New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Penthea]

Some people in here act like wow doesnt have a story. Wow had lore for all the dungeons too. Only difference is you didnt need to go out and do all the out world quests to unlock the dungeon. If you cared about the story for them you could do the quests, if not you could do something else.

Actually nearly every player in WoW played through the story content at least once if not several times. All those quests in the open world are the story content. Yes those massive walls of text in the small window given to you mostly by very forgettable mannequin-like npcs that you were unlikely to ever see again after you left their location, that's the story content. But because it's presented in such a bland way, people don't often seem to consider that it is.

So even though it doesn't gate you like FFXIV's msq does, most players ended up playing it anyway. Often multiple times from trying new classes.

WoW has incredibly rich lore. But at least up until WoD (which is when I quit) it wasn't presented very well, so a huge amount of players just don't bother with it. They only care that they have to kill 10 wolves. Not why. WoW had (still has?) nothing resembling the msq and the central characters to the stories are all npcs. The story isn't about you at all. It's about how you aid these people by being one of many talented soldiers. You're not a major plot device because anything you didn't do, some other talented soldier (another player) did it. You're a face in the crowd.

In FFXIV you're the central character to the story. That alone means the story needs to be told very differently to something like WoW. You are even represented by a character in the expansion trailers.

While both games have very complex and wonderful lore, it is clear that the player's roles in them greatly differ, and that Blizzard and SE don't have the same ideas as to how a story should be told.

In short: they're different games by different studios.