SE, you managed to take the umph outta quests.

[Gramul]

Black hearted mockery.

They certainly took more effort, had more variety and relied on your ability to actually read and think on a basic level in order to complete.

Felt more like adventures than lists of chores. To me at least.

[Monzcarro]

They certainly took more effort, had more variety and relied on your ability to actually read and think on a basic level in order to complete.

Felt more like adventures than lists of chores. To me at least.

Yes, the ability to read ffxiclopedia to find out wtf you're actually supposed to do and the effort required to think "well why didn't they just say that?".

TRIGGER WARNING - 'Black hearted mockery':

"Oh but I didn't look it up, I totes figured it out all by myself!"

Egads, yet more mockery! Turn back!:

Hehe, OK. Cookie in the mail.

Where in FFXIV they give you a quest for each step, FFXI would just give you some flavor text and a have at it. You still had to talk to random npcs, kill certain mobs for plabum, and travel arbitary distances just for the sake of it. Besides the quest text, I daresay the only real difference between then and now is that there's a lot more of them.

[Gramul]

boop

Dude. No.
I don't even care if you could find out the answer elsewhere. There's guides for every single game ever, mmo or not.
Having the game brightly point out everything isn't making it better, it's making it less interesting. It's stripping it down to the skeleton. There's no meat. I like meat. I like having my mechanics hidden in exploring and adventuring through the actual world instead of handed to me on a plate.

And traveling arbitrary distances? Everywhere had a purpose, everyone had a reason for what they wanted. The journey was part of the experience. Part of the adventure.

Oh, and don't take the "Black hearted mockery." mockery thing too seriously. I just really hate the "LOL" response.

[Raymeo]

*needless jabs and sarcasm filtered out* Yes, the ability to read ffxiclopedia to find out wtf you're actually supposed to do and the effort required to think "well why didn't they just say that?". Where in FFXIV they give you a quest for each step, FFXI would just give you some flavor text and a have at it. You still had to talk to random npcs, kill certain mobs for plabum, and travel arbitary distances just for the sake of it. Besides the quest text, I daresay the only real difference between then and now is that there's a lot more of them.

FFXIclopedia wasn't around for the first few years of the game's existence. Even when it was around though, players still had to figure out what to do through trial and error until the articles showed up online, and that includes the authors of the articles themselves. DAT mining wasn't as evolved as it is these days.

That small detail aside tough, nobody's actually saying that having quests spelled out for you in FFXIV is lame. They're rather saying that it's lame when the tasks being explained are easy to the point of being mindless.

Even if you did have the specifics of what you were supposed to do in FFXI handed to you by friends or websites, the quests still presented extremely difficult challenges and offered unique, meaningful rewards. That is at least to say, they were extremely difficult as long as you were trying to do them by yourself at a level when the rewards were actually relevant to you. Soloing quests at a relevant level was nigh impossible unless you were a pet class subbing WHM/RDM/SCH, or a WHM/RDM/SCH subbing NIN and geared uniquely for soloing, which combined to make a demographic group consisting of only a very small percentage of players. The majority of players actually had to devote a good chunk of work and time into preparation before they could consider leaving town to tackle a quest, and they needed to actually cultivate a social network of players willing to help each other in order to get things like quests done in that game. This required amount of effort, planning, and oftentimes coordination made quests actually feel exciting when they were undertaken.

These days however, people's constant demands for MOAR CONTENT and FASTER CONTENT have combined to cause developers to focus on quantity of quests over their quality of depth, while simultaneously a rise in the appeal of MMOs to a more (and I use this word without negative connotation) casual playerbase has caused developers to dramatically reduce the average difficulty of questing. That may float your boat. In fact, it wouldn't be surprising if it did, considering that this trend is happening for a reason -- most players vocalize that this type of development is what pleases them. There's nothing wrong with that. Conversely however, it is still going to be a saddening thing to a minority of others who appreciated the way that things used to be. That's all that's being spoken of by the OP and their supporters here. No need to hate in this thread, folks. It's just a difference in opinion.