Quote Originally Posted by caffe_macchiato View Post
I’d like to illustrate just how dire the situation is with this game’s story.

Refer to this spreadsheet. There are 110 hours of cutscenes in this game. That’s not all dialogue, just cutscenes. No gameplay. If this were a film series, it would be by far the longest film series in history.

And that doesn’t even include the dozens of hours it takes for the rest of the dialogue, or moving from one NPC or the next. The amount of multiplayer gameplay in the MSQ is extraordinarily small compared to text and story. It is, for all intents and purposes, a visual novel with small and isolated gameplay segments. The cutscene-to-gameplay ratio in FFXIV is by far the worst in any Final Fantasy game or RPG ever measured, far exceeding the ratios in games like FF13 and MGS4. And for an MMO!
This is a really good write-up, and I'm coping that 7.0 will finally do something about the insane barrier to entry into the MMO portion of this game that I love so much. I absolutely detest that we've been praising this 12 year arc as if that's something to be celebrated. It's not for celebration, this is a visual novel with a housing crisis. We're a book club at the end of a 10 book series and venomous at anyone even itching to play current content with their friends without reading it all beforehand.

The WoW exodus brought us an increase of 4x our playerbase and a crazy amount of content creators that are just gushing for all the wrong reasons and twisting truths, only for them to all probably leave in the next few months because they'll realize that they wanted an MMO and not a visual novel. I don't want to doom, but I honestly think we're going to see a playerbase crash pretty soon, just watch the Steam Chart. (At least I'll be able to buy a house then)