Quote Originally Posted by Septimus View Post
I think that the truly disappointing part of this update is the lack of story. The CoP days may have been the dark ages when it came to convenience, playability, and not being hated by the development team, but the story involved with the game was incredibly rich. Updates could have up to a dozen quests added, many with more story involved than just "fetch me these items" for our standard monthly fee. To get a dozen of anything now you have to pay $10, and chances are the stories will be sloppily thrown together like those first three terrible add-ons. (Seriously, I will never forgive whoever did the "no one remembers anything because they were dreaming" garbage from a Crystaline Prophecy. Any Freshman literature undergrad could have scribbled out a better story than that.)

Take Open Sesame for example. This was a standard fetch quest where you just give the NPC some stuff and that is it. Instead, it could have been about an archeologist who wanted to study the Quicksand Caves ruins. Throw in a brief tour of the place through ??? spots, discuss the history of the place, maybe tell us some things that we never knew about it, the archeologist figures out how to make a gizmo to work the doors and gives us one because we were so helpful to him; everyone would feel a little more enriched for the experience. Instead we got a very lazy "get me this and something else" and called it a day.

Sure, some people don't care about the game's backstory, but a lot of us do. The game's lore keeps us connected to Vana'diel, it helps us to care about the game- anymore I am finding this part to be disturbingly wanting.
Pretty much hit the nail on the head. I'm running out of (in-depth) story to go through, and it's making me sad. Gear, gear, gear, gear, spells, gear, gear can only go so far.

The plot-holes thread on BG is probably the best thread about XI I've read in a long time, and I'm glad it's being kept maintained.