Quality of Life Improvements and MSQ Gating for New Players

[TwistedTea]

You mentioned FFXI before, but the simple fact was FFXI was gated behind A LOT of stuff and most of that stuff was time.

And I also mentioned that FFXI is imperfect in many ways shortly afterwards. I use FFXI as an example because it seems FFXI had fewer MSQ gates/locks on content:

...FFXI where you can choose to NOT do main story quest if you don't want to, and can level up nicely. You can also do any of the patches main story independently from the base story...

To be fair, FFXI did lock major portions of the game behind story:

To do Dynamis you has to beat the Shadow Lord

To access airships you had to be rank 5 in your nation

To do Sky or Sea, you had to be pretty far in their respective storylines

FFXI did place less impetus on storyline progression, and participation in expansion content was divorced entirely from the story. You bought it, you can start on it right now.