Gamerant lists MMORPG's with best stories, FFXIV #6, WoW #1, uhh

[NanaWiloh]

In FFXIV I am the "messenger boy of light", weapons and armor not required. Almost every single FFXIV msq quest step involves talking to someone and rarely you're given a task to actually do that consumes any significant amount of time. Comparing talk steps to task steps I would describe it as 90%+ talk steps and <10% task-driven steps. What's even worse is that even when given an action/task/mission it takes longer to get through the dialogue than to complete the mission. Ultimately, you are told what the story is. Its very non-interactive. Even when you're sent into a raid to complete a quest, ultimately its the cutscenes that do the story telling.

In Wow its more like 60% talk/40% task in terms of actual quest steps but time spent is more like 25% talk vs 75% action. Talk to someone and they give you a mission to kill people, spy on people, steal/find something, or do some other meaningful activity that's significant to the story. You better be wearing your armor and weapons because you're going to need it! Your actions show you the story and is done primarily in the open world instead of through an instance.

Wow is on the short end of most of my comparisons with FFXIV and I even think FFXIV has better story writing but damn the philosophy/approach taken by SE into translating it's stories into the game is awful whereas Blizzard is just on point.

In wow your character is but one of many heroes,so its ok for the story to just throw you into danger like and expandable commodity. It wont matter if you get your head lobbed off and guts ripped out cause hey..there are hundreds of others to take your place. In FF14 each shard has only 1 warrior of light or in the 1st case 5 warriors of light. So dashing off head long into danger with no thought or consideration especially seeing that warriors of light are not replaced with in any reasonable time frame would be foolish. The story writing for both games takes this into account, even WoW's own devs have said your character is but one of many heores.

[Shougun]

Since both you and Vyrerus brought it up in this context, I did go and find an article talking a bit about how Dark Souls does story and I do think it's at least somewhat similar to the sort of thing I liked in WoW. The example of the archer, at least as presented in the article, is exactly the sort of thing I like. The game assumes you're smart enough to put the pieces together and let's you do so. FFXIV would just have some throwaway messenger NPC show up to report that the legendary archer is dead, while Alphinaud is on hand to say anything that that needs to be said on the player's behalf and can't be expressed with a single emote.

What you liked about WoW, that I've read so far, Dark Souls (and in general all the soul-like games from FromSoft, like Bloodborne, Demon Souls, Sekiro) does in massive spades and I would say not only does it more but does it better (the environment is pretty rich in detail and the characters pretty much never give themselves a huge introduction and backstory, you pick it up overtime through objects, environment, and small quips).

That isn't to say I don't think has WoW doesn't have story or whatever, there is a hilarious amount of books for the universe, there is loads of flavor text and hidden npcs and other things, WoW has a story and a very big and expansive one- I often see people who favor FFXIV kind of discount that WoW has any story or lore at all just because it's not forced on you or as obvious (I don't mind FFXIV forces it, but it's clear one game is like "HEY U DO MSQ" and the other is like "eh, pay attention or not, wahtevs- I don't care"). Personally I'm worried the longer FFXIV goes on and forces MSQ it might scare people away though, it's going to be like 300 hours to catch up lol, I spent half that time to nearly 100% Witcher 3 XD.

Although in a big critique of WoW- I think they handle retcons poorly and their general quality, I feel from watching random story / lore / game announcement videos, is that it has gone down over time, I enjoy the ideas and concepts of the new things they try and I wouldn't say anything like the team is devoid of skill or interesting concepts (and I feel often players here give it an unfair shake, especially since many of the ideas one game uses another seems to be influenced on in a back and forth), but that there appears to be lack of funds and time they need to do what they should have done well (which I feel the earlier days of Blizzard that wouldn't have happened, Blizzard used to be my favorite company for "whatever happens, it'll be done good" but I wouldn't trust anything until it's been thoroughly reviewed first (there are still a few companies out there that'll refuse to deliver anything but excellence but they seem to be fewer and fewer).

[EmmetOtter]

In wow your character is but one of many heroes,so its ok for the story to just throw you into danger like and expandable commodity. It wont matter if you get your head lobbed off and guts ripped out cause hey..there are hundreds of others to take your place. In FF14 each shard has only 1 warrior of light or in the 1st case 5 warriors of light. So dashing off head long into danger with no thought or consideration especially seeing that warriors of light are not replaced with in any reasonable time frame would be foolish. The story writing for both games takes this into account, even WoW's own devs have said your character is but one of many heores.

