Originally posted by tommygunzII Another video of the beautiful scenery of FFXI. When videos like this start popping up for FFXIV, those of you that haven't experienced these worlds will see how breathtaking they can be.
Well, both have day/night cycles - ARR is fast (like 90min cycles), WoW is real-time based on server time (in Vanilla you could see which time zone your server was in)
ARR has weather. Lots of weather.
Both games have jumping, running, walking, mounts. WoW has swimming and some underwater content, which ARR does not.
WoW had a bigger world - 2 seamless continents with 6 major cities, compared to the various zones and 3 major cities of FFXIV
ARR world has much higher detail - part of this may be attributed to the fact that it's released later, and part of it due to the fact that because it's zoned you can have an engine that supports more detail
Themed zones - both have zones of various themes, and the themes work very well within the lore of the story. I can definitely tell the difference between La Noscea and Gridania and Mor Dhona, just like I can between Dustwallow and Barrens and Darkshore.
On the seamless vs zoned thing: keep in mind that seamless worlds always have those "entry barriers" where you have to just go around a long wall for absolutely no reason in the game, but it technically allows the game to load up the next zone without you seeing a zoning screen. To me, those are just as disruptive as a zoning screen would have been, because they are completely unrealistic. Really... who builds a wall right inside the front door, just so you have to walk around it. And it happens ~everywhere~ in a "seamless" world, you always have to run through some sort of corridor in order to give the engine time to load the assets for the next area.
Fast travel - ARR has porters you must link, mounts, instant-teleport crystals you must link, everyone has teleport, everyone has return. WoW had gryphons to link (some of which are ~very~ long flight paths), only certain classes had teleport, certain classes had Summon to Group
ARR has a duty finder initially. Vanilla WoW had... nothing at all, and it was very painful trying to find dungeon groups. You could probably chalk this one up to ARR being a 2010/2013 title and including the group finder aspect that WoW added much later in it's life; however, there were some simple mechanics that were available even in 2004 that WoW failed to implement initially (a LFG flag for player searches, cross-zone chat channels, etc)
FFXIV 1.0 had much higher quality textures than ARR, but the graphics engine was much more demanding (no one could run Ambient Occlusion with the Clip Plane at max). The models are all mostly the same, but the textures have been significantly "optimized' in ARR so it would be much less hardware dependant (or maybe so they could actually get it to run on the PS3). They are still miles better than WoW textures - although most of this gets chalked up to 2013 vs 2004.
Fighting: both are trinity based with tab targeting, nothing really dissimilar about the basics. The GCD is biggest difference between the two. WoW has it's 3 spec trees per class, whereas ARR has it's horizontal Armory system allowing you to play every class.
Lore - both games have a lot of lore, and in and of themselves do a lot to propogate that lore effectively via the quests and the world in general. ARR draws heavily from it's FF heritage (which 1.0 failed to do in large part), WoW draws from it's Warcraft roots. ARR has a main story line that it drives everyone down the same perspective story with only minor differences, WoW has 2 clear factions which see the story from very unique perspectives, but no main story thread in any race/class/faction - you must infer a lot of the lore from the world rather it being told to you like a story.
WoW had 6 semi-unique starting areas for each race (some races shared, like Orcs/Trolls, or Gnomes/Dwarves). ARR has 3 for various classes.
Polish - ARR had about 2 weeks of severe server problems, WoW had several months of various glitches and server availability. The infamous WoW Loot Lag bug was particularly bad initially. I consider that part of the polish as much as I do seeing little details on the character animations.
Quests - both have ! quests in level-grouped quest hubs, both do FedEx/KillXX type quests. ARR also has Hests, Leves, and FATEs - can probably chalk some of that up to 2013 vs 2004. WoW did pretty well invent the ! quest hub, 1.0 introduced Leves and Hests, but I don't know that I would really call that an innovation; I think they mostly just carried over into ARR for continuity and they don't add a whole lot to the experience right now.
ARR does a good job of reusing zones: One zone may have L1-10 content, a L30 dungeon, and L40 content. It keeps the population mixed up and keeps certain zones from becoming deadspots.
PvP - WoW had it (at least open world, there were no BGs or arenas or anything else). ARR didn't at all at launch.
All in all - I'd say they are two very different styles, and it's hard to compare one to the other. You can very obviously see the influence WoW had on ARR, but you could also very obviously see the influence that games like EQ had on WoW. ARR obviously has the benefit of releasing 9 years later. I would say that WoW was a bit more expansive - the world is a bit bigger, it had more starting cities, and 2 opposing factions each presenting a different take on a common world's story. But I'd also say bigger isn't necessarily better, and there are a lot of things that ARR does so well in spite of it's zoned approach (weather, mixing level content inside of the same zone, small animation details, etc).
ARR is a smaller game at launch, but I think it has a lot of things that WoW didn't have at the start either. I don't think that necessarily makes it "worse" or "better" in terms of quality. The real test is where it goes from here. WoW expansions, I hated the way they totally made the previous content obsolete; it was like they just completely killed the old game in favor of the new and it lead to huge dead spots in the game. I loved the EQ model, where previous content was still very relevent, and in many cases required in order to get into the new content. We will see what ARR does in this regard.
- If you play an Elf, at around level 9 your starting zone would be Teldrassil. Here in the town of Dolanaar you would get a quest to go to Ban'Ethal Hollow, this is a deep group/solo non instance cave used to allow players get their feet wet with a group. Sure it could be done alone but that's optional. This is small, but a rich piece of content.....
- Around level 15 and in Silverpine forest, players get a quest to swim out to Fenris Isle and here we have a nice little Keep that a small group or it can even be done solo if you play Rogue and do things smartart. This is a rich piece of content.....
- Have you ever been to the Wetlands ?....To the north and if your exploring and paying attention you would come across a little side thingy called Ironbeads Tomb. If you could even find your way down the steps with fighting all the ozz mobs you would find a nice chest. This is a rich piece of content....
-18-30 Duskwood. This zone is very dark and erie, kind of scary right ? It's dark in this zone. NPC's patrol the roads with lanterns and off the main road you could hear the wolfs howling. If you look hard you would find that wolf !
-Booty Bay, how can we forget !......Hord and Alliance together, not good !....Leave the outpost and their is a good chance your gonna die by a real person looking to kick your ass !
I COULD GO ON AND ON FOREVER WITH AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EXAMPLES OF RICH CONTENT !
Could someone match this with FF14 ?..... Please do..... And if you noticed I left out around 15 Dungeon adventures, but that would take way more space than I could type here and about six hours !
Originally posted by page975 Vanilla WoW Vs. FF14 Open world challenge :- If you play an Elf, at around level 9 your starting zone would be Teldrassil. Here in the town of Dolanaar you would get a quest to go to Ban'Ethal Hollow, this is a deep group/solo non instance cave used to allow players get their feet wet with a group. Sure it could be done alone but that's optional. This is small, but a rich piece of content.....- Around level 15 and in Silverpine forest, players get a quest to swim out to Fenris Isle and here we have a nice little Keep that a small group or it can even be done solo if you play Rogue and do things smartart. This is a rich piece of content.....- Have you ever been to the Wetlands ?....To the north and if your exploring and paying attention you would come across a little side thingy called Ironbeads Tomb. If you could even find your way down the steps with fighting all the ozz mobs you would find a nice chest. This is a rich piece of content....-18-30 Duskwood. This zone is very dark and erie, kind of scary right ? It's dark in this zone. NPC's patrol the roads with lanterns and off the main road you could hear the wolfs howling. If you look hard you would find that wolf !-Booty Bay, how can we forget !......Hord and Alliance together, not good !....Leave the outpost and their is a good chance your gonna die by a real person looking to kick your ass !I COULD GO ON AND ON FOREVER WITH AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EXAMPLES OF RICH CONTENT !Could someone match this with FF14 ?..... Please do..... And if you noticed I left out around 15 Dungeon adventures, but that would take way more space than I could type here and about six hours !2013 My Butt.....
kinda just sounds like ur a WoW fanboi and nothing anyone says will make FFxiv even close in ur eyes. just stay with ur beloved WoW if thats what u really want.
