MSQ Needs Further Condensing

listen, my man, I'm just gonna

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Originally Posted by Sauteed

I don't need to be a walking Encyclopedia Eorzea to state I feel the MSQ needs massive pruning still.

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Yes, yes you do. You need to know what you're talking about before you want to talk about cutting stuff out. I don't trust my hairdresser to do brain surgery. They know a fair bit about the head, but not enough to go poking around inside of it with a scalpel.

edit: goodnight lads, it's 1:30 in the morning and I am done with the topic

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

A vital plot device continually necessary for dealing with Ascians does not qualify as either filler or wasting time.

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Made a typo there, I apologize, I meant to say the stuff going on AROUND getting that white auricite in the first place was filler.

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Originally Posted by Ammokkx

listen, my man, I'm just gonna



Yes, yes you do. You need to know what you're talking about before you want to talk about cutting stuff out. I don't trust my hairdresser to do brain surgery. They know a fair bit about the head, but not enough to go poking around inside of it with a scalpel.

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No, I don't need to be the one doing the cutting, but I also don't go to a hospital and demand to perform surgery on myself when my appendix is ruptured either. I DO know there needs to be some cutting done on that msq, in my honest opinion. Love some of these little quips tho. Keep em coming.


To give some examples of why I started insta skipping 5.0 and further cut scenes and why I will every single time I get that "feeling", just think about Thancred fighting Ranjit and "dying", and then being right there alive just seconds later, or Y'shtola dying and being brought back like 5 minutes later as a cludgey attempt to help someone identify with someone who also says he believes we're all fake anyways, and wants to kill us all anyhow to bring about the rejoining.. Or watch the exacrch get shot in the back as some kind of big deal by said person, and then you get him back immediately after kiling him in the ultimate battle with them, etc, most ardbert stuff just seemed kind of tacked on (to me), and of all the people in the story Vaulthry to me was the most interesting and also bizarre there was. Elidibus stuff was pretty bad also (like meeting and talking to him and just deciding to let him go around try to convince people to be warriors of light, maybe to discern some further plot? Or what?) That and emet selch again just being able to freely come and go as he chooses with us? Like why did even tolerate this guy? Story purposes? The Thancred thing tho, and actually going and raiding Eulmore "finally" was enough for me to just realize I wasn't ever going to like ShB. And thus, I've chosen to completely and utterly stop watching XIV cutscenes unless I just feel like I should.. which is what happened with 5.4 up until we get to see the Fandaniel schpeel, and they'll be getting skipped again maybe til 6.0 if I'm still here by then.

Anybody that can read books with lots of pictures can kind of know this is some hamfisted not well written stuff that just in my opinion again, isn't worth getting invested in or obsessing over. It's a video game, it's got a story. It's not good, it's not great, but it does it's job for a video game. It COULD be so much better, but it's not. So it could be shorter.. and well, hoping it is soon™

I guess something else to give comparison to as well is Star Wars.. I liked the original triology that came out Episode 4 5 and 6. After seeing 1 and 2 (which I fell asleep during) I didn't watch or care about 3 until years later, and can no longer go back and just 'relive" the excitement of 4 5 and 6 (which I loved dearly decades ago). I have not watched any of the newer star wars things either, except for bits and pieces of The Force Awakens. As far as star wars is concerned, I'm done with it. I can't call some hollywood liberal and ask them to revert or change things, I can't call my congressman, I can get on a fan ran forum and complain, and get told I'm dumb and then ip blocked off the forum or whatever they do in those places. As it stands, star wars will never receive a cent of my money or a moment of my time outside of me saying I just can't stand it anymore. Now why did that happen? They just kept going in a direction I felt sucked.. so I just kind of hoped the next part would be better and it sucked way worse (in my opinion mind you), and I decided to give it another chance years later and felt like it was just totally dead and gone. Many years later, someone asked if I wanted to watch the "then new" star wars movie with them and I said you know, ok.. I hope it's better than the last one. And you know, imo it wasn't. Again, I can't go anywhere and have any chance of pushing my hopes for the series that I'm willing to go. I don't like Reddit or facebook or even making youtube videos at all. So, I just tossed my little hands up and said you're dead to me and decided to play some online games again. I don't watch a lot of movies, I feel most of them are little cinematic catastrophes and I think the vast majority of people also do. It's a dying genre. We get netflix series now, and some of them make it, a lot of them don't.

My hope tho is XIV lasts super long time, and just gets better. Not more restrictive, and not in need of investing hundreds of MORE hours than already are there to get to places where people who've been playing for years are at. My playtime according to steam is around 5k hours. My actual play time is much less, as I've left the game on in the background or on overnight or while I was at work. In sincerity, the game could do with a mighty pruning about and be better for it. Again, I'm not super versed in the lore, I have played for years and watched some of these cutscenes 1 time years ago, and ceased caring about the story in much the same way I ceased caring for Star Wars stuff. (which I could have told you stuff out of books and all the little names of pieces of a light saber, it was like that for me back then). XIV will never have a place in my mind or heart like that.. the story will just never be that tier for me. I don't need to go look at a list of MSQ's on console gaming wiki and wade through those to feel I have "earned" some right to come to this conclusion. Simply having played through it several times is what I base my opinion on.

