New Player Experience Sucks! - Impending Expansion Problems

[van_arn]

Snip

You're ignoring the core of their point: even if it's a Final Fantasy, it's a social game. The MSQ is automatically diminished in importance simply because other people are there to play with you. There is no justification for requiring a new player to do this much non-gameplay busywork just to play with their friends. And no, teleporting repeatedly for 150+ hours doesn't deserve to be called "gameplay" when so much better is out there.

Don't get me wrong, I do like to watch the cutscenes on my own time, in my estate, when I'm looking for something slower paced. But when I want to run the new dungeon, they tedious teleporting gets in the way.

That's just how I play the game, though, and that's fine. I have no interest in getting rid of cutscenes for current content, even if I need to do boring busywork to actually get to the game. I limit this to the current content, though, because what happened in Heavensward no longer matters to me. I have no idea why we went to arborium hard, for example, nor do I care in the slightest. I love pooman, though.

The core issue that will only get worse as expansions release is a social reason, though: we currently have players spread across going on six years of content, much of it badly out of date and a poor example of what the SE team can create. Too many are stuck back in Heavensward, "taking their time" for going on four years now, playing an entirely different game than what is being announced at fanfest or on live letters. This can't keep happening for the team if they're going to keep these players engaged, and these players -- perhaps unwittingly -- are sabotaging their own play by locking themselves out of the content everyone else gets excited for during the live letters or fanfests.

So yeah, skip everyone to book 3 so everyone has a nice baseline of content to enjoy that doesn't insult their intelligence with one button hotbars.

Those that want additional context, or need remedial tooltip-reading can use new game+.

Before you tell me this is what Final Fantasy isn't again, you're already been skipped to book 2. The difference is we didn't have new game+ when everyone was forced to leave 1.0 and start playing ARR instead.

Simply change the starting point on the timeline again so new players start further along and new players won't be required to suffer to play with their friends in today's ffxiv. Should those players want to experience the timeline in sequence, permit ng+.

The existence of skip potions doesn't mean Square can just let content rot, and I'm never going to look positively at Square making money off of their abysmal expansion onboarding. The fact that square seems utterly incapable of editing loathed portions of the msq out tells me they aren't really able to condense the current story, perhaps for technical reasons rather than any sort of malice or greed.

Changing the starting book is the most reasonable option available at present; especially since we know ng+ is already on the way.