Originally posted by page975 Vanilla WoW Vs. FF14 Open world challenge :
- If you play an Elf, at around level 9 your starting zone would be Teldrassil. Here in the town of Dolanaar you would get a quest to go to Ban'Ethal Hollow, this is a deep group/solo non instance cave used to allow players get their feet wet with a group. Sure it could be done alone but that's optional. This is small, but a rich piece of content.....
- Around level 15 and in Silverpine forest, players get a quest to swim out to Fenris Isle and here we have a nice little Keep that a small group or it can even be done solo if you play Rogue and do things smartart. This is a rich piece of content.....
- Have you ever been to the Wetlands ?....To the north and if your exploring and paying attention you would come across a little side thingy called Ironbeads Tomb. If you could even find your way down the steps with fighting all the ozz mobs you would find a nice chest. This is a rich piece of content....
-18-30 Duskwood. This zone is very dark and erie, kind of scary right ? It's dark in this zone. NPC's patrol the roads with lanterns and off the main road you could hear the wolfs howling. If you look hard you would find that wolf !
-Booty Bay, how can we forget !......Hord and Alliance together, not good !....Leave the outpost and their is a good chance your gonna die by a real person looking to kick your ass !
I COULD GO ON AND ON FOREVER WITH AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EXAMPLES OF RICH CONTENT !
Could someone match this with FF14 ?..... Please do..... And if you noticed I left out around 15 Dungeon adventures, but that would take way more space than I could type here and about six hours !
2013 My Butt.....
kinda just sounds like ur a WoW fanboi and nothing anyone says will make FFxiv even close in ur eyes. just stay with ur beloved WoW if thats what u really want.
Really, I can't stand the retail version. But the real point of all this is a comparison of content we get from mmos lately !
And by the way, you should not have to craft. That's just an excuses of no content.
- If you play an Elf, at around level 9 your starting zone would be Teldrassil. Here in the town of Dolanaar you would get a quest to go to Ban'Ethal Hollow, this is a deep group/solo non instance cave used to allow players get their feet wet with a group. Sure it could be done alone but that's optional. This is small, but a rich piece of content.....
- Around level 15 and in Silverpine forest, players get a quest to swim out to Fenris Isle and here we have a nice little Keep that a small group or it can even be done solo if you play Rogue and do things smartart. This is a rich piece of content.....
- Have you ever been to the Wetlands ?....To the north and if your exploring and paying attention you would come across a little side thingy called Ironbeads Tomb. If you could even find your way down the steps with fighting all the ozz mobs you would find a nice chest. This is a rich piece of content....
-18-30 Duskwood. This zone is very dark and erie, kind of scary right ? It's dark in this zone. NPC's patrol the roads with lanterns and off the main road you could hear the wolfs howling. If you look hard you would find that wolf !
-Booty Bay, how can we forget !......Hord and Alliance together, not good !....Leave the outpost and their is a good chance your gonna die by a real person looking to kick your ass !
I COULD GO ON AND ON FOREVER WITH AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EXAMPLES OF RICH CONTENT !
Could someone match this with FF14 ?..... Please do..... And if you noticed I left out around 15 Dungeon adventures, but that would take way more space than I could type here and about six hours !
2013 My Butt.....
Regardless of what anyone says, it sounds like you are just in love with WoW and no MMO's can compare to the feelings you currently have for the game. That's fine, but just realize that if you constantly hold everything up to WoW you are never going to find another MMO you love. MMO's can be different from WoW and still be great.
Gonna go through the same points as the OP. I largely agree with most points, but have some key differences. I'll also try to be way more concise than I usually am. So don't expect too much depth (EDIT: I guess I lied. Time for another post that sadly nobody will read due to its length...)
The World and It's Zones
I absolutely give vanilla WoW the edge here. I loved the distinct personality and uniqueness of each environment in WoW. It made the act of exploring it that much more exciting. Seamless transitions between zones are something I continue to miss with every game I've played since my WoW days. It's so crucial in making the world feel like one unified place. The natural movement from zone to zone and questing within each zone felt really good too, although the huge quest hubs were a bit chaotic and scattered in vanilla. They got more refined with each expansion and, after incorporating phasing, become much better at conveying a grand narrative within each zone.
FFXIV's zones do feel insanely...monogeological. As you say, it feels like there are really only 3 zones, inconveniently divided up into much smaller sections. On that point, I also completely agree that Coerthas was a huge breath of fresh air; it was the first zone that truly felt like a real MMO zone. Additionally, the game's main storyline only served to further emphasize the disconnected feeling of the zones by requiring you to constantly travel all the way across the entire freaking world for every sequential step of the quest-line. After using the aether network to teleport around hundreds of times and litter the map with my polka-dot travel history, all sense of geographical continuity of the world was utterly shattered for me. Contrast this to WoW where I have very fond memories of relatively seamless journeys across dozens of zones at a time. There's no comparison.
WoW had like what? 40ish zones on release? FFXIV probably has over 20, but it really does feel like it only has about 5. I'll even concede that FFXIV's zones are probably much bigger than most WoW zones too (and I'm talking about the broken up, zoned-off section zones.) But that doesn't matter. It just feels (and really, isn't it all about how it feels?) much smaller, much more claustrophobic and sporadic at the same time. More importantly, I feel like I spend less time actually soaking in the zones in an immersive way, and more time navigating them with my mini map, the waypoint network, and by tab targetting the mobs to gauge their level increases.
Fighting/Combat
I kind of agree with the OP here. I definitely recall having to very carefully pick my way through some mob camps and caves and underground labyrinths in vanilla WoW in order to complete many quests. There also used to be a ton of elite mobs that littered Azeroth, which wasn't so much the case when I stopped playing at the end of WotlK. Death definitely stalked you if you weren't careful, but you were also given a ton of tools to deal with a variety of situations.
In FFXIV, by contrast, there were very few (actually I can't really think of any at all) situations where I was in danger of dying in my solo pve experience. I played and leveled as a scholar though, so maybe my OP faerie auto healing me for days had something to do with that. I remember having a hard time with one personal story instance for the conjurer in beta, but that was about it. Other than that, every mob involved a very standardized rotation that I applied uniformly across every fight throughout my entire leveling experience.
Overall - and I really hate to be that guy - but I really do have a problem with the 2.5 second GCD. Everything, literally every single action, just feels so much more sluggish, delayed, and slower to recharge than I remember WoW feeling. I has been over 3 years since I last played WoW though, and I've been playing GW2 for a year before FFXIV, so taking that into account, it's entirely possible that my sense of combat snappiness and fluidity is a bit skewed.
Now on the other hand, I absolutely love the distinctly Final Fantasy sound effects, spells and animations. It feels good to be in a Final Fantasy world with other players and fight along side them. If you're a Final Fantasy fan or if you've played FFXI (my first MMO), the nostalgia is strong here.
Exploration
This goes hand in hand with much of the conversation on the zones and environments. There is one additional factor I'd like to discuss, however. Sure, left to your own devices, dropped randomly in the world and left to run around and explore, I think Azeroth was much more of a thrill to explore than Eorzea. Hands down. For all the reasons mentioned above and more. However, I think the way FFXIV guides you from one place to another - particularly to the dungeons - is far superior to WoW. It's quite elegant how players are led from one quest hub to another while completing the rather in depth primary story, and how, after completing a specific step in the story, suddenly brand new quests are opened up before you in a place you though you had already milked for all it's worth.
WoW, on the other hand, featured a very basic enter quest hub > gather quests for the entire zone > run around the zone completing them > return to quest hub to turn in quests > receive a final quest to send a letter to someone at a new quest hub > deliver the message to unlock or be guided to the next quest hub > repeat.
