Can't Access 3.0 until you complete 2.0-2.55

[Tsukino]

I have mixed feelings about this one.

It really doesn't matter for me anyway because, like most everyone else here on the forums, I'm caught up with the story and can jump right in.

On one hand it is nice that they're so focused on the story that they couldn't see a way around this - you have to witness the events of the previous quests, such as with Midgarsormr, Iceheart, and Aymeric, for Heavensward to make sense to begin with. In so many MMOs there is a lot of negativity amongst players toward the story (they only care about endgame lootz) and the developers play into that by making the story less important, and it's nice to see FFXIV stick with it, as it's a core component of the Final Fantasy name. Perhaps most importantly, they clearly intend to continue with some long-standing plot points such as what primals and ascians really are, and it's incredibly difficult to try and present progress on those mysteries out of order.

On the other hand, people don't want to pay $40 to be locked out of content, and not everyone is a diligent forum-goer who finishes all their story quests. In MMOs people enjoy things in different ways, and it's tough to tell people to just deal with it because the story quests are easy anyway. Additionally, it may become more difficult to get through them as time goes on; roulette bonuses only go so far to keep old content alive. There are also sometimes ways to "cheat" at separating out story content if you plan ahead for it. Not that it directly applies to what's going on with Heavensward, but in FFXI the expansions were absolutely intended to take place in order, especially the first two. But you could still play them out of order and they used some tricks to make them make sense that way too (most notably, Esha'ntarl "filling in" for Kam'lanaut even though you know he's dead if you did them in order). Finally, there's a ton of other areas in the game where they clearly said screw the lore because they wanted to add something, for something to be more accessible, or to use lore as an excuse for game functions - female chocobos were supposed to be locked away by Ishgard but there sure are enough for the Gold Saucer suddenly, Yugiri was added to introduce both Au Ra and Ninja but players can already be ninja without story progress and most likely we be able to be Au Ra as well, ridiculous quest text like for the Crystal Tower weekly, etc.

I think the best solution is to attempt to balance things as time goes on. Allowing people into old instanced content solo and separating out some of the utterly ridiculous filler quests into side quests are two of the biggest and easiest ways to do this. That way even if people have to play through an original game plus two expansions worth of story to get caught up with everyone else, it would at least be possible and reasonably quick to do.