Quote Originally Posted by Penthea View Post
Actually nearly every player in WoW played through the story content at least once if not several times. All those quests in the open world are the story content. Yes those massive walls of text in the small window given to you mostly by very forgettable mannequin-like npcs that you were unlikely to ever see again after you left their location, that's the story content. But because it's presented in such a bland way, people don't often seem to consider that it is.

So even though it doesn't gate you like FFXIV's msq does, most players ended up playing it anyway. Often multiple times from trying new classes.

WoW has incredibly rich lore. But at least up until WoD (which is when I quit) it wasn't presented very well, so a huge amount of players just don't bother with it. They only care that they have to kill 10 wolves. Not why. WoW had (still has?) nothing resembling the msq and the central characters to the stories are all npcs. The story isn't about you at all. It's about how you aid these people by being one of many talented soldiers. You're not a major plot device because anything you didn't do, some other talented soldier (another player) did it. You're a face in the crowd.

In FFXIV you're the central character to the story. That alone means the story needs to be told very differently to something like WoW. You are even represented by a character in the expansion trailers.

While both games have very complex and wonderful lore, it is clear that the player's roles in them greatly differ, and that Blizzard and SE don't have the same ideas as to how a story should be told.

In short: they're different games by different studios.
Its been a while but was the player anymore then just a random adventurer till ifrit? That's when it was found out you were immune to being tempered right? I do agree the way Wow told the story in the past for a lot of things mad it seem like you were helping out important npcs rather then being the important one yourself. That changed after a while though. Even in Mists you were somewhat well known by faction npcs as being important. WoD and onward you were center stage too(commander in WoD, class leader in Legion, etc.)

As for the msq, Legion had a max lvl story that needed to be done to unlock things(broken isles,that one dungeon i cant remember the name of with the Naaru, the class quests.). BFA has something like msq as well now with the faction campaign. both of those you play a large part of the story. Both will be skip able in future expacs(legion's story already is skip able). Still, WoW quests and npcs mention how much you have done/how important you are but WoW has no cut-scenes with the player in it. Always thought that was one of those famous server limitations though.


Again. All I want is past expacs max lvl stories to be skip able. Keep the lvling stuff,keep the current expac lvling and max lvl stuff, don't get rid of anything. Right now in SB I think players should get the option to go to HW lvling quests without doing ARR max lvl quests. Then go to SB lvling quests without doing HW max lvl quests. Have the dungeons and stuff be unlocked when you hit 50 and 60 keep the quests i case you want to know what happened. That alone i feel would make it feel less overwhelming to new players and even veterans that just want an alt with a different look or something.