As I already said, I particularly enjoyed the way dungeons were introduced in FFXIV. The main storyline provided context for the dungeon, the lore behind it, and made sure you knew of its location in the world. I generally understood my purpose there, which was even further facilitated by the awesome cutscenes throughout many of the dungeons. This was always something I felt WoW was lacking. Minus a few special cases, like the Deadmines, I often had no idea why I was in a particular dungeon, who the bad guys were, or what our purpose was there. There were usually some quests that led you to each dungeon, but some were more in depth than others, and really, this showcases the plight of the classic text-based quest model: by time you reach level 50 and are on your 800th quest, you're just not reading them as closely as you did when you started. Cutscenes and cinematic dialogue like in FFXIV can help re-engage players with the storyline when they're beyond burnt out on reading quest text.
Personal Story
I completely disagree here. I love this direction MMOs are going in. I think it's absolutely crucial to provide players with a substantial amount of content they can complete solo, on their own time, in addition to the substantial amount of group content MMOs are known for. I will agree, however, that instanced parts of the personal story should be able to be completed with friends if you want to. It is silly to intentionally tell players they cannot play with each other. GW2 suffered from the same issue with the personal story. In that game, you could at least accompany your friends on their story, but you weren't allowed to share completion. If you had the same storyline - which, to be fair, was almost never the case in that game - you would have to repeat it for each person.
Anyway, overall, I feel narratives and storytelling in MMOs have come so far over the past decade, largely because of things like personal story lines, or main story lines, and cutscenes, and cinematic dialogue. This was actually one of my bigger gripes with WoW, especially as an ex-FFXI player. While every zone and town was bursting with more life and goings-on than had ever existed in FFXI, there really wasn't a main narrative present. Each zone had its own concerns. Then at max level, you dealt with the global concerns by A) fighting the main baddies in raids, and by reading the patch notes and the wiki on these raids to provide context for why they must be dealt with. FFXIV does a much better job of weaving in the concerns that threaten all of Eorzea throughout your entire leveling experience.
Dungeons
Oh dear, this one could be big, but I'll try to keep it brief! As mentioned earlier, I think FFXIV does a much better job of providing context and background for each dungeon. Then, within the confines of the dungeon, it continues to provide a better storytelling experience with the cutscenes and pre boss fight cinematics. Fight mechanics are interesting enough - completely on par with or even better than vanilla WoW's regular dungeons. While leveling, there is also a satisfying number of dungeons you encounter, which again, is about the same as vanilla WoW was.
All that said, once you get to level 50, the evaluation completely flips. My time in FFXIV has been reduced to "farming" the same 2 - that's right, only 2 - dungeons over and over and over again. Not even in the exciting "oh I wonder what loot I might get this time!" sort of way, but in the extraordinarily boring "I'm slowly accumulating enough points to buy a minor gear upgrade" sort of way.
The overall progression in FFXIV is cool enough. You have a dungeon set of gear to go after, two tiers of points with which to purchase even better upgrades, single boss hard mode fights that gate the first big raid and also drop good weapons (which are immediately negated by the Relic Weapon you obtain as a result of defeating those very same bosses among other things), crafting upgrades, and then raid gear to duke it out with your guildies over in some good ol' fashioned DKP wars. But the things you have to do to participate in this end game gear progression are boring as fucking hell. There's no better way to get me to click that "log out" button than by telling me to keep speed running the same 2 dungeons over and over and over again. Unfortunately, there's next to no incentive to run any of the other level 40-50 dungeons. The 3 hard mode primals were pretty awesome, but they're like a one night stand. Once you've had your way with them, you escape before they wake up, leaving only a "dear resident" letter behind.
WoW's "end game" dungeons, on the other hand, gripped me for months and months - really, straight into the Burning Crusade. And even then, heroic dungeons and all the raids that were crammed into that fantastic expansion kept me happy for the entire duration of the expansion. I had Scholomance, Stratholme undead/living sides, UBRS, LBRS, BRD, Dire Maul north east and west, and hell, even Mauradon runs for nature resist gear for Princess Huhuran. More importantly, these dungeons were freaking HUGE...like HUGE. They were cavernous and maze-like. Navigating them was a skill in itself. Runs would often take hours. In many cases, it was discussed while forming the group what bosses you planned to cover, or which path you wanted to go down the dungeon because it was understood that nobody had the time to complete the entire thing. Most importantly, every single one of them had relevant gear that took an extremely long time to acquire and could be used for raiding.
Now, I must be fair. Dungeon crawling was brand new to me back then. It's only natural that I couldn't get enough of this cool new thing. Nowadays, it feels like the dungeon burnout from one game just carries over to the next game. I mean, I haven't really played an MMO where I grind dungeons in several years, but the time doesn't seem to matter. Once I've played a dungeon in FFXIV twice, I have very little interest in doing it again. Every subsequent run feels more and more painful. And that, my friends, is how I define a "grind". Repeating something that is otherwise pretty fun so frequently that it ceases to be any fun at all.
And I hit that point with FFXIV's dungeons faster than I can ever recall in any game.
Crafting, a Hidden Blessing
In an effort to wind this post down, I wish to mention my single favorite part of FFXIV so far: it's crafting system. Honestly, it's probably the main thing that still has me playing. (Although don't be fooled by my tone throughout this post. I really do think FFXIV is a good game. I am still playing it afterall. I'm just trying to honestly compare it to vanilla WoW, which, despite the poop sandboxies love to throw at (in?) it and the resentment recovering addicts feel toward it, was a pretty revolutionary experience in my gaming career. Right up there with firing up Final Fantasy 7 for the first time, or evolving my precious little Pidgey into the badass skyhawk Pigeotto!) I'd argue FFXIV's job system works better with the crafting disciplines than it does with the combat disciplines. It feels so satisfying to level a new trade to a level that unlocks a key cross-class ability, then use that ability as another profession in order to more efficiently HQ a series of items that I can then turn in for a levequest that awards ultra phatty EXPs. The synergy throughout the system is astounding and ridiculously rewarding. Careful planning of the classes you level is rewarded. The skills you choose to use and the order you use them is rewarding. The gear you craft for yourself to more efficiently craft even better items is rewarding. HQing that gear is super rewarding. And earning a living while doing all this is most rewarding of all. This is truly a game within a game, and it's the main game I'm playing right now. And I'm having a blast doing it.
Gonna go through the same points as the OP. I largely agree with most points, but have some key differences. I'll also try to be way more concise than I usually am. So don't expect too much depth (EDIT: I guess I lied. Time for another post that sadly nobody will read due to its length...)
The World and It's Zones
I absolutely give vanilla WoW the edge here. I loved the distinct personality and uniqueness of each environment in WoW. It made the act of exploring it that much more exciting. Seamless transitions between zones are something I continue to miss with every game I've played since my WoW days. It's so crucial in making the world feel like one unified place. The natural movement from zone to zone and questing within each zone felt really good too, although the huge quest hubs were a bit chaotic and scattered in vanilla. They got more refined with each expansion and, after incorporating phasing, become much better at conveying a grand narrative within each zone.
FFXIV's zones do feel insanely...monogeological. As you say, it feels like there are really only 3 zones, inconveniently divided up into much smaller sections. On that point, I also completely agree that Coerthas was a huge breath of fresh air; it was the first zone that truly felt like a real MMO zone. Additionally, the game's main storyline only served to further emphasize the disconnected feeling of the zones by requiring you to constantly travel all the way across the entire freaking world for every sequential step of the quest-line. After using the aether network to teleport around hundreds of times and litter the map with my polka-dot travel history, all sense of geographical continuity of the world was utterly shattered for me. Contrast this to WoW where I have very fond memories of relatively seamless journeys across dozens of zones at a time. There's no comparison.
WoW had like what? 40ish zones on release? FFXIV probably has over 20, but it really does feel like it only has about 5. I'll even concede that FFXIV's zones are probably much bigger than most WoW zones too (and I'm talking about the broken up, zoned-off section zones.) But that doesn't matter. It just feels (and really, isn't it all about how it feels?) much smaller, much more claustrophobic and sporadic at the same time. More importantly, I feel like I spend less time actually soaking in the zones in an immersive way, and more time navigating them with my mini map, the waypoint network, and by tab targetting the mobs to gauge their level increases.
