100+ old quests to access expansion content...?

[LeeraSorlan]

Everyone here saying lore reasons has already been proven wrong by the devs themselves.

4.0 will not require the completion of HW to enter, you will be given a brief summary of HW and you are on your way to new content.


This exact thing could have been done for ARR<HW. This was an unintentional oversight by devs, not something they did for lore reasons and the fact that they have adressed this and stated it will not be the case anymore for future expansions only proves this

[Niwashi]

Everyone here saying lore reasons has already been proven wrong by the devs themselves.

4.0 will not require the completion of HW to enter, you will be given a brief summary of HW and you are on your way to new content.

This exact thing could have been done for ARR<HW. This was an unintentional oversight by devs, not something they did for lore reasons and the fact that they have adressed this and stated it will not be the case anymore for future expansions only proves this

No it doesn't. That bit of the story isn't needed for 4.0 because it wasn't written for 4.0. It was written as a lead-in to 3.0 so of course 3.0 is the one that needs it. The fact that down the road they'll have another story that doesn't is completely beside the point. This specific story needs it for lore reasons.

For later expansions, SE won't have the luxury of knowing for a fact that everyone who gets the expansion also has the previous one. Here, since the previous piece of the story comes from the base game that's required in order to register the expansion, they do. So this is the only place that SE could put so much lead-in heading towards an expansion's story. All other expansions will have to provide their own lead-in.

Perhaps it helps to consider later few 2.x patches to be in essence 3.0 content. It just doesn't require purchase of the rest of 3.0 to do those prologue chapters. So, by that measure, there really aren't 100+ patch quests before accessing the expansion, because you're essentially already on the expansion when doing them. All later expansions will still need their own lead-in prologue quests that have to be done to set the stage for their later quests. The only difference being that you won't be able to do that lead-in part in advance like you can here, as it will have to come within the expansions themselves.

[Sylens_Mnemonic]

I literally started FF14 a month ago and I was initially frustrated with the number of quests I needed to do to get to Ishgard. That said, I'm SO glad it was a requirement. The story was so good, and I got so attached to the characters that it is what made me really love the game. I sincerely hope that there is some kind of story requirement going forward, the story is genuinely great and one of the big things that separates this game from other MMOs. If I had had the option to skip it I can guarantee that I would have succumbed to the temptation of impatience and missed out on the best MMO experience I've had since I can remember, and I've been in the genre since UO came out.

A side benefit is that some of the story missions you need to do to access Ishgard are not especially easy for a newbie (not hard granted, but definitely not a "push buttons till it dies" kind of experience) - kind of provides an artificial floor to player skill that I think helps the community greatly.