WoW in 2024 (avoid)

If you really have to, play FF14. Between WoW and FF14 the first is the better game by a very wide margin. Even at a basic, technical level it is a whole tier above. But where WoW main problem has been a terrible mismanagement that made the game in its worst shape and hamstrung its potential, FF14 is at its best and all its content can be enjoyed fully (with a little effort required to the player to juggle some things counter intuitively, but still largely accessible and possible).

WoW is a game that has lost everything, that is the jumbled mess you expect from an old game, that was delivered to the hands of developers less and less inspired, less daring, and less competent. It’s on a constant, sheer downhill, and it’s simply unplayable even if you tried hard while gaslighting yourself in thinking it’s actually interesting and fun. All content is unbalanced, all systems are contradictory and overlapping. It’s like a tabletop sum of rules after an earthquake. No one ever cared to set them right and organize them orderly, they just kept tossing random shit in. (And as it happens in these cases, it’s enough knowing what’s wrong to easily fix. Fixing WoW would be REALLY easy in practice. Whereas pushing FF14 past its limit would be several magnitutes more complex.)

WoW is a fat, misshapen, rich slob that now can’t even move a step without opening an ulcer. It only wails in despair to please have mercy. FF14 is (was) a lean youth with few talents and nowhere to go, but that really tried hard, never stopping reaching, and only now starting to get a little tired.

The conclusion is that despite the significant potential within WoW, the resulting mess isn’t even comparable to FF14, that, despite its major restraints, still delivers a coherent game in all its parts.

What’s here below is just three separate comments (not me) from a forum, like old times.

But fun it is not.

Enjoy the short term cheap reward coming from easily exploited novelty, and the long term failure. Giants die slowly, but die nonetheless.

EDIT: I’m adding this a month+ after I wrote the above. There’s some actual good design, here and there. As long you accept “World of Warcraft” being solely the content of the last expansion, and everything before just an hard disk tax you have to pay. The small island of content that is the last expansion has some merits to it. We’ll see if it’s enough of a World (of Warcraft) to be sustainable. The playable surface of the game keeps shrinking in order to survive. At some point players will fall right off the edge.

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