Length MSQ from all the expansions - it is getting insane

[Catwho]

I'm gonna story skip 29 pages myself here to say to the OP - I get it, I truly do. I have a bad case of altaholism myself. I love the character building aspect of RPGs and that's why I have characters on every NA data center, and four different ones on Balmung alone.

For me, the compromise was to make 1 story the "completionist" character, and take all the other character concepts through MSQ at a slower pace, picking away at their own stories over time. Of those alts, so far only one has made it through to Stormblood.

My main conpletionist character is 100% caught up with everything and on the achievement rat race. During content lulls like recent weeks, I'll go play with the other dolls in my house.

Replaying the story over and over again has given me a deeper appreciation, even for the slog, because you can see the slow buildup over ARR long before anything beyond Heavensward was actually solidified and written out. The Isle of Val disappearing in ARR patches one where their long term plan come two fruition TWO EXPANSIONS LATER. I lost the plot at that point in ARR the first time around, but now that I finished Eureka on one character, the most recent alt playthrough had a lot more meeting when I hit that scene.

[kinslayer-]

Would be cool if they make the story optional (don't riot yet, i like the story despite EW flaws) and instead doing the MSQ stuff were unlocked by leveling like others games, as you level up, the content would be unlocked in the duty finder, But make the class quests mandatory, if anyone want to unlock certain dungeons, trials, raids, instanced content, relics, savage/ extreme stuff just do the corresponding quest line to unlock it and have the Unending Codex to explain context of the places, bosses, characters and npcs of said content, i don't think this disrrupt the flow for people who adore and like the msq, just my two cents.

[TaleraRistain]

Endwalker is a step down from other expansions (relic, post-msq story, job design, etc), and this can be seen in steam charts. Obviously steam charts isn't going to show the whole population, but a trend downwards in steam can be extrapolated to a downward trend in all platforms. Since there's no functional difference between steam players and other players.

There's only one data point. How can anything possibly be extrapolated from one data point and especially when it's unknown what percentage of the population is involved in that data point?

As was mentioned earlier, JP tend to have higher Savage clear rates and they trend more toward using consoles. If more NA and EU where we see lower clear rates use Steam, then by your assumption we can extrapolate that Savage participation is lower because less users on one platform do it. But in actuality if more data points were included, we would see higher participation numbers so our extrapolation using the single data point would be shown to be incorrect. We really can't determine anything about the playerbase at large from Steam because we don't know how representative of the playerbase it is. We can only accurately comment on trends among Steam users.

[R041]

I mean, what do you want them to do, exactly? Truncate or remove parts of the story? In a story-driven game in a story driven series? I'm not sure what else you could want or expect, other than them adding a free instant-90 button which we all know they won't do because they charge money for that.

You forget the part where I said they lost the opportunity. Yes, they dug this hole themselves, and there's not a lot they can do about it. I'm saying I wish they had the foresight to NOT have fallen into such a deep MSQ pit.

I'm still allowed to be frustrated, in-fact I'm more frustrated because it's like watching a slow moving train hit a car that had 8 years to move away from the tracks.

You know what I expected? The thing that most series writers and even original FF writers do, they section things off and make them relatively contained by allowing individual story progression with some or even no overlap. You build a world, you write stories within the world. You don't need to write 1 story for the whole world and every event being the same thread.

This is basically a problem only JP writers continue to throw themselves at every chance they get. They write stories that just go on, and on, and on, and on and they require reading from the start to understand anything. They're so linear in how they tell the stories, that everything is required reading. They also love to develop power creep because of the linear storytelling in how the main character(s) are the most important AND powerful person in the universe. Like it's hitting all of the JP Manga tropes today.

Final Fantasy itself was the king of self-contained stories, so we know they can do it. They just refuse to.

Stop acting like the only options are

A. Play through the story
B. Pay to skip through the story.

Can I get
C: Stop writing all systems and story linearly for a decade

Like put this into context of the game and story, we had to literally get to the point of power creep and exploration, travel through TIME and TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE. WHILE BEING ABLE TO KILL ULTRA GOD. To MAYBE having a chance at a new story? Like wtf is going on you guys? At what point do you think the linear storytelling needs to just chill out? Like we went from DragonBall to DragonBall Super in 1/3rd of the time. And most people think Super was pretty extreme.

Everything reeks of 'Too many cooks DBZ'. It's pretty nuts, I really don't think they know what they're doing anymore. Or ever did tbh. We know they didn't know what to do with Ascians until 5.0, they admitted to that as a fact.

[Iscah]

Would be cool if they make the story optional (don't riot yet, i like the story despite EW flaws) and instead doing the MSQ stuff were unlocked by leveling like others games, as you level up, the content would be unlocked in the duty finder,

That would not be "cool" for a first-time player whose level has gotten even slightly higher than the story level. They wouldn't be able to run rouletttes without a risk of major spoilers, and even the duty list would be spoilerish.

