What works for one won’t work for the other, but both games have lessons to learn.
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Take inspiration from FF, don't just copy their homework, they made the FF devs play Cataclysm, have the WoW devs play up the Heavensward at least and have the team go from there lol
It shouldn’t try to be like FFXIV. But it should take lessons from it. Having Steve Danuser as LND really doesn’t help.
They don't need to copy FFXIV, just be inspired by it. Blizzard's issue is nothing is planned and they can change direction of Warcraft's Plot on a whim. Remember what they said about Denathrius? He was planned to die but they changed their mind due to his popularity, they altered the Plot like it was nothing.
FFXIV doesn't do that and it's one of the reasons it captures so many Fans, because it's solid content, Where as Warcraft is flimsy and brittle and easily broken for what ever reason they can think of.
After years of sending condescending "Congratulations" cards to Square Enix, I'd say any attempts of Blizzard even remotely bending their neck in defeat would be wishful thinking 🤣👌
Yaaaay Kung Fu Hustle!!
I feel like they could reach a happy medium. Wow definitely needs a more concise narrative driven main story quest line from beginning to end that can kind of guide you through all the different areas of the game and have meaning and purpose to them not just previous expansion quest fodder. However it doesn’t have to be as drawn out and emotionally impactful as Final Fantasy is.
oh WoW can learn a lot from FF – not wasting players time, crafting, transmog, housing, emotes, gearing alt classes, long planned story, less trash in raids, less useless filler bosses in raids, seperate unique boss encounters like the extreme fights, faster patch cycle and many more
Halo Grunts with with plasma pistols will be able to very quickly neutralize Priest shields and DKs' Anti-Magic Shells and such…
World of Warcraft's storytelling had so far been at it's best when it focused on worldbuilding. You were a nameless hero in a big world full of factions and conflicts. You could witness the occaisonal story from the sidelines, like the return of King Varian or the drama of Arthas and Jaina, but these were ultimately small stories in a big world.
If Blizzard would remake The Burning Crusade now, it would propably be a character story centered around Maiev and Khadgar. And it would propably also suck.
There's the story itself, and there's the presentation of that story. Blizzard has focused towards the latter and ignored the former for too long using the rule of cool. It would go a long way for them to just have a concise story first, and then find the cool moments within it to highlight.
I wouldn't want WoW to be like FF. If I wanted to read or listen to some shit I'd go and get a damn book or something. Don't force me to sit through endless dialogue. I want to stabby stab stab and nothing more. Don't you dare fucking do it. I like fallout but I can't play it for more than an hour because you spend half the game smashing the B button to skip the dialogue.
I don't think they are capable of emulating FFXIV at this point. In recent years they have pared down their team to the point where not only shadowlands was the best they could do, but they thought it was a great expansion that would be a hit.
I've been leveling a BE Paladin in Classic BC/Wrath. Not knowing precisely where to go next is so different from FFXIV (with the MSQ) and from Retail (with the pre-selected sets of quests). I spent a couple of hours in Shimmering Flats doing quests that were almost too high because I wasn't sure where to go next. So right now, I have a bunch of quests waiting in my Quest log while I do some Level 32 quests in Arathi Highlands.
The strangest part is that I haven't done a single dungeon. Which meant I've mostly geared off the AH. No heirlooms and no Poetics.
Denathrius should have been the big bad, and I think that would have been better in the end. The dreadlords worked for him, not zovaal. It's not unreasonable to think he was responsible for Zovaal's original heel turn.
The only reason it wouldn't work in WoW is because WoW was not released in that way from the start, so player expectations and desires are different. If they were to relaunch WoW in an FFXIV-style however, I think it would work. WoW has a significant amount of lore and stories, which is why most of them are told in books rather than in-game, but those stories could absolutely be adapted to the game.
I don't think WoW needs an overbearing storyline. Some consistency would be a good step forward.
Maybe some characters that aren't kings/queens or leaders of nations that we consistently interact with that are comparable to us would be good too.
