That’s part of what sold me. I saw the zones.
Modern WoW zones are claustrophobic messes where you can’t go anywhere without aggroing ten mobs. FFXIV zones are wide expanses where everything is spaced out and given breathing room.
The best zone design I’ve seen was in GW2, though. So many little details across zones — and it actually recognized exploration as an important mode of gameplay, by itself, rather than something that happens by necessity on your journey to the next quest marker.
Personally, I’d put WoW’s zone design definitively above FFXIV’s. Both are good, but the aesthetic design for WoW is just so, so good. I like Final Fantasy’s too, but it doesn’t hold in my memory as keenly as the newer zones in the former.
On topic: There are MMO RP communities in most games but they range from ‘Smaller than WoW’ to ’ Ridiculously niche to the point of being near impossible to find’.
If you know where to look though, you can find it.
And on the matter of housing, counterpoint: Wildstar RP thrived thanks to housing. But by design it was far more open, and addons were made to further facilitate that openness. By making it very easy to see which public housing plots were active, when events were being held where, and so on and so forth. Literally open a menu and you could see what plots had activity, what their theme was, who ran them, and if any upcoming events were approaching.
Sure in most MMOs like SWTOR or GW2, where housing plots are rather tiny and confined to a very specific purpose, Wildstar housing was the world in a sense. I’ll acknowledge it required some initial checking of the RP forums to see how it worked, but once I was pointed the right way I had zero issues finding plentiful RP.
People were able to make space stations, malls, jungles, spaceports, hoverboard parks and way more besides. Without that it would’ve been limited to the ‘actual’ game world alone, which frankly could not have easily replicated half the RP hotspots I remember engaging in.
I remember even making a hub myself as an apartment block with shops and a park that a bunch of people used even while I was offline, just because I set it to public and contributed to the RP plot addon listing. It was incredible.
Even without housing though plenty of events were still held in the world, but housing was great to let people create very specific environments and ‘minizones’ for events both public and private. I honestly don’t think RP would have persisted until the day the game died if it were not for the housing system in that game. I legitimately RP’d more than I might’ve done because I loved seeing what other people had put together, and some brainiacs even figured out some insane API scripting to make stuff work in their instances like rollarcoasters and fighting pits (Albeit jankily, but it worked!).
However, if the housing is very narrow, specific and very ‘closed off’ ala GW2 guild halls or SWTOR Strongholds, then yeah, that’s a problem. They end up serving as purely private instances and there’s little chance to find and understand which are active and their purpose can’t be used for much more than social RP. That’s not something I’d really want, we kinda have it already with Garrisons.
Housing where it’s just “Here’s an instance, and you can out furniture down” bore me to tears. Wildstar and Star Wars Galaxies nailed it and it saddens me that most MMOs go for the bare minimum instead of the awesome stuff we’ve seen elsewhere.
This bothers me as well. Since MoP zones have gotten smaller and smaller, and densely packed with mobs to the point where you can’t step off the road at all without aggroing several packs in the process. In Legion and BfA especially it’s like every zone is a ‘land’ in a theme park…
I still mourn it’s passing.
Bring her back to me. It’s all i ask
Still waiting on any of the successor projects for City of Heroes.
We have the Rogue servers still, but… I miss it being live. I miss Union, the EU RP server. The forums, the ONLY forums I have EVER been on that were, genuinely, not toxic at all. Yes, even General Discussion. People who were trolls or nasty were few and far between, and usually instantly hounded out when they did surface.
The atmosphere out of game, in game… I want those times back 
Screwed badly by mismanagement from the higher ups… hey that sounds familiar.
But, yeah. It proves that housing can benefit RP significantly, but it so badly depends on the implementation and features.
But as mentioned even if WoW got the ‘meh’ kind I doubt overworld RP would die. There’s simply too many people on WoW that would rather do stuff in a variety of environments that a basic house interior could never replicate.
Well, they did try too hard to be a WoWkiller. Such is the fate.
BDO? I don’t see how it isn’t RP friendly. Character customisation is probably the best ever, your character can lean and/or sit on most surfaces, the armors/costumes and dye system is very complex, there’s a ton of nice places to go to, the housing system is very solid with a ton of properties and furniture to choose from.
The only problem is they don’t have a dedicated RP server, but we’ve all been using the same server for it anyway.
And the RP community is far from dead, the RP discord has some 700 people in it.