Unless SE changes ffxiv to have permanent death, our plot armor will always be 1 mile thick titanium with a Chobham layer surrounded by force fields. SE can implement the story with action, explosions, death, and destruction and we would be safer than today because we won't die of boredom.

It's time for se to let loose this dog of war and truly be a Warrior of Light.

[linayar]

In FFXIV I am the "messenger boy of light", weapons and armor not required. Almost every single FFXIV msq quest step involves talking to someone and rarely you're given a task to actually do that consumes any significant amount of time. Comparing talk steps to task steps I would describe it as 90%+ talk steps and <10% task-driven steps. What's even worse is that even when given an action/task/mission it takes longer to get through the dialogue than to complete the mission. Ultimately, you are told what the story is. Its very non-interactive. Even when you're sent into a raid to complete a quest, ultimately its the cutscenes that do the story telling.

In Wow its more like 60% talk/40% task in terms of actual quest steps but time spent is more like 25% talk vs 75% action. Talk to someone and they give you a mission to kill people, spy on people, steal/find something, or do some other meaningful activity that's significant to the story. You better be wearing your armor and weapons because you're going to need it! Your actions show you the story and is done primarily in the open world instead of through an instance.

Wow is on the short end of most of my comparisons with FFXIV and I even think FFXIV has better story writing but damn the philosophy/approach taken by SE into translating it's stories into the game is awful whereas Blizzard is just on point.

Ok, so I feel like you're mixing two things here: being part of the story and being part of the action. Yes, you may feel like you spend more time in the action in WoW, but that doesn't make your character any more part of the story. You may think that FFXIV spends too much time talking, but at least they're talking with and to your character, as opposed to WoW where your character may suddenly disappear all of a sudden in important scenes as if your character was never there in the first place.

I think WoW has slowly made some changes recently to make your character actually has some presence in the story, but when player characters have NPC stand ins (see Legion class hall leaders/representatives as examples), it's very obvious that the player character isn't actually incorporated into the story.

[Nixxe]

What you liked about WoW, that I've read so far, Dark Souls (and in general all the soul-like games from FromSoft, like Bloodborne, Demon Souls, Sekiro) does in massive spades and I would say not only does it more but does it better (the environment is pretty rich in detail and the characters pretty much never give themselves a huge introduction and backstory, you pick it up overtime through objects, environment, and small quips).

Maybe I'll go give Dark Souls another shot then. I have the trilogy for PS4, but never really got around to it properly, largely because Monster Hunter World/Iceborne ate up almost 2,000 hours of my life and virtually all of the time I spent playing console games this console generation aside from the couple of weeks I spent on Nier Automata.

Although in a big critique of WoW- I think they handle retcons poorly and their general quality, I feel from watching random story / lore / game announcement videos, is that it has gone down over time, I enjoy the ideas and concepts of the new things they try and I wouldn't say anything like the team is devoid of skill or interesting concepts (and I feel often players here give it an unfair shake, especially since many of the ideas one game uses another seems to be influenced on in a back and forth), but that there appears to be lack of funds and time they need to do what they should have done well (which I feel the earlier days of Blizzard that wouldn't have happened, Blizzard used to be my favorite company for "whatever happens, it'll be done good" but I wouldn't trust anything until it's been thoroughly reviewed first (there are still a few companies out there that'll refuse to deliver anything but excellence but they seem to be fewer and fewer).

Absolutely. Warcraft III and early WoW had a serviceable story, though I always felt WCIII and anything related to it, such as WotLK, was generally overrated in that regard. Following MoP, however, Blizzard basically gave up on doing anything genuinely new in favor of an unending stream of returns and retcons in a cheap attempt to cash in on nostalgia regardless of the demands it placed on the universe. A lot of the retcons they introduce actually make even bigger problems than they fix, like the Legion being the same Legion in every reality. Why should any player want to care about the lore when the people making it obviously don't and change it regularly to suit their most immediate needs?

[Shougun]

Maybe I'll go give Dark Souls another shot then. I have the trilogy for PS4, but never really got around to it properly, largely because Monster Hunter World/Iceborne ate up almost 2,000 hours of my life and virtually all of the time I spent playing console games this console generation aside from the couple of weeks I spent on Nier Automata.

