MSQ Needs Further Condensing

[Iscah]

Grind through 100-250 hours of story vs skip all cutscenes, and do quests like a rat in a skinner box, or pay $115

OR

condense the MSQ

Firstly, these are only "the two options" for someone who doesn't want to play the game for the story that is intended (by the creators) to be a large chunk of the game.

And even then it's a massive oversimplification. One of those things is what someone would have to go through if they want to play endgame without the preceding story, and the other is what you expect the devs to do to cater to those people - when there is simply no obligation for them to do so.

The edits made to ARR and post-ARR are their oldest and most notoriously grindy part of the whole game. Older players routinely warned newbies that "the grind through post-ARR is terrible but it gets better in the expansions". The patch quests were designed to be time-fillers that often didn't drive the story forward.

That is what they put the effort into fixing thus far. It does not mean that they intend to give the same treatment to the rest of the story.

I believe they've said they would look at it for Heavensward and beyond, but I can't see major edits happening. They're not going to pull out whole plot arcs, and I don't think there's much room to condense things - at most we would lose some busywork quests.



Secondly, you keep mention this terrible $115 price tag for a new player. Let's look at that a bit closer.

I'm not sure of the exact cost breakdown in American prices so let's say $50 for the game, $25 for each skip and $15 for the subscription.

Everyone getting into the game has to pay the $50 for the game itself. That's not part of the cost of choosing to skip to endgame.

New players get their first month of subscription free, so they're not paying that at all - and even if they were, that's another thing that everyone has to do equally whether they're playing the RPG or skipping it.

If they need to catch up to friends quickly, then the MSQ skip is going to be necessary but they may be able to get away without a job skip if they're willing to spend their first week or two of gameplay levelling up their character. A friend could probably help them power-level at the beginning - I'm not sure how fast that goes with a class other than blue mage, but it would at least be enough to get past that initial barrier into the levelling roulette.

The cost of choosing to skip isn't $115, it's $50 at most and you can look at it as the would-be cost of the few months of subscription it would take to get through the story without having to actually put the time into it.



Also, even if the 250-hour story was condensed down to something like 150, you sound like you'd still be complaining about what was left of it.

(For the record, 100 hours is a length that would be seen as a selling point for a single JRPG, and FFXIV is essentially four of them back-to-back at this point.)

You realize the trailer for Heavensward says all a new player needs to get into the game at that point? All of ARR can be condensed into a little sip, a collapse, an escape, and standing at the threshold of frozen gates.

That’s all that’s needed for a new player to have a good time in heavenward and beyond.

That's a quick summary so you can be dropped into the start of Heavensward without having played ARR, yes.

That does not replace ARR or tell you everything you'll ever need to know to understand what happened. It will not stop the player from being unclear about the details, if they skipped ARR but want to pay attention to HW's story. It certainly won't stop the player from being confused once they reach Shadowbringers without having been through the Crystal Tower, which I believe is included in story skips now.

The current expansion is "the good part." That's not endgame. Content balance in earlier eras is a pale shadow of what they were when they were current, and there's no way to experience that content as intended outside of perhaps faux hollows.

That's a very gameplay-focused way to be looking at what constitutes "the good part". From a gameplay perspective, maybe the older expansions aren't as good as when they were current, but that has no impact on them as stories (except perhaps the pacing of some battles). From a storytelling perspective, the plot, characters, scenery and music haven't changed. Heavensward was a great story when I first played it and it's exactly the same story now.

So I went over in my head what could be cut from Stormblood while staying narratively sound. [...] That is just a small amount I can think of but cutting them would undermine a lot of character moments some of these character drop off hard as well not getting another chance to be involved in msq, lost of world building also happens when you go about cutting too much.

That's exactly the issue with asking for large-scale trimming of the story. You trim something back to "the bare minimum needed to understand the plot" and you lose everything around it that builds up the characters and makes the plot richer.

You can't just pull entire events out of the plot and say "we're doing this for the sake of some people who don't enjoy the story anyway so they want it to go quicker".

There are certainly things that could be trimmed out but on a much smaller scale. One that jumps to mind is when you're sent to talk to the storyteller to learn the history of the Xaela but he won't talk to you until you've chased down his lost sheep. The sheep add nothing to the plot and 5-10 minutes of running around to your playtime, so that could easily be trimmed or turned into a sidequest and it would improve rather than disrupt the flow of the story there.