In recent years, the once-dominant MMORPG, World of Warcraft, has taken a beating. While it is still one of the biggest names in the market, it is no longer the only game in town. With its many missteps, confusing systems, general unfriendliness to new players, and disjointed story—not to mention the scandals coming out of Activison Blizzard—the luster has worn off the crown. All these things have allowed other games, such as Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV, to not only compete with World of Warcraft but to overtake it. Here are ten reasons why many players find Final Fantasy XIV better than World of Warcraft:
1) The fun starts at level 1, not at max level
In World of Warcraft (WoW), the entire game is a race to get to max level so that you can participate in raids or in arenas—the only two viable forms of end-game content on that platform. With Final Fantasy XIV (FFXIV), the point of the game is to enjoy the story that is told in a coherent narrative that forms the Main Story Quest, or “MSQ.”
In this story, your character grows from a nameless adventurer to a world-saving hero revered and celebrated throughout the world. The game is designed to allow even the newest player to progress easily through all of the dungeons, trials, and raids by putting systems in place to encourage veteran players to revisit that content as well.
2) Lots of different max level content
As mentioned before, in WoW, the only two things to do once you reach max level are raiding and player-versus-player. Once you have completed your raids or battlegrounds for the week, there really isn’t much else to do beyond your weekly chores and making preparations to do the exact same thing next week.
In FFXIV, once you have completed the MSQ and reached the current “end” of the game, you can raid or do PvP if you like, but you can also craft items that other players actually want and make money on the Market Board; you can get a house or apartment and decorate it; you can level another class on the same character; you can do Deep Dungeons and get rankings and rewards for those; you can set trends by finding unique ways to dye various pieces of armor and create unique “glamour;” you can race chocobo; or play all kinds of mini-games at the Gold Saucer.
From card tournaments to house decoration, there is so much more to do while you wait for the next bit of story or the next tier of raids to be added than just run the same few raids over and over again.
3) Crafting is actually useful
Crafters can make serious gil (the in-game currency) in FFXIV. In WoW, crafting is just to make things that raiders or PvPers can use and to boost a few stats for either of those activities. Selling the materials to make something is often more useful than selling the completed item, and very few crafting professions have ways to ensure a steady stream of gold in WoW.
However, in FFXIV, crafters can make armor that allows players who are new to the game to “catch up” with those who have had months to farm the highest raid-tier armor. Crafters can also make housing items that players can use to decorate their homes—both inside and outside!
Crafters can make armor that is useful only for its looks and sell it since the glamour system allows a player to transform their armor to look like any other armor they have placed in their glamour chest without losing any stats. Crafted armor is often just as cool-looking as armor gained through raids—when it’s not cooler-looking, as is the case with the current changes to the Shadowbringers top-level crafted weapons!
4) You can play all classes with one character
While many players still have alts in FFXIV, it’s not required. Once your character reaches level 10 with their first class, they can join (or “unlock”) every other class in the game once they meet whatever requirements it has. So, if you rolled a healer but would like to play a caster, you just have to talk to the appropriate class trainer to unlock the class you want! Changing classes is simple and just requires you to not be in combat. Using the Armor Sets feature that is part of the game, you can switch between classes whenever and where ever you want so long as you are not being attacked or in a dungeon.
You can also unlock every crafting and gathering class on one character, so you won’t need to have one alt for one set of professions and four others for the other sets you find necessary if you wish to be self-sufficient in WoW.
5) Level-synchronized dungeons and raids mean fun for newbies and veterans alike.
One of the most difficult things to do in WoW is to find a group willing to run lower-level dungeons if you are not at max level. So, if you get quests that require you to go into a dungeon like Blackfathom Deeps or the Wailing Caverns, you will probably not get those quests done until you are too high-level to get any real benefit since no one does them.
In FFXIV, on the other hand, players who are finished with the MSQ can go back and do lower-level dungeons at that class level in order to get special currency, items for glamours, rare crafting items, mounts, or to level up another class. FFXIV allows players who are a higher class level than the dungeon level to sync their stats and the stats of their equipment down to the level that would be challenging for that particular dungeon in order to earn cool rewards. There are even daily rewards that you can get for running lower-level content using the level sync through the Roulette system.
However, if you’re nervous about doing a dungeon for the first time with a group of people who could complete it in their sleep, FFXIV also offers a Dungeon Support system called the “Trust” system, wherein you can opt to go through that dungeon with a set of level-synced NPCs who will fill out the rest of the party roles that you need and who will automatically respond to the mechanics appropriately.
6) Older content is continually revamped
In WoW, once a new patch or expansion comes out, the previous tier is abandoned completely aside from over-leveled groups running it for transmog items or achievements. In FFXIV, however, daily roulettes mean that older content is revisited by the developers and revamped as needed to keep it fresh and challenging. With the latest expansion, Endwalker, the developers are going back through every pre-Shadowbringer dungeon and revamping the mechanics and even the maps for some of them!
