When you have an MMO that is long-lived, you eventually hit a point where a playerbase saturates and needs new blood to replace people who leave, whether temporarily or permanently. The top two MMOs in the world currently, World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV, are interesting case studies in what new player experiences can look like.

There’s a problem, though – both games are kind of bad at it.

Both games have crossed the two-digit number of years milestone, with FFXIV entering the 10th year of service since the A Realm Reborn reboot of the game (13 years counting 1.0) and with WoW in it’s 9th expansion and 19 years deep, so they have a lot of legacy content and options for how to shepherd new players into their gameplay and get those players joined with their friends to do stuff.

Both games have also, and fairly recently, revamped their new player experiences. WoW created a single starting zone for all characters, moving away from racial or class starting zones to a unified area that tries harder to teach the basics of the game before conveying players to the leveling content of Battle for Azeroth, while FFXIV has made substantial revisions to the ARR story questing to trim fat, add flying to the original zones of the game as a capstone reward for ARR’s main scenario quests, cut the number of quests between ARR-post launch content and the start of Heavensward substantially, and made a concerted effort that will conclude next patch to update all the story dungeons from levels 1 through 70, making them doable with NPC partymates and improving clarity of mechanics and overall flow, matching the dungeons that were already soloable through this system in Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

But as both games enter 2024, a year which will see a confirmed FFXIV expansion and likely see WoW’s 10th expansion and 20th anniversary, there are still a lot of things that can be done to make the new player experience better.

World of Warcraft and New Players

WoW’s approach, taken at the launch of Shadowlands, was two-fold – consolidate the level 1-10 experience to a new zone that attempts to teach players more mechanics, with specific ability-based quests for each class and a micro-dungeon that can be done solo or with other players that makes a small effort to teach the basic mechanics of WoW’s core gameplay. After that, new players are only given a single choice – back to their faction capital, into the leveling wilds of BfA. The logic was simple – the story content of BfA, at the time, was the lead-in to Shadowlands, so there you go.

While this decision does make some amount of sense, or at least did at the time, there are a few holes in the experience. Firstly, while BfA as an expansion was the story lead for Shadowlands, the challenge with WoW in general is that the leveling content is almost never where the actual expansion story lies. Instead, the core character stories, actual plot events, and such are all either in introductory quests and events (which are a part of the leveling experience) or are post-launch patch content (which is not a part of the leveling content), so while there is a certain thought process to pushing players into BfA, it doesn’t actually give a new player a sense of what is happening in any real, meaningful sense. Compounding this is the fact that with a new expansion in Dragonflight, this experience has not been changed or updated other than to be valid for an additional 10 levels, so the lead-in makes even less sense! To be fair, if it had changed to Shadowlands, it would still be weird and disjointed because the game has basically memory-holed almost all of Shadowlands at this point except the plot with Ysera from Ardenweald.

Secondly, one of the major challenges WoW faces is that the game has grown in mechanical complexity over the years, something that the old, straight-through content chronologically route helped new players acquaint to by adding layers of mechanics over time. The worst dungeon mechanic you had to face in Vanilla dungeons after their revamps is usually a runner pulling more, and then slowly, things like interrupts, interactable environments, and other such mechanics are added in over time, so a player running dungeons through their leveling route can get their feet wet piece by piece, becoming a better player over time. The game never taught those mechanics directly, so I am being a bit optimistic here, but the game did give you the time and grace to get used to things in small doses. BfA’s dungeons were initially designed and developed for experienced, long-term WoW players, so they assume a lot of knowledge that new players just will not have. Scaling can help the problem, but if you take a look at the game’s subreddit or social media, you can easily find newbies talking about how dungeons are loaded with mechanics that are difficult to parse and understand, not helped by the game’s lack of consistency with how it messages different mechanics to players.

On top of this, the item level scaling of the leveling experience has been clearly designed for veteran players with heirlooms and not for new players. If you are just questing and taking rewards, you will be undergeared for a dungeon run – only a little at first, but by level 30, it’s a lot, and by level 40-45, it is a whole lot. You can, sure, spam-run dungeons to keep gear kind of on-par, but that isn’t a real solution – it is a band-aid that relies on good RNG. But at least before players gatekeep you from endgame content because you don’t already overgear it, the game will do the same by setting you up for mechanics to just plain one-shot you and for your performance to feel underwhelming!

