The Future of Missions

[Arciel]

Hello everyone.

As a player who absolutely loves FFXI's missions, I've been very sad lately because there have been no new missions to attempt. And there are a bunch of questions I'd like to ask in the open.

But first, a quick look at the recent history of missions and story quests in FFXI.

The last batch of missions, for the story line of Wings of the Goddess was released in Dec 2010. It began in Nov 2007, meaning it took 3 years to fully release. This was unusually long even for full expansion stories, but still proved to be fulfilling and enjoyable.

Since then there were no new missions added, but Abyssea did have a series of story quests that ran from June 2010 to Dec 2010, which were similar in some ways to missions. And there were also 3 add-on scenarios in 2009.

In 2011, there is Voidwatch. It also has some kind of background story, but so far they're just mainly cutscenes to elaborate on the Voidwatch phenomenon and are nothing like traditional missions.

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As a mission enthusiast, I'd like to ask to developers:

1) Will there be new missions in the near future? If so, what can we expect to see?

2) Looking further, if there are no future expansions to FFXI, are we to assume that there will not be any new series of missions anymore? Or will there be new story missions without the need for new full expansions? (like add-on scenarios, but hopefully longer and more interesting)

..to other mission fans, I'd like to ask..
What do you hope to see from future missions, if any, and how do you wish to see the story expand?

Personally, missions are one of my favorite aspects of FFXI and I was a little disappointed that the 12 month road map made no mention of them at all.

What do you guys think?

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Also, on a semi-related note, I hear that the devs are looking into making it possible to re-enter mission battlefields that one have already cleared, just for the sake of it.
I hope it gets implemented soon, I miss some of those battles, but it's so hard to find someone who's currently on that specific fight just to join him for it.

[AyinDygra]

I have a vague idea (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/14365-My-Ideal-Expansion?p=192588&viewfull=1#post192588) of what I'd want to see when they expand on the game's story. (mainly posts 3 (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/14365-My-Ideal-Expansion?p=190060&viewfull=1#post190060) , 4 (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/14365-My-Ideal-Expansion?p=190061&viewfull=1#post190061) , and 5 (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/14365-My-Ideal-Expansion?p=190064&viewfull=1#post190064) apply to the main question, and this one (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/14365-My-Ideal-Expansion?p=190171&viewfull=1#post190171) for the semi-related point)

Basically, I want to see them tie together all of the stories, since Treasures of Aht Urhgan and the Abyssea add-on scenarios seemed disconnected from the main storyline of the world. In addition, I want to see the four continents we've only heard stories of so far (at least partial sections of them). And I want, at the very least, for one expansion to take us to Tavnazia itself, like in the opening movie; Aldo leading an army of adventurers to retake the city from the beastmen.

(directly applicable excerpts from the above links)
Quest-wise, the "Kill X for Y of Z items"-goals like in the first three add-on scenarios get very boring very fast. Instead, I'd like more Assault style missions with their varied goals, many being non-combat.

Choice of jobs should not be as important as in past boss battles, even for major fights (I'd go so far as to say the main story should be solo-able, with optional bosses and endgame events providing the real challenge of the game.) And please do not require participation in mini-games as part of quest completion.

I do not expect fancy movies, just a good story & fun battles. From what I understand, the movies are what delayed the release of each batch of missions for the expansions and this was made even more apparent with the Wings of the Goddess, due to the three nations quest lines between each mission section. While the movies have been better than ever recently, they're not the important part of the story. If movies are so important to the FFXI team, I suggest putting enough resources into the development team to release them in a timely manner so the expansion is completed within one year of release.

[Zarchery]

Missions are the main reason I play the game. They have a definitive beginning and end, and you go through it and accomplish something, and see an entertaining story play out as well. I never understood the mad rush for gear. It seems weird to go through all this trouble to get stuff so that you can..... kill monsters to get more stuff. It's totally circular.

I'd love to see them add some based in the unexplored areas of Vanadiel. I think something in the Far East which deals with their two main problems of the war with Aht Urghan and the encroaching Emptiness would be cool. Dunno what they'd do with the other continents.

[Mirage]

The large amount of missions with actual storyline progression is what sets this game apart from a lot of the other MMO games, I think. It would be a shame if this part of the game didn't continue. It is always nice to have a reason to play a game other than "get loot to become stronger so that you can get even better loot". Missions provided this in the past, I hope we will see more of them.

It would be very cool if we got some additional missions which would actually need a party of level 90+ characters to be finished.

