I hope 7.0's has a way to skip most of the current story

[Midareyukki]

I think the team is trying to make a new entry point.
it might be 7.0, it might be somewhere else.
But I'm 90% sure it'll definitely happen

The real question is... when you start the game, there's an entire status quo that is unresolved:
- You start in the 6th Astral Era
- You can't access Ishgard other than housing
- You can't access Ala Mhigo or anything outside Eorzea proper
- A lot of the world is still being rebuilt and dealing with outside threats
- Dragons are still angy, the Empire still has a stick up its fourth eye and is terrorizing a bunch of lands, a lot of countries are sheltered and closed off...
If you start a new adventure through such a skip, it won't look organic at all. It will feel like you just missed out on a decade worth of content that never once stopped being linear.

So if they do anything, either they need to skip the entire story and shove people directly into 7.0. And they need to scale things down, because odds are people won't be playing through ARR.
Or they just make up a whole new continent and at some point in the ARR tutorial you're given the option to stay in Eorzea and deal with four-ish expansions worth of drama, or travel there for a whole new breath of fresh air. But the Scions can't come with us, and it seems they're still going to be present in the future. Because it'd mean that they went through some personal development, and that's just not right.
...or something else that I'm just not seeing. Maybe this situation or "new starting point" is being misunderstood and odds are won't be as drastic as we make of it. It likely will still be a continuation of what's already been laid out.

Honestly, I didn't play World of Warcraft :P How did they deal with this? I know that you can sort of choose which expansion you want to deal with, but I assume some stuff is linear, like X character having Y development in one expansion and keeps growing from that into the other one.

[hagare]

The real question is... when you start the game, there's an entire status quo that is unresolved:
- You start in the 6th Astral Era
- You can't access Ishgard other than housing
- You can't access Ala Mhigo or anything outside Eorzea proper
- A lot of the world is still being rebuilt and dealing with outside threats
- Dragons are still angy, the Empire still has a stick up its fourth eye and is terrorizing a bunch of lands, a lot of countries are sheltered and closed off...
If you start a new adventure through such a skip, it won't look organic at all. It will feel like you just missed out on a decade worth of content that never once stopped being linear.

So if they do anything, either they need to skip the entire story and shove people directly into 7.0. And they need to scale things down, because odds are people won't be playing through ARR.
Or they just make up a whole new continent and at some point in the ARR tutorial you're given the option to stay in Eorzea and deal with four-ish expansions worth of drama, or travel there for a whole new breath of fresh air. But the Scions can't come with us, and it seems they're still going to be present in the future. Because it'd mean that they went through some personal development, and that's just not right.
...or something else that I'm just not seeing. Maybe this situation or "new starting point" is being misunderstood and odds are won't be as drastic as we make of it. It likely will still be a continuation of what's already been laid out.

Honestly, I didn't play World of Warcraft :P How did they deal with this? I know that you can sort of choose which expansion you want to deal with, but I assume some stuff is linear, like X character having Y development in one expansion and keeps growing from that into the other one.

yeah, well. That's their problem.

[Striker44]

Honestly, I didn't play World of Warcraft :P How did they deal with this? I know that you can sort of choose which expansion you want to deal with, but I assume some stuff is linear, like X character having Y development in one expansion and keeps growing from that into the other one.

World of Warcraft kinda...well...didn't. One of the more common criticisms I saw on their forums in more recent times was how utterly disjointed, confusing, and non-sensical the leveling experience could be for a truly new player, since you could in fact choose which expansion to level in. It meant you could sometimes be effectively going backward in time, the world could completely change in ways that could leave you lost, and since leveling itself was streamlined, you likely only needed a couple expansions worth of content to reach the latest xpac, so there were entire parts of the story that you just never saw, and then suddenly characters from them would show up in the current xpac acting as if you knew them well.

Frankly, I don't yet see a good method for allowing a "skip" without creating those kinds of problems. Fortunately, I think FFXIV has several advantages on that front. The story itself is actually important and engaging, rather than existing purely to get people to max level, so playing through the story is likely to result in fun and a good time for people who enjoy RPGs in general. There's also the level sync system that allows higher-level people to play with newer friends they might have without completely trivializing the material or making the newer player feel useless. And the endgame focus itself is very wide open rather than just being the "raid or die" mentality, so there's less "pressure" to get to max level as quickly as possible. There's plenty of other things and social events and the like that you can take part in at any point along the way.