Quote Originally Posted by Malthir View Post
I would argue that people want to be engaged in the world, not necessarily with a single story. Take Tam-Tara Deepcroft Quest chain and subsequent hard mode quest chain, did you not find that engaging when you first did it. I agree being forced to repeat dungeons and grind them is not fun, I remember the Aurem Vale runs back to back to hit 50 back in ARR . Again, that's not what I'm suggesting. Have you everyplayer GW2? Each part of the map has it's own little storyline where you do objectives to fill hearts once filled they are fiinished. ESO does something similar with self contained story lines in points of interest that you go through, this would be a huge boost and a way of breaking up the MSQ which by it's nature is always going to be more cutscenes than it isn't, you can balance the exp so players don't have to grind them, they have the option of what path they want as opposed to being functionally railroaded by the MSQ. So have the MSQ be more to the point, with only the pertinent information dumped on the players for the plot and storyline, and then have the world tell the players the rest of the story of that country region etc etc.
No, actually. I found the Tam-tara quests boring but was far more forgiving of them because it's the very beginning of the game. I expected things to be slow since MMOs usually are. Now the hard mode was good but that's more due to the story surrounding Edda being a massive surprise. Very few dungeon unlocks have anywhere near that level of storytelling. Regardless, what you're suggesting remains arbitrary. It won't suddenly make Dawntrail a better MSQ if we're constantly getting side trailed or level lock. It'd feel worse for the reason I initially cited: I'm doing busywork to then return to a boring story. And if said busywork wound up being more interesting than I'm all the more annoyed at the poor writing from the MSQ. Case in point, it actively bugged me how the Leatherwork Wachumeqimeqi managed to tell forklore stories for all the races in both a concise and interesting manner yet the MSQ felt like a boring slog with the exact same races.

Both Shadowbringers and Endwalker had issues with a lack of gameplay. The difference is they kept you engaged through good storytelling. Granted, Endwalker does drag in the early quests too--Thavnair in particular. Just nowhere near as much as Dawntrail. That tells me the bigger issue is bad writing. While I'd like more actual gameplay, the main reason I was so bored going through the MSQ was because Dawntrail couldn't keep me engaged so I noticed the lack of it far more than I did previously.