ARR: new player perspective

[Shougun]

I still believe they should have alternative starts to the game that come accelerated into content (later in the game/level) and prebaked with basic lore and combat tutorials in as exciting a way as possible (making tutorials that are fun and intuitive), ARR is great for some people but it's a near (or actual) game killer for others and the lore isn't /required/ to understand later content.

It certainly could help but any person prepared to leap forward and use their two gils to spin some logic together could piece a story that was handed to them, especially as the game's story isn't some terribly complex mystery crime puzzle (which means big concept explanations and clear actions in context could do well in the majority of circumstances). Like it would be nice to know about white aethercite in advance to seeing it the first time much later in the story, but eeeeh if you didn't know already what it was you could guess it did based on the context of people bringing it up and mentioning it again and the game even does a sort of "I assume you may have forgot about this" and vaguely explains it again at that moment. You miss build up but the value of build up is not equal for everyone for some it's meaningless and other's its why they love a certain character (like playing save forwarding single player games out of order, it's fine and some may prefer it differently which is also fine), and with the new game+ system they can just go back once they determine it's worth it rather than being demanded to pay it in advance of whether or not they'll actually care about it.

In terms of an MMO I found ARR's story not bad, particularly in comparison of having played a few MMOs with story I can't even try to recall because it just wasn't that interesting lol. There were a few moments ARR that had me annoyed though but (busy work quests, or sometimes info about characters I don't care about lol), I understand they're trying to cut down on that (though for example personally I don't really care for ARR Minfilla and she's not really a trim-able character lol). Yet if someone sold to me I had to do it and 150 other hours of other story to catch up to content that I was actually interested in I'd probably just bounce (assuming I was a new player, which in this case I'm not since I played ARR while it was new content). That would be a lot of time investing in something I didn't prepare to invest in (given the perspective of a new player seeing current content on twitch, youtube, or trailers for expansions- 150 hours is like how much time I put into doing almost all the content in Witcher 3 a game clearly designed around that single player value). Moreover the dev team has learned and improved over that time frame so if you experience their most rocky/unrefined content first and know you've many many more hours to go, unless you've a friend who can hype you along the way, you might just be out as it's not quite clear when it'll "get good". As I saw on reddit and here where people saying to those who don't live for the lore "stick with it, it gets good" and I think many players will think "why isn't it great already? why do I need to wait for it to 'get good'? . . . Okay I might be willing to wait but why is it nearly an entire 98% clear of witcher 3 worth of time to reach there?".

Even if they cut down story content, as they are, it's still significant of a required investment and cutting down isn't the only thing that could help (due to the structure of the MMORPG your compelling combat content, that tends to get restructured around expansions, is also delayed in that mountain, besides also potentially your friends and the general population of the game as a whole). While I don't regret doing the story, and so I don't want to set the perspective that it has to be purged because humbug, I don't think it's mandatory to understand the fairly straight forward story of this game and I think you'd gain more than you lose (both the to players and for the company as players may stick around easier) by offering an optional alternative accelerated meticulously crafted start to the game meant to be an introduction polished with all the knowledge the team has accumulated thus far. "The best we can do to start you off well" vs ARR which was "the best we can do in dev crunch hell as we revived the game from the ashes of 1.0, we're all so tired and we're all still learning and trying to grow together"- which is to say I don't think it was horrible but I think they could do better now given non-rushed time and the learned experience on deck. Also to note straight forward isn't an insult, but the game isn't hard to understand at least on first layer basis which is where most players will be at- not at the deep lore dive video level where questions are pondered.

[basketofseals]

It's funny, the skills from the base class like lancer use to have debuffs attached to them (leg sweep was a good example as it placed a slow buff) for example and we had some cross-class skills we could use to add small variety.

I thing feint was the slow. Leg sweep was always the stun, although it had damage attached to it.

Funny enough that you mention LNC though, since that was one low level experience that actually improved after pruning. Previously you spammed impulse drive from level 12(I think?) to level 34.