[Zarchery]

You know what might be cool, and not require expansion of the game world? Jeuno rank missions or rank missions above rank 10.

[Mirage]

I have pretty much given up hope on seeing more areas by now, so yeah, reuse of existing areas is fine by me. Jeuno missions 1-10 and Starting nations missions 11-15 would be pretty cool, each with a cool and worthwhile reward at the end, of course.

What I really do want to put emphasis on however, is that if this was to be done, I would want a plot that is actually throught well through, is interesting, and that the writing for the new dialogue is well done.

I would also want the new storyline battlefields to not be pushovers, but also not more or less require certain job combinations to be beatable. I would want the fights to require well thought-through strategies, but I would want there to be more than one single strategy to be able to beat it.

I realize however, that this is not as much an issue today, because the amount of players with more than 3 jobs at max level is a lot higher now than it was before abyssea.

[Gwynplaine]

You know what might be cool, and not require expansion of the game world? Jeuno rank missions or rank missions above rank 10.

That would be bore me tears. They need to focus on foreign continents or not do it at all, nothing else is acceptable. I've accepted at this point that they have no interest in FFXI.

[Retsujo]

In my opinion, we have seen several things about the far-east. Mostly through holiday events, but the large emphasis on it intrigues me. I would like to see the land where Tenzen and Gessho originate from, the story behind Phoenix, and the history between that half of the Aradjiah continent and Aht Urhgan.

Barring that, I am very interested in the Gigas' snowy mountainous homeland to the north.

I'm glad SE has taken a timeline approach to new and revised content, but I really hope they announce an answer to this thread in some way. I remember planning on quitting this game after beating CoP for lack of content, and that's about when they announced ToAU. I've been sticking with it for something I keep hoping for.

Did anyone else speculate they might be doing something with the far east after the latest level limit cap quest? All the dialogue and that key item is similar to how they pseudo-hyped Aht Urhgan through adventuring fellow quests before its official announcement.

[Septimus]

That would be bore me tears. They need to focus on foreign continents or not do it at all, nothing else is acceptable. I've accepted at this point that they have no interest in FFXI.

While I would love a full expansion, I would be still be thrilled to see more nation missions. Not just nation missions, but nation missions that require completion of the expansions. (RotZ, CoP, ToAU, and WotG.) Once you get rank 15 in all three nations (yes, we know that those ranks are hiding in the game data), a set of missions for Jeuno would be spiffy. There are a lot of interesting stories that they could write involving the scheming within the Armathrwn Society, maybe ending with the Zilart plan being made public and Esha'ntarl being named Archduchess of Jeuno. Something that is substantial, interesting, and that actually matters to the game.

A man can dream...

[Mirage]

Yeah I agree that new areas would be a lot cooler, but I'm just trying to be realistic here.

[Arciel]

I think a new set of missions that focuses on the modern state of things in Jeuno would be nice. Jeuno missions would be very interesting. I think it'd be cool if it were able to cross over and involve all 4 expansions in its progress, for once. Having new missions that require the completion of prior ones is something I'd welcome too. There are a whole lot of mission enthusiasts out there who would pounce on these, and its satisfying to know that our effort to follow the missions isn't unrewarded.

Ideally, I'd love to see the stories for unexplored continents, of course. My destination of choice would be the Mithran continent of Olzhirya, especially the Gha Naboh Matriarchate, and also including the islands of Tsahya and Zhwa. But any new area would be great. It's been a very long time since I felt like there was something truly new in FFXI anymore - new areas fueled my wanderlust. At times I felt that there may have been too many in the past.. and not enough anymore.
And technically speaking we did get 10 "new" areas through Abyssea last year.. except that none of them were really new.

Gameplay-wise, I really love missions because it introduces amazing battlefields to the game that don't necessarily involve drops and so on. This was my favorite aspect to battles like "The Celestial Nexus" vs Eald'narche and "One to be Feared" vs Ultima/Omega.
As far as the newest missions were concerned, I felt that they could have made them a little more challenging, since EXP loss has been removed, in effect making the missions feel more rewarding upon completion (in some ways like CoP difficulty), but without EXP penalty or the need to do preparation quest or have some kind of limitation imposed on the number of times you can try the fight.

If other aspects of the game are being raised to meet the future 99 cap, I expect for more content in terms of missions to come along too, and also to provide such a challenge for players. That's what I feel anyway. But there's been no news of additional mission content at all, so we can only wait.

Anyway, FFXI's 10th anniversary is coming up in like 7 months time.. Maybe the devs will have plans for something special then? Here's hoping.