3.x has two entirely different loading screens for a bunch of the quests. Thankfully, a smaller proportion, but you do have to go Foundation -> Pillars -> House ______ quite a lot. Much less annoying than Waking Sands though! That was Limsa -> Arcanist Guild -> ferry to Vesper Bay -> Waking Sands -> Solar. x_x At least Rising Stones is only Mor Dhona -> Rising Stones -> Solar or whatever it's called there.

No classes (except Rogue) have quest markers for their opening quest, you just find the guild marker on the map, go there and register, unlocking the first quest. The jobs in 3.0 are the same - find the guild marker on the map, go there, register to unlock the first quest. The only oddity is DRK, which works the same way, except there is no DRK guild, and thus no marker on the map. Instead, you have to find the NPC with the quest marker over his head where there is no quest marker on the map. It's to the North East of one of the two city areas, I forget which.


The 2.1-2.4 stuff is a little tedious at times, though I think it picks up at 2.5, and found the 2.55 stuff to be really interesting. I feel like they would get more positive results and new subs if they added a digest mode, where each patch from 2.1 to 2.5 had a single, optional quest. Finishing the quest autocompletes all of the main story quests in that patch. In the new optional quest, the key story elements are shown as a cutscene that leads up to the primal battle, you do the primal battle, and then there's another cutscene showing the key story elements from there to the end of the patch. Doing this forgoes all rewards from those quests, but takes much less time. In 2.4 and 2.5, they'd have to have two breaks, one for the trial and one for the dungeon. Don't remove those, they're interesting and have story attached (especially the 2.5 dungeon and trial). For 2.55, the whole thing can be left in, since it's all just leadup for the ff-style, long cutscene of an ending. Finishing the final quest for a given patch auto-completes the cutscene version, so you can't do both.

I feel like that'd be a much better way of handling the tedious content while keeping the story and the non-tedious content (the trials/dungeons).

Alternatively, they could make these digest quests not autocomplete the rest, but still allow progression, so you could go back and do the story later if you feel like it.