Having to slog through lvl 50 quests is tedious

[Skivvy]

The reason there are so many quests is because of story patching. Y'know, content that kept the original ARR players hooked months after they beat Ultima weapon? It's the same deal with Heavensward. Once you beat the main guy, you'll have a week and a half of additional quests to get through to reach Stormblood. And Stormblood just had two story patches with many more to come. This is called content.. You're getting your money's worth. It's a good thing! If you don't like it, buy a skip potion.

Sure, I suppose it's content - but it's content of the lowest level. It's filler. There are so many pointless fetch quests - and that's not including the hundreds of random !'s quests all over the place. At least those give you some XP for your leveling.

[SannaR]

Snip

The reason for those differences are how the XI team and the 2.0+ team for XIV do the expansions. In XI they were their own little things with their own stories while obviously in XIV it's a continuing story. Sure, that can be off putting to some but so was wasting hours getting nothing done because you couldn't get a group together and you weren't a smn/bst/blu/pup/rdm. Because lets face it even with 5 AI's somethings weren't going to be cleared "solo" for a lot of people. Along with there's only so many times until you start grumbling about the npcs you've done countless of things with not knowing who you were just because it was the start of a seperate storyline. I highly doubt a lot of people who join XI now or a few years ago would have enjoyed playing XI before some of the MASSIVE QoL they put into the game under the current team. Especially without the insane amount of short cuts they put into the game not being there.

[Skivvy]

The reason for those differences are how the XI team and the 2.0+ team for XIV do the expansions. In XI they were their own little things with their own stories while obviously in XIV it's a continuing story. Sure, that can be off putting to some but so was wasting hours getting nothing done because you couldn't get a group together and you weren't a smn/bst/blu/pup/rdm. Because lets face it even with 5 AI's somethings weren't going to be cleared "solo" for a lot of people. Along with there's only so many times until you start grumbling about the npcs you've done countless of things with not knowing who you were just because it was the start of a seperate storyline. I highly doubt a lot of people who join XI now or a few years ago would have enjoyed playing XI before some of the MASSIVE QoL they put into the game under the current team. Especially without the insane amount of short cuts they put into the game not being there.

I'm really not trying to get much into the XI vs. XIV debate here as they are vastly different. This is strictly with how they handle unlocking content. For the most part, XI let you pick your path, and your pace. XIV does not. This would be like forcing full city rank/missions, ZM and CoP missions on someone who was eager to get into Assaults or Einherjar (from ToaU).

XIV is a modern game. It should absolutely blow XI out of the water with how they implement things, but many times they do not. In my opinion, the full MSQ requirement is a massive turn-off.

[Berethos]

It's all a matter of opinion, of course. I find them boring because all I'm doing is delivering stuff. Basically, just fetch quests.

Less fetch quests and more "talk to this person" quests.

I don't mind the 2.x series at all myself, but it's not due to any really interesting quest design, that's for sure. There's a lot of plot that goes on, including stuff setting up future events, alongside quite a bit of character development moments, that I really enjoyed (I find many MMOs rush their character stories to a silly degree and find it distracting).

All that plot relevant stuff makes it trickier to just turn around and make chunks of it optional or removed, though. I do wish they would opt to make the 2.x series an optional block, meant to be done in order if you want, but you can pick up with HW upon defeating Ultima if you want that instead and just have to acknowledge that "thar be spoilers ahead, Cap'n" when moving past the 2.x block (ideally you'd be able to do the 2.x series, in order, at your own leisure if you want the full context of the various story moments).

[Berethos]

Fair enough. But the story wouldnt suffer if Minifila would be replaced by a potted plant (seeing how certain flowers sell for a lot of gil on the market, I should pitch this idea to Tataru...!)

I mean, it would be pretty tough to convince people that a plotted plant is sending out letters and having boring meetings with emissaries and others vying for the attention of the Scions when we're out doing all the fun stuff (make no mistake, that's largely what she does - a lot of management and meetings and letter writing and coordinating...all that boring stuff that keeps the Scions working as an effective organization, so she's hardly just a pretty face).

I think only the last 10-something quests are relevant to the story leading up to HW ;;

You'd be surprised at what's relevant and what isn't. Some of it is super connected directly to the main plot of HW, some is connected to plots that take place later, some of it deals more with thematic elements that are ongoing, some of it is focused on character developments that while not plot intrinsic do add to the overall feeling that the characters are meant to be developing characters and not cardboard cutouts handing out quests, and some of it

is stuff that arguably still hasn't been properly dealt with or resolved and is still an ongoing issue

.

And some of it's more for pacing reasons that felt right at the time (not the idea of "filler to have them keep doing stuff" but more "the characters are doing these things, so let's have the plot hit these beats along the way" and not necessarily realizing that the pacing that worked when 2.2 was the latest patch feels much different when 4.2 is the latest patch).

[KokoChibata]

Quest skip potion [Do you need it?]

[Iscah]

The HW story actually starts as early as in 2.3 - when we start looking for "Lady Iceheart"

By that logic, the Heavensward story actually starts right back in the Coerthas story arc (Lv35-40ish), which introduces some important characters and the general 'idea' of Ishgard and its problems.

And then there's the dragoon quests. If you are not yet at Heavensward and intend to play dragoon at some point, this is a good time to do that questline. The Lv30-50 dragoon quests are an early introduction to a character who is involved in the Heavensward MSQ, so if you do it later it will be "out of sequence" as if the Heavensward story hasn't happened yet.

[savageink]

By that logic, the Heavensward story actually starts right back in the Coerthas story arc (Lv35-40ish), which introduces some important characters and the general 'idea' of Ishgard and its problems.

And then there's the dragoon quests. If you are not yet at Heavensward and intend to play dragoon at some point, this is a good time to do that questline. The Lv30-50 dragoon quests are an early introduction to a character who is involved in the Heavensward MSQ, so if you do it later it will be "out of sequence" as if that story hasn't happened yet.

Goons don't read...

[Hasrat]

Anyone that says the 2.x quests should be optional probably forgot about the HW MSQ quests that tie back to many of those events. Y'know, the parts about why you're there alone, and why it's a big deal when hear back about events happening outside Ishgard, the characters you meet back up with. Admittedly, 2.1 is probably the worst of it, but that's just how it goes, when you're coming down from the big Ultima climax. After that, the character/story relevance is decently dense.

[TThibi]

Working on a new alt now that for some reason I felt the need to make and level the week before housing was released. I went 1-26 on pug, switched to rogue just because and took that to 50, then unlocked and playing as Sam. All of this while losing no time whatsoever grinding msq, unlock quests, side quests, and first clearing leves and dungeons, not to mention the class book for rogue, and maelstrom, as well as soloing fates. It's been a busy few weeks, my ninja is lvl 56, my sam lvl 54 about to tick 55, and I am just now unlocking Shiva Hard as we log out for 4.21 maintenance. I'm also burning 2-3 hard mode lvl 50 dungeons a day to clear them.

I'm sure my FC is sick of my mantra about too much filler content but that is what it is there is too much, and SE's little cash grab scheme is just insulting but there was a discussion when heavensward came out SE said they wanted players to play through the msq so they wouldn't place the gate earlier so people could bypass. They did the same thing when Stormblood came out they didn't want people to easily bypass. Jump potions though wildly opposed by the playerbase were SE's way out if people hated the msq glut so much they could pay to skip it. When the next expac comes out I wonder what they'll do but I do know I won't be leveling any more new characters as it is I will be lvl 70 Nin, Sam and Monk before I complete SB.