Option to unlock content without mandatory MSQ

[Elladie]

I am not really sure why you think this is a good idea, OP.

If you don't want to play the story and level up, you can buy skips to take you straight to endgame. If you don't consider that a valid investment, your urge to get the endgame isn't an overpowering one, so maybe you'll enjoy journeying through the story. It's a win/win for SE because you either pay a larger amount to bypass the MSQ or you sub for the time it takes to do it. By the time to get to level 80 by either means, you're having fun or you're not. But SE has made money out of you through this time.

If they make story skip free, level boost free and then you decide you're not having fun, they made a month's sub out of you, and that's it. The option to skip the story already exists. Why would they make it free? People who want to rush past the story are probably not going to hang around very long once they've done so, most of the future content is also going to be story based so why would they stay.

SE gave these people the option to buy skips if they want to. That's all the game needs in this respect

[SamRF]

I am not really sure why you think this is a good idea, OP.

If you don't want to play the story and level up, you can buy skips to take you straight to endgame. If you don't consider that a valid investment, your urge to get the endgame isn't an overpowering one, so maybe you'll enjoy journeying through the story. It's a win/win for SE because you either pay a larger amount to bypass the MSQ or you sub for the time it takes to do it. By the time to get to level 80 by either means, you're having fun or you're not. But SE has made money out of you through this time.

If they make story skip free, level boost free and then you decide you're not having fun, they made a month's sub out of you, and that's it. The option to skip the story already exists. Why would they make it free? People who want to rush past the story are probably not going to hang around very long once they've done so, most of the future content is also going to be story based so why would they stay.

SE gave these people the option to buy skips if they want to. That's all the game needs in this respect

The skips don't take you straight to endgame, you still need to do considerable amount of very awkward story you will barely understand because you didn't experience everything that came before it. It will also spoil previous story which you may have wanted to do at some point after you've experienced some endgame content and got a feel for the combat.

When it comes to profit, the game could perhaps make even more profit by making it more accessible and draw in many more players who are used to other MMO's. They could potentially get more sales long term and thus make more profit. Complying to demand is why the game isn't costing 200$. You need to have a good deal to attract as many players as possible.

These are purely counterarguments against the "MSQ skip potion", not for the actual topic itself.

[linay]

It will also spoil previous story which you may have wanted to do at some point after you've experienced some endgame content and got a feel for the combat.

That's what unlocking content without the story would do: spoil the story unless the endgame content is always separated from the MSQ, which would limit the narrative possibility. The latest example is the Eden raid.

[Saefinn]

The skips don't take you straight to endgame, you still need to do considerable amount of very awkward story you will barely understand because you didn't experience everything that came before it. It will also spoil previous story which you may have wanted to do at some point after you've experienced some endgame content and got a feel for the combat.

When it comes to profit, the game could perhaps make even more profit by making it more accessible and draw in many more players who are used to other MMO's. They could potentially get more sales long term and thus make more profit. Complying to demand is why the game isn't costing 200$. You need to have a good deal to attract as many players as possible.

These are purely counterarguments against the "MSQ skip potion", not for the actual topic itself.

You speak like they're needing to compromise to get more players when it is doing remarkably well as an MMO. As though this isn't a ridiculously successful MMO already, which just got a standing ovation for its Shadowbringers expansion (with it being heralded as one of the best storylines in the FF series, which is high praise), an increasing player base and one miraculously rescued from its massive flop from 1.0. It's not like this hasn't been encouraging its share of WoW refugees either. It seems ridiculous that after the team has done this amazingly well, that they should be doing more to maximise profit. There's certainly things that need improvement (chronic moany healer here) and there are problems out there, but I'd not say it being a story focused game is not one of them.

They could try to please everyone to maximise profit even further, yes, but the idea of developer effort being driven to maximum profit for me already is a terrible principle. Hello EA.

But trying to please everyone can also dilute the experience, there being an imperative to progress story rather than it being optional encourages more investment in the experience of the game and this is what people come to expect out of a story driven game. And the game is tailored to provide a certain user experience. I cannot skip story progression in any other Final Fantasy. If I want to fight Ruby Weapon in FFVII, I have to progress to it, not just jump in and do the fight. I thought this principle was actually kinda well...normal for a video game. It isn't always different for an MMO and I like that it isn't here.

[Packetdancer]

The skips don't take you straight to endgame, you still need to do considerable amount of very awkward story you will barely understand because you didn't experience everything that came before it. It will also spoil previous story which you may have wanted to do at some point after you've experienced some endgame content and got a feel for the combat.

It sounds to me like you're asking for two mutually exclusive things here, though, at least insofar as they want to handle FFXIV. So far as I can tell from this, you want:

1. For people to join and be immediately able to jump to endgame raiding, so they can experience endgame and know what it's like.
2. To ensure they aren't spoiled on story, so they can go back and play it at some later date.

But clearly what the devs want to do with FFXIV is to tell a story where pieces interconnect. You can't do really any Shadowbringers content that takes you to the Crystarium without (to some extent) spoiling a bit of the Crystal Tower alliance raid storyline. You can't do the Twinning without spoiling at least a little bit of the Alexander and Omega raids. You can't do the Eden raids without spoiling the end result of the choice that a certain character makes in the MSQ. You can't do any ShB content at all without spoiling the entire late-post-Stormblood arc.

There are games where you can do content out-of-order. Where things will scale appropriately, so it doesn't matter if you've finished three other expansions or if this is your first set of quests, and where no storyline in one expansion remotely impacts another one. Where every expansion stands on its own narratively, and nothing that happens in any one expansion is referenced (and thus potentially spoiled) in another, so it doesn't matter what order they're played in. (Or where the game has little to no story at all beyond some sort of shared background meta-narrative that advances in realtime, a'la EvE Online or Elite: Dangerous.)

But I'd argue we have plenty of evidence that's not the game that the FFXIV dev team want to make.

I feel like even if they were to reboot the story and get rid of every element we've already had—no reference to the Calamity, no interactions with the existing NPCs we've met and had extensive interactions with like the Garlond Ironworks crew, or the Eorzean leader NPCs and Aymeric, or Estinien, or the Scions—so that absolutely nothing in the game up to this point were referenced, I suspect they'd still want to reference things in the new saga going forward in it. And then you still have the same problem; even if 6.0 pushes a reset button—throws you onto a new star somewhere without any established NPCs and never references anything prior to it—when 7.0 comes out, it references stuff in 6.0.

What you might be able to do is the Bioware approach, like they did for Mass Effect 2 on Playstation when Mass Effect 1 had not been released there; they made a sort of playable 'comic book' that took you through the story very quickly, letting you make any choices that you would've been able to make in the game, and then created an appropriate world state to import into ME2. SquareEnix could do one of those for each storyline—including 1.0, if they wanted!—and then people would be able to get the story without having to do the grind, and could use jump potions. You could even extend those potions to go to endgame at that point.

But if the ask is "I don't want this game to have ongoing story at all, every expansion should be self-contained with no story elements and characters carried over between them, and where you can do them in any order and at your leisure", I'd argue that's a very different game than FFXIV is—or, arguably, than the dev team seems to ever intend it to be. Or even want to make.

And for a shift that dramatic... well, it strikes me as saying there's flaws in Law and Order, because it doesn't have enough starships and space wizardry. And no matter how much you might enjoy Star Wars, they're two very different things, and there's space in the world for both of them.

(That said, BRB; I'm totally going to go write a procedural legal drama set in the Star Wars universe because it sounds amazing. And there's space in the world for that third thing, too.)