Larger emphasis on story is needed.

[Zezlar]

Awesome, glad to hear it.

That said, yes we do need more interesting and engaging storylines. But, please for the love of all that is holy.... No more walls of text. I love to read so that isn't the issue, but for some reason some of the existing quests are pages and pages of text where I suspect the story could have been told in less words just as easily.

As an aside, does anyone else miss missions?

I definitely do. When I speak of "quests" most of the time I mean missions. Players from other MMOs believe i'm talking about the side quests that we have here.

[SolArisa]

I would think it's funny if it didn't hurt so bad ... remember that since April 2006, when the ToAU expansion for XI had been released, every little sidequest was part of an individual sidequest storyline, and fully cutscened? Sidequests, not just scenario missions. And there have been lots of them.

It hurts to see Square Enix struggling (or perhaps not even caring because WoW does not do it?) to meet standards Square Enix themselves set six years ago in their own product.

And when I think that since a few weeks the standard has not just been raised to full cutscenes for everything, which are also voiced with optional subtitles in multiple languages, I am concerned if Square Enix will ever be able to turn the FF franchise into something which got lost after Squaresoft had been acquired: The Final Fantasy series setting RPG standards, not just in looks, but also storytelling mechanics, instead of desperately trying to keep up with the competition and promising deadlines which cannot be kept without redefining the goals in terms of content and quality.

[Zezlar]

One of my hopes coming from FFXI to FFXIV was the advanced storytelling. They have the technology because they use it in their cut-scenes now on occasions. Need less walls of texts, more cut-scenes and branching quests that don't involve the same old/same old Korean MMO quest style.

[WOmega]

This is why we should have quest-based leveling!

Just because it's an MMO doesn't mean they have to abandon that old Final Fantasy charm. FFs were always about fighting your way to the next story event. But that fighting always felt like it was a part of the story.

Granted, in XI and XIV we fight things to gain enough levels to get to the next chunk of story, but it feels disjointed and arbitrary in relation to the world.

How many raptors we kill has nothing to do with the encroaching threat of the empire.

The worst thing for any game is if a new player gets out of the opening toto rial and says "now what?" There should be quests all the way to 50. And the instances they involve should be repeatable once unlocked so that subsequent classes may be leveled.

as a low level i agree. i was lost i had to look up on the internet what to do. and the only thing i could figure was grind until i was level 8. i dont care how bland a side-quest is, its still better then sitting in a field grinding, at least with them they could teach us mechanics of the game. (newbies i mean) theres no reason to alienate players who dont learn well left to their own devices.


and to be honest, they should work on making side quests better rather then just pumping them out. theres nothing that says they have to pump out more boring stuff

[Rowyne]

I absolutely agree with the OP.

This is why we should have quest-based leveling!

Just because it's an MMO doesn't mean they have to abandon that old Final Fantasy charm. FFs were always about fighting your way to the next story event. But that fighting always felt like it was a part of the story.

Granted, in XI and XIV we fight things to gain enough levels to get to the next chunk of story, but it feels disjointed and arbitrary in relation to the world.

How many raptors we kill has nothing to do with the encroaching threat of the empire.

The worst thing for any game is if a new player gets out of the opening toto rial and says "now what?" There should be quests all the way to 50. And the instances they involve should be repeatable once unlocked so that subsequent classes may be leveled.

Well said. I'm an advocate for quest-based leveling, also.

My only concern in regards to this 'solution' is an overabundance of dumb quests.

Out of the thousands of quests you did levelling in WoW (If you've ever played it) How many did you actually bother reading the quest text on?

*raises hand* Me me me. I have most of the major loremaster achievements in WoW. And I read every single word of every quest.

I only really played WoW for about 10 levels, though I did read what the NPCs said for those levels.

But in XI I annoyed the crap out of my CoP static because I actually read the cutscenes instead of spamming enter through them. Guess I'm just a rare breed.

LOL, me too. People always got seriously impatient with me. And since I was the WHM, I decided they could wait.

Sounds like you're not as rare as you think. And that's a good thing.