Additionally, when relic weapons come out in the middle of each new expansion, part of powering them up generally requires going back and doing older content that is not required to progress through the MSQ. This means that all raids, trials, and dungeons get revisited from time to time by both the developers and the players!
7) Bad behavior is not allowed
In WoW, one player can harass another, be blocked, log out, delete that character, remake it, log back in, and go right on harassing that player. In FFXIV, if a player does that, the character remains blocked since deleting a character does not remove it from the block list. If the harassing player instead rolls a different character to carry on their harassment, they can be reported, and the GMs, after looking into the matter and seeing what happened, will ban the entire account. If that doesn’t get the message across, then the personal information may be flagged, so if that person tries to make a new account, even using a new payment method, they will fail.
Part of this is due to ActivisionBlizzard being an American company and Square Enix being Japanese, but, beyond that, the community itself does not tolerate toxicity. A player who develops a reputation for insulting others, particularly sprouts (new players), will quickly become unwelcome in any party or player-run free company. Telling someone to “git gud” does not get the laughs in Eorzea that it might garner in sections of Azeroth.
8) Community building is built-in
With WoW, if you want to find a guild to join, you often have to search through the Realm forums on the official site, do a web search for guilds on your server, or stand around the current popular city for your faction and ask random people about their guild or listen to the recruitment advertisements in either General, Trade, or Local Defense.
In FFXIV, on the other hand, you can go to the official website and check to see which free companies (FFXIV’s equivalent of guilds) are on your server, what hours they are active, what content they tend to favor, and if they are recruiting. Free companies can and do create recruitment pages to let new players (or even veteran players looking for a new place to hang out) know who, where, and what they are.
Beyond that, however, FFXIV also has linkshells, which allow you to speak either just to people on your server or to people on other servers in your data center (Cross World Linkshells or “CWLS”). Players often organize CWLS around various topics such as “Fantasy Readers Club” or “Role Players United” or even “Quilters of Eorzea.” These linkshells also have recruitment pages on the official website. Finding people to chat with and making friends is easy in FFXIV!
9) Addons are not required
If you have played WoW for more than five minutes, you know that the first thing you do is get something like the Curse Client and then download a plethora of UI modifying addons, gathering addons, boss mechanics addons, questing addons, and spell effect/spell proc addons in order to make the game playable. The only way to create your own, unique client without addons is to learn a lot of LUA scripting.
FFXIV has a built-in HUD manager that lets you infinitely customize all parts of your interface. You can change the size of your action bars, change where they are positioned, how they are oriented, whether or not they are the same or different depending on your class, and more. You can move your minimap, your quest details, your health and resource bars, your party lists, and your class gauges—every part of the UI can be moved and resized.
Additionally, when it comes to mechanics for bosses in FFXIV, all boss abilities are well-telegraphed and predictable if you are paying attention to the fight. There is no need to have a plugin shouting at you that a certain attack is about to happen—the enemy cast bar, enemy ability names, and the animations that the enemy has all indicate exactly what attack is about to land and where it is going to land. There is very little in boss fights, especially in end-game raids, in FFXIV that is purely random. Once you understand the mechanics and the best way to resolve them, the fights are simple enough, even if they aren’t easy.
10) The story is awesome
In WoW, the story is disjointed, told largely through various cinematics that require completing high-end raids, changes depending on who the developer currently is, and has no real narrative thread to unite it. The events of Wrath of the Lich King and Legion were unaffected by the story from Burning Crusade. Each expansion seems to be based on whatever the developers thought would be cool at that moment and not on creating a coherent narrative that allows the player to feel as if their character has moved from being a random adventurer to being an important part of Azerothian history.
As you might guess, FFXIV takes the opposite approach. Your character begins as just a humble adventurer who stops in to register with the local Adventurers’ Guild and do odd jobs. Within an hour, your character is already on his or her way to becoming one of the most influential and important people in the entire story. Over the course of A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood, Shadowbringer, and Endwalker, your character experiences love and loss, peace and pain, anger and anguish, along with humor and happiness. The leaders of the various city-states come to view your character as a hero and someone worth confiding in, trusting, and supporting. The story is told through cutscenes that are part of the MSQ and thus accessible to everyone, not just a small percentage of the player base.
While playing through FFXIV and all of its expansions, you will laugh and you will cry because the story is just that well written. The narrative is tight, and there is a real unity of plots, places, people, and events that makes you feel as if your character did more than just run around random quest hubs grinding experience until they could raid.
There are many other reasons why FFXIV is better than WoW—from the punishing daily chores that a person must do in WoW if they want to raid that week (chores that are absent entirely in FFXIV) to FFXIV’s lack of complex and completely random progression systems that will be abandoned next expansion for something even more inexplicably confusing (here’s looking at you, conduit system), it just comes down to the fact that FFXIV is not only more accessible to more people than WoW, it’s just much more fun.
