World of Warcraft is adding Final Fantasy XIV Duty Support-style dungeons to the game in its next major update, Dragonflight: Seeds of Renewal. Details of the new Dragonflight Follower Dungeons were revealed in a blog post on WoW developer Blizzard’s official website on Nov. 16.
In the post and accompanying promotional materials, Follower Dungeons were described as a way to explore dungeons: “Alongside follower NPC companions that join you on your Dungeon adventures.” If that sounds almost exactly like the Duty Support and Trust system from FFXIV, it’s likely because it is.
But the WoW Follower Dungeons do one better than Trusts and Duty Support, as they’ll allow “1-4 players” and scale accordingly. WoW’s dungeons are five-player content by standard, so Follower Dungeons will allow players to fill in any blanks in your their with up to four Follower NPCs. FFXIV players see this as an improvement in comparison since Duty Support and Trusts are only for solo players.
Beyond this, WoW’s Follower Dungeons will allow players to “to learn about Dragonflight dungeons at their own pace and provide the freedom to experiment and customize their Party makeup.” The only downside is the fact that it’s currently restricted to just the eight “Normal” difficulty Dragonflight dungeons, although that could be expanded in the future.
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First Look at Follower Dungeons in Patch 10.2.5 - Complete Dungeons With NPCs
One of the new features coming in Patch 10.2.5, Seeds of Renewal, is Follower Dungeons - Or the ability to queue into dungeons solo and progress through them with a party of NPCs! We're taking a look on the system on the first 10.2.5 PTR patch to bring a first look into it.
As of late, World of Warcraft has been less shy about borrowing systems from other games. Once the trailblazer of the MMO genre (cited often by Naoki “Yoshi-P” Yoshida as an inspiration for FFXIV), as its dominance of the genre has waned, WoW has been more willing to take inspiration from others. From the Dragonriding of Dragonflight, which has been heavily compared to the mount systems from Guild Wars 2, to major quality of life additions cribbed from other games, and perhaps even the narrative structure of other MMOs, Blizzard is taking the best of all worlds, and bringing it to WoW.
What is left for WoW players is the inevitable criticisms that FFXIV faced when Trusts were first added in Shadowbringers — that this would kill the game, no one would queue for dungeons anymore, and that it turns the game into a single-player experience with no social interaction. Given none of that came to pass for FFXIV, it’s easy to imagine nothing similar will happen to WoW.
WoW’s Dragonflight: Seeds of Renewal update is currently in development and doesn’t have a solid release date. Alongside Follower Dungeons, it will feature Dragonriding expanded to the rest of Azeroth, an epilogue to the Dragon Isle story, and several other features, detailed in the announcement post.
