SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Avarghaladion]

What iconic fights would those be, exactly? I'm having a real hard time thinking of any except the main hitters like the Zilart brothers and Promathia... Treasures had it's fair share throughout I guess. Actually, Treasures was great in that regard, but then again it was its own independent story. Final Fantasy XI up to Rise of the Zilart and Chains of Promathia was a beginning/middle/end sort of deal, as is the existing A Realm Reborn story, and I'd say what we've gotten in this game so far is much better than vanilla XIs "So this is your nations story OHNEVERMINDGOKILLTHESHADOWLORD where were we..." followed by "Lets retcon the ending to that Shadow Lord stuff" for Rise of the Zilart...

Yes Chains of Promathia was amazing, but it was the ending. It's meant to be amazing. The beginning is not, it's meant to establish the world and all it's players. I can honestly say I've enjoyed the Primal fights far more than I enjoyed Rank 2.3 or Rank 5.1 in XIs original story, both in terms of memorability (dem songs) and overall enjoyment, and while I find shit like "Go get Tataru her pickaxe" to be annoying, I find it orders of magnitude less annoying than that thrice damned Sacrarium mission, and all the other Chains missions like it (were they meant to build the world up? They made me hate it, that's all I can say), though that isn't a fair comparison, but I still prefer looking for Tataru more enjoyable than The Rescue Drill and other such awful missions in XI. Most of Chains of Promathia felt like I was trying to read a great book, but the author kept punching me in the face to be honest. Was it a great feeling to finally be done with such awful places as Sacrarium? Sure. I'm sure captives with Stockholm Syndrome also feel pleased when their captor praises them instead of beating them, too. Such places did not enhance the story, they ruined it as far as I'm concerned. I look back on the (handful of) amazing fights and finale with nostalgia, but I brush the rest of it away simply because of what a damn pain it was. Not once have I thought back to Sacrarium and smiled, if I wasn't a bored teenager I'd probably never have passed it, or any of the other such dull pieces of mission fluff XI had to offer.

Only issue I have with A Realm Reborns story is the small map means we end up treading the same places fairly often all the damn time, which sucks, but hey, they did rebuild the world in an astonishingly short amount of time, so I can forgive them for that.

Don't get me wrong, it's getting better, like WinterSolstice said, and non-main scenario plot is decent. I think the primary issue with the main scenario aside from the tedium is the ludonarrative dissonance. Plot says "zomg we need to fear this swarm of evil" -> character procedes to single handledly decimate hundreds of thousands of said evil's minions. Aside from that I'd agree with you that it's thus far at least on par if not better than vanilla XI. That being said, I do expect a P2P game to learn from it's own company's past experiences and they should know how to make it at least on par with XI expansions, presentation wise.

It would help immensely if instead of the same generic "the person you need to talk to is beside an overturned wagon/is a traitor/needs help/is unconcious" -> get ambushed by the same 3 humanoid trash NPCs that always ambush you they'd just give the errand boy encounters some flavour. The last trash encounter in 2.4 I thought was alright thanks to them giving it a battleground feel and the addition of ninjas in the mix and all. XI errand boy encounters were kept fresh and fluid though. We rarely got generic mobs, we'd get special quest NMs like the Opo threesome or the pots, or the Manticores, and such. They put care into making sure it didn't get stale. My experience with CoP was opposite your though. It felt challenging without being overly difficult and I never felt frustrated. It goes with my earlier comment in XIV that our world is just waaaayyyy too safe. If they'd find a middle ground where players need to at least pay a little bit of attention when they run errands I think everyone could be pleased. The addition of sneak/invis, for me, would be welcome.

Yes, you're right that another big part of it is how tiny our damn sandbox is. Even with our (imo) disturbingly slow movement speed, it's way too small.

Edit: So yes, to rephrase, it's only the main scenario script I find to be lacking. Most of the class/DoH/DoL stories are very well done, Hildebrande is awesome, beast quests are pretty good, coil is good (and should be more readily accessible to everyone considering how fundamental it is to the plot) and CT/ST story is quite good. Come to think of it I'm surprised Main Scenario storytelling isn't as on point as it could be. The secondary plots are actually one of the reasons I'm holding out for future improvements and I especially like that all of the class quests are left wide open for future development with a wink to the audience.