ability to do anything outside of the content that you ignore. There are plenty of people who only pay a FFXIV sub when new story drops and completely ignore the game otherwise because nothing else is required to do the story. You can very easily just blitz it.
2 Likes
Thank you karen.
Torghast isn’t required. It’s extra content. If things like your ultima weapon are extra content in FFXIV. Why is it suddenly mandatory in WoW?
You’re not being forced to do Torghast.
You’re not even forced to level through questing. Unlike FFXIV. If anything there is less mandatory in WoW.
That’s the problem. It’s not one thing that’s mandatory. It’s an absolute beast of a list of crap that’s mandatory.
Something tells me you’re intellectually dishonest and will say “Well you don’t have to do this.” When you pretty much are required to, like the Maw. I’m not completely screwed in FFXIV if I choose to not engage with the raid content. In WoW?
Covenant is required because character power gets held hostage.
Korthia dailies are required because character power gets held hostage.
Torghast weekly is required because character power gets held hostage.
The Maw is required because it holds character power hostage.
Doing the stories are required at least once (though XIV also has this with MSQ)
Reputations are required because they hold character power hostage.
Raiding is required because it holds character power hostage.
About the only things optional in WoW are m+ and PvP, but if you want upgrades they aren’t.
Don’t even get me started on the fact that this is JUST Shadowlands. Want me to go through ALL the obligatory BS chores this game has thrown at us in just the last five years alone? Even worse, they get made entirely optional when another expansion comes out so all the time I spent doing them means NOTHING.
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A difference in scale mostly. Legendaries represent a significant amount of player power. If I join a dungeon or a raid without a legendary equipped I’ll be laughed right out of the group.
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No no no. That’s what YOUR doing. You are saying only the MSQ is mandatory. You are claiming this really dumb thing as a positive for FFXIV in that only the MSQ is mandatory like WoW has this huge laundry list of mandatory content.
But you’re looking at FFXIV is the best possible interpretation of what’s happening and you’re looking at WoW and warping it to fit your narrative.
Scale… sounds like horse manure. It’s hypocritical and the fact is that you’ve moved on from WoW and have lied to yourself that FFXIV is better in this aspect, but it’s the same thing.
Aaaallll optional. Just as much as anything in FFXIV.
I actively play both my dude. I haven’t moved on from anything.
3 Likes
I just threw a number, but more of the stuff isn’t mandatory than is is the general point.
I guess it was more apt to say 90% of the content outside of MSQ isn’t mandatory. I don’t need to raid, do Alliance Raids, PvP, craft, gather, treasure maps, beast tribes, collectibles, Ishgard Restoration, custom deliveries, housing, gardening with housing, cap my tomestones weekly for gear, Bozja/Zadnor, Eureka, Extreme Trials, or any of the non-MSQ trials like 4 lords ones or the weapons questline in ShB, relics. . .
It’s literally all optional. That makes it engaging. I craft and gather because I have fun making gold, but there’s no requirement for me to do it or have someone else do it for me.
2 Likes