Level 50 quest from AAR to Heavensward is just too much.

[Reap00]

The number of drama queens that pop up over this topic is hilarious. ARR was great. ARR is great.

[Ayuhra]

My alt is lvl 60.

Still has not reached Heavensward.

[WellFooled]

While I agree 2.x could use some pruning, I wouldn’t say it would take a casual player years to get to current endgame—I think that’s a bit hyperbolic. They’d have to just not play for weeks/months at a time, or spend a lot of online time not doing MSQ for that to be the case.

The first time I did 2.x was back in early HW, and it took me about a month or so of just a couple hours each night (not every night, because I was working a lot at the time). But I was also doing the ARR EXs and farming them for ponies, so I wasn’t focused solely on the story. I did it again on an alt during SB, and I could do a patch a day—so it took maybe a week of 5~6 hours a day to get through 2.x. And that was without skipping anything, and queuing up for the dungeons/trials as a DPS.

A hyperbole in some cases maybe, but not all. I like this post on reddit where someone broke down exactly how long each section of MSQ took them on an alt. All told it took them about 200 hours with minimal sidequesting to finish everything from ARR to the end of Stormblood. If my friend plays 3 hours for one night a week, it would take her about one year to go from the beginning of ARR to the end of Shadowbringers.

Its a very difficult sell to recruit someone to the game even if they can play it every single night, because you have to tell them they'll need to play the game 200 hours straight without many diversions from the MSQ (plus probably another 30 now for Shadowbringers content?) before they can join the rest of us in content that actually matters. On top of that, the first 60 or so hours aren't all that interesting. Its hard to convince someone that the investment is worth it and I don't blame them.

[Avidria]

The number of drama queens that pop up over this topic is hilarious. ARR was great. ARR is great.

Parts of ARR were great.

A lot of other parts were not. I'd count the vast majority of post-50 content among those parts.

[HyoMinPark]

A hyperbole in some cases maybe, but not all. I like this post on reddit where someone broke down exactly how long each section of MSQ took them on an alt. All told it took them about 200 hours with minimal sidequesting to finish everything from ARR to the end of Stormblood. If my friend plays 3 hours for one night a week, it would take her about one year to go from the beginning of ARR to the end of Shadowbringers.

Its a very difficult sell to recruit someone to the game even if they can play it every single night, because you have to tell them they'll need to play the game 200 hours straight without many diversions from the MSQ (plus probably another 30 now for Shadowbringers content?) before they can join the rest of us in content that actually matters. On top of that, the first 60 or so hours aren't all that interesting. Its hard to convince someone that the investment is worth it and I don't blame them.

I feel like the example you’ve provided of your friend only playing 1 day a week for 3 hours is a bit of an outlier, probably even an extreme one. I don’t think such a schedule would apply to most new players, as they’d probably manage a couple nights a week for a couple hours each; but this is just speculation.

It’s also about what the player wants out of the content—if they enjoy the journey to endgame, then I don’t think the time spent is that big of a deal (I enjoyed the journey the first time, and when I do MSQ again on alts, it’s about the journey). If they only want to get to endgame and only care about endgame, it’s likely they’ll start skipping cutscenes and saving time anyways.

I’m in agreement that the ARR quests need to be trimmed down, but I don’t think we should use outliers as basis for the claim.

[HumanNinjaToo]

I enjoyed the main story, I even enjoyed the 2.x story for the most part. But a lot of seemed like a bunch of fill in fetch quests that just had you porting from hub to hub just talking to people. It felt like a lot of it could’ve been condensed, and the story would have turned out just fine. Kind of like the Hateful Eight, 3 hours was boring; could’ve been trimmed to a two hour movie and been even better.

[KadaRemnant]

Sorry but i like them and i want they stay. I enjoy ffxiv with lots to do and story.

[Feronar]

To be fair, if they stop to streamline ARR. That means less time spent developing new content.

From a business perspective, that is a sacrifice they may have to make. How many new players have they lost due to the 7th Astral Era (Level 50) campaign? How many do they continue to lose? How many active players would they have now if they had pruned the 7AE campaign sooner (I.e. during Heavensward or Stormblood)? How many inactive characters are there that are progressed up to somewhere within the 7AE campaign?

They don't even have to do it all at once. They could start with the most egregiously dumb and/or pointless quests (I.e. "The Things We Do for Tea" and "Rock-Solid Protection") that can be easily cut without negatively impacting the story, and do more intensive pruning later.

[EdwinLi]

It is a effect of what 2.X was being a era where a new story has just begun and much of the plot was still being developed.

[Iscah]

Aside of having to adjust the story, there's the complication that NPCs with quests are tied to a particular spot, and the Scions move positions twice during post-ARR, from the Waking Sands to the Rising Stones to elsewhere. If you converted things like Tataru's request for tea leaves into a sidequest, that version of Tataru would be stuck in place at the Waking Sands until you complete it.

Already you can see this in play with other characters. The game forces you to complete the hard mode primals because the Scions can't leave the Waking Sands until you complete those quests. Urianger spends the next two expansions stuck in place handing out EX primals and the Binding Coil, and when the story finally moves him elsewhere he's still simultaneously in place there if you haven't completed his quests.

There might be ways around it, but just changing MSQ to sidequests isn't simple.