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As much as I love this game, I've gotten to the point where I've become a super casual after 4 years of being a hard core player. I've won fashion wars, I'm in the top 2% of wealthiest accounts on gw2efficiency, the only time I really play is when there is a significant content drop. I've tried other MMO's, none of them really impressed me for too long. SWTOR was amazing for the story, but I never really cared to get into the end game. City of Heroes doesn't count because it was before I ever played GW2, and it was amazing for its time. Black Desert has tempted me many times, but the fact that you're forced into open world PvP upon reaching the level cap just is a no go for me. I don't like to be harassed while I'm minding my own business. I tried Blade & Soul, Revelation Online, and Vindictus. All had interesting concepts, but overall lacked certain things that kept my interest. B&S's low level areas died within a month as its more of a PvP focused game. Revelation Online's combat was.. eh, and Vindictus' optimization is reaaaly bad. World of Warcraft just never appealed to me... so I gave FF14 a shot with its free trial. Even though I don't love it as much as GW2 gameplay wise. I do like it a lot and I see the immense value in paying SE's sub. I can't fairly compare it to GW2 since I don't have a max character but here are some of my observations. The Free Trial GW2 is a F2P game, Buy to unlock everything. FF14 is F2P until level 35 with very little limitations from what I can tell outside of housing and some delivery service NPC. FF14 wins hands down here. This may be tilted because I have extensive knowledge of GW2, and how it works, but the limitations put on your account suck the life out of the enjoyment, most notably the inventory limits. With how FF14 does it, you're experiencing the full game pretty much unrestricted for a ton of hours of game play. If I'm missing out on something, I don't know what it is besides maybe mounts... but I figured you just get at a later level. Graphics and Performance GW2 is an older game, but both are on par with each other graphically. GW2 wins hands down in character, attack, and enemy animations and its not even close. That's due to the different combat systems. Where FF14 outshines GW2 is the finer details. The lighting is better, the character emote library dwarfs GW2, and along with it, the facial expressions are just amazing. There is also way less clipping of outfits and weapons. Characters don't go bald when they wear a head piece. Also FF14 runs off DX11, while GW2's severely aging engine still runs off DX9. DX9 bottlenecks mutlicore processors causing GW2 to be CPU intensive. Lag spikes, framerate drops, and skill lag are all a thing when population gets too high. Granted FF14 is more instanced, it has none of these issues. Even in a FATE full of enemies, other players, and NPCs I get zero lag, no FPS loss, and no half loaded textures for the first 10 seconds of loading into an area. FF14 is amazingly optimized, and is one of the smoothing running games I've ever played on a PC. Gameplay This one is subjective on tastes, but this is where GW2 just wins for me. I hate global cooldowns. FF14 is a more traditional MMO where you pick and attack/skill and all of your skills go on cooldown and then you pick another. There are exceptions to this but not many. GW2 has little to no global cooldowns, combat is free flowing, and often relies on fast paced, non-ending rotations where you're constantly attacking and dealing damage non stop. For the most part this means you're doing less damage per hit than you would in a game like FF14, but for someone like me, GW2's style feels better and more satisfying, especially when you can freeflow between targets even if you class or build can't cleave. Both games have a fast travel system, but GW2's is superior and using the map is way more user friendly to hit any wp anywhere in the world. FF14's map gets less detailed at times when you click a far off objective and it shows this fancy world map with no crystals to teleport to. Instead you have to use a list, and remember where they are off of that. Activities Both games seems to be the only ones with a lively open world. During the level up process in FF14, you do basic redundant quests and FATES, which are kinda like GW2's dynamic events, but way less varied, and they don't have an off shoot minor story behind them most of the time outside of some text base stuff... its mostly kill a bunch of this creature, or kill this giant creature. GW2's dynamic event's offer more variety in theory, but they take longer than fates, and once you do them once, you really don't want to repeat 99% of them. GW2's renown heart system replaces the redundant quests... with the same thing essentially. with 303 hearts, there are only so many tasks you can come up with. Both games have dungeons, altho GW2 long abandoned that content. Storytelling Both games have great story telling. GW2's stories aren't perfect, but the way they execute them has always been extremely well done. The main campaign is meh for GW2, but you're first time through was still pretty good. It has a lot of great voice acting and high stakes. FF14's voice acting is phenomenal as well. A lot of its lesser quests are all text base, which I've noticed a lot of people knock against it. I personally think the text dialogue is well done, and better than GW2's text dialogues which aren't that intricate by comparison... its almost an afterthought at times. For FF14 a ton of work has been put into the text dialogue.... so much that I've started skipping most of it for side quests. People will tell you their life's story just for you to go kill 6 squirrels. which going back to activities, I appreciate how the cliche trash quests only require you to kill 3-8 things rather than 10-20 like other MMOs traditionally have done. Rewards This is where that sub shines obviously. Go out in GW2 and kill a bunch of trash mobs, and your inventory will fill with complete garbage. FF14 respects your inventory. It's rarely dumping junk you don't need in your bag. Even better, when you complete low level quests, you can pick a bag some type of bullion that you can just sell to a vendor when the reward is under powered gear. Further more, unlike GW2, you can get new emotes and the equivalent of minis for doing small side quests. Basically cosmetics you'd have to buy from the gem store in GW2, are just being given out for small time side quests in FF14. I had a lot more to say about this category, but I'm half asleep about to pass out. Basically if you had FF's rich content, engine, with GW2's combat, it would be the ultimate MMO. Right now I'm leaning towards buying it and paying for a few months. Even paying for SWTOR for 3 months, I feel like I didn't get any value outside of being able to sprint and get the land speeder way earlier.... basically pay to get common conveniences. In what I've seen playing FF14, there is value in paying. Their trial is probably the best out there. You don't feel pressured or feel like you're missing out on anything because you're playing for free. I like that, and feel like they've earned my money with that trust in their product. That presenting it to me, would sell it. Its not really something you see much of anymore, as "try for free" these days normally come with some kind of scheme to hold candy out in front of your face in hopes you'll take the bait.

Season 2 was really good, get on it!

Ugh, they had to bring up the Nemesis feels. 😢