It's pretty good I think, so long as you don't mind dying lol. Your experience with those other games you listed will help you a bit with Dark Souls. The story I think is nice, and how they tell it through the locations, music, npcs situations, and monsters is subtle- so you have to prepare your thinking cap because it's unlikely they'll just straight up tell you things. Like each time you talk to an npc in a new area they might sound a little bit more broken and then later you fight them, but the game wouldn't have made this long cutscene screaming to you about how that was them, if you noticed you noticed if you didn't you might have just thought "what a strange situation" and for some reason never see that npc again lol, and at the locations and small quips of dialog (the game doesn't go on extended rants) and through items you learn what they were trying to do and their troubles. May even be your fault, depending on your actions .

There are a number of youtube channels dedicated to piecing it all together after you finish the game, which can be fun.

Absolutely. Warcraft III and early WoW had a serviceable story, though I always felt WCIII and anything related to it, such as WotLK, was generally overrated in that regard. Following MoP, however, Blizzard basically gave up on doing anything genuinely new in favor of an unending stream of returns and retcons in a cheap attempt to cash in on nostalgia regardless of the demands it placed on the universe. A lot of the retcons they introduce actually make even bigger problems than they fix, like the Legion being the same Legion in every reality. Why should any player want to care about the lore when the people making it obviously don't and change it regularly to suit their most immediate needs?

I never understood why they made so many changes, I don't think gently massaging things to fit your gameplay needs is a problem but there were a number of moments where someone was telling me some change they made and I'm just like "...but y tho?". What did they achieve that they couldn't have achieved by doing something else that wasn't against the story.

[TheMightyMollusk]

WoW's lore isn't even that deep, because they are constantly retconning and trashing the old lore to make room for whatever the current raid designer feels like doing. This isn't even a new problem, it goes all the way back to Burning Legion and the "lorelol" jokes of how they basically rewrote the Draenei on the fly and then had the Blood Elves stealing spaceships because "reasons".

At this point it's a soup of stuff that is barely held together by any kind of common narrative, as shown by how the game lets you just skip almost all of it to get to whatever is new and current.

It really goes all the way back to Warcraft 2 and 3, where the orcs were entirely rewritten from "generic evil army" to "noble savages corrupted by demons".

And even that lore, including 90% of the backstory for Thrall, essentially the game's main character, largely depends upon Lord of the Clans, a game that was never even finished.

[Penthea]

They also credit Illidan as "among the greatest video game villains of all time" despite part of Legion being devoted to how Illidan wasn't actually a villain at all, so that article's credibility is near zero.

He's an interesting character for sure but for me he's not remotely the best villain I have come across at all. Not even among just the characters in WoW.

It's interesting how Star Trek Online is on the list. WoW requires you to know about events that happened before the mmo to truly appreciate the game's lore, but Star Trek...jeez you need to watch several seasons worth of the tv series and at least one movie to properly understand the significance of STO's story. Star Trek's lore is actually gigantic. Sure the game does say enough so you can follow the story but it's absolutely not enough to be able to really appreciate what happens there.

I like FFXIV's story for many reasons, but one of them is you are not required to have prior knowledge of anything in order to be able to fully appreciate it. Yes there are references to other FF games but that's all they are at most. Being aware of them is not necessary to strongly appreciate the story, and not being aware of them won't make you miss out on the importance of anything. This is not the case at all for WoW or STO, especially for STO.

The writer mentions that STO takes place three decades after the movie Nemesis...but even watching that on its own isn't enough. You'd be lost if you watched that without enough Star Trek knowledge.

[linayar]

Star Trek's lore is actually gigantic. Sure the game does say enough so you can follow the story but it's absolutely not enough to be able to really appreciate what happens there.

This is why I don't put much emphasis on lore. To me, lore is the setting/background story whereas the plot is the main/foreground story. As long as enough of the lore is presented to understand the plot of the story, the rest of the lore is not necessary, though no less welcomed. Where an established lore is important is primarily to guide the development of the story, but of course, plans can change, hence retcon exists.

For example, in FFXIV, I wouldn't have minded had new characters in ARR had the same intro and extras as 1.0 characters because 1.0's story is just part of the lore that you don't necessarily have to know to appreciate the story post Calamity.

And as for STO, while I am a Star Trek fan (in as much as I've seen every TV series and movies up to the first few episodes of the first season of Discovery), I think not having that knowledge would still make me appreciate STO's story. It's just too bad I don't really have time to play it any more after FFXIV, WoW, and SWTOR even though I started with it.

[Juicymama]

Blade and Soul not even on the list makes it questionable.