Storytelling

I find MSQ harder to follow than any other game I've played for some reason. Partly it may be that its text heavy and the plot takes many twists and turns.

I have issues concentrating, but don't struggle with other games. Even earlier FF that don't have VA are fine, maybe because they are much more succinct, less wordy.

I have to say I don't like the story or characters, outside of the early HW, ishgard portion but maybe that's a seperate issue.

I don't mean to demand change or aimlessly whine I'm just curious if anyone else feels the same?

The only thing that bothered me were the amount of quests released between 2.0 and 3.0, but that's it.
I still found them very enjoyable and had no problems reading everything.
However, I do have to admit that Urianger's dialogue kinda annoyed me. Luckily I play with JP dub and don't have to listen to his English VA.

While playing the game I never had real issues to follow the story - however I'm currently making a Scrapbook of our HW-experience for a friend as birthday present and the last pages missing are the ones about the story. While I still had a general idea about how the story played out, I looked at the screens I took and was a lot of times like "...how did we get here? Why did we fought Bismarck again? Why did we go there?" - so I can kinda understand what you mean, there are many twists and turns and specially in the retrospective I'm taking right now I often feel like "This could have totally beeen skipped or streamlined" for several parts of the 3.0 story (not even talking about fillers here). I like that everything is there, dont missunderstand me, but I can totally see why it may seem difficult to follow from time to time

My biggest gripe for the story itself is infact how lengthy and needlessly "wordy" it is, making it hard to follow (for me) because it's not very smooth and hasn't a very natural flow.
I've been playing several rpgs lately and if there's one thing that I noticed when I read the dialogue, is that they're short (3 sentences for each character per turn), pretty straightforward (there's no purple prose...google it) and that the language used is fairly simple yet elegant (there's no olde English and when there is, it's not overly abundant).

I mean, I played Trails of Cold steel recently and that game is filled with exposition and is very dialogue heavy, but I NEVER felt tired of reading and the dialogues were very enjoyable too. And that game also lacks a lot of Voice acting, which is already not great but far better than FFXIV. In FFXIV, however, I tried recently to see a cutscene where Cid and someone was talking - I don't even remember who it was - and here it pops a para-worthy bubble of text...and all of it was unnecessary! He could've explained his stuff in 2 lines but nope, has to be over 5-10 lines of dialogue to say something! And then he spoke the same length!

If people like it, by all means, I have nothing against them but I just can't stand tons and tons of needless dialogue when it could've been summed up in two or three lines..

That's because they want to have story quests in every single level, making it very bloated and not having a good pacing. You have to read everything or risk skipping important parts, and there's a lot to read.

Also, instead of keeping story lines self-contained in their own sections/expansions, they want to make a huge, single story line. I've recently re played through the game and there was a lot of stuff that I forgot. It's cliff hanger after cliff hanger and the conclusion to said cliff hangers often takes several months to be released.

Meanwhile the main story from GW2 is still fresh in my mind because you only got story every 5 levels, making it just as long as it needs to be.

The old English makes dialogue too formal and unnecessarily long, if you compare it to other localizations you notice that the English version has way more text, for some people it makes the story hard to follow and this leads to this antipathy for the characters some people Feel.

The problem is not the story it's the localization ... but you will be bitten by Koji's fans if you complain too loud about it.

I have ADHD, so I know a thing or two about finding it difficult, if not impossible, to focus on things. I don't really experience a problem with the MSQ, which means it's doing an adequate job of being the most interesting thing going on whenever I'm doing it.

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Originally Posted by Renik

The old English makes dialogue too formal and unnecessarily long, if you compare it to other localizations you notice that the English version has way more text, for some people it makes the story hard to follow and this leads to this antipathy for the characters some people Feel.

The problem is not the story it's the localization ... but you will be bitten by Koji's fans if you complain too loud about it.

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It's faux early modern English. It's doubtful you would be able to read Old English.

I personally would rather them take the MSQ out and make a new game with it that is single player. No one would spend 15 a month to have a book sit on a bookshelf. What's the difference here? The MSQ is an obstacle to the real game.

I like playing a MMO with other players. You can't do that in the MSQ outside a few dungeons. And lets be honest, the story lovers hate that too. Why not give the solo'ers a solo game and groupers a group game?

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Originally Posted by Nixxe

It's faux early modern English. It's doubtful you would be able to read Old English.

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Oh sorry, I'm not even native, i just know that it resembles old English.

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Originally Posted by Kaethra

Why not give the solo'ers a solo game and groupers a group game?

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MMOs are about society in a vitual world not about being forced to play content with others, most soloers would take ofense about what you just said.

There needs to be some sort of depth for the characters and everything whats going on around in Eorzea , else it would be just some other copy/past story world with boring stuff in it ^^

I suggest taking ur time with the game and not rushing through it ^^