Well of course they won't start at level 1... no jobs start at level 1. Never have. "Classes" start at level 1 and these are NOT classes. ;)
Printable View
It's not the issue of having the jobs available from the start but the barrier to them being 2.55 or greater storyline is a little steep. I could understand if it required them to get 1 specific job to 30 and another to 15 to unlock the "job" much like all other jobs. Even levelling to 50 isn't such a big deal to unlock them.
But forcing a new player to lv a job to 50 that they may not want to use, then do Castrum > Praetorium > ifrit > garuda > mog > titan > leviathan > ramuh > snowcloak > shiva > keeper of the lake > nabriales > steps, plus all the fetch quests inbetween and get your ilevel to i90 to just get access to the last instance and finally after all that you can unlock DRK, AST or MCN and be the job you want, that's a good way of putting people off who may be enticed by expansion jobs to buy the game and quit before they get there.
That is one of the main reasons why this topic was created. Two articles posted on the same day presented conflicting information. I'm going into it assuming the quoted response from SE is true considering it was sent specifically to clarify what was an inaccurate statement. That and I always get wary when an interview gets paraphrased as you don't know how much was actually said. Despite what many people seem to think, this is not a complaint thread. I would simply like a definitive response and if it is true that such a requirement is needed before these new jobs can be played I would very much like to know the reason for that decision.
The hard part is that as someone mentioned, this is more along the lines of a 'Extension' pack than 'Expansion'. Taking XI as an example, none of the stories were actually tied together, but their own little thing(Otherwise RoZ would have interfered with WoTG IIRC). Therefore, jobs 'introduced' in that area could be accessible through a quest. However, they were still gated in a form or fashion. For example, Samurai and Ninja had been in Kazham. Norg to be exact. However, you needed to obtain Kazham Airship pass before even reaching the quest starter.
My biggest issue is that its been said they wont start from level 1. Even in XI, the jobs you unlocked always started from level 1. I can forgive gating them behind the expansion story. But I really want to experience the jobs from scratch and learn to play them as I go. Starting at a specific level takes away from that experience.
In my utopian vision of Heavensward though, the new jobs would be available from the get go, to anyone starting the game from scratch. (Which is what I had hoped since I would love to play the game again from the beginning as an Astrologian or DRK).
We have approximately three months until 3.0. That should be more than enough time to get things done.
That's also been ambiguous. It was later "clarified" to make it possibly sound like what he meant to say (or actually said) was that you can't start the game as one of the new jobs, and was lost in translation.
Someone sees all the cool previews for the expansion and decides to buy it, only to find out that everything they have seen in the expansion can't be accessed for another 3 months for them. There might be zones that aren't gated by the full MSQ, but they might also just be meteor crash sites that you run through to unlock Alexander or a dungeon, and can't get into without first seeing Ishgard.
Like someone else pointed out earlier, the way they're numbering these patches, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, etc. makes it seem they're trying to tell a huge story split into chapters, with each expansion being an extension into the next chapter instead of a stand-alone expansion that could tie together events that happen across the world but not necessarily dependent on each other. This offered more parallel things that still mattered. But with things in FFXIV, they couldn't get any more linear than what they have now.