Have a happy starlight tho.

As much as the XIV community is notorious for slinging vitriol at people that don't do the MSQ the "right" way, I take comfort in the knowledge there are plenty of people that enjoy XIV every day that ignore the story.

To those of you that skip cutscenes, the Twelve bless you. If you skipped the cutscene that explains the Twelve, that's ok.

Sauteed, something else you are failing to see here is that the story often goes back to things that seemed trivial or filler. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, 5.4 is a perfect example of this. An NPC we previously took as filler became instrumental to a major plot point.

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Originally Posted by TaleraRistain

Sauteed, something else you are failing to see here is that the story often goes back to things that seemed trivial or filler. Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, 5.4 is a perfect example of this. An NPC we previously took as filler became instrumental to a major plot point.

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That npc needed to be brought back tho. He was never filler. And somewhere in the back of my mind I knew he'd be coming back into the equation before this. I wondered where he was. 5.4 was "ok" all the way up til Fandaniel started talking at the last bit. Even the "Garlean" towers that look like something out of the heavensward raid series. And it isn't the writing quality that is "in the way", what gets in the way is clicking on something sometimes multiple times and taking it to someone to watch a cut scene of them telling you you didn't click on something enough times ( example), or trying to make sure kids got their cookies when you're on a mission to investigate some ruins for bandits or whatever else. Little trip ups (like previously mentioned Tataru) in the midst of massive escalating wars, after trudging through days worth of quests to try and get to the massive escalating wars and hopefully new jobs like dark knight and astrologian and some new areas to explore. Being held back because you didn't pass go or whatever, that should be handled a little better imo. One can make the argument tho that lore reasons are why you can't go to Ishgard "early", there's a war going on and they're secretive! But by that same token, why are people still in Little Ala Mhigo if Ala Mhigo is back and in action? I don't need to know why , I'm just saying we can let lore be some kind of road block or we can let people explore a little and when the time for that part of the story comes for them to deal with war/famine/whatever let them run through that part of the story. Allow a litlte more freedom detached from MSQ progress.. again, not asking for people to go day 1 to Norvandt and spam shared fates, but it woudl be nice to see players getting a little earlier access to a larger portion of the game.

I think all they really need do going forward is plan quest clusters for the MSQ where you have 1-2 important to the story and 5-8 filler that is part of the MSQ..with the intention to make those filler into optional side quests once the content gets old.

The moogle section in HW is a good example where you could do 1-2 errands for them and get the idea without slogging through it.

Also I wouldn't be opposed if they just didn't go so nuts on the XP rewards, or made ALL MSQ level-independent (or something like 2.0 is anything under 50; 3.0 anything 50-60). An alt of mine is almost 70 ONLY doing MSQ, just finishing Heavansward and a few random roulettes.. would rather finish a quest but collect rewards on an second job so slow that down a bit.

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Originally Posted by Reyketi

The game suffers greatly from trying to be both an MMORPG, and single player story focused RPG.

The fact is this game is an MMORPG, with a large focus on end-game content, that being trials, raids, gearing, ect.

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Though I agree that there should be improvements in terms to the story presented in the MSQ and the amount of catch-up a player has to do to arrive endgame (in fact I agree to some of the solutions presented)... . the specific above statements are simply not something I agree to.

As SE themselves said so, this is not just an MMORPG, it is a Final Fantasy MMORPG... it is a Final Fantasy game too, a main numbered one to top it... the story needs to be there even if it practically resembles a single player story focused RPG. I think they are already trying to balance both as much as they can though there should be improvements.

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Originally Posted by kaynide

I think all they really need do going forward is plan quest clusters for the MSQ where you have 1-2 important to the story and 5-8 filler that is part of the MSQ..with the intention to make those filler into optional side quests once the content gets old.

The moogle section in HW is a good example where you could do 1-2 errands for them and get the idea without slogging through it.

Also I wouldn't be opposed if they just didn't go so nuts on the XP rewards, or made ALL MSQ level-independent (or something like 2.0 is anything under 50; 3.0 anything 50-60). An alt of mine is almost 70 ONLY doing MSQ, just finishing Heavansward and a few random roulettes.. would rather finish a quest but collect rewards on an second job so slow that down a bit.

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This is a very solid idea and, really, it already sort of feels like they are doing this in the design. The proof will be in the pudding as for what they do with it in the future but you can already feel that divide between the obvious "Big Quest" parts of the MSQ and stuff that could easily be pushed to optional side quests in the future.

If you don’t wanna play the game buy a skip, don’t wanna spend money play somthing else don’t have the whole game bend at your whim