For this year's April Fools' Day shenanigans, several World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 players took to social media to share jokes and reference each game's plots while swapping the context of one another. Given that World of Warcraft inspired the current iteration of Final Fantasy 14, and how World of Warcraft lost some of its players to Final Fantasy 14, the community collaboration came at an excellent time for both games.
In the summer of 2021, World of Warcraft saw a massive dip in its subscriber count as a result of both player dissatisfaction with the state of the Shadowlands expansion, and the news of Blizzard's mishandling of workplace harassment claims. During the exodus, several World of Warcraft players chose to give Final Fantasy 14 a try, as it was hyping up the Endwalker expansion that would release in December 2021. While World of Warcraft's direction has changed a bit in Dragonflight, only time will tell if Blizzard's long-running MMORPG will ever recover from the summer of 2021. However, some World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 players chose to remember the good times, and trade jokes with one another.
On Reddit, both the r/ffxiv and r/wow subreddits swapped headers, logos, and descriptions for April Fools' Day as part of a collaboration between the two communities. Though the URLs for both subreddits did not change, users had to do a double-take today to make sure they were in the correct subreddit. Once the ruse was figured out, players decided to share out-of-context pictures from World of Warcraft while referencing moments in Final Fantasy 14, and vice versa. For example, a user on r/wow shared a picture of their Final Fantasy 14 character "enjoying Dragonflight" while another user referenced the Burning of Teldrassil from World of Warcraft while jokingly quoting an infamous scene from Final Fantasy 14.
The collaborative effort between the two communities came as both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 are gearing up for major content updates in the near future. World of Warcraft Patch 10.1, Embers of Neltharion, will take players to the underground of the Dragon isles as they uncover the dark secrets that Deathwing left behind. On the other hand, Final Fantasy 14 Patch 6.4, The Dark Throne, will see the Warrior of Light come face-to-face with Golbez, a powerful Voidsent and a reference to the Final Fantasy 4 antagonist of the same name. Both patches will include new story quests and new raid tiers to their respective games, though it remains to be seen when exactly both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 will launch their respective updates.
While both games have their pros and cons, the collaborative effort between the two player communities to share moments from both games is both heartwarming and overdue. Only time will tell what lies ahead for players of both World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14.