World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft's endurance is not sentiment. Nobody has matched Blizzard's combat feel — the weight of an ability, the readability of a boss telegraph, the tuning of a twenty-player encounter across four difficulties. Mythic raiding remains the hardest co-ordinated content in the genre, and the world-first race is a legitimate spectator event.

Mythic+ deserves particular credit. Taking dungeons and layering an escalating difficulty ladder with weekly modifiers and a timer turned five-player content into an infinitely repeatable competitive activity, and every other MMO has since copied the idea badly. It is the reason a lot of long-term subscribers still log in.

The Classic experiment

Blizzard's decision to run Classic, then Season of Discovery, then progressive Burning Crusade and Wrath realms, has turned WoW into several games under one subscription. It was a reluctant concession to players who insisted the old design was better, and it turned out they were partly right. It also solved a preservation problem most publishers ignore entirely.

What has not improved is the cost structure or the new-player experience. A subscription, a $50 expansion, an in-game store, and a token economy is four monetisation surfaces on one product. And twenty-two years of expansions have left a levelling path that jumps between eras with no narrative coherence at all. Compared with FFXIV's single continuous story, the on-ramp is a genuine weakness. Come for the group content; that is where the value is.