[VelKallor]

They're quick to fail and quick to react

[VelKallor]

It's funny how people now say it's a dead game and Endwalker has been the most lackluster expansion to date. Meanwhile, I'm probably having more fun than I've had in years with the game. Don't mind the new story, I'm excited to see what it leads into.

So are the vast majority of people. The tiny band of malcontents here represent no one.

Things need to change now

So.....what do you suggest, what needs changing, and how do you recommend they change it? Do you have any specific solutions?

They even had an example of bad practices by looking at WoW,

LMFAO!!! Blizzard has OBLITERATED past content, taken a chain saw to it, deleted HUGE swathes of content left and right, wiped out entire questlines and cutscenes, have butchered the story in favour of short term gains vs long term, are a raid focussed MMO that ignores the outside world, their endgame is raid pvp, do mplus AND LITTLE ELSE.

heir crafting is an RNG infe. You cant play the old expacs because whats left has been fragmented, incomplete, retconned or outright deleted.....sted catastrophe, their current story" was pilloried to the heavens with the LOTR ripoff...please...Id rather SE didnt follow the example of Blzzards long litany of failures, if thats okay with you.

The Jailer is just Sargeras 2.0 except he’s very lame, Shadowlands has been a massive stain on the lore. The retcons, the ridiculousness of it all, the writers are obviously living in a bubble because anyone with common sense would have told them how silly the decisions they’ve made are. They’ve obviously had no critique of their ideas because the fact this actually got approved is astonishing, it shows a complete disregard for the game or an absolute lack of talent at Blizzard, personally I also think they just don’t care. Even Metzen despite his flaws cared about the story and the fans, nothing he ever wrote apart from Me’dan was this bad but that character was quietly benched from the main lore because he was at least self aware enough to gauge the players reactions to his work.

Lets not get into the idiotuc faction war that NO ONE gives a rats for anymore other than the "D" team writers, who are hopelessly addicted to it..if they had an ounce of sense theyd scrap the idea entirely..only they cant as it justifies their "wurld pee vee pee".

But they wont. Remember Teldrassill, Sylvanus and "morally grey?

Id tell you to go back and play that again..only...OOPS....you cant because Blizzard DELETED ALL OF IT. Why? its one of the many ways they make sure their addicts stay subbed, FOMO, let that sink in..the burning of the World Tree was a HUGE event...but if you are a new player you never get to see it

"You werent here, you miss out, too bad, so sad, sucks be to yoouuuuuuu"

By all intents and purposes the difference between WOW's story and FF 14 is astronomical. FF 14s story is cogent, connected, complete.

WOW's...whats left of it...isnt.

( Before someone throws the cash shop straw man at me, thats ITEMS. mounts, earrings, glamour...not the CONTENT that was literally wiped from existence. One is not the other )

[Thaciscokidd]

Id tell you to go back and play that again..only...OOPS....you cant because Blizzard DELETED ALL OF IT. Why? its one of the many ways they make sure their addicts stay subbed, FOMO, let that sink in..the burning of the World Tree was a HUGE event...but if you are a new player you never get to see it

"You werent here, you miss out, too bad, so sad, sucks be to yoouuuuuuu"


If you didn't play 1.0 you'd never guess that this was Cortheas.
By all intents and purposes the difference between WOW's story and FF 14 is astronomical. FF 14s story is cogent, connected, complete.

WOW's...whats left of it...isnt.

( Before someone throws the cash shop straw man at me, thats ITEMS. mounts, earrings, glamour...not the CONTENT that was literally wiped from existence. One is not the other )

I just want to touch on this.

This game is guilty of this too



How many people would even know that this is what Cortheas looked like in 1.0. Most games are guilty of this. There's some good titles that are lost to the winds of time too.

While I agree with you, we can't shoot WoW over stuff that 14 is guilty of.

[Boblawblah]

Eh, idk, I can level through FFXIV from 1 - 90 and have a cohesive story. WoW? I was lost about 5 minutes in, and it never got better. I was going back/forward in time, meeting characters for the first time that pretended I was some hero they had known for ever (I just met them), etc. You can easily shoot WoW over that kind of stuff compared to 1.0 stuff that is explained/mentioned in-game, and seeing some grass doesn't equate to the nonsense that your exposed to in WoW.

[Iscah]

How many people would even know that this is what Cortheas looked like in 1.0. Most games are guilty of this. There's some good titles that are lost to the winds of time too.

While I agree with you, we can't shoot WoW over stuff that 14 is guilty of.

Well, Ishgard is quite a giveaway that the picture is taken in Coerthas...

But, not having personally played either 1.0 or WoW, from these discussions I get the impression that the difference is which parts are getting deleted. Being cut off from what is effectively a prequel is different to losing chunks of the existing story while other parts of it remain.

The closest FFXIV has come is the shortening of ARR but at least they patched over the edits and nothing has lost coherency, though I will forever miss the "disguised sylphs" part.