Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft are starting to meet in the middle on modding, and it's a strange new world for MMOs and their AddOn communities

Two households, both alike in genre, in fair AddOn-a, where we lay our scene.

This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMORPG column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.

Alright, let me roll up my sleeves and deliver unto you some lore. Not just any lore: mod lore. Final Fantasy 14 and World of Warcraft, two of the biggest MMORPGs on the market, have always tackled their modding scene—or AddOns, as they're often called—very differently.

World of Warcraft has historically embraced AddOn creators with open arms, giving a ton of the game's information to them in-client through its API. Crack open the shell of any WoW raider's client and you'll find a homebrew moonshine concoction of custom raid frames, sound effects, and WeakAuras telling them what buttons to push and when.

In fact, Blizzard was so dependent on its AddOn community that two things wound up happening. First, it didn't overhaul its user interface until 2022. Blizzard spent 18 whole years assuming that any player who didn't want to wrestle with its old, archaic interface could simply download a batch of mods to deal with it. Which they could, but boy that's a big ask.

Secondly, all of those combat AddOns caused an arms race between Blizzard and the game's players. Raid mechanics became incredibly complicated, with world first raider teams having on-staff AddOn coders who'd puzzle out the best way to solve a mechanic with code, not skill.

Meanwhile, class design remained complex—in some places, untenably. I've been playing an Outlaw rogue for 3 years and I couldn't tell you what my Roll the Bones Debuffs do. I've got a WeakAura for that.

Final Fantasy 14, in comparison, took a different approach—outlawing the use of UI mods entirely. Well, in theory. In practice, FF14's always had a lively mo

Source: PC Gamer