What's so good about FFXIV?

[Itori]

It's just a honeymoon period, it will die down in a month or two. FFXIV is still vastly inferior to WoW in almost every way.

Don't be so sure, Endwalker drops in 4 months, and all the WoW refugees enjoying the story, dungeons, and raids so far will have a ton more content to play dropped in their lap by the time the more hardcore players complete the harder content.

[Velshin]

I have been playing FFXIV since ARR launch at 2013 then had to quit in 2016 but now recently I quit WoW (not planning to come back and this is my first time quitting WoW since 2004 and now focusing more into playing FFXIV)

Here is the list of why I love FFXIV:

1-The community is super friendly and helpful I remember I was dying in Shinryu raid boss fight I was expecting peopld will rage or kick me but guess what? they were super friendly and the raid leader said something like "Dont worry about it just enjoy the sound track and enjoy the ride." and went on explaining to me the tactics in a very chill and civil attitude.


2-No link achiev or no invite mentality, or link your logs or instant kick and all of that over competitve bullshit we have in WoW. The achievement system exist in the game but it is similar to PlayStation trophy system where you cant link it, it js just personal thing.


3-The game has 8 years old contents that are still relevant and you will find a lot of players still active there. Unlike modern WoW which only focuses on the latest patch.

4-The game is like a theme park specially for FF series old fans. It has so many references, nods, cameo, easter eggs from previous FF titles.


5-Crossplay which is a major feature when it comes to online games.


There are many things I love about the game but these are the major ones.

[Delever]

It's just a honeymoon period, it will die down in a month or two. FFXIV is still vastly inferior to WoW in almost every way.

My dude its fine to not like the game but to spout such bullshit is just disingenuous. The game has been steadily growing in playerbase for a while now. The only change is that now it spiked instead of continuing on its normal linear growth trend. Even if half of the people that came now were to drop it (which I expect will happen) the game will still be doing great and probably at this very moment better than WoW.
Not that it matters in the grand scheme of things. Whenever an MMO doesnt have competitions its a shit period for it.

[NatePsy]

Just plenty to do in a game I haven't played for 15 years. It helps that their systems are fun and have depth too.

[Geckoo]

Visually speaking i never liked the game too much, the world looks bland and is mostly empty... once you get flying it's even worse since you can see how bad it is from a distance. The theme and general tone of the game, such as the story, is very subjective. I was never a big final fantasy or jrpg fan, so it's not my cup of tea.

But the group content, the community and the simple fact that the game respects your time makes up for all the negatives. Specially for someone who likes raiding.

[bmjclark]

Honestly, got completely engaged in the story and I was 100% ready to hate it despite everybody praising it.

The classes are engaging and tend to have a lot going on at higher level which I like but they also play pretty much how you'd expect and they feel good. I love that you can play every job on one character. I've also loved messing around with blue mage which is honestly really unique in an mmo. The leveling dungeons are easy but some do have mechanics which will punish or outright kill you. It's nice that the game actually feels like you have to be engaged even in leveling dungeons. I like that the hardest raids (ultimates) seem to be mostly just for cosmetics tbh. I look forward to trying raiding with my friends that came over from WoW.

Also, the community in this game is for the most part incredibly nice. No one really rages in dungeons if you wipe, every dungeon people say "hello" and maybe talk a bit. It's not like im having full fledged conversations with people but its just nice to know that there's someone behind the keyboard


The biggest negative is that 1-50 and the realm reborn patch content drag on for ages it feels like. I really felt like the game took off after 50 when you started getting more class mechanics and the road to get there wasn't really great. Everyone I know hit a wall during the realm reborn patch content and had to kind of drag their feet through it until Heavensward

[TheRevenantHero]

Honestly, got completely engaged in the story and I was 100% ready to hate it despite everybody praising it.

The classes are engaging and tend to have a lot going on at higher level which I like but they also play pretty much how you'd expect and they feel good. I love that you can play every job on one character. I've also loved messing around with blue mage which is honestly really unique in an mmo. The leveling dungeons are easy but some do have mechanics which will punish or outright kill you. It's nice that the game actually feels like you have to be engaged even in leveling dungeons. I like that the hardest raids (ultimates) seem to be mostly just for cosmetics tbh. I look forward to trying raiding with my friends that came over from WoW.

Also, the community in this game is for the most part incredibly nice. No one really rages in dungeons if you wipe, every dungeon people say "hello" and maybe talk a bit. It's not like im having full fledged conversations with people but its just nice to know that there's someone behind the keyboard


The biggest negative is that 1-50 and the realm reborn patch content drag on for ages it feels like. I really felt like the game took off after 50 when you started getting more class mechanics and the road to get there wasn't really great. Everyone I know hit a wall during the realm reborn patch content and had to kind of drag their feet through it until Heavensward

The community really is awesome. I love doing Praetorium during moogle events because everyone is just cracking jokes and shit posting in between each boss.

