New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[Iscah]

Some people in here act like wow doesnt have a story. Wow had lore for all the dungeons too. Only difference is you didnt need to go out and do all the out world quests to unlock the dungeon. If you cared about the story for them you could do the quests, if not you could do something else.

I'm not a WoW player, but I assume that must work like the optional dungeons here - get a quest from a person who wants you to brave the depths of X to clear out the monsters or retrieve something for them.

Most of FFXIV's dungeons work in an inherently different way, because they're tied to the MSQ. You're sent there because of story events, and travelling through the dungeon is itself a story event. Some of the ARR dungeons could be disconnected from it if they wanted to, since you're just there as one adventurer of many (who happened to make it out alive), but it gets harder as the story gets more involved.

You don't just invade the Praetorium because you felt like beating up some Garleans. Every boss you fight there is story-relevant, and wouldn't make sense if you could do it without playing ARR first. (Who's the guy in the silly helmet? And isn't that Thancred that we met in the Lv5 quest back in Ul'dah?)

We wouldn't be in Dravania trying to make peace with the dragons if we hadn't met Ysayle, who is the reason we thought we could even attempt it. Vidofnir wouldn't have given us permission to access Sohm Al, and we wouldn't be venturing into the Aery to kill Nidhogg.

We wouldn't invade the Vault just for the sake of it. We're only doing it to rescue Aymeric, because he went to confront Thordan about the truth of the Dragonsong War, which we learned from our trip to Dravania.

And so on. We go to these places and do things there at specific times in the MSQ. We're not just adventurers exploring a freely accessible dungeon, we're there for a reason, and it doesn't make sense if that reason hasn't happened yet.

It would also make the story more confusing for those who are trying to follow it legitimately - or at least frustrating, because you keep unlocking new dungeons but can't play them yet. It would also mess with being able to sign up for roulettes, because there'd be a chance of ending up in that dungeon you're manually avoiding because you shouldn't be able to go there yet.

To me, that would just seem sloppy on the game writers' part. Like they don't care about telling a coherent story step-by-step, and keeping everything in order.



This is the only MMO I've played. I come from single-player games and RPGs, and there's nothing strange at all to me about being "locked out" of content until you've progressed to that point. It's how game stories normally work, unless they're designed to be wide-open from the start.

Maybe it's not how MMOs usually work, but this MMORPG still has a lot of RPG in it. And personally, I like that.



The one compromise I could see working is to have the optional endgame dungeons unlock earlier, if they don't rely on events happening in the MSQ.



Also, I don't see "play New Game Plus later" as a good solution to racing through content now - especially if you're doing it the long way and 'skimming through' everything instead of paying for a skip potion. Maybe you'll get to endgame sooner, but then if you use NG+ you'll be going through all the same tedium a second time just to get the story that you skipped over the first time.

do you think she is actually reading that story again? on two charachters? i doubt it.

It's very dependent on the person. I'd be reading through the script again (though maybe not so carefully on a second character within two weeks) because I'm interested in the story, and even the "boring" stuff at the beginning of the game can turn up some interesting or long-forgotten details.

I have four characters - my main is at endgame of course, second is halfway through Stormblood, third is in post-Heavensward. These three were all started very early in my gameplay because I wanted to see the opening stories for all three cities.

The fourth was still in the early stages of the game, but I boosted him to Lv50 specifically because I wanted to replay the Crystal Tower questline. (and it has been a surprisingly disconcerting business as I try to remember where he's up to in the main plot now, because I haven't seen him go through any of it.)

They should indeed make some changes to the "new player" experience:
- There is no need to have classes anymore, at all. Start with jobs directly
- Either move the starting Rising Stone (Horizon) or put an etherite there (so painful when you don't even have a chocobo to do 100 back and forth on foot)

Removing classes would mess with the storywriting for a lot of jobs - the job quests often emphasise the difference between the two disciplines. Usually the class is a "common skill" but the job is an obscure, advanced technique or restricted to only a few practitioners.

There's also a story-reason mentioned for why Vesper Bay doesn't have its own aetheryte: basically, either the Syndicate or Lolorito specifically blocked it from being installed, because the Scions wouldn't take bribes from them - so it's a very deliberate inconvenience, although one that could potentially be written out if they wanted to change it.

I think they will just update those that exist already instead of adding new. I mean, until the moment when you buy 4.0, with potion you will skip only 1-50. But If you bought 4.0, you will skip 1-60, that's how it upscales now. Most likely it will upscale to 1-70, if you bought 5.0, but we will see.

There are two separate "story skip potions" currently available. (They're actually books, but anyway.) One only skips ARR and takes you to the start of Heavensward (specifically landing a little way into the first HW quest, ready to talk to the gatekeeper and enter Ishgard), the other takes you to the start of Stormblood.

So it seems likely that we'll be seeing a new "skip to start of Shadowbringers" option when that releases - hopefully with price reductions on the previous versions, rather than an increased price on the new one.