Fighting/Combat
I kind of agree with the OP here. I definitely recall having to very carefully pick my way through some mob camps and caves and underground labyrinths in vanilla WoW in order to complete many quests. There also used to be a ton of elite mobs that littered Azeroth, which wasn't so much the case when I stopped playing at the end of WotlK. Death definitely stalked you if you weren't careful, but you were also given a ton of tools to deal with a variety of situations.
In FFXIV, by contrast, there were very few (actually I can't really think of any at all) situations where I was in danger of dying in my solo pve experience. I played and leveled as a scholar though, so maybe my OP faerie auto healing me for days had something to do with that. I remember having a hard time with one personal story instance for the conjurer in beta, but that was about it. Other than that, every mob involved a very standardized rotation that I applied uniformly across every fight throughout my entire leveling experience.
Overall - and I really hate to be that guy - but I really do have a problem with the 2.5 second GCD. Everything, literally every single action, just feels so much more sluggish, delayed, and slower to recharge than I remember WoW feeling. I has been over 3 years since I last played WoW though, and I've been playing GW2 for a year before FFXIV, so taking that into account, it's entirely possible that my sense of combat snappiness and fluidity is a bit skewed.
Now on the other hand, I absolutely love the distinctly Final Fantasy sound effects, spells and animations. It feels good to be in a Final Fantasy world with other players and fight along side them. If you're a Final Fantasy fan or if you've played FFXI (my first MMO), the nostalgia is strong here.
Exploration
This goes hand in hand with much of the conversation on the zones and environments. There is one additional factor I'd like to discuss, however. Sure, left to your own devices, dropped randomly in the world and left to run around and explore, I think Azeroth was much more of a thrill to explore than Eorzea. Hands down. For all the reasons mentioned above and more. However, I think the way FFXIV guides you from one place to another - particularly to the dungeons - is far superior to WoW. It's quite elegant how players are led from one quest hub to another while completing the rather in depth primary story, and how, after completing a specific step in the story, suddenly brand new quests are opened up before you in a place you though you had already milked for all it's worth.
WoW, on the other hand, featured a very basic enter quest hub > gather quests for the entire zone > run around the zone completing them > return to quest hub to turn in quests > receive a final quest to send a letter to someone at a new quest hub > deliver the message to unlock or be guided to the next quest hub > repeat.
As I already said, I particularly enjoyed the way dungeons were introduced in FFXIV. The main storyline provided context for the dungeon, the lore behind it, and made sure you knew of its location in the world. I generally understood my purpose there, which was even further facilitated by the awesome cutscenes throughout many of the dungeons. This was always something I felt WoW was lacking. Minus a few special cases, like the Deadmines, I often had no idea why I was in a particular dungeon, who the bad guys were, or what our purpose was there. There were usually some quests that led you to each dungeon, but some were more in depth than others, and really, this showcases the plight of the classic text-based quest model: by time you reach level 50 and are on your 800th quest, you're just not reading them as closely as you did when you started. Cutscenes and cinematic dialogue like in FFXIV can help re-engage players with the storyline when they're beyond burnt out on reading quest text.
Personal Story
I completely disagree here. I love this direction MMOs are going in. I think it's absolutely crucial to provide players with a substantial amount of content they can complete solo, on their own time, in addition to the substantial amount of group content MMOs are known for. I will agree, however, that instanced parts of the personal story should be able to be completed with friends if you want to. It is silly to intentionally tell players they cannot play with each other. GW2 suffered from the same issue with the personal story. In that game, you could at least accompany your friends on their story, but you weren't allowed to share completion. If you had the same storyline - which, to be fair, was almost never the case in that game - you would have to repeat it for each person.
Anyway, overall, I feel narratives and storytelling in MMOs have come so far over the past decade, largely because of things like personal story lines, or main story lines, and cutscenes, and cinematic dialogue. This was actually one of my bigger gripes with WoW, especially as an ex-FFXI player. While every zone and town was bursting with more life and goings-on than had ever existed in FFXI, there really wasn't a main narrative present. Each zone had its own concerns. Then at max level, you dealt with the global concerns by A) fighting the main baddies in raids, and by reading the patch notes and the wiki on these raids to provide context for why they must be dealt with. FFXIV does a much better job of weaving in the concerns that threaten all of Eorzea throughout your entire leveling experience.
Dungeons
Oh dear, this one could be big, but I'll try to keep it brief! As mentioned earlier, I think FFXIV does a much better job of providing context and background for each dungeon. Then, within the confines of the dungeon, it continues to provide a better storytelling experience with the cutscenes and pre boss fight cinematics. Fight mechanics are interesting enough - completely on par with or even better than vanilla WoW's regular dungeons. While leveling, there is also a satisfying number of dungeons you encounter, which again, is about the same as vanilla WoW was.
All that said, once you get to level 50, the evaluation completely flips. My time in FFXIV has been reduced to "farming" the same 2 - that's right, only 2 - dungeons over and over and over again. Not even in the exciting "oh I wonder what loot I might get this time!" sort of way, but in the extraordinarily boring "I'm slowly accumulating enough points to buy a minor gear upgrade" sort of way.
The overall progression in FFXIV is cool enough. You have a dungeon set of gear to go after, two tiers of points with which to purchase even better upgrades, single boss hard mode fights that gate the first big raid and also drop good weapons (which are immediately negated by the Relic Weapon you obtain as a result of defeating those very same bosses among other things), crafting upgrades, and then raid gear to duke it out with your guildies over in some good ol' fashioned DKP wars. But the things you have to do to participate in this end game gear progression are boring as fucking hell. There's no better way to get me to click that "log out" button than by telling me to keep speed running the same 2 dungeons over and over and over again. Unfortunately, there's next to no incentive to run any of the other level 40-50 dungeons. The 3 hard mode primals were pretty awesome, but they're like a one night stand. Once you've had your way with them, you escape before they wake up, leaving only a "dear resident" letter behind.
WoW's "end game" dungeons, on the other hand, gripped me for months and months - really, straight into the Burning Crusade. And even then, heroic dungeons and all the raids that were crammed into that fantastic expansion kept me happy for the entire duration of the expansion. I had Scholomance, Stratholme undead/living sides, UBRS, LBRS, BRD, Dire Maul north east and west, and hell, even Mauradon runs for nature resist gear for Princess Huhuran. More importantly, these dungeons were freaking HUGE...like HUGE. They were cavernous and maze-like. Navigating them was a skill in itself. Runs would often take hours. In many cases, it was discussed while forming the group what bosses you planned to cover, or which path you wanted to go down the dungeon because it was understood that nobody had the time to complete the entire thing. Most importantly, every single one of them had relevant gear that took an extremely long time to acquire and could be used for raiding.
Now, I must be fair. Dungeon crawling was brand new to me back then. It's only natural that I couldn't get enough of this cool new thing. Nowadays, it feels like the dungeon burnout from one game just carries over to the next game. I mean, I haven't really played an MMO where I grind dungeons in several years, but the time doesn't seem to matter. Once I've played a dungeon in FFXIV twice, I have very little interest in doing it again. Every subsequent run feels more and more painful. And that, my friends, is how I define a "grind". Repeating something that is otherwise pretty fun so frequently that it ceases to be any fun at all.
And I hit that point with FFXIV's dungeons faster than I can ever recall in any game.
