Terminally Online
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.
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 mod community, but it operates on a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy—billboards aside.
See, director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) has been open about the fact that Square doesn’t look at what your computer’s doing, so if you aren’t outright cheating, and you don’t cop to using mods in game, and nobody reports you? You’re pretty much fine. I mean, you still shouldn’t do it, Square’s within its rights to ban you, but also it hasn’t done that and so there’s an ecosystem.
This means that both MMOs have had completely opposite problems. While WoW has had to wrestle with its increasingly modded-up community, designing its game around their whims, Final Fantasy 14’s Yoshi-P has had to wearily say, multiple times: Please stop talking about mods. Seriously. Stop talking about them. For the love of god, stop.
But things have changed in recent years. A gravitational pull has drawn these two MMOs together, rather than pushing them apart. And when I consider how Blizzard and Square Enix handle their modding communities in 2025? I’m starting to notice an uncanny number of similarities.
Closed doors, open arms
Starting with World of Warcraft: Midnight, Blizzard is winding down its AddOn support. Well, specifically combat AddOns. Quality-of-life stuff, bag sorters, map adjustments, UI reskins, roleplay AddOns, and accessibility mods are all okay to stay—but when it comes to WeakAuras that flood your screen with homebrew icons, telling you exactly what buttons to press and when? That’s all going out the window.
Blizzard is doing its part to help smooth the process. Even before the announcement, it was snagging features from popular mods, and Midnight will feature Blizzard’s very own DPS meter and an ever-improving cooldown tracker. Heck, classes are even being redesigned without mods in mind—Roll the Bones, an ability I have never understood, is having its complicated buffs trimmed into a “more dice is higher” icon to track. Which I’m all for.
While I was skeptical at first, I have since come around to the idea, especially since Blizzard’s shown it’s serious about revamping WoW to be playable out of the box. I don’t doubt the company will make mistakes—MMO design is hard—but it seems like a solid move for the health of the game overall. It’s the right time.
And when it comes to Final Fantasy 14? A dialogue has, at the very least, been opened. It’s one-way, a mere crack in the door, but it’s there.
I don’t think there’s ever a world in which Yoshi-P allows the modding floodgates to open. WoW and FF14 may be drifting closer together, but I’m almost certain they will forever remain apart, like tragic lovers in a Shakespearean play. But since 2022 Final Fantasy 14 has explicitly been trying to improve its UI features to out-compete mods:
It’s a sign that FF14 has stopped its finger-wagging and started listening, properly, to what the players want.”
“We believe that people use the aforementioned tools to expand the HUD,” reads a 2022 post, “and display more information because they feel that existing functions are insufficient for tackling high-end duties. In recognition of this, we intend to review the most prominent tools, and in order to discourage their use, endeavor to enhance the functionality of the HUD.”
And to Square’s credit, it’s been doing that—adding cooldown numbers to abilities, chat bubbles, and so on. I wouldn’t say the quality of life suite is completely on par, but there’s definitely been a change in philosophy.
Yoshi-P’s tone has been altered somewhat, too. Historically, he’s adopted the role of “disappointed dad” when it came to modding, being outright stern about it: Mods are against the ToS, stop using them. But after Square shut down Mare Synchronos, a mod that let players share their heavily modded characters with each other, he wrote a refreshingly earnest blog post.
His tone still wasn’t permissive, but for the first time, Yoshi-P drew a proper line between his own personal stance and the stance that Square Enix has to take, and gently advised players about what is and isn’t okay: “My own personal stance regarding mods—that I do tolerate them—has not changed. In the past 20 or so years, I’ve seen numerous positive examples of games with fan-made mods that expand upon existing gameplay.”
Indeed, when it comes to the Mare controversy, Yoshi-P has followed up on giving players more freedom when it comes to glamour, recently announcing that items can be glamoured onto existing sets of gear with zero class or level restrictions in the next patch. This is despite over a decade of maintaining that such cross-pollination was bad for the game’s aesthetic—no longer.
While FF14 could never offer the same customisation its modding community can (which is probably a good thing, given some of the flesh-jiggling horrors I’ve borne witness to) it’s a sign that FF14 has stopped its finger-wagging and started listening, properly, to what the players want.
Same difference
The middle-ground both MMOs are leaning towards is for the better. The overwhelming wild west of World of Warcraft is completely unsustainable when it comes to combat design—and while Final Fantasy 14 probably won’t ever allow mods in an official capacity, it’s nice to see Creative Studio 3 actually taking on feedback-by-proxy.
Which is, I think, why modding communities are so valuable to games. Especially MMORPGs, which are built to continue for years and demand developers filter genuinely useful feedback from the noise. Players are very good at identifying problems and terrible at offering solutions.
If the masses are complaining, it’s likely you’ve got an issue on your hands, but wading into the trenches to figure out what exactly is wrong is… bad for you. It’s bad for your brain. God love you both, WoW and FF14 players, but your official forums are psychically caustic to read and I think we all know that.
Any rando can make a forum post and speak with conviction (and a lot of mean and/or rude words). Modding, however, is really hard. If you’re an MMO developer, and a widely used mod is causing you problems (without just being an outright cheat) I actually think you’ve been given a gift, because:
- Your players have identified a problem for you.
- They have made a solution.
- That solution has proven effective enough that it’s popular.
Modding communities, when properly treated as a font of inspiration, just make these games better. Midnight will, if all things go well, finally create a version of World of Warcraft that can be played without any mods at all—meanwhile, FF14 has only ever improved when it’s submitted to the wisdom of the modding masses. These are strange years for these MMOs and their modding communities, but not necessarily bad ones. Mostly.
