After a pretty solid week of World of Warcraft discussions, I thought I'd take today to being to toss in some discussions on other games. I gave Final Fantasy XIV a real shot. Not a weekend, not a free trial I abandoned in the starting city. A couple of years, an actual subscription, a character and jobs I put genuine hours into. And I still stopped. This is my attempt to be honest about why, without doing the tribal thing where you have to trash one game to justify playing another. And of course I did the altoholic thing, FFXIV style. By the end of Endwalker, I had every job at max level on my character. Because here's the thing. FFXIV is good. It's clearly, obviously good, and the people who love it aren't wrong. The story people rave about really is that well told. The community is about as friendly as any I've dropped into. The presentation, the music, the sheer care in it, all of that is real and I'm not going to sit here and pretend otherwise. And I embraced it for a long time and thought I'd found a new home after WoW disappointed me with Shadowlands. But at the end, it just wasn't for me, and I think it comes down to two things. The first is the story itself, which is the game's biggest strength and, for me, its biggest wall. FFXIV asks you to sit through an enormous amount of narrative to get to the parts everyone talks about. I respect people who did it. I found myself skipping cutscenes I'd promised myself I'd watch, and once you're skipping the thing the game is built around, you have to ask what you're actually there for. But at some point it just felt like I was moving my character from cut scene to cut scene instead of actually playing. A second reason is that, in order to level alt jobs in FFXIV, you can't just go back to the beginning and start questing again. Really the only way to do it is to do group content, and that just didn't fit as well with my play style. The last is simpler and a little embarrassing. It wasn't WoW. Seventeen years of muscle memory means I sit down in another MMO and half my brain is comparing the map, the bags, the way abilities feel, to a game I already know in my bones. That's not FFXIV's fault. That's mine. But it's real, and it's why almost nothing else has ever fully stuck. So I let the sub lapse, no drama, no burned bridge. I'd tell anyone on the fence to try it, honestly. It might grab you the way it grabs its people. It just turned out that it wasn't the replacement for WoW for me. But when the next expansion drops, don't be surprised if you see me jump back in to try out the new stuff. That's it for now! Cheers! Joar