Crafting, a Hidden Blessing
In an effort to wind this post down, I wish to mention my single favorite part of FFXIV so far: it's crafting system. Honestly, it's probably the main thing that still has me playing. (Although don't be fooled by my tone throughout this post. I really do think FFXIV is a good game. I am still playing it afterall. I'm just trying to honestly compare it to vanilla WoW, which, despite the poop sandboxies love to throw at (in?) it and the resentment recovering addicts feel toward it, was a pretty revolutionary experience in my gaming career. Right up there with firing up Final Fantasy 7 for the first time, or evolving my precious little Pidgey into the badass skyhawk Pigeotto!) I'd argue FFXIV's job system works better with the crafting disciplines than it does with the combat disciplines. It feels so satisfying to level a new trade to a level that unlocks a key cross-class ability, then use that ability as another profession in order to more efficiently HQ a series of items that I can then turn in for a levequest that awards ultra phatty EXPs. The synergy throughout the system is astounding and ridiculously rewarding. Careful planning of the classes you level is rewarded. The skills you choose to use and the order you use them is rewarding. The gear you craft for yourself to more efficiently craft even better items is rewarding. HQing that gear is super rewarding. And earning a living while doing all this is most rewarding of all. This is truly a game within a game, and it's the main game I'm playing right now. And I'm having a blast doing it.
Fighting, Well, Fighting in FF14 is no challenge. Very few multiple mob attacks unless you back into something else. You know your gonna win ! Lets face it it's a sure thing unless you have that lazy minute where your not paying attention.
It's hardly the games fault if you are not taking risks. Grow some balls and try harder mobs. Try to party up and it will increase the number of mobs that aggor. Yes, for solo you will be safe most of the time if you stay in areas at or below your level. If you want a challenge go and fight mobs 3-4 levels above you.
Khm, game to be challenging one must always looks for areas with mobs 3-4 levels above? What kind of response is this? OP forgot to mention all mobs in FF are stationary in Wow you had to be carefull at all times, patrols always moving pretty far, one had to make a good plan how to move past solo.
Exploration. WoW hands down...No caves, no major enemy outpost, no enemy controlled cities in FF14, in fact no caves at all. First time in a new zone and I already know whats over the hill " the same ". Remember that little cave under the water fall in Darkshore to the north. I used to be afraid to go in there at level fifteen !...Remember Mo'Grosh Stronghold in Loch Moden, you wouldn't even attempt to play around unless you had a group.
There are Beastmen outposts, i think 5 or 6 total. There are caves. You have obviously not explored all the small zones yet. Maybe you do that before you post next time.
Uhm, also in starting areas there are caves but unfortunately protected by magic and invisible walls.
In general I agree with all OP. I have loved a lot FF on PS and played them nearly all. Stopped to play ARR after 3 days of gameplay on my PERSONAL COMPUTER. This says a lot.
But as I usually say I'm glad for those who enjoy, but this game is not for me. Virtually any other I have played (with exception of TR) was able to keep me in at least until expiration of free time. Here I left with aprox 20 days of free time. 7 days of trying to log in and 3 days of playing.
Time will show if they did right this time. Only reason FF14 ressurected was Japanese pride. When we talk about pride money one loses does not matter. But still there are limits.
I enjoy FFXIVs world but GW2 has the best open world hands down. Even though it's zoned in there's so much to discover and when little events actually happen in these places it just adds to the feel.
My hope is they focus on FATEs more in the future and make them feel more organic and thus the world feeling more alive.
So I went back to my lv 33 Warlock in Vanilla WoW this afternoon. First let me say that I spent over an hour relearning all my abilities, the versatilely of World of Warcraft classes blow awayany class FF14 has. Just think about it.....A warlock has a fantastic tank pet, and so much utilities that you can strategies your situation to take on greater odds. Same with the Rogue,but in a totally different way. I remember way beck when I played the retail game, I made it a point to get the Zul'farrak hammer from an encampment deep in the Hinterlands. This involved a group effort but I chose to do it alone, I made my way through the camp and entered the room where the hammer was in stealth, and swiped it and disappeared again. This was a great time.
Most everything involved with FF14 involves about two minutes and no real effort !
Do you really think you would ever have a memory like this in FF14 ?
No!.....Why is no one getting the point of all this ?
FF14 IS SHALLOW !......IT'S A SHELL, JUST LIKE EVERY MMO IN THE PAST FEW YEARS !
I could easily give the same examples using :
Everquest 1 Everquest 2 LOTRO UO Dark age of Camelot FF11 EvE ( never played, but can only assume, from others )
This is not even about old school.....It's about cheapness !!!!.....There are countless topics on " you have to craft " ......I'm like, what !....Since when is crafting to get a full rich mmo a requirement ?
People will say " give them a break, FF14 just released ". I say Bull crap to that. It's also not about quanity of content. It's about the cheap content. All patches and expantions will just be an addon of the same quick, simple do stuff type.
I did the End game bosses with the level 20, and 35 previews. All I could say is that they were more aggervating than fun. Time your run when you see the blue squair, and run to the edge when he jumps....To me that sucked, constent finger pointing with groups. Yet end game you do the same crap but only faster.....Thats fun for you ?
PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE POINT, I'm not WoW lover....It's about richness and content.
No!.....Why is no one getting the point of all this ?
FF14 IS SHALLOW !......IT'S A SHELL, JUST LIKE EVERY MMO IN THE PAST FEW YEARS !
I could easily give the same examples using :
Everquest 1 Everquest 2 LOTRO UO Dark age of Camelot FF11 EvE ( never played, but can only assume, from others )
This is not even about old school.....It's about cheapness !!!!.....There are countless topics on " you have to craft " ......I'm like, what !....Since when is crafting to get a full rich mmo a requirement ?
People will say " give them a break, FF14 just released ". I say Bull crap to that. It's also not about quanity of content. It's about the cheap content. All patches and expantions will just be an addon of the same quick, simple do stuff type.
I did the End game bosses with the level 20, and 35 previews. All I could say is that they were more aggervating than fun. Time your run when you see the blue squair, and run to the edge when he jumps....To me that sucked, constent finger pointing with groups. Yet end game you do the same crap but only faster.....Thats fun for you ?
PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE POINT, I'm not WoW lover....It's about richness and content.
It's ok page you don't like ffxiv and you're not going to play it. Last night hyperion was having technical difficulties due to a heavy load, again, we are too full. Even with the idle kick.
Outside the small zones and loading screens, I would say FF14 makes a good come-back in the feel of the world thanks to the personality behind the NPCs and the lore. I would say the characters in FF14 are well-developed and comparable to the lore and feel behind WoW. In comparison, GW2 and Rift's (especially, Rift) world felt empty with the generic cut-and-paste characters.
i feel the same way about the World in Rift, but not in GW2. While i enjoy the world in FFXIV i think GW2 world has a lot more life to it. Specially when you die and an NPC that was standing or walking nearby comes and revives you... an NPC!. I havent seen that in any other mmo, ever. The world in FFXIV is beautiful, but IMO it feels more generic and with less life than Tyria. My opinion based on my own experience and perspective of both worlds.
It's ok page you don't like ffxiv and you're not going to play it. Last night hyperion was having technical difficulties due to a heavy load, again, we are too full. Even with the idle kick.
it is great that the servers are still full of people, but i think your post make it sounds like its something extreme. If i remember correctly SE increased the capacity of the servers but each server still holds 4 digit number of players. About the same capacity of a private server of WoW (a private / pirate server, not official ones), that is not a lot per server.
But like i said, its indeed awesome the game is still full of peeps. That can only mean more money for more content which is always good.
I understand what your point is. I don't get why when comparing open world you bring up graphics and dungeons but forget to mention that WOW was two continents that were both seemless overworld travel from tip to tip. You could also see the world from the air via flight paths. It had water that people could swim in. Both underwater content and islands to swim to. It also had caves, tunnel networks, and good use of the z axis.
FF14 is invisible walls, loading screens, instant travel, and ankle deep water.
"You CAN'T buy ships for RL money." - MaxBacon
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
It's ok page you don't like ffxiv and you're not going to play it. Last night hyperion was having technical difficulties due to a heavy load, again, we are too full. Even with the idle kick.
it is great that the servers are still full of people, but i think your post make it sounds like its something extreme. If i remember correctly SE increased the capacity of the servers but each server still holds 4 digit number of players. About the same capacity of a private server of WoW (a private / pirate server, not official ones), that is not a lot per server.