Well, that is your opinion, and I disagree with it. The storytelling in ARR is not bad, and the number of fetch quests is no worse than in most other MMOs.
The story is a bit unfocused because it is "our" story - the story of how we go from unknown adventurer to famous Warrior of Light. It also has to do a lot of worldbuilding and introducing characters and events that will become important later on. A few too many "pray return to the Waking Sands", but even that does not actually happen all that often.

There's definitely a couple times that the story takes a giant stomp to the face in terms of pacing for not very good reasons.

The company of heroes fetch quests made little sense in universe(although I'll give them credit for pointing that out), and it was all for some shallow vapid reason that I can hardly remember, but I do remember my reaction to wanting to grab my face and go "OH MY GOD GUYS THAT WAS SOOOOOO DEEP" melodramatically.

The getting the wrong aspected stone to pierce Garuda's wind barrier made zero sense in game and out of game. It serves literally zero purpose but padding.

Both of these moments happen right in the middle of an arc climax and just totally ruin things. Especially since you're likely to get 3 overgeared allies with you that will just trounce the boss for you without you even understanding what happened. Then you'll wonder why everyone was even worried the Primals in the first place when you could have just ordered a pizza and had some randoms take it out for you.

[MoonPhaseAlpha]

Like everyone else said, the devs said the revamp is going to remove 13% of the ARR quests and streamline all the remaining ones (unless it introduces an important character).

Personally, I think 13% isn't going to be enough...

[Mimilu]

Personally, I think 13% isn't going to be enough...

We'll have to see how much they streamline the remaining quests. >x>
Wished they'd streamline some of the cutscenes too. >w>

[AduroT]

But the worst parts to me were things like constantly being pulled back to Vesper Bay, yet the town didn't have an aetheryte, so it was just a waste of time to go to Horizon to get to the Waking Sands.

I find it’s actually much quicker to get there via Limsa. Teleport in, aether network to the Arcanist’s Guild, and take the ferry to Vesper Bay.

[wereotter]

I find it’s actually much quicker to get there via Limsa. Teleport in, aether network to the Arcanist’s Guild, and take the ferry to Vesper Bay.

My new character was placed (by Square, I didn't care what server I was on) into Gilgamesh, and people there LOVE to afk in Limsa. So with how long it took me on PlayStation Pro to load into Limsa, and then load again from the large crystal, it actually was faster to teleport to Horizon and go from there, at least once I unlocked mounts.

Though that is another thing I would point out that existing players can do to make the new player experience better is not all congregate, and stand around doing nothing in the same place. It just leads to annoyance for new players when they have to go to a specific zone, but the load time in takes too long. If people there are actually doing things and it makes the game feel alive, that's great, but when you're just standing at the aetherite plaza because logging off is too inconvenient for you, then that's not great for new player experience.

[Gaido]

I have something different point of view at ARR.

I'm WoW's refugee, and when I played ARR i constantly compared in mind FF XIV to WoW. So (for me) it was so refreshing. When in WoW you had a three-minute cutscene and people (especially some well-known WoW's youtuber) rationalise how significant for development of character or story it was, but in Final Fantasy similiar scenes are just so much more common. Fetch quests, especially houndred quests maraton before HW was painfull, but (for me) it wasn't much different than WoW storytellng today. And we are talking about content from 2013. Speaking for myself, leveling experience in FF XIV ARR was much more satisfying than in WoW BfA.

Little offtopic, but I wonder if quests in Costa del Sol, where quest giver just bluntly tells, that we can't progress until we do some chore for him, still will be in game? :d

[Elladie]

But the worst parts to me were things like constantly being pulled back to Vesper Bay, yet the town didn't have an aetheryte, so it was just a waste of time to go to Horizon to get to the Waking Sands. They also could cut a little of the fluff before fighting Titan, and as they already said they're going to fix, there's that spot near the end where they have you at level 46 quests then jump you to level 49 the very next one, and if you weren't over-leveled, you have to go grind out three more levels on your job.

Just a heads up, if you're going to Vesper Bay, don't go via Horizon. Port to Limsa, use the aetheryte shard to go to Arcanist Guild, hop on ferry to Vesper Bay. MUCH faster