Quote Originally Posted by linay View Post
Except you can buy and play Warcraft 3 without ever having to touch Warcraft 2. The same is not true for FFXIV and its expansions, so it's improper to view it as something that it's not and then judge it based on how well it fits the criteria of that wrong view. That's like saying you should just be able to go to the end game of any game without having your character go through the game.
Quote Originally Posted by Shougun View Post
Keep in mind I see after a certain amount of content as a new game, this is why I keep bringing up games in a series. So I do think it is fair to see having to do 100+ hours of content you dont want to do to get to the expansion you did as a fair vision of an accessibility issue. Like Rokke said he came to this game to do the dragon content and had to trudge through ARR to get it.

The longer we go the bigger the time requirement of course. Also I'm not thinking of an accelerated start to drop people at end game but to put them at the gates of fairly new stuff that they were getting into the game for like Rokke's story (so they avoid say 100 hours of msq but still have some more related to their interest hours to go till end game). Again to me I shouldn't have to play warcraft 2 to get into warcraft 3, and I see at a certain point FFXIV should be seen in units like that because it's too freaking big otherwise lol. If you want wc3 then you should have to invest in wc3, that doesn't require investing wc2 though.
...Isn't that basically his point, that ARR, HW, and SB, etc. combined are too big at this point to feel like a single game (or, to leave you time to feel like you're really investing in any one of the expansions)?

In my opinion, though, it's more alike to the 3 releases of Starcraft II, where each gave one of the three races' individual campaigns and cumulatively updated the shared multiplayer experience. The stories are separate, but the backstory behind them are far too interlinked to feel wholly invested in any later step without the ones before it.

It's amazing how many of my friends enjoyed the aesthetics and vibes of the game but just couldn't trudge through that ARR MSQ, either dying out before the MSQ could improve, with/around the Mor Dhona rescue mission, or else during the ARR HW-prep slogfest. But at the same time, I cannot rightly recommend that they get jump potions and skip it all, even if that option were free. There's too much to lose there. It's just muddied and muddled down by being stretched too long and with too many irritants.