WoW’s experience is one that grapples with the reality of the modern game – the focus on endgame, the quick pace to get to current content and get moving – but it loses the forest for the trees, putting players on a specific path that fails at its stated mission of being a lore-compatible way to bring players up, struggles to teach players the core mechanics that will define their experience at endgame, and ultimately also creates layers of struggle through a scaling curve that isn’t quite as generous as it ought to be for the pace of the experience. With 11.0, the plan currently as stated is to shift to Dragonflight as the experience for new leveling players, which is at least a change. How good that change will be, well, we’ll have to see.

Final Fantasy XIV

FFXIV benefits and suffers from a simple core issue – the game is not so much experience or leveling gated as it is story-gated. The intended experience of FFXIV has players do all of the existing Main Scenario Quests, or MSQ – a roster of quests over 800 deep at this point and growing with each patch. The MSQ for a new player is a great guide – follow the meteor quest markers and be rewarded, and with the experience curve reworks per expansion, the MSQ is typically enough to get your main job to the level cap, or at least very close (current expansion content is typically designed to require some amount of non-MSQ content like daily roulettes, Hunts, or rested experience, so you can end up needing to do a little bit more if you hit the current expansion’s level range and only do the MSQ in a constant stream of play).

This is also where FFXIV tends to be strongest – the MSQ, as a whole product, is a fantastic overall story and has so many good beats and moments that doing the whole thing is worth the experience. But that isn’t to say it doesn’t have cracks.

Firstly, certain segments of the MSQ are a little dry on story. ARR gets a lot of unwarranted flak here in my opinion, but it does have some story patches where you’re doing a lot of weird extraneous things before doing the actual content goal and it is easy to start to feel listless. Likewise, some pieces of the story just won’t hit for everyone – Stormblood is the most iffy expansion on that footing, sandwiched between what most people regard as the two best story expansions in the game, so even though Stormblood isn’t actually bad or anything, it just doesn’t quite stand up the same.

Secondly, the FFXIV MSQ is long. Each expansion increases the total time commitment of the game by adding more cutscenes, longer cutscenes, and while post-launch patches have never added as much as the original ARR “horrible hundred” quests of MSQ, each expansion adds about 30-40 new MSQ quests in patches and these patch quests have a completion time that is pretty close to the total base expansion when you add all the patch content up.

Thirdly, you might have caught it in that last sentence, but a lot (a lot) of FFXIV’s MSQ time is not gameplay time – it’s cutscene time. Short of small dialogue choices that don’t change the overall direction of the story, it is non-interactive drama watching time. This time has ballooned, such that the entire Heavensward set of MSQ cutscenes (both launch content and patches) is only longer than the base Endwalker cutscene time by an hour – just one hour! Endwalker’s launch content has a full 24 hour day’s worth of cutscenes. When the game brags about how much content is there, keep in mind that those free trial memes include cutscene time, so 200 hours of gameplay includes around 50 hours of cutscenes, and when Stormblood is added to the trial in October, that will increase again to around 70 hours of cutscenes. The story is good, but a playthrough of the MSQ is, quite often, paced such that you are engaged in gameplay for a relatively small portion of it, and even when quests do have gameplay, it’s often simple – go talk to an NPC, kill 1-3 enemies, or click the shimmering spot to start a cutscene. How bad this is depends on your tastes, but it isn’t for everyone!

Lastly, the game is generally pretty good about putting you on a track that ensures you’ll meet minimum requirements for dungeons and story content most of the time, but post-patch content MSQ can get dicey on that front – you might hit a spot where you need to upgrade gear, and while the game has excellent systems to facilitate this easily like Tomestones, finding the right vendor to buy the right stuff can be a challenge as the game doesn’t really spell it out in good detail. You can, as a new player, especially without a friend to help guide you, get dead-ended and need to grind for a moment to get the gear needed to proceed, and while tomestones likely will solve this in short order, again, the game isn’t exactly helpful about pointing you there in the context of the game itself.

Overall, the tricky thing about FFXIV’s new player experience is that it is good, but it is also very long and can be off-putting for it. If you have a friend you want to join in endgame content, and you want the experience of that story, you are looking at a total commitment to just get to Endwalker’s post-launch MSQ of around 800 quests and almost 110 hours of just cutscenes. Sure, you can story skip, but then you miss out on what is, for many people, one of the best parts of the game, if not the single best thing about it. This doesn’t have signs of abating, either – in the early press interviews for the forthcoming Dawntrail expansion, game director and producer Naoki Yoshida has said that they do not intend to have a skip into Dawntrail for new players, which means you will need to complete the full MSQ through Endwalker’s post-launch content to just get into the new expansion if you want the story experience. If you don’t, skip away – but again, that is a tradeoff. There is some groundwork being laid to maybe allow players to move into Endwalker patch 6.1 to start and proceed from there with the use of the story aid Unending Codex to bring a new player up to speed on who the characters and key events are, but again, you miss the story to that point, and I still believe it’s pretty damn poignant and good, even if my opinion on some of Endwalker has softened over time.

