Can we start getting serious about having ARR restructured?

[Gula]

It's not about getting through the story content faster to play with friends. It's about making the early portion of the story more tolerable -- and maybe even enjoyable -- to experience.

This right here. I'm sitting, tense, waiting for a friend to run into an annoyance as he plays through the free trial. He really does want to give this game a chance, and it's rather unfair to try to get someone in and say, "Oh it gets good 60 hours in."

[Blanchimont]

For me, the big issue is that the story between the primals are way too long. The lead up to Titan and even the investigation of the imperials up to the Garuda fight have very little that happens, but are needlessly dragged out. There's a lot of quests where you just report back to someone too and they basically just tell you to wait.

[Knahli]

I find it funny how everyone remembers and complains about the Titan questline but not the Garuda one where you are sent to do various tedious tasks to retrieve a crystal, only to be told "Oops, wrong crystal" twice before they finally send you on a third hunt for the actual, proper one. Literally each crystal hunt had its own little story arc only for the NPC to turn around and say "Actually, you just completely wasted your time with this. Allow me to recommend you to someone who will now do the exact same thing".

[MistakeNot]

I find it funny how everyone remembers and complains about the Titan questline but not the Garuda one where you are sent to do various tedious tasks to retrieve a crystal, only to be told "Oops, wrong crystal" twice before they finally send you on a third hunt for the actual, proper one. Literally each crystal hunt had its own little story arc only for the NPC to turn around and say "Actually, you just completely wasted your time with this. Allow me to recommend you to someone who will now do the exact same thing".

And all that trouble just because we didn't tell them what we needed the crystal for before running out to do tasks....
That whole questline is quite hilarious in a "shaggy dog joke" type of way - and we get to learn quite a bit about how crystals work in the process.

[Verlyn]

Problem with this is that it would really mess up the story timeline. We can, for example, not enter Ishgard until certain events in the MSQ has made it possible for our characters to do so. For many dungeons, the reason our characters go into them, is beacuse of events in the MSQ. Etc, etc.
Now, some people will of course not care at all if they skip backwards and forwards in the story, because they did not care about the story in the first place.
For many of us it is quite important to have things happen in the right order though, and for us your "solution" would make the games story a tangled and near incoherent mess.

We can already go talk to Urianger about Extreme Primals or Coil during Shadowbringers. We can already start Coil right after talking to Alisae in Doma. We can do Omega without touching Alexander. We can run, start to finish, the Crystal Tower questline right after running some dungeons with Exarch in Shadowbringers. We can have Krile in Eureka, while also having her in Azys Lla looking into the Warring Triad. We can have job quests introduce to us and constantly talk about abilities we don't get and may never be getting again, such as Royal Road! We can start the DRG quest and antagonize Estinien long after making a close friend of him.

These things do not matter nearly as much as you seem to think they do, and if they ever did the ball has long been dropped.

Making the MSQ an optional undertaking would increase the enjoyment of many at the cost of a piddly few, and those piddly few can still do the MSQ in the proper order before doing anything else just like they have to now. Why would you care how total strangers experience the MSQ anyway?

[MistakeNot]

Making the MSQ an optional undertaking would increase the enjoyment of many at the cost of a piddly few,

I do not think that is true.
I do not think that nearly as many would find increased enjoyment from making the MSQ optional as you think.
I also do not think that there is just a few people who would find less enjoyment in the game from such a game.

Overall I think making the MSQ optional would make the game worse rather than better. Some people would probably enjoy the change, but then that is true for just about any possible change.

[Verlyn]

Why would it make the game worse? The people who care about the story will still run the MSQ. The people who do not care about the story will not be forced to run the MSQ to play dungeon-bot with their friends. They might even go back to the MSQ later (hearing people talk about it or seeing stuff happen in dungeons does pique curiosity) and, rather than rush rush rush, play it at their own pace for actual enjoyment (which definitely colors how they'll approach and feel about it). Maybe they'll see something while leveling, get curious, and then do the story.

Who loses in this situation?

