Quote Originally Posted by Penthea View Post
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Pretty much spot on. As you point out, WoW refugees will have a bit of a learning curve to adapt to this game. The experience in wow after BC was everything you do up to the current xpac is just unimportant. See that guy, go see what he wants, gather 10 zebra hooves, turn it in. Here's a pat on the back, now go find another dude who wants you to collect some twigs. Good job. That's the leveling experience pretty much until the most recent xpac. You have very little to no impact on anything that goes on in the world. Where as in FFXIV, while you still have those kind of simple 'fetch' quests, you start impacting the world and story around you very quickly. You gain fame, people start recognizing you for the MSQ. Youre not an ambiguous hero in the horde or alliance that passes through an area and maybe does some things, but you're the WoL.


Dont get me wrong though, there are advantages and disadvantages to this set up. The advantages is you're more central and thus more invested in the game and story. But you cant 'skip' past parts of the story. It all builds off of previous parts of the story. WoW is more of these small vignettes of events. You can skip past parts because you dont impact things that deeply. Youre not as central to the struggle of the horde/alliance. So if you skip past Northred or Pandaria, thats fine. Someone else resolved those plot points. You werent there for those battles (unless you go back and do those quests). The game compartmentalizes and doesnt refer to specifics of what happened because you werent there.

This is the distinction people need to understand with FFXIV. Its a particular experience that is story centric. So skipping older content doesnt work as well here as it does in things like WoW, and thats fine. This shouldnt be a WoW clone in that regards. I like this structure, and would be disappointed if SE changed it so the MSQ didnt matter.

Some streamlining could be done with ARR 2.1-2.55, sure, but people should still play through it and not be handed a free pass.