But like i said, its indeed awesome the game is still full of peeps. That can only mean more money for more content which is always good.
Hyperion is a legacy server, legacy players have been paying customers already. It was nice when the increased the server size, but that last all but a week.
I understand what your point is. I don't get why when comparing open world you bring up graphics and dungeons but forget to mention that WOW was two continents that were both seemless overworld travel from tip to tip. You could also see the world from the air via flight paths. It had water that people could swim in. Both underwater content and islands to swim to. It also had caves, tunnel networks, and good use of the z axis.
FF14 is invisible walls, loading screens, instant travel, and ankle deep water.
Your right, I just got off track....I went into how rich mmos used to be even from the start, now their fast 30 days games.
I have no real love for WoW, but in terms of the virtual world feeling like a world, it's miles ahead of FFXIV. FFXIV looks nice, but feels so small, no swimming, no hidden paths to rare mobs or loot, no real exploration or hidden gems. In terms of land mass it's about the size of the Outland in WoW, possibly smaller making it one of the smallest AAA games I've played. There are also two zones in each city and these aren't particularly big zones.
Comments
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdZQu88OsgM I say they done better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQhS-l02GEI Part 1,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Do9b7_8dpow Part 2
Well, both have day/night cycles - ARR is fast (like 90min cycles), WoW is real-time based on server time (in Vanilla you could see which time zone your server was in)
ARR has weather. Lots of weather.
Both games have jumping, running, walking, mounts. WoW has swimming and some underwater content, which ARR does not.
WoW had a bigger world - 2 seamless continents with 6 major cities, compared to the various zones and 3 major cities of FFXIV
ARR world has much higher detail - part of this may be attributed to the fact that it's released later, and part of it due to the fact that because it's zoned you can have an engine that supports more detail
Themed zones - both have zones of various themes, and the themes work very well within the lore of the story. I can definitely tell the difference between La Noscea and Gridania and Mor Dhona, just like I can between Dustwallow and Barrens and Darkshore.
On the seamless vs zoned thing: keep in mind that seamless worlds always have those "entry barriers" where you have to just go around a long wall for absolutely no reason in the game, but it technically allows the game to load up the next zone without you seeing a zoning screen. To me, those are just as disruptive as a zoning screen would have been, because they are completely unrealistic. Really... who builds a wall right inside the front door, just so you have to walk around it. And it happens ~everywhere~ in a "seamless" world, you always have to run through some sort of corridor in order to give the engine time to load the assets for the next area.
Fast travel - ARR has porters you must link, mounts, instant-teleport crystals you must link, everyone has teleport, everyone has return. WoW had gryphons to link (some of which are ~very~ long flight paths), only certain classes had teleport, certain classes had Summon to Group
ARR has a duty finder initially. Vanilla WoW had... nothing at all, and it was very painful trying to find dungeon groups. You could probably chalk this one up to ARR being a 2010/2013 title and including the group finder aspect that WoW added much later in it's life; however, there were some simple mechanics that were available even in 2004 that WoW failed to implement initially (a LFG flag for player searches, cross-zone chat channels, etc)
FFXIV 1.0 had much higher quality textures than ARR, but the graphics engine was much more demanding (no one could run Ambient Occlusion with the Clip Plane at max). The models are all mostly the same, but the textures have been significantly "optimized' in ARR so it would be much less hardware dependant (or maybe so they could actually get it to run on the PS3). They are still miles better than WoW textures - although most of this gets chalked up to 2013 vs 2004.
Fighting: both are trinity based with tab targeting, nothing really dissimilar about the basics. The GCD is biggest difference between the two. WoW has it's 3 spec trees per class, whereas ARR has it's horizontal Armory system allowing you to play every class.
Lore - both games have a lot of lore, and in and of themselves do a lot to propogate that lore effectively via the quests and the world in general. ARR draws heavily from it's FF heritage (which 1.0 failed to do in large part), WoW draws from it's Warcraft roots. ARR has a main story line that it drives everyone down the same perspective story with only minor differences, WoW has 2 clear factions which see the story from very unique perspectives, but no main story thread in any race/class/faction - you must infer a lot of the lore from the world rather it being told to you like a story.
WoW had 6 semi-unique starting areas for each race (some races shared, like Orcs/Trolls, or Gnomes/Dwarves). ARR has 3 for various classes.
Polish - ARR had about 2 weeks of severe server problems, WoW had several months of various glitches and server availability. The infamous WoW Loot Lag bug was particularly bad initially. I consider that part of the polish as much as I do seeing little details on the character animations.
Quests - both have ! quests in level-grouped quest hubs, both do FedEx/KillXX type quests. ARR also has Hests, Leves, and FATEs - can probably chalk some of that up to 2013 vs 2004. WoW did pretty well invent the ! quest hub, 1.0 introduced Leves and Hests, but I don't know that I would really call that an innovation; I think they mostly just carried over into ARR for continuity and they don't add a whole lot to the experience right now.
ARR does a good job of reusing zones: One zone may have L1-10 content, a L30 dungeon, and L40 content. It keeps the population mixed up and keeps certain zones from becoming deadspots.
PvP - WoW had it (at least open world, there were no BGs or arenas or anything else). ARR didn't at all at launch.
All in all - I'd say they are two very different styles, and it's hard to compare one to the other. You can very obviously see the influence WoW had on ARR, but you could also very obviously see the influence that games like EQ had on WoW. ARR obviously has the benefit of releasing 9 years later. I would say that WoW was a bit more expansive - the world is a bit bigger, it had more starting cities, and 2 opposing factions each presenting a different take on a common world's story. But I'd also say bigger isn't necessarily better, and there are a lot of things that ARR does so well in spite of it's zoned approach (weather, mixing level content inside of the same zone, small animation details, etc).
ARR is a smaller game at launch, but I think it has a lot of things that WoW didn't have at the start either. I don't think that necessarily makes it "worse" or "better" in terms of quality. The real test is where it goes from here. WoW expansions, I hated the way they totally made the previous content obsolete; it was like they just completely killed the old game in favor of the new and it lead to huge dead spots in the game. I loved the EQ model, where previous content was still very relevent, and in many cases required in order to get into the new content. We will see what ARR does in this regard.
Vanilla WoW Vs. FF14 Open world challenge :
- If you play an Elf, at around level 9 your starting zone would be Teldrassil. Here in the town of Dolanaar you would get a quest to go to Ban'Ethal Hollow, this is a deep group/solo non instance cave used to allow players get their feet wet with a group. Sure it could be done alone but that's optional. This is small, but a rich piece of content.....
- Around level 15 and in Silverpine forest, players get a quest to swim out to Fenris Isle and here we have a nice little Keep that a small group or it can even be done solo if you play Rogue and do things smartart. This is a rich piece of content.....
- Have you ever been to the Wetlands ?....To the north and if your exploring and paying attention you would come across a little side thingy called Ironbeads Tomb. If you could even find your way down the steps with fighting all the ozz mobs you would find a nice chest. This is a rich piece of content....
-18-30 Duskwood. This zone is very dark and erie, kind of scary right ? It's dark in this zone. NPC's patrol the roads with lanterns and off the main road you could hear the wolfs howling. If you look hard you would find that wolf !
-Booty Bay, how can we forget !......Hord and Alliance together, not good !....Leave the outpost and their is a good chance your gonna die by a real person looking to kick your ass !
I COULD GO ON AND ON FOREVER WITH AT LEAST ONE HUNDRED EXAMPLES OF RICH CONTENT !
Could someone match this with FF14 ?..... Please do..... And if you noticed I left out around 15 Dungeon adventures, but that would take way more space than I could type here and about six hours !
2013 My Butt.....
Really, I can't stand the retail version. But the real point of all this is a comparison of content we get from mmos lately !
And by the way, you should not have to craft. That's just an excuses of no content.
