Final Fantasy 14 Players trying WOW?

[EzekielBook]

Do give it a try. Just don't look for a particularly in-depth story, nor a clue as to what really happens next (and why).

That's part of the new design philosophy. Blizzard feels that more players want to play with their friends first, so they rush you through the BfA expansion (where the individual storylines kinda hold together, but not within an overall arc), to get you to the current content. You can be in the latest expansion fairly easily that way.

Up until then, you would go to lvl 1 in the original starting area, and start from there.

Once a new player gets a character to lvl 50, any new characters can start in the original leveling area. Nowadays though, leveling happens so fast that you're in the latest content fairly quickly. It makes FF look like an impossible slog.

[DPZ2]

Once a new player gets a character to lvl 50, any new characters can start in the original leveling area. Nowadays though, leveling happens so fast that you're in the latest content fairly quickly. It makes FF look like an impossible slog.

It's not a feature I appreciate at this point. 14 years of story line goes out the windows for more-or-less easy leveling straight into the end game. Why not just rewrite the entire thing, start from scratch with a new MMO? It's a cheap way to use up the good will generated over the years without actually doing anything ... and it forces players to pay for the expansion as well as the monthly subscription to see "what happens next" far too early.

[EzekielBook]

Why not just rewrite the entire thing, start from scratch with a new MMO? It's a cheap way to use up the good will generated over the years without actually doing anything ... and it forces players to pay for the expansion as well as the monthly subscription to see "what happens next" far too early.

17 years of WoW. That's nearly an entire generation that has been playing, and they're not going to want to give up all their achievements, all their transmogs, all their titles, all their guilds, all their feeling of superiority, just to play a new game, even if it has the same engine. There's a bunch of other reasons, but those are WoW specific.

Imagine if FF made the "World Reborn" decision *now* rather than when they did. Given all the investment people have made in the game, not just monetary for items and such, but time as well, how many people would really come back? FF is going to be facing the same kinds of issues that WoW has faced fairly soon - the barrier for new players to get into the game. It takes time to get to a level where you can play with all your friends who are already in the game, and then to discover (as I did) that pushing the MSQ at the expense of everything else, means you can't do the Raids on the duty roulette. It's going to run into a whole host of problems with increased item levels, and continuing to make content that is interesting, and challenging.

It could be that SE will say "We don't care, let them buy boosts or level slowly." Which is fair. But it's the design decision they chose to make, and I wonder how much they're thinking about what the next two expansions after Endwalker will be like. Where do we go from there?