What Makes a Good New Player Experience?

For me, I think a big part of looking at the games through the lens of new player experience is simple – both games I’ve named here, if not the broader MMO genre – suffer with new player acquisition. MMO design, in many ways, tends to invert a lot of common game design engagement tactics, because they rely on leveling systems and mechanics that mean that early-game gameplay is just not made to be that engaging with a limited toolkit and the missing understanding of the game’s interconnected systems.

This is especially and unfortunately easy to lose sight of in a long-lived MMO like these two, because they have so many years of legacy content and there is, intuitively I think, a desire to honor that in some way. At this point, Blizzard’s new player experience in WoW has basically surrendered the old content altogether (and Shadowlands, but hey), focusing on a narrow slice of newer content as the way to reel players in and then having this massive world they can explore later if they get invested. It’s not necessarily a bad approach ideologically, but it narrows the scope in service of a goal that isn’t met – you go to Kul Tiras and Zandalar because they are the story predecessors for the modern game, but then also, you play a single set of two islands as the majority of your early hours into World of Warcraft. and that feels kinda bad!

When I got into WoW in 2005, the thing that stood out the most was the open world and how well Blizzard had built and released a functioning world as a part of their game in 2004, with tech that could run on a variety of computers of that era. It didn’t need SSDs, RAID arrays or other expensive chicanery and even the various tricks that get remarked upon in our current day and age (tunnels between zones, various other ways to obscure a player from the larger world momentarily while the assets were loaded) were not huge wastes of time or egregious but instead were built into the world as a functionally large part of it. I always find the Blizzard-take of “the world is our greatest character” to be a little strained and overstated, but honestly, there is also something to it, and it’s the experience that is still hard to match in modern games. The new player experience cuts the legs out from this and puts new players on a trajectory where their current gameplay will never show it.

Final Fantasy XIV’s experience is, in many ways, a stark contrast. FFXIV pays extreme respect to the content that makes up its foundation by ensuring that every player goes through it and it matters, but as the game has grown and added full earth days of new story content per expansion, the amount of stuff a new player has to run through is massive and daunting. It takes an extreme amount of confidence to trust that players will play through a massive backlog of old content for the sake of the story experience the game wants to offer, but there is a point where confidence doubles over into stupidity, and while I don’t know that we’re there yet, it feels more likely with each new expansion.

Dawntrail expecting that a new player will engage with over 100 hours of cutscenes alone, much less the accompanying gameplay, is a huge bet to make, and it feels like an unforced error considering that FFXIV just did a major expansion arc that closed out a good bit of the existing story to clear the stage for new beats. I’ve known and seen a lot of people try and fail to get into FFXIV because the story can, at times, feel like a burden you’re made to do rather than a treat you get to do, and I find it hard to disagree. Sure, by Endwalker, a lot of those earlier burdens become a big positive as the earlier exposition and lore becomes a centerpiece or at least the foundational elements of the bigger, well-told story the game is trying to weave – but the process of getting to those poignant moments and powerful bits of established, well-built story, is down a path of patchwork lore reveals, sometimes-clumsy transitions between storytelling and gameplay, and an experience that can, at times, feel more like watching a movie than playing a game.

Ultimately, I also feel like the new player experience of both games is authentic to the game they are when you finish that onboarding process. WoW is rough around the edges, focused to an extreme on the current content, with a community that tends towards being quiet in groups more than anything else, unless you’re unlucky and get trash-talkers or lucky and get a friendly group. FFXIV focuses on story and you can see the craft at play evolve from expansion to expansion and patch to patch, as the story grows in scope and size while keeping sight locked on core characters and recurring themes, motifs, and story elements, while the gameplay you are exposed to throughout the process is very friendly and made to be enjoyed simply – the depths of optimization and performance aren’t shown at all unless you get really into the kinds of content that allow for it – which the game purposefully puts behind some progression walls for you to test yourself against first.

I think the challenge is this – if I wanted to refer a new player to either game in 2023, the experience that stands between where you start and joining me is a fraught road that doesn’t teach too well, doesn’t always map to your experience at endgame, and can be, at times, quite different from what the game expects you to do at the tail end of the journey. Even when it does match, there is more to see and do and that experience isn’t very well conveyed as players are whisked to the endgame on either a story-lite route through modern content or through the Eorzean Historian’s long-haul of lore.