Offline Mode

[Dellita_of_Mtek]

Yeah, I always expected something like this, to a degree. The moment I heard about f2p I expected every scummy monetization method under the sun, and some that only exist in the darkness. What people are doing right now is going through a honeymoon phase of a sort exacerbated by their discontent with the game, hyperfocusing on the things it does better, while ignoring all that is done worse, even the things that make those better things not as good as they sound on surface. It was always going to get this sort of reaction.

Messing up the story order wasn't in my bingo card, though...

According to her they stripped out a lot of the beginning quests to fit with mobile game expectations (i.e. fast progression w/ little time investment). She started in Ul'dah with Summoner (unknown if that was a 2.0 decision or they just decided to switch things up with mobile) and did the intro quests (learning how aethers work, markets work, etc.) but after that it felt like she had only been playing for 30m-45m of story before already going to visit the other main cities (without even going to the Waking Sands or meeting the grand companies). You don't fight Ifrit and you skip Tam-Tara and Copperbell. Satasha you still do but they slot it in at level 10 now. You skip learning about materia and retainers and guildleves as well.

So the flow for the beginning is: character creation -> normal introduction quests -> extremely summarized version of your main city questline (like 6-7 quests tops, there's 23 in the PC version) -> unlock chocobo randomly -> go visit Limsa and New Gridania -> stay in Limsa and do Satasha

Edit:
She just brought up something else I forgot to mention. There's no push or reminder that class/job quests exist until after Satasha. So either they are just lazy and forgot to add that into the tutorial/pre-Satasha bits or they've redesigned class quests to where they're pointless now for progression outside of lore. She hasn't dove too deep into them yet because crafting/gathering testing took up her attention lol, but that really stuck out to her as something that was "off". There are also a lot less cutscenes than there are in the PC version, they turned them into simple like...half-cutscenes where the character just kind of stands there and you go through their text.