As someone who’s made the jump, I can say that FFXIV does have an RP community however it’s one that’s a little bit more behind closed doors, though you can still find roleplayers out in the wild at times. With the changes to server visiting coming with the new expansion (basically imagine the cross-realm play WoW has, but instead you can choose what realm you want to visit and now with the new changes other data centers. Essentially imagine if you could choose to visit the US WoW RP realms while still playing oin AD EU, that’s what’s coming to FFXIV soon) finding roleplayers will be fairly easy, though you’ll likely be resorting to Discord or third party RP forums to get into RP properly. I will also say that as a roleplayer I find I enjoy FFXIV’s content more than WoW’s mainly because the story it tells is far more cohesive, the world fleshed out more than WoW’s is and the story itself is told in game rather than through third party media such as novels or comic books.
ESO is also a great game for RP but a lot of the RP in it is instanced, as people vastly prefer the privacy of player housing to the risks of the open world, though open world communities like Stormhaven RP do still exist. Definitely one of the nicest ones in terms of RP features but for the newest things like emotes, furniture, personalities or fancy skins be prepared to pay through the nose as the development team LOVES to tie such things to either the cash shop or their loot box system.
Guild Wars 2 does have an RP community but it’s shrank quite a bit over the years. Hopefully with a lot of players moving from WoW to other MMO’s at the moment that community might be revitalized, especially with both it’s upcoming expansion and a release to Steam.
STO likely has the same issues as ESO, but with a new expansion coming it’s way as well there may yet be life in the old beast yet!
On the more expensive end of things there is also Star Citizen. I know, an unconventional choice but a game that puts a lot of focus into realism and allowing the player to interact with the world as they see fit does create a lot of opportunities for RP. In fact there are already a couple of small groups who role play in Star Citizen and one or two streamers center their content around their in character adventures on the game.
Hopefully you’ll be able to find a game that fits your niche and has a vibrant RP community to involve yourself with!
Hardly. There’s no racial variety and despite the layers and layers to the character customization all you can make is asian waifus and bart simpson
I fail to see how complex is a positive here
Shouldn’t exist but i’ve already touched on that
I could have a 1200 member wow rp discord and it would mean nothing because 1185 of them would be lurkers that aren’t even interested, in game numbers matter, not discord member counts
I actually played BDO during the closed and open beta iirc and honestly when the game released I rly enjoyed, yeah it was your typical asian mmo where there was a lot of grinding etc. but me and some friends gave it a chance and it was honestly good, until they kept adding more and more P2W along with insane grinds and ridiculous RNG. Shame, otherwise it would’ve been a good MMO imo. And while BDO has a very good character customization, it is indeed true that all you see in that game are your typical anime/asian waifus with big booba
As for the topic of MMO’s I have no interest in FFXIV despite how critically acclaimed it is, GW2 (lol) neither. New World looked great but honestly it still seems kind of wonky considering it’s gonna come out next month lol. Only MMO I am hyped for is AoC but that seems years away, so I guess unless WoW improves (lol) I will be taking a long break from MMOs. Although I might continue the adventures of my dorf in LotRO at some point, as that MMO has a special wee place in my heart.
If every game had a community like in LotRO, humans would be colonizing space now and there would be peace on earth + end of poverty etc.
I’m re-dabbling into GW2.
Although I have a huge problem with paying for bank space. In that I have to pay for it.
To store things. This isn’t Storage Wars.
And bart simpson. Very important aspect
true, I’ve seen some absolute horrors in that game
I wonder how the Ashes of Creation alpha went, not really seen much talk of it so… maybe not well.
google gave me this as one of the top results for ‘ashes of creations alpha impressions’
https://twitter.com/quinrex/status/1413607024558964736?s=20
First impressions of Ashes of Creation alpha?? I ran around a forest for hours looking for wood to complete the first quest… I repeat, struggling to find 𝐰𝐨𝐨𝐝, for 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬, in a 𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐭.
So it might have some teething issues.
Ah, the classic “collect 10 bear bums” however no bear seems to be carrying his bum on him today.
It’s more of a three dimensional design philosophy, building up and down along with the horizontal plane. You get more zone out of it but to then use this to also shrink the flat open spaces isn’t good.
I won’t defend WoW’s many pointlessly large dead spaces beyond them making a fine evening screenshot. The area could’ve been used for fun things like bigger towns and wilds to explore but instead is just a patch of land the size of Redridge between two trees.