Regardless of what anyone says, it sounds like you are just in love with WoW and no MMO's can compare to the feelings you currently have for the game. That's fine, but just realize that if you constantly hold everything up to WoW you are never going to find another MMO you love. MMO's can be different from WoW and still be great.
Gonna go through the same points as the OP. I largely agree with most points, but have some key differences. I'll also try to be way more concise than I usually am. So don't expect too much depth
(EDIT: I guess I lied. Time for another post that sadly nobody will read due to its length...)
The World and It's Zones
I absolutely give vanilla WoW the edge here. I loved the distinct personality and uniqueness of each environment in WoW. It made the act of exploring it that much more exciting. Seamless transitions between zones are something I continue to miss with every game I've played since my WoW days. It's so crucial in making the world feel like one unified place. The natural movement from zone to zone and questing within each zone felt really good too, although the huge quest hubs were a bit chaotic and scattered in vanilla. They got more refined with each expansion and, after incorporating phasing, become much better at conveying a grand narrative within each zone.
FFXIV's zones do feel insanely...monogeological. As you say, it feels like there are really only 3 zones, inconveniently divided up into much smaller sections. On that point, I also completely agree that Coerthas was a huge breath of fresh air; it was the first zone that truly felt like a real MMO zone. Additionally, the game's main storyline only served to further emphasize the disconnected feeling of the zones by requiring you to constantly travel all the way across the entire freaking world for every sequential step of the quest-line. After using the aether network to teleport around hundreds of times and litter the map with my polka-dot travel history, all sense of geographical continuity of the world was utterly shattered for me. Contrast this to WoW where I have very fond memories of relatively seamless journeys across dozens of zones at a time. There's no comparison.
WoW had like what? 40ish zones on release? FFXIV probably has over 20, but it really does feel like it only has about 5. I'll even concede that FFXIV's zones are probably much bigger than most WoW zones too (and I'm talking about the broken up, zoned-off section zones.) But that doesn't matter. It just feels (and really, isn't it all about how it feels?) much smaller, much more claustrophobic and sporadic at the same time. More importantly, I feel like I spend less time actually soaking in the zones in an immersive way, and more time navigating them with my mini map, the waypoint network, and by tab targetting the mobs to gauge their level increases.
Fighting/Combat
I kind of agree with the OP here. I definitely recall having to very carefully pick my way through some mob camps and caves and underground labyrinths in vanilla WoW in order to complete many quests. There also used to be a ton of elite mobs that littered Azeroth, which wasn't so much the case when I stopped playing at the end of WotlK. Death definitely stalked you if you weren't careful, but you were also given a ton of tools to deal with a variety of situations.
In FFXIV, by contrast, there were very few (actually I can't really think of any at all) situations where I was in danger of dying in my solo pve experience. I played and leveled as a scholar though, so maybe my OP faerie auto healing me for days had something to do with that. I remember having a hard time with one personal story instance for the conjurer in beta, but that was about it. Other than that, every mob involved a very standardized rotation that I applied uniformly across every fight throughout my entire leveling experience.
Overall - and I really hate to be that guy - but I really do have a problem with the 2.5 second GCD. Everything, literally every single action, just feels so much more sluggish, delayed, and slower to recharge than I remember WoW feeling. I has been over 3 years since I last played WoW though, and I've been playing GW2 for a year before FFXIV, so taking that into account, it's entirely possible that my sense of combat snappiness and fluidity is a bit skewed.
Now on the other hand, I absolutely love the distinctly Final Fantasy sound effects, spells and animations. It feels good to be in a Final Fantasy world with other players and fight along side them. If you're a Final Fantasy fan or if you've played FFXI (my first MMO), the nostalgia is strong here.
Exploration
This goes hand in hand with much of the conversation on the zones and environments. There is one additional factor I'd like to discuss, however. Sure, left to your own devices, dropped randomly in the world and left to run around and explore, I think Azeroth was much more of a thrill to explore than Eorzea. Hands down. For all the reasons mentioned above and more. However, I think the way FFXIV guides you from one place to another - particularly to the dungeons - is far superior to WoW. It's quite elegant how players are led from one quest hub to another while completing the rather in depth primary story, and how, after completing a specific step in the story, suddenly brand new quests are opened up before you in a place you though you had already milked for all it's worth.
WoW, on the other hand, featured a very basic enter quest hub > gather quests for the entire zone > run around the zone completing them > return to quest hub to turn in quests > receive a final quest to send a letter to someone at a new quest hub > deliver the message to unlock or be guided to the next quest hub > repeat.
As I already said, I particularly enjoyed the way dungeons were introduced in FFXIV. The main storyline provided context for the dungeon, the lore behind it, and made sure you knew of its location in the world. I generally understood my purpose there, which was even further facilitated by the awesome cutscenes throughout many of the dungeons. This was always something I felt WoW was lacking. Minus a few special cases, like the Deadmines, I often had no idea why I was in a particular dungeon, who the bad guys were, or what our purpose was there. There were usually some quests that led you to each dungeon, but some were more in depth than others, and really, this showcases the plight of the classic text-based quest model: by time you reach level 50 and are on your 800th quest, you're just not reading them as closely as you did when you started. Cutscenes and cinematic dialogue like in FFXIV can help re-engage players with the storyline when they're beyond burnt out on reading quest text.
Personal Story
I completely disagree here. I love this direction MMOs are going in. I think it's absolutely crucial to provide players with a substantial amount of content they can complete solo, on their own time, in addition to the substantial amount of group content MMOs are known for. I will agree, however, that instanced parts of the personal story should be able to be completed with friends if you want to. It is silly to intentionally tell players they cannot play with each other. GW2 suffered from the same issue with the personal story. In that game, you could at least accompany your friends on their story, but you weren't allowed to share completion. If you had the same storyline - which, to be fair, was almost never the case in that game - you would have to repeat it for each person.
Anyway, overall, I feel narratives and storytelling in MMOs have come so far over the past decade, largely because of things like personal story lines, or main story lines, and cutscenes, and cinematic dialogue. This was actually one of my bigger gripes with WoW, especially as an ex-FFXI player. While every zone and town was bursting with more life and goings-on than had ever existed in FFXI, there really wasn't a main narrative present. Each zone had its own concerns. Then at max level, you dealt with the global concerns by A) fighting the main baddies in raids, and
by reading the patch notes and the wiki on these raids to provide context for why they must be dealt with. FFXIV does a much better job of weaving in the concerns that threaten all of Eorzea throughout your entire leveling experience.
Dungeons
Oh dear, this one could be big, but I'll try to keep it brief! As mentioned earlier, I think FFXIV does a much better job of providing context and background for each dungeon. Then, within the confines of the dungeon, it continues to provide a better storytelling experience with the cutscenes and pre boss fight cinematics. Fight mechanics are interesting enough - completely on par with or even better than vanilla WoW's regular dungeons. While leveling, there is also a satisfying number of dungeons you encounter, which again, is about the same as vanilla WoW was.
All that said, once you get to level 50, the evaluation completely flips. My time in FFXIV has been reduced to "farming" the same 2 - that's right, only 2 - dungeons over and over and over again. Not even in the exciting "oh I wonder what loot I might get this time!" sort of way, but in the extraordinarily boring "I'm slowly accumulating enough points to buy a minor gear upgrade" sort of way.
The overall progression in FFXIV is cool enough. You have a dungeon set of gear to go after, two tiers of points with which to purchase even better upgrades, single boss hard mode fights that gate the first big raid and also drop good weapons (which are immediately negated by the Relic Weapon you obtain as a result of defeating those very same bosses among other things), crafting upgrades, and then raid gear to duke it out with your guildies over in some good ol' fashioned DKP wars. But the things you have to do to participate in this end game gear progression are boring as fucking hell. There's no better way to get me to click that "log out" button than by telling me to keep speed running the same 2 dungeons over and over and over again. Unfortunately, there's next to no incentive to run any of the other level 40-50 dungeons. The 3 hard mode primals were pretty awesome, but they're like a one night stand. Once you've had your way with them, you escape before they wake up, leaving only a "dear resident" letter behind.
