I had a super enjoyable time with ARR a few months back so I can 100% recommend it as a great beginner MMO. It does a good job of introducing new concepts and teaching you dungeon mechanics, while also allowing you to just solo quest and enjoy the world at your own pace. It’s really flexible.

Saying that, the story is... bad to non existent and the last 10 hours or so killed any interest in continuing on with the next expansions but I still had an immensely enjoyable, relaxing 100+ hours prior to that which I don’t regret playing. Going into it if you set your expectations that the side quests and exploring is vastly superior to the main story quests I think you’ll have a great time with it.

Saying all this, WoW is still really good with more (and vastly more varied) content and better writing but the onboarding is a bit steeper for absolute beginners imo (though still not hard).

@meestero: I also agree with everything said here.

Edit: wow 2 year old thread? My bad lol.

I've gone back to WoW to maybe get to Shadowlands since I'm in between patches on the much better MMO.

And like.. it's going fine but I have a great deal of respect for the storytelling of FFXIV so I gotta get back into the WoW mindset of just playing the game and not acknowledging any of this bullshit going on.

Anyway since the time before a bot brought this topic back ARR has pruned a lot of its more plodding elements so its an even better place to start than it was before and all of the expansions after it whip ass.