MSQ Needs Further Condensing

[Iscah]

One of the big problems with the MSQ, especially early on, is how much running you do. There is a severe disrespect for the players time. There are so many quests, that are literally 'run for 10 minutes, get one line of dialogue, run back for 10 minutes'. To me, this happens to the point of being insulting. It gets particularly bad early on when you still don't even have enough money to teleport back, which just happened to me last night.

I've been through the early game several times now on different characters, and I don't remember ever being that stuck for money that I had to walk long-distance like that. (Well, except for that time I scraped up all my gil to buy a particular glamour and barely had enough left for a chocobo porter.)

Are you using the porters for cheap travel? Setting your home point and/or preferred location at the location where you're questing, and using Return?

And yeah, the porters do have a longer travel time than teleporting but it's a whole lot better than walking, and you can use that minute to take a quick break or check your inventory or something.

Finally some REAL experience, rather than nostalgia.

So experience is only real when it matches your opinion?

I've been through the game multiple times now, and I won't deny some parts are tedious, but I also know I just didn't notice a lot of it as a new player. Everything was exciting and I was absorbing every bit of information about the plot and world to piece it all together. It's only on replaying it that it's clearer where the plot is going and how long they're taking to get there.

It's a recurrent problem with MSQ (and quest in general) in FFXIV. Gameplay between cutscenes is usually nonexistent till a solo duty, dungeon or trial is unlocked. The last 24m raid related quest all had my doing was going from A to B and use an emote.

I feel like this is an inherent issue with RPGs as a whole genre, if not any game that is story-heavy, and I'm struggling to think of how else it might be expected to go. Any game story has to be set out as cutscenes interspersed with a balanced amount of whatever counts for gameplay, and FFXIV's battle system just doesn't have much to make this interesting. Either you get the story delivered by just moving from cutscene to cutscene, with a few designated points for a big solo fight or dungeon, or you pad it out by inserting tasks like "fight these three monsters in the purple circle" or "let's compete to see who can lure the most bats" or that weird solo duty in 5.2(?) where we got trapped in the Ronkan ruins with the sphinx and the card game. That's where the MSQ drags, in my opinion.

Just make the pc use their linkshell and switch to the cutscene of whoever they needed to talk to talking. SO much is wasted on back and forth porting including gil.

Again this is a personal taste thing perhaps, but the game would feel so empty doing that. If it's already an issue that we don't do anything but watch one cutscene and then another, why lose the last bit of agency and just stand in place as each scene is put in front of you?

Even if it's all cutscenes, having to move through the world and go to the right place is important. It's what makes it a story about a journey that you're on.

Not saying they shouldn’t have MSQ but a lot of the patch stuff is filler. 5.4 for example, besides the closing scenes you aren’t missing much of the overall story if you don’t do it. There’s no reason the limsa stuff couldn’t have been additional sidequest content as at least currently it appears only to add extra context to things rather than be a crucial addition to the story.

The Limsa story is changing the situation of something in the world that will probably be built on in further story. They found a cure for tempering - that's hugely important and not something that can just happen in an optional sidequest. It needs to happen in the MSQ so that the next part of the story can refer back to that previous event. It's the same reasoning why Crystal Tower became required once they wanted to build on those events and have something happen that came after it.

Also, even if things don't seem important at the time, they can be setting up for something in the future. You can't judge how important something was to the story until you've gotten to the end of it.