why i quit before reaching endgame (feedback from a new player)

[RyuSaarva]

I don't even understand how you managed to speedrun the game that fast, it took me 28 days to clear 2.0 main story alone, I don't think you ever watched any cutscenes or read any text at all.

[Acesfool]

To each their own. My wife tried FFXIV a couple months ago and just couldn't get into it, mainly because of the cutscenes. Even being able to skip them didn't make her enjoy it any more. For me, the story is one of my favorite things about the game. There are several MMO's out there and I'm sure one fits your expectations.

[Crushnight]

I don't get that argument. I played FF9 recently. Interestingly enough, I did not felt that 90% of my time playing was just reading blocks of text and teleporting to one npc to the next. Maybe because even though the history is a trait of the Final Fantasy franchise, telling that history in a way that is tiring is not.

Actually the thing you will probably spend the most of your time in FF9 is cutscenes most specifically the going into and out of combat cutscenes and yes they are cutscenes they wrest control away from the player to be all swoosh whoa do i look cool for a normal battle yet? XD

[Crushnight]

will say it seems they are doubling down on MSQ by making 1 set of Role quests mandatory where the other 3 sets you don't do are side content. So i would advise anybody who you try and get interested in this game to be as informative as possible and tell them it has a lot of cutscenes, there is a lot of back and forth between areas, if these are deal breakers then it would be best to find another game to play, because at it stands atm for ShB MSQ is remaining mandatory to do later content, they have plans to trim down ARR but they would still need to go through ARR to SB to get access to ShB if they are not willing to pay extra to get there.

[VictorTheed]

If I were u I'd buy a story skip potion, u can get em on the mogstation, $18 to skip to heavensward, $ 25 to skip to storm blood, then again I heard there was a sell going on do they might be cheaper now

[Barraind]

I don't even understand how you managed to speedrun the game that fast, it took me 28 days to clear 2.0 main story alone, I don't think you ever watched any cutscenes or read any text at all.

My alt made it from 1 to msq done in ~7 days.

Having road to 60, preorder earrings and hat/ring for early levels makes it go fast. Had to feed xp to 1 other class pre-50 and 2 pre-60 to avoid being more than 5 or 6 levels ahead at all times, and only had to do ~12 sidequests in SB (ruby sea from 62-63 and yanxia 66-67). I did 1 roulette and 3 alliance raids other than the required dungeons pre msq done.

Praetorium and Meriandum took as long as 45-50 did.

That's skipping cutscenes.

Cutscenes by length take longer than the entire leveling and instance process of the msq.

[PyurBlue]

Buying the game allows you to play it. But it takes time, and buying the subscription allows you to play it over time. Buying the boost allows you to complete the game without taking time to do it. By skipping, I mean you leave them uncompleted and you just move on to other things. That's not the case here. In some other games, it is an actual skip where you reach the minimum level of the current expansion and they take to the start of the current expansion, but your character still have content from the previous expansion that you didn't complete. So you still have to do them if you ever want anything from the previous expansion.

That is not the case with FFXIV. The boost actually completes the MSQ for you so you unlock a lot of content and reward that you would have otherwise needed to do.

Thus, you're not paying twice like you would have in other games for actually skipping. What you're paying for is for the game to complete the content for you. You didn't just skip over it.

This doesn't seem like a significant distinction to me. If you bought FF14 primarily to participate in something locked behind the MSQ you have to pay additional money to play the content right away. It's the same as with the other games. While the content you don't want to play might be handled a little differently, that probably doesn't matter if you didn't want to play it in the first place. FF14 flagging the skipped content as done could be a disadvantage too. If the player skipping wanted to do the skipped content at their own pace, the skip potion forever takes that content away from them (but this is fixed in Shadowbringers).

Maybe I can make it clearer by putting it another way. The skip potion and similar items have you paying to solve problems made by the devs. Paying to save time is completely valid, but in FF14 the time investment only exists because the developers put it into the game. They didn't have to and paying for it just reinforces it as a good business strategy for them. SE absolutely deserves to make money for their products of course but when you end up paying the devs to sell you solutions to problems that shouldn't exist, it hardly seems fair to have to pay. It makes some sense with the level skip because leveling helps to keep dungeons alive. Making players go through the MSQ on the other hand has very little effect on the game as a whole since it's a solo experience.

