Do you think the Next Expansion will be Gated Behind HW?

[aesteval]

For a game that emphasises story, I worry how it could continue to make sense to people if they haven't done Heavensward's

I'm personally conflicted about the storyline focus and having all players experience the full story themself vs the capability of a growing and persistent world. From a world building standpoint - life continues to go on whether the player is present or not. The world is capable of changing. I'm actually a little bit disappointed at the focus on the player character being the center of everything vs a living and changing world that the player is part of.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

I'm personally conflicted about the storyline focus and having all players experience the full story themself vs the capability of a growing and persistent world. From a world building standpoint - life continues to go on whether the player is present or not. The world is capable of changing. I'm actually a little bit disappointed at the focus on the player character being the center of everything vs a living and changing world that the player is part of.

Difference in opinion. This is a Final Fantasy game though, so I guess overall a focus on story makes sense given that's a major draw for Final Fantasy games in the first place. But personally, one of the major reasons I've continued playing as long as I have is because of the story, I'm very invested in it and personally sort of like it being so central and important to other parts of the game :/ But as I said, I understand how others may dislike this.

But with the game how it is, my point still stands in how they'd keep the storyline cohesive if they allowed people to completely bypass 3.0 and go into 4.0 without knowing anything about Heavensward events that may or may not show up in 4.0 (Ascians, WoD stuff, etc). There's also a confusion as to level... like someone above mentioned, wouldn't the expansion possibly be taking us into level 60-70 territory? How would fresh-out-of-2.0 people deal with that..

Nalien's suggestion is nice though, and could work well. Hopefully they're planning to do something along those lines!

[Nalien]

I'm personally conflicted about the storyline focus and having all players experience the full story themself vs the capability of a growing and persistent world. From a world building standpoint - life continues to go on whether the player is present or not. The world is capable of changing. I'm actually a little bit disappointed at the focus on the player character being the center of everything vs a living and changing world that the player is part of.

The main scenario is actually kind of going this route, I think... Spoilers, duh;

While we've been busy with the Dragonsong War, it would seem the Warriors of Darkness have been taking down Primals for us... The sort stories they posted recently hinted that they've slain enough to gain some acclaim, and 3.4 is taking us to Xelphatol to try and stop Garuda once more (and I'd bet anything we bump into the Warriors of Darkness once more there), so it would see the whole Primal threat has continued to happen regardless of our presence... We're not the center of the world in that regard... It's a shame SE didn't do more to kind of highlight this, having some dialog kicking around like "Titan has been summoned again!", while we had no involvement with that... That would have created a sense that events are going on in the background regardless of our involvement... Instead we're retroactively learning that, and it's not nearly as impactful like that...

The Garlean stuff kinda happens without us as well, obviously we have direct confrontations with Regula van Hydrus, but the Empire is expanding out there without us noticing, them showing up in 3.0 was even meant to be a surprise...

Then there is the Ala Mhigan resistance, of course... Yda and Papalymo are involved in that of course, and it seems we'll be pulled into it with 3.4, but it's still a set of events that we've not been at the center of... It's a shame SE doesn't do more to highlight these kinds of things, I guess... We retroactively hear about all this stuff, Doma is a great example... We learned about that place after it was destroyed, and then we learned about a war of succession in Garlemald... All this stuff was going on, and we had no idea until after the fact...