Besides, something like this eventually has to be done. We're going on something like 300 hours of hard-locked story content to get to where the world is properly populated and the most people are actually doing stuff. I'd rather have the MSQ become an optional pursuit for either fun or a guided leveling process than for say... certain other games' approaches, where they distill it down to a Best Of set of scenarios and the rest of the content just vanishes.

[Vivian_Vex]

As I'm sure we all know, A Realm Reborn is by far the biggest road block for new players, and it's essentially the only reason we cannot recommend the game without throwing in a hefty caveat re: how much of a slog ARR is. There's also the problem of players being overleveled by the time they hit Heavensward.

I don't think it would be too big of an undertaking for the developer to pare down the number of quests (imagine an ARR postgame consisting of, say, 20 quests), and possibly even turning a few of the dungeons currently required for story progression into optional dungeons. They could smooth things over with altered dialogue in order to shuffle around some story events if need be.

While they're at it, they could standardize the outdated AoE/mechanics markers in older content to be more consistent with what players will see in the rest of the game.

Yes, let's put all 5 story arcs for the trials into only a few quests each. That sounds like a WONDERFUL idea.

Sarcasm aside. That's a terrible idea. This is a story driven game so cutting down on *good* story is just stupid.

Making the MSQ an optional undertaking would increase the enjoyment of many at the cost of a piddly few, and those piddly few can still do the MSQ in the proper order before doing anything else just like they have to now. Why would you care how total strangers experience the MSQ anyway?

Oh you mean like WoW does? You know with how new plays have *absolutely no idea what's going on* because they're not guided through a story? Yeah. Really great idea there in a *story driven game*

Accept that MSQ is part of the game and that won't/shouldn't change because it will DRASTICALLY hurt the game just to please the piddly few. Story needs to be required in order to avoid spoilers and if people can just skip to the end without doing it then the entire story is pointless.

[Jeeves72]

Yes, let's put all 5 story arcs for the trials into only a few quests each. That sounds like a WONDERFUL idea.

Sorry, what? Who said that? Did you read the part about paring down the postgame quests and miss the word "postgame"? Let me know what you're talking about.

[Verlyn]

Oh you mean like WoW does? You know with how new plays have *absolutely no idea what's going on* because they're not guided through a story? Yeah. Really great idea there in a *story driven game*

Accept that MSQ is part of the game and that won't/shouldn't change because it will DRASTICALLY hurt the game just to please the piddly few. Story needs to be required in order to avoid spoilers and if people can just skip to the end without doing it then the entire story is pointless.

Talk about unnecessarily combative.

First: WoW didn't have a cohesive story at all until later in its lifespan. You had to piece it together from the disparate bits they gave you in quests. Very bad example.

Second: A story does not have to be forced down your throat to exist. It would still be there. People would be able to run it at their leisure. *Nothing would change, but for that dungeons, zones and trials become level-locked instead.* Who says they wouldn't be guided through it, anyway? There's a little window that tells you where your next MSQ is at all times. That can still be there. Not to mention there's the whole thing that the MSQ is still probably the fastest method of leveling a fresh character from 1-80 anyway. That alone would encourage people to run it.

Third: If people cared about spoilers in the first place, then they would... run the MSQ? O_o

Finally: What renders it pointless, exactly? What about the MSQ becomes irrelevant to *you* if Johnny Raider who you probably don't even interact with, opts to spam FATEs or dungeons to 80 anyway? You do know there exist people who just put a movie in their other monitor and skip all the MSQ text and cutscenes *right now*, right? And they've existed since ARR's inception. What about skip potions? Does that make the MSQ pointless already?

Making it optional at least creates a chance, however minor, that this person would get interested in the story and go back to experience it.

Anyway, given so many people are clamoring for ARR to get chopped up instead, I'd think this would be a better alternative. I mean, it solves the problem (people are a lot more tolerable of flaws when they don't feel like something is a barrier to what they really want to do) and still allows all the intended story beats, build up and foreshadowing and such to exist.