Though you're right about the ARR patch content. But because of how they generated the story progression, there's not much SE can do to fix that.

[Fus Ro Yay]

The community really is awesome. I love doing Praetorium during moogle events because everyone is just cracking jokes and shit posting in between each boss.

Praetorium is just made to be shitposted in. its why i love doing main scenario for poetics everyday

[Deneios]

Praetorium is just made to be shitposted in. its why i love doing main scenario for poetics everyday

Praetorium is the barrens chat

[Tyrick]

Got to level 30 last night just to give it a fair go

I still have no idea what people see in it.

My only thing I like about it so far is the crafting bit even that has drawbacks (needing to keep and swap gear/ class to use them, or the fact each zone has like 5 nodes that constantly respawn in a small area while the rest of the zone has nothing (feels like an after thought) but the quality durability minigame was nice.

Questing I'm falling asleep doing, just spams you with monotone text rather than placing you in the action like guild wars 2. The quests are also always kill 4 mob, place 4 items, speak to 4 people.

Dungeons were a bit blah as well (not sure if it's because they are lower level so probably first made.lile 10 years ago) but grey cave number 1-3 didn't proove to be fun.

Combat is spam fire till out of mana , shift, spam ice till full mana, repeat.

The fates we're like a downgraded version of "random events" from eg. Gw2, rift etc.

The little gnome things I want to punt one whenever one comes on the screen.

Anyone played the game for more than 1 hour will know that this comment is a complete lie.
You tried to exagerrate a bit too much to convince people not to play the game.

[Tyrick]

In fairness, what part is false?

Gathering really does behave that way, with a few clustered nodes in one area of a zone that respawn as you do them.

ARR questing is pretty universally seen as slow.

The early dungeons actually are mostly "grey caves", if we're being honest.

THM/BLM really does play like that early on. (Which is bordering on criminal, the class gets so much more involved and fun later.)

Fates are pretty similar to GW2 events.

...and everyone wants to punt a Lala!!

To be honest, it doesn't seem like they're exaggerating at all. That really is the impression that the game gives to new players, which is a shame because it improved so much so quickly later on.

I'm a new player. Just subbed for my second month and I'm only level 52.



Questing I'm falling asleep doing, just spams you with monotone text rather than placing you in the action like guild wars 2.

The quests are also always kill 4 mob, place 4 items, speak to 4 people.

Not true.

Dungeons were a bit blah as well (not sure if it's because they are lower level so probably first made.lile 10 years ago) but grey cave number 1-3 didn't proove to be fun.

I'm not sure but I can remember a few dungeons from lower levels where it was green and outside too.

Combat is spam fire till out of mana , shift, spam ice till full mana, repeat.

Playing as a Dragoon and I'm using quite many skills currently and even my guildies said it's one of the slowest classes so probably others are even better.

The fates we're like a downgraded version of "random events" from eg. Gw2, rift etc.

Why "downgraded"?

The little gnome things I want to punt one whenever one comes on the screen.

No comment.

[Absintheminded]

If someone here reading all this hyperbole is considering the game, please just try it for yourself. There's a lot of exaggerating the good and the bad, and the one universally accepted statement is that the game gets better once you get to Heavensward. I'd take that step further, honestly and say each expansion is an improvement over the last. That includes combat rotations.

[Thrif]

I guess it is then. Because it seems pretty standard not to do it.

Yet FFXIV seems to be one of the few games that actually does it. For such a low bar, it's obviously difficult to clear.

I know, I just find it mind boggling that that's the point we actually are at. It's like being in a children's drawing class and handing out medals to the kids not eating the crayons. Which is a poor metaphor because children lacks the level of critical thinking we expect from adults but you get my point.

But for what it's worth, it's definitely something they are doing right in comparison to certain others.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Visually speaking i never liked the game too much, the world looks bland and is mostly empty... once you get flying it's even worse since you can see how bad it is from a distance.

Yeah. The spell effects are cool (though you need mods to make them look super cool), and I guess the character models are fine, but the environment art is pretty... lackluster, to put it nicely.

[Wrecktangle]

What makes raids feel epic is surrounding them with a coherent story and lore that is interesting, and sadly wow doesn’t do that or even come close honesty. When you provide a proper story and lore, you don’t need fluff to make things feel epic.

To be fair, despite Shadowlands flaws, I felt that Nathria's story was actually quite decent and brought great interaction across the NPCs as you quested and then were pitted against them in dungeons/raids later on. Then the raid outcome literally impacts the skybox/map going forward as well as the story?