Wow doesn’t need to be FF . If we were comparing two restaurants, one a great Japanese food, high end restaurant with a great staff and amazing food . The other a run down dirty steak restaurant with a rude incompetent staff. Someone says to the steak place, hey why can’t you be more like that Japanese restaurant.. and the takeaway was, well we serve steak not Japanese food , we can’t be like them , YOUR MISSING THE POINT…………
I get that streamers care a lot about the story and they think it's of primary importance (it is, kinda), but anecdotally I know at least half a dozen folks who couldn't care less about the story but still like the game. It's the systems (or lack thereof). If at any point my friends want to take a break, they can. If they want to come back, they can hit the Market Board or get catch-up (albeit not BiS) gear over the course of a weekend.
I don't have to be on a hamster wheel of progression for 3 different builds of a role or manage 8 different alts if I want a different playstyle. As a WAR main I'm pissed that I don't do the most damage which makes Week 1 clears tight, so I'm using DRK/GNB for now until I get more gear.
XIV is F L E X I B L E.
I personally as my own pet project if I had all the money in the world I totally would want wow to risk everything and ff14ify their game hardcore.
I love the linearity of FFXIV, so that I don't get spoilers for the raid story before I finish it or the raid story spoiling quest story for me because they can't be bothered to set up its flow properly and gatekeep things in a way that avoiding spoilers is impossible.
By the time I finish the campaign story, either it spoils the raid story for me or the other way around and I'm supposed to figure out myself at what point of the story I'm supposed to stop and do the raid but because I also am casual and play random queue I can't finish the raid even if I knew when I'm supposed to do it in the campaign continuity.
Like for example week three of current patch I think was when I was supposed to do the raid timeline wise, but I didn't know that until next week when I was spoiled seeing anduin back at the base, which I was spoiled about anyway based on the raid journal and data mining and I couldn't even queue for anduin LFR until weeks later and the quest campaign finished before I could do jailer LFR. In FFXIV I get to do the raid content at its proper point in the story and random queue for raids is actually fun as opposed to LFR.
Same kind of thing happened in sanctum of domination. The game spoils itself. I play the game for the story and it freaking is structured to spoil its own story for me as a solo player. It really sucks.
Like, when you build the game systems to experience the lore linearly like in FFXIV, you get full context for everything and the community learns to respect the lore and yet they also somehow don't have the shit shows you see in LFR nearly as often in FFXIV random queue.
Like I know the community wow created doesn't care about lore and story as much as I do, those were the reasons I played wow, because of warcraft three but again, if they had built it like FFXIV they would have an FFXIV like community and I think the rich lore of warcraft universe is its best selling point and I wish they would double down on that hardcore rather than try and make it a destiny game but also lore rich. You end up pleasing neither audience IMHO because your story suffers too much from the gameplay and vice versa.
Wow has such a rich history of raids and dungeons, imagine if they had the systems to make all of them constantly relevant like they are in FFXIV, you would have soooo much content diversity.
Also I hate having each alt have all the quests marked undone, whereas in FFXIV it's just a job toggle and all my quest history is kept, everything I did there is forever done but that's just my completionist brain protesting, I guess.
So basically I know I'm the exception and they would never cater to me but in fantasy land yes, fully ffxiv ify wow, that would be awesome imo.
But I guess that's why after the overt spoilers of the game spoiling itself for me as a solo player I switched to FFXIV as my main mmo after over ten years maining WoW, now I only sub to wow when there is new content. FFXIV broke my habit of just playing for playing sake like I did with WoW.
Separate comment. Here's what I think is weird about WoW: the cutscenes/trailers are so fucking cool but they don't make sense. I saw the Mists of Pandaria trailer right around Kung Fu Panda fever and thought "omg this is bad ass" but like.. ok what's the context? The Dragonflight trailer is so God damned cool and I love the "How To Train Your Dragon" universe so the trailer spoke to me.. but aside from a cool trailer.. what the payoff?
I feel like ppl like the trailers because they ooze coolness and impact and all that but at least when Bahamut blew up Eorzea (2.0) it meant something and had repercussions for the story and world. When that dude stabbed the sword into the planet..ok what's up with that? Where's the payoff? What are we even doing here?!
Here Lies Galakrond
he was just full of boulder
fuck got me wanting to watch kung fu hustle again
WoW could be like FF14… if they started from scratch and hired a writing team, rather than getting literary tips from a child.
