Should I insist in the game?

If you want to do the /insist emote in this game, nobody is going to stop you :P Go ahead and do it
sorry, was making a bad joke based on the title

This is relatable, since I only started as a new player a couple of weeks ago (although I did play 1.0 and a little bit of ARR at launch)

Practically everyone forwarns that 2.0 - xx.4 can feel like a slog, but I've still been managing to enjoy myself. I'm actually surprised by the consistency of the writing, which by and large, is very good. (including fetch quests and flavour text)

It will be interesting to see how much is trimmed in 5.3, though.

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Originally Posted by Lersayil

I guess some people care about it, but a quest is a quest is a quest. MMO mechanics are generic, hard scripted and boring no matter how much frosting you plaster on them. I'm actually thankful that FFXIV (usually) doesn't pester me with clunky mechanics in the quests and focuses on writing. It's almost refreshing that they don't try to dress up quests as something interesting when really, they aren't. I'm also guessing that many of these mechanics would turn out even clunkier than usual with the spaghetti engine.

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Not sure what exactly you're implying. A quest is a quest.. yeah but do you not want it to be as enjoyable as possible? Or will you always only see quests as a means to an end? In other MMOs, those "clunky" mechanics as well as autonomy give the quests more immersion and makes you actually enjoy the open world to a greater extend as well as develop a closer bond with it while you engage in more unpredictable activities with greater variance. Only reason I can see for not wanting this is that you just dislike questing in general and perhaps only care for story. That's okay I guess but that's not everyone's priority and many sidequests don't even have any story. Imo you just can't get around the fact that quests lack engagement in this game and aren't as fun.

I'm sure the devs acknowledge this since you can clearly see there's an effort to increase quest mechanics and adding variance in ShB.

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Originally Posted by kadriel

So, after dropping the game a couple years back, I decided to give it another go.

I enjoyed the combat (it starts slows but gets better as you get more powers), the aestethics...

...

Long story short is: if I get a story skip potion, will I be able to enjoy the game? Do the quests after ARR change from the unbearable fetch quests? Or is this game just not for me?

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If money isn't an issue, just whether or not worth spending, I think you should consider the job+story skip to Shadowbringers. The current state of AAR doesn't do justice of this game. As a long time MMORPG player and a fan of the Final Fantasy console games, ShB is on the top of my list, if not the best one.

Here are the reasons why I recommend the skips.

I started in January and it was my 4th time to start in this game since AAR was released. I had my own little annoyances with AAR, but I decided to stick out this time, for the story. However, even I'm in for the story, I felt burned out from questing a few times, and switched to crafting and exploration in between. It took me 4 months, 600+ in game hours, to reach ShB content. If it wasn't for the stories that I don't want to miss, I could have spent that subscription money on the skips and saved the time. I know others probably power-leveled to 70+ much faster, but then, if you don't enjoy the story that can't be skipped, why bother. Time is money.

On the other hand, in ShB, there is a lot less fetch quests in MSQ. And, with all the cut scenes and voice acting added, the MSQ feels like watching a movie that keeps me wanting to know what happens next. I don't think one should miss out on this experience. This could be that "once in lifetime" thing, considering the trend in current MMORPGs.

Another benefit of skipping to level 70 is that you can try every job in the game. Since you mentioned that you like the combat, here are more options to play with without creating a new character (a major plus for this game).

There are in-game features to revisit cut scenes and skipped MSQ quests, so you can always go back and check them out later.

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Originally Posted by kadriel

I come from DDO which is a complete instance based MMO (Just dungeons, with lore either included in the dungeon or given by the quest giver), that I enjoyed quite a bit. Might explain some of it.

I think I would be ok with fetch quests every now and then, but from the responses I am guessing they make up most of the content of the game, so yeah, maybe I should cut the losses :(

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Going to repeat what others have said and add tidbits. The Lvl 1-50 (+100 Lvl 50 quests) are tedious, that is a fact. BUT, they are world building and honestly you'll be very confused without them. Also if you like to run content, a lot of content is locked behind the MSQ so by buying a skip you'll miss running those organically, (mostly all the primals and some dungeons). That being said you have a couple of options.

1) You can wait until 5.3 (june/july) as they will have reworked the msq and it should no longer be fetch hell and be way more streamlined. I would recommend this as option 2 is tedious in it's own way.
2) You can find the story on youtube, watch that and then story skip. This comes with a few caveats. First one is that if you skip the story you lose your main source of xp up until 50. The second one is that watching the story and playing it are different enough that you won't feel invested as much and you won't experience the story to it's fullest. The third one is that the story videos on youtube are pretty long and sometimes incomplete. Here's a playlist with all of the cutscenes up until where the story skip should land you : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBxF...YN4uaM&index=1
The first video in there is missing cutscenes from the two final dungeons around the 3:06:14 mark. You can pause that video once you get there and find those extra cutscenes here and here then go back to the first video to finish it up and continue with the rest of the playlist. All in all you're looking at close to 10h of viewing.

If you skip without looking up the story you will be lost without a doubt, you can't make up for the loss of 10h of story buildup. I would personally just bite the bullet and do the content, put some music on, find a nice FC and chat away with people while you do it.

Skipping anymore than ARR (as suggested above) would land you in real deep waters for no reason. Don't do that to yourself.

ARR can be tedious due to the filler quests, though the experience is much more streamlined as of HW and beyond. It's worth pushing through it if you enjoy the meatier and more meaningful parts of the story since if you skip too much stuff then you'll miss out on the payoff that comes later. Understanding the context involved in later content is dependent on having a decent grasp of ARR.

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Originally Posted by SamRF

Not sure what exactly you're implying. A quest is a quest.. yeah but do you not want it to be as enjoyable as possible? Or will you always only see quests as a means to an end? In other MMOs, those "clunky" mechanics as well as autonomy give the quests more immersion and makes you actually enjoy the open world to a greater extend as well as develop a closer bond with it while you engage in more unpredictable activities with greater variance. Only reason I can see for not wanting this is that you just dislike questing in general and perhaps only care for story. That's okay I guess but that's not everyone's priority and many sidequests don't even have any story. Imo you just can't get around the fact that quests lack engagement in this game and aren't as fun.

I'm sure the devs acknowledge this since you can clearly see there's an effort to increase quest mechanics and adding variance in ShB.

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I'm implying that to me, MMO quests don't give any immersion via mechanics. Its just smoke and mirrors, and once seen through, they're just extra mechanics without any enjoyment. I played most popular MMOs in the last two decades (ESO aside) and no matter how much they try, MMO quests ARE a means to an end. Either to tell a story, or to get rewards. To me neither requires the mechanics you mentioned, and often serve only to annoy. The MMO genre just comes with inherent limitations that make these efforts a token gesture, and never truly successful.

I actually prefer the old, cut-and-dry kill x to collect y quests without any of the new "innovative" objectives popularized since... one of the WoW expansions? Or GW2? Can't recall which started it first. Anyways, I like it when mechanics don't try and pretend to be something they are not: fun.

And yes, I'm aware that I most likely represent a minority view.