I wanted a game and all I got were cutscenes

[Kaedan]

On the bright side, the OP quitting means one less person to whine about the story on the forums. That's a plus.

Btw, it doesn't take 30 hours to go through all the lvl 50 MSQs. So the OP itself is ridiculously hyperbolic. Three weeks to get through it? Not unless you are extremely casual.

[Adire]

I don't see why the skip cutscenes option is so hard to fathom. Or how the game is lacking in content outside of cut scenes.

[Chatoyant]

As somebody who just grinded through all of the 2.x ARR story, I have to agree with OP that the pacing of the story was terrible as a returning player. Most of the people in this thread likely experienced it as it was naturally released, over the course of months and years, and within a single patch's story you could do some meaningful side activities such as doing dungeons for tomestones or treasure hunting. These activities are pointless to a returning player, though, since you are awarded tomestone level gear just from doing the story quest and a level 50 treasure hunting party spontaneously forming is incredibly unlikely.

Playing through the 1-49 story is a lot more rewarding since you at least are experiencing and exploring this new world for the first time, you're frequently rewarded with gaining levels, and I would imagine this holds true for the HS story. The 2.x story rewards you with gear, but I didn't gain a single level until hitting Heavensward content.

[Chatoyant]

Is there really any downside to having the content be optional? Even with skipping dialogue and cutscenes and simply listening to recaps on the Mr. Happy youtube channel, it felt like it took forever to slog through the story quests.

And that was as a white mage who was fortunate to have < 5 minute queues for dungeons and trials. Had I been playing a dps character, I have no doubt these queues would have reached 30+ minutes. In some instances, I was forced to leave a group and re-queue due to a large amount of players leaving simply because they randomed The Steps of Faith or The Chyrsalis, and doing these difficult trials with no echo with first timers likely seemed more headache than it's worth. Again, I can imagine this being much more frustrating to a dps class who has to look forward to another 30+ minute queue without even getting to attempt the trial.

[Akira_Tenshi]

" Die hard FF fan" complains about story, go away.

[Maliki_Ozari]

Even with skipping dialogue and cutscenes and simply listening to recaps on the Mr. Happy youtube channel, it felt like it took forever to slog through the story quests.

The Steps of Faith difficult trials

I imagine skipping all the dialogue would make questing very boring.. The story is a huge part of the game.

Also, Steps of Faith a difficult trial? lol

[Neuflune]

Okay, first off, let's put things in perspective:

You are a returning player.

Time did not stop in Eorzea. These quests weren't dropped upon the userbase in one go. They were implemented with patches over the past year. It can't be helped that you were away for so long that it now takes ages for you to get through quests and cutscenes. On PC, press ESC. Skip cutscene.

A suggestion would be to add a "skip all cutscenes" option, but even then someone's probably going to complain about that.

[Darra]

I find it amusing how all of you seem to reject the notion there are players who want to play the game, but don't care about the story or only have a passing interest in it. Just because the majority of forum users are nuthuggers for the story, doesn't mean the population as a whole are. I certainly know that only about 1/5th of the people I know care about the story. Rather than just spew some crap about how he/she can't be a real fan and how they'r a tiny tiny minority, get your heads out of your asses. I for one feel the same as the OP, in that the quests are 90% running. I want to use more than WASD, I'd like the actual quest to involve more than just running, reading dialogue (which I skip 99.9% of) and then on rare occasions killing 3 targets. This is an MMO that's being treated like an RPG with the occasional content you're forced to team up with 3-7 others to do. The gating of so much content behind so many trivial quests involving looking for objects or people that incompetent NPCS have mislaid is vexing, and rather than just telling me, like the OP, to bugger off, how about actually stopping to think "hey, what would happen if they forced me to do crap I don't like"? Yes, quitting is an option, but then, so is actually doing that crap to do what you want to do, just like the Devs actually listening to player's concerns and adjusting as necessary, but no, that seems too complicated for most of you, it's easier just to tell us to shut up.

[SpiritMuse]

This is an MMO that's being treated like an RPG with the occasional content you're forced to team up with 3-7 others to do.

Exactly. This is the traditional Final Fantasy story-heavy approach applied to an MMO. Deal with it.

[Neuflune]

I find it amusing how all of you seem to reject the notion there are players who want to play the game, but don't care about the story or only have a passing interest in it. Just because the majority of forum users are nuthuggers for the story, doesn't mean the population as a whole are.

This reminds me of people who wanted to level up nothing but gatherers and crafters, and were miffed because they had to do main story quests to get to new areas. They were annoyed that they actually had to level up a battle class in a *SHOCK* MMORPG.

Different strokes for different folks, yes. But this is 1) an MMORPG; 2) Final Fantasy.

Some quests can be pieced together to form the lore of a certain area, which in turn may foreshadow future events or game updates. If not those kinds of quests, what then? As I see you're not only complaining about the cutscene length but the quest system as a whole. Any suggestions as to what kind of quest can be put in place instead?