World of Warcraft’s biggest streamer, Asmongold, will be playing and streaming rival MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV for the first time starting this weekend.
Asmongold, who has 2.1 million followers on Twitch, says he wants to give the game an honest shot and will start playing July 3. He plans to forgo using a level boost and wants to play through the game’s story from the beginning, and eventually hopes to participate in some of the game’s most difficult endgame challenges.
The move comes at a time when jumping ship from WoW to Final Fantasy XIV has become a bit of an ongoing joke in the WoW community, as players unhappy with recent expansions or Blizzard’s decisions threaten to move over to Square-Enix’s increasingly popular MMO instead.
“Many people have moved over to Final Fantasy from WoW, and I understand why,” Asmongold said on a recent stream. “The truth is that WoW’s best release in the past 5 years has been a release that came out 15 years ago,” referring to Blizzard releasing WoW Classic, a recreation of the game as it was when it originally released in 2004.
Despite that, WoW will likely continue to be Asmongold’s primary game, even as he looks to branch out and play other MMOs in the near future.
“There’s been a lot of dumb things that have happened, but at the same time it’s still an enjoyable game for me,” Asmongold says about the latest version of WoW in a recently uploaded video. “I still play it pretty much every day, and by pretty much every day I mean literally every single day. I’ve taken breaks before, played Dark Souls, played Path of Exile, but I always come back to WoW.”
Asmongold says he is looking forward to more competition in the MMO genre, and also wants to play Amazon’s upcoming MMO New World as well as Kickstarted MMO Ashes of Creation in addition to Final Fantasy XIV.
“Now, so many games are coming out, we have actual competitors to WoW like Final Fantasy, even Elder Scrolls Online is doing quite well from what I know,” Asmongold says. “It’s just really nice to see those alternatives popping up because I think competition breeds excellence and hopefully every other game, WoW included, will rise to the occasion.”
Blizzard has recently taken a more hands-on approach to changes in regards to the recently released Burning Crusade Classic, such as testing same-faction Battlegrounds. WoW: Shadowland’s latest update, which added a new zone, raid, and mega-dungeon, released June 29. Final Fantasy XIV’s latest upcoming expansion, Endwalker, is slated to release this November.
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