Possible level/story jumps....really?

[Lambdafish]

How do you condense all of the open plot threads into a quick and easy level jump experience? You have the scion story, the garlean story, the ascian story, the ul'dah story. the allagan story, the beast tribe story, the hydalyn/zodiark story, and midgarsormr. How the hell do you condense all that into something bite size? And thats not including the dragonsong war or the initial ala mhigo story.

[Belhi]

How do you condense all of the open plot threads into a quick and easy level jump experience? You have the scion story, the garlean story, the ascian story, the ul'dah story. the allagan story, the beast tribe story, the hydalyn/zodiark story, and midgarsormr. How the hell do you condense all that into something bite size? And thats not including the dragonsong war or the initial ala mhigo story.

With difficulty.

For people who don't care much for the story its a moot point.

For people who are interested but don't want to play through the rest you would need a pretty indepth 'The story so far' feature. Honestly if making a Jump potion got them to do this it would be a good thing because I think a lot of people already playing wouldn't mind some kind of refresher feature to remind them what has happened so far. It amazes me how much people I talk story with have either forgotten what happened in the past or have details wrong and that can totally skew context. After all this is story that has been being told out over literally years and quite a few people have had breaks during that time.

[Lambdafish]

With difficulty.

For people who don't care much for the story its a moot point.

For people who are interest

The people who skip the main story are probably skipping to get to current content quickly. Then they go through 4.0 story and suddenly "I don't understand the story" threads appear everywhere, and the devs have to make the stories independent in the future due to massive backlash.

[dragonseth07]

The people who skip the main story are probably skipping to get to current content quickly. Then they go through 4.0 story and suddenly "I don't understand the story" threads appear everywhere, and the devs have to make the stories independent in the future due to massive backlash.

I've seen people skip story. I've seen people complain about not understanding it. I've not seen someone skip it and then complain about their own choices like that.

[Belhi]

The people who skip the main story are probably skipping to get to current content quickly. Then they go through 4.0 story and suddenly "I don't understand the story" threads appear everywhere, and the devs have to make the stories independent in the future due to massive backlash.

The WAR in my FC's static has never paid any attention to the story the entire time he has played. He only knows the names of the Scions because they are people he has had to click on to turn in quests. He has never read any quest dialog or watched a cutscene. He didn't even know what Aether was. Frankly he doesn't really care. He has also been a core member of the FC since I joined. my experience is that the argument that people who skip story don't stick around is baseless.

I say this as someone who loves the story and lvled every Job and class just so I could play out the different Job/class questlines.

Here is a novel idea. 2 or 3 expansions in; discard the 2.0 story and replace it with one that makes sense with the current timeline. Every game I have ever played suffered from this. It made you feel like you're playing in a time machine.

You can't invest time into this with every expansion. However if you're going to overhaul gameplay to a point the earlier content makes no contextual sense: I see no point in maintaining that content. Our combat is getting a major overhaul with this expansion.

The duties from 2.0 were designed with our old combat system in mind.
Why can level 1-59 players not help out Al Amigo? WoW attempted that with Cata. Went poorly because they tried painting a new landscape over an old one. Poorly.

Want to border ruin your game? Allow players to skip what made the game great. Learning the game in an environment designed to teach it while enjoying it. Overhaul the game, it's combat and most of it's systems? Overhaul your content delivery system to match. Including the content that you're trying to convince your new players to continue to pay and play.

I think you vastly underestimate the amount of time and work such a overhaul takes. WoW attempted it with Cata and it went poorly because they lacked the staff and resources to completely rework their existing world and make a full expansion at the same time. There is a reason Blizzard pretty much ruled out trying that again and instead have left their lvling story a complete mess.

If they were to try this with FF14 it would take them probably at least the same amount of work as making a brand new expansion. That's about 2 years of content. So, would you want 4 years of half of the normal amount of content or just a 2 year content drought? Its simply not workable.

People need to remember any time they spend reworking old content means time not spent developing new content for existing players. Any major overhauls of past content means content we as endgame players won't be getting as a result because the people who would have been building content for us are reworking all the old stuff instead.