There's a dozen+ things to dislike Shadowlands for, but I'm not sure raid story/epicness is one of them. Fair warning I haven't subbed for 9.1 so I have no input in anything other than launch Shadowlands.

FF14 boss encounters are 2-3 times as long as wow boss encounters, typically with multiple phases. I’ll take that over wows short bosses with mindless trash between them any day.

I actually hate how long FF14 encounters are. Some of my favorite fights were the gatekeeper fights back in SB. They were like 4 minutes of straight mechanics and throughput requirements (Kefka/Exdeath). They always felt so satisfying, even more satisfying than their counterparts where basically hitting 50% guaranteed you a clear, because the entire second half of the fight was just the first half in reverse or repeat.

I can't stand doing any of the Ultimates because they're just too damned long. UwU was tolerable, but not great, the others are just annoying.

Most people hate RNG and in WoW currently there is no confident way to get gear.
Yeah, you can do a mythic dungeon which in higher levels can take easily 40 minutes, and only one or two player gets gear.
The playerbase were asking Blizzard for years to bring back valor vendors like in the old times, but I heard they just introduced something similar in 9.1?

While I do think that vendors could and should make a comeback, I've never found it challenging or time consuming at all to get geared in WoW and this is a hypercasual's viewpoint. I think there's pain points around weapon/trinket slots, but otherwise it's pretty trivial IMO. It's even more trivial in FF14.

FFXIV had 22 million registered users in April, before all the WoW bullshit started. You may think it's inferior but a lot more people don't think it's inferior at all.

To be fair only a handful of the 22 million registered players are active, which means the overwhelming majority of people who have tried the game have quit for any number of reasons. The most generous estimates I see place the active player count around 3M, which means 87% found the game not worth playing long term. 13% retention is probably a bit above the average for the genre if I had to speculate (for instance WoW is probably like 5%), but comparisons aren't 1:1 due to age of games.

Anyone played the game for more than 1 hour will know that this comment is a complete lie.
You tried to exagerrate a bit too much to convince people not to play the game.

Eh, I've played the game for more than 1 hour and a lot of it certainly has merit. As Bovine covered, the first 5 dungeons are basically the same palette/theme. It does get better after that though for a bit. The questing is literally bare minimum quality. The story is fine, but the actual mechanics of questing are usually super generic, or just fetch text spam, and can get grating when it takes hours to throw in some combat to mix things up.

[Tyrick]

<...>
While I do think that vendors could and should make a comeback, I've never found it challenging or time consuming at all to get geared in WoW and this is a hypercasual's viewpoint. I think there's pain points around weapon/trinket slots, but otherwise it's pretty trivial IMO. It's even more trivial in FF14.
<...>

You must be really lucky then.

Last time I did a 10/10 mythic CN a few months ago, I haven't got a single piece of gear.
Clearing full CN took us 2x 3 hours a week if everything went well.

[Xilurm]

When is MMOC going to start putting FF14 news on the front page? Last I checked, this is MMOChampion, not WoWChampion. And seeing as FF14 is now the #1 MMORPG, it's high time for this site to recognize that fact and put news for the game on the front page.

Just look at the front page, this site was always a BLIZZARD fansite.

[Soimu]

Why is everyone migrating to this game now? what makes it so good?

Because streamers advertised it and because Shadowlands sux. FF is ok as an mmo but is overrated.

[Soimu]

Wrong!. The game is actually good. And the reason you say is "overrated", is because is clear you haven't played it yet. I started playing it 2 weeks ago and for me, this game is 1,000 times better than WoW or ESO.

It is World of Warcraft the one to blame. Because if a Japanese game like Final Fantasy 14 has far more features and less years than WoW, it means that WoW has become lazy. FF14 has far more features than WoW. Even ESO pales in features vs FF14.

What you guys need is to take off the WoW glasses and start playing other games. FF14 is the best option in all MMO's out there.

I am playing it right now. For me WOW is way better but am just bored of it. To each their own.
Maybe the end game content and raids are better but i don't care about that stuff that much anymore. I am mostly talking about the way the world, combat, quests and some other stuff feels.

[shadowmatrix]

Wrong!. The game is actually good. And the reason you say is "overrated", is because is clear you haven't played it yet. I started playing it 2 weeks ago and for me, this game is 1,000 times better than WoW or ESO.

It is World of Warcraft the one to blame. Because if a Japanese game like Final Fantasy 14 has far more features and less years than WoW, it means that WoW has become lazy. FF14 has far more features than WoW. Even ESO pales in features vs FF14.

What you guys need is to take off the WoW glasses and start playing other games. FF14 is the best option in all MMO's out there.

2 weeks, so the game still has that new car smell for you. Hope you continue to enjoy it but your still too new to see the problems that exist, same way we look at new WOW players and know they still don't understand the end game treadmill and its problems.