What I said was I wouldn't object to some sort of skip potion being made free, I still have big issues with suggestions here about the devs changing how the MSQ is being done to make it optional from the get go. I don't disagree to some of the post ARR MSQ quests being shortened but that's as far as I would take it. A lot of people here have advocated to FFXIV having a story structure like WOW or XI which I'm strongly opposed to.

In both threads I went out of my way to say that changing the nature of the MSQ would not be the right way to make the MSQ optional. Optional MSQ simply means the player can choose to their MSQ progress flags checked or not, exactly like the current skip potion but free. FF14 wouldn't change at all for players enjoying the story and willing to watch cutscenes. SE would follow the same formula that it has used from the beginning. The only difference would be that players would gain the option jumping to the end of MSQ as if they had played through it.

While the MSQ wasn't for me, I understand that everyone has their own preferences and I know what it's like to lose something you enjoy. I really, really don't want to take that away from you, I promise. Sometimes you can't please everyone, but I don't think an agreeable solution is out of reach on this issue.

[Sicno]

I think I'll leave this here.

[Souljacker]

I recently started a new character and worked through the main story quest of ARR so that I could get her a car before the event ends. Looking at it through the lens of someone who played at launch, I agree that there's still too many cutscenes that don't really add much to the story at all. I counted three times where there was at least a half hour of the three leaders basically just saying the same thing the other said, over and over and over again. Like, I guess it was supposed to 'rally the people' but by the end I just wanted it to be over.

I forced myself through it because I wanted to remember everything that there was to remember... and now I realize why I didn't mind forgetting.

Last night was probably the worst. There are two eight man dungeons back to back that equal out to about two hours of cutscenes all told... and maybe a minute or two of actual battle. I started at a little before 8pm last night, figuring I'd get it done pretty quickly even with the forced cutscenes, and I didn't get to bed until 10:30. And then I let the credits roll overnight and there was ANOTHER cutscene about the next big task in the story after that.


Maybe it's because I'm a bit older now, but I don't remember XI's story as being a chore like this one is. This one felt like I was being forced to watch copy\pasted cutscenes in order to get to the content I wanted to do, like the new dungeon to explore. In XI the cutscenes were the reward for having completed the content that preceded them.

I wish SE would just keep making movies, because that's clearly what they want to do. I liked their movies. I like their games. I think that they should remain at least mostly separate. There's no need to break up a dungeon with numerous, time-wasting cutscenes. Put the cutscenes for the story either before the queue, or after the dungeon is over, and for the love of all that is good in this world PLEASE don't add fluff just to add fluff. Just tell the story you want to tell. As much as I love to hear her speak, I don't need the Admiral to take 15 minutes to say the exact same thing Kan-E just said.

[Sicno]

There's no need to break up a dungeon with numerous, time-wasting cutscenes. Put the cutscenes for the story either before the queue, or after the dungeon is over

And they've already done that. Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium are dinosaurs from the end of vanilla ARR, at launch, when they were still remaking the game and it was on diapers, before it could get refined to see what worked and what didn't. A lot of the cry about the story filler has to do with the early stages of the game, the base release and the first few patches. It got A LOT better as time passed, as there was feedback, as they could mature their ideas, etc. both in terms of storytelling and in not getting in the way of gameplay. But people who gave up on the story early and who started skipping all cutscenes afterwards and those who flatout gave up on the game only remember those early stages as if all the improvements that came up later never existed and just assume that the entire game remained the same forever and ever.

They never loaded any dungeon with cutscenes again, for instance. There's still a couple of cutscenes on the last boss of the last 3.0 dungeon, but they were considerably shorter. That was still too much for some people, and on the last 4.0 dungeon we only got the same short pre-last boss cutscene we get on any other dungeon in the game. See? They're actually paying attention and improving the game.

The thing about the early ARR story is that it's not as simple as starting to delete and resume parts, or rewriting it, and it's already there and it's the introduction card to the game and be it good or bad it's not a simple thing to start re-writing the story. Do you see tv series going back to redo the earlier seasons or episodes that were not that good? Only when they make a reboot or remake, usually with a different cast, but not while the original series is still airing. (I'd like to give examples to make the point more clear but then I realized how long I've stopped watching tv).