The Final Fantasy Network

Guess i'll chime in here on this topicl, since i have played both games a lot (and i mean a lot) =).

First FFXI, while this game was incredibly fun for the first few days of playing, it got incredibly tedious very fast. Waiting for parties is just one of the things you will have to put up with when you want to level, high levels training mobs on your party and costing you to lose experience, also morons in your party not knowing how to play their class and getting you killed (losing more exp).

The environments in FFXI were pretty dull in my opinion, every place in 1 zone looked exactly the same and to be honest it got incredibly boring looking at the same scenery over and over again.

This will be my last point about FFXI, the drops from mobs and quest rewards... when you kill something in FFXI they NEVER drop items you can use unless they are a rare spawn mob (can't remember what they're called) and most of the quests you do never give you anything useful to use. This is something that really bothered me about the game and ultimatly led to me quitting for World of Warcraft.

Now, onto WoW. First the bad points, some of the classes are stupidly overpowered (shaman anyone?), some of the classes are a bitch to level (still faster than FFXI though lol) and some of the players are absolute morons, but you get them in every online game.

The environments in WoW are stunning, some of the views i have come across are breathtaking, you just have to look at some of the screen shots of the days on the WoW main site for an example of what i am talking about. The character models are a lot more 'cartoony' than the FFXI ones but, as sean said, there are a lot more character models to choose from and it is a rarity to run across someone that looks exactly like you (including armors and weapons) where as in FFXI its an hourly occurance.

The item selection is far superior in WoW. In FFXI you wore the same shit at the same levels, and everyone else wore the same shit as you did. In WoW there is such a selection of items to use while you are levelling that you will never see someone with the same gear as you ever, and i mean that. Also the things you kill actually drop useful items (gasp) and the quests reward you with items that are useful to you (gasp again), in fact i'm still using a quest reward item now and i got it 4-5 months ago, some of them are just that good.

Now for all those people who think that WoW is a single player experience, you couldn't be more wrong, blizzard just gave you the option to play it as a single player. There are a ton of things to do as 5 man, 10 man, 15 man, 20 man and even 40 man raid groups. All of the instances in the game (instance being a dungeon) are made for parties, up until 50+ they are all 5 man instances, but once you hit 50 you'll start doing 10-15 man instances and then if you're in a big guild or a high population server you'll start doing 40 man instances that give some of the best items in the game. So saying WoW isn't party based is a lie, i levelled my main character in a party of at least 2 people at all times, i very rarely solo'd.

PvP in WoW > PvP in FFXI... i don't think i need to go into this too much, anyone who has played both games and pvp'd in them will tell you this much. As a warning if you do play WoW and you don't like getting killed, make a character on a PvE server =P

So to conclude this post...

In my opinion WoW > FFXI, i've spent roughly the same amount of time in each game to come to this conclusion and so it is not biased...

In the end its your decision.