WoW's "end game" dungeons, on the other hand, gripped me for months and months - really, straight into the Burning Crusade. And even then, heroic dungeons and all the raids that were crammed into that fantastic expansion kept me happy for the entire duration of the expansion. I had Scholomance, Stratholme undead/living sides, UBRS, LBRS, BRD, Dire Maul north east and west, and hell, even Mauradon runs for nature resist gear for Princess Huhuran. More importantly, these dungeons were freaking HUGE...like HUGE. They were cavernous and maze-like. Navigating them was a skill in itself. Runs would often take hours. In many cases, it was discussed while forming the group what bosses you planned to cover, or which path you wanted to go down the dungeon because it was understood that nobody had the time to complete the entire thing. Most importantly, every single one of them had relevant gear that took an extremely long time to acquire and could be used for raiding.
Now, I must be fair. Dungeon crawling was brand new to me back then. It's only natural that I couldn't get enough of this cool new thing. Nowadays, it feels like the dungeon burnout from one game just carries over to the next game. I mean, I haven't really played an MMO where I grind dungeons in several years, but the time doesn't seem to matter. Once I've played a dungeon in FFXIV twice, I have very little interest in doing it again. Every subsequent run feels more and more painful. And that, my friends, is how I define a "grind". Repeating something that is otherwise pretty fun so frequently that it ceases to be any fun at all.
And I hit that point with FFXIV's dungeons faster than I can ever recall in any game.
Crafting, a Hidden Blessing
In an effort to wind this post down, I wish to mention my single favorite part of FFXIV so far: it's crafting system. Honestly, it's probably the main thing that still has me playing. (Although don't be fooled by my tone throughout this post. I really do think FFXIV is a good game. I am still playing it afterall. I'm just trying to honestly compare it to vanilla WoW, which, despite the poop sandboxies love to throw at (in?) it and the resentment recovering addicts feel toward it, was a pretty revolutionary experience in my gaming career. Right up there with firing up Final Fantasy 7 for the first time, or evolving my precious little Pidgey into the badass skyhawk Pigeotto!) I'd argue FFXIV's job system works better with the crafting disciplines than it does with the combat disciplines. It feels so satisfying to level a new trade to a level that unlocks a key cross-class ability, then use that ability as another profession in order to more efficiently HQ a series of items that I can then turn in for a levequest that awards ultra phatty EXPs. The synergy throughout the system is astounding and ridiculously rewarding. Careful planning of the classes you level is rewarded. The skills you choose to use and the order you use them is rewarding. The gear you craft for yourself to more efficiently craft even better items is rewarding. HQing that gear is super rewarding. And earning a living while doing all this is most rewarding of all. This is truly a game within a game, and it's the main game I'm playing right now. And I'm having a blast doing it.
Incognito
www.incognito-gaming.us
"You're either with us or against us"
Thanks Homitu,
Very good read
You would quote the whole thing
And thanks, now I can rest knowing at least one person read it 
Khm, game to be challenging one must always looks for areas with mobs 3-4 levels above? What kind of response is this? OP forgot to mention all mobs in FF are stationary in Wow you had to be carefull at all times, patrols always moving pretty far, one had to make a good plan how to move past solo.
Uhm, also in starting areas there are caves but unfortunately protected by magic and invisible walls.
In general I agree with all OP. I have loved a lot FF on PS and played them nearly all. Stopped to play ARR after 3 days of gameplay on my PERSONAL COMPUTER. This says a lot.
But as I usually say I'm glad for those who enjoy, but this game is not for me. Virtually any other I have played (with exception of TR) was able to keep me in at least until expiration of free time. Here I left with aprox 20 days of free time. 7 days of trying to log in and 3 days of playing.
Time will show if they did right this time. Only reason FF14 ressurected was Japanese pride. When we talk about pride money one loses does not matter. But still there are limits.
My hope is they focus on FATEs more in the future and make them feel more organic and thus the world feeling more alive.
So I went back to my lv 33 Warlock in Vanilla WoW this afternoon. First let me say that I spent over an hour relearning all my abilities, the versatilely of World of Warcraft classes blow awayany class FF14 has. Just think about it.....A warlock has a fantastic tank pet, and so much utilities that you can strategies your situation to take on greater odds. Same with the Rogue,but in a totally different way. I remember way beck when I played the retail game, I made it a point to get the Zul'farrak hammer from an encampment deep in the Hinterlands. This involved a group effort but I chose to do it alone, I made my way through the camp and entered the room where the hammer was in stealth, and swiped it and disappeared again. This was a great time.
Most everything involved with FF14 involves about two minutes and no real effort !
Do you really think you would ever have a memory like this in FF14 ?
No!.....Why is no one getting the point of all this ?
FF14 IS SHALLOW !......IT'S A SHELL, JUST LIKE EVERY MMO IN THE PAST FEW YEARS !
I could easily give the same examples using :
Everquest 1
Everquest 2
LOTRO
UO
Dark age of Camelot
FF11
EvE ( never played, but can only assume, from others )
This is not even about old school.....It's about cheapness !!!!.....There are countless topics on " you have to craft " ......I'm like, what !....Since when is crafting to get a full rich mmo a requirement ?
People will say " give them a break, FF14 just released ". I say Bull crap to that. It's also not about quanity of content. It's about the cheap content. All patches and expantions will just be an addon of the same quick, simple do stuff type.
I did the End game bosses with the level 20, and 35 previews. All I could say is that they were more aggervating than fun. Time your run when you see the blue squair, and run to the edge when he jumps....To me that sucked, constent finger pointing with groups. Yet end game you do the same crap but only faster.....Thats fun for you ?
PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE POINT, I'm not WoW lover....It's about richness and content.
It's ok page you don't like ffxiv and you're not going to play it. Last night hyperion was having technical difficulties due to a heavy load, again, we are too full. Even with the idle kick.
i feel the same way about the World in Rift, but not in GW2. While i enjoy the world in FFXIV i think GW2 world has a lot more life to it. Specially when you die and an NPC that was standing or walking nearby comes and revives you... an NPC!. I havent seen that in any other mmo, ever. The world in FFXIV is beautiful, but IMO it feels more generic and with less life than Tyria. My opinion based on my own experience and perspective of both worlds.
it is great that the servers are still full of people, but i think your post make it sounds like its something extreme. If i remember correctly SE increased the capacity of the servers but each server still holds 4 digit number of players. About the same capacity of a private server of WoW (a private / pirate server, not official ones), that is not a lot per server.
But like i said, its indeed awesome the game is still full of peeps. That can only mean more money for more content which is always good.
@ OP
I understand what your point is. I don't get why when comparing open world you bring up graphics and dungeons but forget to mention that WOW was two continents that were both seemless overworld travel from tip to tip. You could also see the world from the air via flight paths. It had water that people could swim in. Both underwater content and islands to swim to. It also had caves, tunnel networks, and good use of the z axis.
FF14 is invisible walls, loading screens, instant travel, and ankle deep water.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/Hyperion is a legacy server, legacy players have been paying customers already. It was nice when the increased the server size, but that last all but a week.
Your right, I just got off track....I went into how rich mmos used to be even from the start, now their fast 30 days games.
Lol it's not even close.
WoW wins hands down.
Actually I believe Azeroth is still the best World of all MMOs, maybe EQ-EQ2 come close.
FF14 just feel plastic, empty and those invisible walls..................just tragic
I have no real love for WoW, but in terms of the virtual world feeling like a world, it's miles ahead of FFXIV. FFXIV looks nice, but feels so small, no swimming, no hidden paths to rare mobs or loot, no real exploration or hidden gems. In terms of land mass it's about the size of the Outland in WoW, possibly smaller making it one of the smallest AAA games I've played. There are also two zones in each city and these aren't particularly big zones.
This is probably the single most incredibly derptastic thread in the history of ever.
"Quality of open world"...? FFXIV is not an open world by a long shot. It wasn't intended to be. Apples, oranges. /thread.