I can't speak for all but some of the WoW players I know came to ffxiv for the raiding content and didn't even touch the MSQ. To each their own, I say.
But, was it the Old Gods that corrupted Galakrond? At no point in the book does it say what corrupts him.
But, does that matter? Of course not.
they dont have to go all widescreen cinematic but jesus, learn how to structure a cohesive narrative and stop with the "but wait, theres MOOOORE" cliffhanger nonsense. you have how many years of content lingering in the void you could use without regurgitating the same like six villains like a revolving door of evil or introducing new villains who are as bland as wallpaper paste and try to pull an Aizen Sosuke "It was part of my plan the entire time" with them.
WoW could do even just 10% of FFXIV's narrative focus and WoW would be 10 times more enjoyable than it is now. Currently WoW is at around 1% of FFXIV in terms of story/narrative, and that 1% might be generous.
There's plenty of room for WoW to learn from FFXIV storytelling without becoming anything like FFXIV.
FF14 did take a lot from WoW early on. You can see it in how they designed their raids and set up their currencies. But from Heavensward on they started to change how they set things up, and by Stormblood their raid format changed completely. But you can see how they kept the same currency systems and just improved on them from the BC/Wrath/Cata era.
I think it would be a lot harder for WoW to learn from FF14 because I there are fundamental problems with where WoW has gone with storytelling and it's narrative. I don't think the faction leaders make nearly as compelling characters as the scions. I think for them to try and tell stories like that, they need new characters, and to go much smaller scale. It's hard to tell a compelling story when you're just chasing the next "end of the world" level threat, and need all the most important people on the planet to keep getting involved. It plays out like a super hero movie that people are more or less getting sick of.
WoW was just supposed to be about being one cog in the machine. You were just one grunt/soldier/person in a greater world. The stories should reflect that. Every 2-3 expansions, sure, have that big epic moment that feels like it was earned, and have the faction leaders show up for that. But you need more characters to tell smaller scale stories, and these new characters need the same level of development as a major character would. They can't just be a bunch of random quest npcs.
I would definitely agree! Blizzard needs to do more cross overs, even if it is only with their own IPs. Hell non-canon skins/weapons and stuff would just be fun.
The more I hear about shadowlands and it’s story the more I think they needed to set the first ones up as the new burning legion style big bad.
Can have it be that they messed with a section of the shadowlands and forced as many souls into that section as possible to act as fuel for their machinations (based on the way that ardenweald uses that fuel for rebirth). They then set about creating new leaders of their “shadowlands” and “rewriting” the winter queen to serve their purpose
This would have solved so many issues since the “shadowlands” are totally artificial and not the real afterlife that still exists out in the void, it would also tighten up the story around the jailer and sylvannas since they would literally be fighting to break this artificial system that doesn’t actually care about the individuals and would allow them to have not messed with the fundamental parts of the universe while still having a story that could reintroduce deceased characters. Even better at the end of the story (which could still continue pretty much unaltered with the jailer being the final boss)we would break down the artificial system permanently and allow things to return to how they should be, and removing our access to the afterlife altogether
Warcraft absolutely should not try to be Final Fantasy. FFXIV is High Fantasy, WOW is Sword & Sorcery. FFXIV is a novel, WOW is a Pulp Anthology.
The difference involving the two games, FFXIV has a story line that makes sense & people care about the story line & the characters in the game. Those involved in FFXIV play as The Hero of the world, & at the end of the day you feel fulfilled. And in WoW, "I mash buttons hehehe". Seriously, in WoW you are a nobody, just one of many soldiers fighting in battles, & never felt like there was a goal other than to get better gear so you can show it off standing around in town.
FFXIV writes out a story line that takes years, almost a decade to tell, & the care put in to it shows.
To me, when I did play WoW the story felt like it was made up while in the bar, using drink coasters to take notes.
Ff did try to be wow. It gave us arr and saved the game from the garbage bin, giving them time to nurture well received writers and battle designers. Blizz isn't willing to invest in their developers, AND the community acts like something about the ip is magic and will save it from being bad. Meanwhile azeroth rots.
It would not fail he just doesn't trust blizz to pull it off
Wow narratives will be dogshit until danuser is there