why i quit before reaching endgame (feedback from a new player)

[KadaRemnant]

I know this is a feedback and some may not like cutscenes and story but i fell in love for the story and cutscenes and the way it makes you feel you are part of the story. I'm sorry the game wasn't to your liking and hope you find your kind of game.
But i wanna say that i hope it's not about wanting to change the core of the game because some new players didn't like. This game is like 5 years old and always been this way. I love everything the game offers so please people, don't change it. Only play the type of game you enjoy. Everyone is different.

[Melorie]

In FF9 you don't get to teleport. But seriously 90% is and exaggeration for either game. Though both have points where you may have to spend half an hour or more of reading mostly it's is broken up with dungeons and stuff. In either game you can take a break from the main story and go grind something or play a mini game if you like.

You're missing my point. I'm not saying that FF9 is perfect or better than FFXIV - theyre completely different games, I'm saying that justifying any MSQ criticism with "well, it's a final fantasy game" doesn't really make sense. Pacing and balance are also traits that you have to consider while telling a story in a game.

Actually the thing you will probably spend the most of your time in FF9 is cutscenes most specifically the going into and out of combat cutscenes and yes they are cutscenes they wrest control away from the player to be all swoosh whoa do i look cool for a normal battle yet? XD

I don't mind cutscenes per se. I don't think that cutscenes or story are the problem, but how the player feels towards doing them is important. You can make a cutscene good to watch or you can make it boring. You can make certain blocks of texts very impacting or you can make it a slog to read. You can make the player finish a quest without making him sniff chocobos and teleport 0328509804 times just to say something that could've been said through a linkpearl.

And as I said like everytime I post in those threads, I LOVED doing the history on FFXIV, but I know that I'm not the majority and I've meet way too many people that decided to give up on the game because the way they handle the history (HANDLE the history, I'm not saying that the history existing is a bad thing and I bet that these people that got burnt out also deep down doesn't) and I think that SE should develop solution that it's not only "skip everything" or "spend dozens of hours of your time just reading blocks of text and teleporting".

[SerLuke]

I think I'll leave this here.

[linay]

This doesn't seem like a significant distinction to me. If you bought FF14 primarily to participate in something locked behind the MSQ you have to pay additional money to play the content right away. It's the same as with the other games. While the content you don't want to play might be handled a little differently, that probably doesn't matter if you didn't want to play it in the first place. FF14 flagging the skipped content as done could be a disadvantage too. If the player skipping wanted to do the skipped content at their own pace, the skip potion forever takes that content away from them (but this is fixed in Shadowbringers).

It is a significant distinction when you're claiming that you're paying for the game twice. Regardless of your interest in the part that is affected by the boost, when you use the boost, you get the benefits of the quests that are completed for you at a fraction of the time it would've taken were you to do them manually, like minions and mounts and unlocked dungeons. So it's not like you're paying for nothing, aka being charged twice for the same thing.

Maybe I can make it clearer by putting it another way. The skip potion and similar items have you paying to solve problems made by the devs. Paying to save time is completely valid, but in FF14 the time investment only exists because the developers put it into the game. They didn't have to and paying for it just reinforces it as a good business strategy for them. SE absolutely deserves to make money for their products of course but when you end up paying the devs to sell you solutions to problems that shouldn't exist, it hardly seems fair to have to pay. It makes some sense with the level skip because leveling helps to keep dungeons alive. Making players go through the MSQ on the other hand has very little effect on the game as a whole since it's a solo experience.

The time investment only exists because that is the nature of a growing game that is continuously expanded at a regular frequency. If you're not willing to invest the time in a growing game and not willing to pay to go through the provided shortcut, then maybe look for a static game that doesn't grow.

[Penthea]

I don't get that argument. I played FF9 recently. Interestingly enough, I did not felt that 90% of my time playing was just reading blocks of text and teleporting to one npc to the next. Maybe because even though the history is a trait of the Final Fantasy franchise, telling that history in a way that is tiring is not.

FFIX doesn't have many cutscenes or camera angle changes during dialogue due to the limitations of the ps1. FFX which came on the ps2 had far more cutscenes and skipping through dialogue took longer due the things like camera angle changes during scenes. Sounds familiar?

