Quote Originally Posted by Takfloyd View Post
I've been wondering... once the game has a few expansions, there's no way players will be forced to play through hundreds of hours of main quest to get to current content.

What will happen then? I really don't want the story to be "missable" if you don't start playing before a certain expansion comes along, they already did that once and that's enough.

Best way would be to overhaul the story and cut out all the fluff quests I guess. How did FFXI do it?
Not unless they refund the money we paid for the game. Those "fluff" quests you want to cut out are what many of us are here for.

Anyway, I'm not sure about XI, but I think the most usual pattern is that the content from different expansions isn't dependent on each other (even if each is dependent on the base game). After all, someone may purchase the 4.0 expansion without having purchased the 3.0 expansion. They can't be required to have completed content they don't have access to. On the other hand, since expansions require players to also have the base game, they can require having done the base game's content. (The story is likely to work best if you do all the expansions in the order they were released, and may have some odd gaps or inconsistencies if you don't, but they can't feasibly be required to be done in a specific order if each is a separate purchase that players may or may not have.)