As technology became more robust the FF games got more and more cutscenes and more chunks of dialogue with fancy camera work. Comparing a ps1 game to FFXIV is very misleading. Those games are at least ten years apart, and when you consider how rapidly technology advances this is a super long time.

Cutscenes and long chunks of dialogue holding you in place are part of the FF experience. It's just how the stories are told. At least in FFXIV you usually would experience each of these only once, because solo duties aren't usually so challenging you need to attempt them more than once. In the solo games sometimes you could experience the same piece of dialogue several times if it was something you had to go through in order to access a difficult boss. I can't comment on FFXV (not played it yet) but at least from FFX and up to then you could skip previously viewed cutscenes, but normal dialogue had to be spam clicked through. Sound familiar again?

People also need to consider that FFXIV is a mmo and often the cutscenes also serve to remove other players from disrupting the immersion of a scene. I'm sure we can all agree that serious scenes such as a character's death would have a very different tone if another player on a fat cat mount was seen running around, or that it might be difficult to see what is going on if a lot of players are crowded around you.

Another thing to consider is in the older FF solo titles combat was randomly thrust upon you by an invisible force and you could rarely avoid it. Therefore it meant that there was a lot more time between story-telling sections due to spending time in these random battles the game threw at you. In more modern games, and certainly in mmos, you can see hostile mobs before engaging with them, so you can choose not to do so thus cutting your downtime between storytelling.

No one has to like how the story is told in FFXIV or any other game. We are all entitled to our tastes, and different types of games exist because tastes can greatly differ. However to say that frequent cutscenes and large chunks of dialogue isn't a typical trait of the FF series is simply untrue. Such a claim is only the case for the older games of the series, and a lot of the time they were like that due to the limitations of technology at the time.

[Miles064]

I have already said my piece in the last thread about making old msq optional so I wont go into it again. That said, I think I know why I really wanted it changed in the first place. The MSQ can be done in a party though some things(a lot of the early ones) dont give credit to the party so groups have to repeat. You also have to drop group and reform every time a duty shows up in the MSQ that isnt a dungeon. While you can do it with others, the flow seems to favor doing it alone(with areas that you have to do alone tossed in).

I guess for me it boils down to this: Are people really ok with paying a monthly fee to play a single player game that unlocks multiplayer aspects down the road? It's like Divinity making you pay X/per month to even log in but forcing you to complete act one before letting you play with anyone else. Not only that but FF14 being an mmo just means more and more story will get added so the "gate" just gets longer. Ill say it again before the same people that jumped on me in the last thread tell me to "go play wow" yet again. I like this game, enough to spend money on it and I am super hyped for ShB. I dont hate the story either. I play mmos to play with others, not play single player. I assume the people that make these threads might feel somewhat the same.

[Penthea]

Ill say it again before the same people that jumped on me in the last thread tell me to "go play wow" yet again. I like this game, enough to spend money on it and I am super hyped for ShB. I dont hate the story either. I play mmos to play with others, not play single player. I assume the people that make these threads might feel somewhat the same.

It's fine that your taste doesn't align with having a single player experience in a mmo. However this also means it doesn't align with SE's vision. If you look below you'll see they even use the single player experience as a selling point. Most of SE's games are story-driven and single player, so it's hardly surprising that they try to please their core audience by offering this in their mmo.

I don't think SE are going change much of anything about the msq. At most they will consolidate and streamline certain quest lines. They're not going to unlock the gating it does because that would require restructuring the intended progression map for players, making sure said gate removal is bug-free demands additional dev time, and they would also lose out on making money on msq skip potions. On all fronts they would lose a lot of money in the attempt to please a minority, while also risking displeasing their core audience. Unless that minority significantly grows, the msq isn't going to budge from its position.

I think I'll leave this here.

[Katie_Kitty]

I mean I never would've played this game and would immediately quit playing if not for it having a story sooo.. don't let the door hit ya on the way out. Anyone who wants to get rid of story can find their way to the door as well as far as I'm concerned.

[SerLuke]

I mean I never would've played this game and would immediately quit playing if not for it having a story sooo.. don't let the door hit ya on the way out. Anyone who wants to get rid of story can find their way to the door as well as far as I'm concerned.

I love the story too including the cut scenes and I would quit if it was changed.

[Casra]

I'm new to the game, and I love the cut scenes and the story drives me to play more. To each their own I guess.