MSQ Needs Further Condensing

[Iscah]

I am not sure that you have any grasp of my stance. So, I'll summarize it for you.

The MSQ was condensed, and SE is soon to release another expansion, adding more content to the already lengthy, and mandatory, MSQ.

The addition of this expansion is going to undo the progress they made on reducing the length of the MSQ.

I understand your stance but I think you are misunderstanding SE's reasoning for reducing the length of the MSQ.

They are not trying to keep the overall length of MSQ from 1 to 80 at some arbitrary maximum where to put more MSQ in, they need to shorten it somewhere else. They are shortening a specific and notoriously dull section of the MSQ to be more enjoyable.

Adding more MSQ in 5.5 and beyond does not "undo" the fact that post-ARR MSQ is now shorter than it used to be.

Perhaps the problem is that you seem to be viewing the story as some monolithic lump of an obstacle to reaching the endgame and all that matters is the length of it, which simply isn't the case. It is a serialised, chaptered story and there will always be more chapters being added to it. It isn't designed to be kept at a fixed length.

I don't think there is a perfect answer here but I think it's worth considering, if you do love the story as much as you claim you do, then which would you really prefer? People skipping it entirely (or rushing through it as fast as possible by skipping every cutscene and rushing through all dialogue) or being able to experience it all in a more digestable manner?

The thing is, making the story "shorter and more digestable" by cutting bits out of it is potentially detrimental to what makes it enjoyable in the first place - especially if you're talking about cutting out entire chunks of the narrative and discarding them as unimportant.

And no, I don't think that it's more important for "everyone" to enjoy it in a shortened format than that the people who like it in its current format can continue to see the whole thing. If I don't like a game or story, I just don't play or watch it, and leave it to be enjoyed by the people who do.

I've written before that there are definitely places in which the overall playtime of the expansions could be tightened up by removing busywork tasks or moving them to sidequests, but I don't think that the answer is taking away parts of the story to appease people who didn't like the story in the first place. Even the apparently-necessary changes to ARR have pulled out at least one part of the story I actually liked - while I haven't played the whole thing to see what's been done, I've heard that the lead-up to Ramuh (with the sylphs playing pranks and transforming into copies of the Scions) has been glossed over with a sentence or two of dialogue. That part was funny, especially if you took the time to speak to the characters between objectives, and now it's just gone.

[Barwara]

But, at some point, something does have to give. Even if the story is amazing, when your ask for a new a player is for them to spend 500 hours just to get to the current storyline that everyone is raving about as being the best thing ever, it's just too much. So the option then becomes do you just ask them to skip the story via skip pot and potentially not experience it at all (and incur an extra expense just to do so) OR you condense the story in some way to make the 500 hours more easily consumable.

I've mentioned it before but I'll mention it again: instead of encouraging / pressuring your friends into catching up to you, go back and do lower-level content with them as they progress and be patient with them? That's what I do. Do you always encourage your friends to rush through everything (tv shows, books, movie series), just so they can get to the 'good part'? o_o Mine don't. They sit down and re-watch that tv show from the start, with me.

I'm sorry, I genuinely do not understand the validity of this argument: "I want my friends to catch up to me asap, who's been playing x number of years or months, therefore the msq needs to be condescend so they can get there faster."

Am I unexperienced, or do other MMOS give you access to all of the game's content from day 1? Isn't there always going to be a disparity between levels? If a game has been around for 10 years, I'd expect it to take a couple of months for a new player to reach the level of a veteran player.

The topic of ARR being grindy is kinda exhausted. We know it. Everyone knows it. Sure, they could do some more cutting here and there. Lots of filler. But beyond ARR the expansions seem to be just the right length. If you can't cope with the fact the game will keep having expansions that will continue to the story and making it longer, then don't play the game? -_-

[Barwara]

Also, another point. When people say the game should be a maximum of X hours in total, that means that with every additional expansion, the devs will have to cut a certain % of the MSQ in every expansion to never cross that limit of X hours total. Come on... that makes no sense. One day there will be no msq left.

FFXIV online is essentially 4 games back to back, not a single one that happens to be too long. You'll have to accept it someday and take it for what it is?

[TheMightyMollusk]

Why branch out when the same stick is getting so many bites?

[Tranquilmelody7]

I still feel, at thevery least ARR definitely needs more trimming.
It's a step below the expansions in term of gameplay and storytelling complexity and yet still requires by far the longest time to get through.

After dwelling on it for a while I feel the Crystal Tower raid series is more engaging from a gameplay and plot standpoint than the several dozen quests that were removed, but it still takes several hours to complete.

In regards to the point amount of time saved by removing and trimming several dozen quests I feel SE failed to condense the ARR MSQ due to mandating the Crystal Tower series.

[DPZ2]

In regards to the point amount of time saved by removing and trimming several dozen quests I feel SE failed to condense the ARR MSQ due to mandating the Crystal Tower series.

Or, perhaps, they failed to 'condense' (your word, not theirs) the ARR MSQ further because it'd be a different story? They dropped the post 2.0 quests from 100 to 80. They dropped the 1-50 quests from 196 to 165. They removed 51 quests in total, and still maintained the essential storyline.

Here's an idea, we start Heavensward right after Praetorium. Just skip everything from 2.1 through the last patch of ARR, including dungeons and raids. I'd bet that'd cut out a lot of stuff we don't really care about anyway, right?

No Ramuh, no Iceheart, no Snowcloak, no Leviathan, no Thornmarch, no Keeper of the Lake, no Chrysalis, no Steps of Faith, no Crystal Tower or Turns. Nope, replace them all with a 15 minute 'while you were gone' and move along.

Better still, cut every post-50/60/70/80 dungeon/raid instance, as well as the post-2.0/3.0/4.0/5.0 quest lines from the game so we can move along quickly to the 6.0 content.

Pfui.

[Ammokkx]

hahahaaaaa yeah no I'm so done with this thread

At this point I genuinely think OP is willfully ignorant and misrepresenting stances on purpose

[van_arn]

Apparently, the game cannot do anything, and the devs, apparently, can't do anything with the game. Why do we discuss anything ever, nothing can be done about anything!

The length of the msq is clearly a design problem, and the devs have acknowledged it as such with the edits.

I suspect the true purpose of ng+ is to permit a more drastic skip than what we got with the msq edits, but we won’t know until a future expansion is revealed. Long ago back in beta, they acknowledged the msq length would be a concern they’d eventually need to consider, and retiring level ranges might be necessary.

Now that the ascian saga is over, and now that the gigaprimal arc seems to be coming to a close, it may be time to shelf the entire storyline and only introduce players to a new arc. Maybe not this upcoming expansion, but certainly the one after.

[Shanst]

As someone brand new to the game going through all of this right now, I can tell you the game feels like a slog. The story eventually gets good, but the constant run here, talk to someone, run here, talk to another person and repeat that until end game isn't very enjoyable. It doesn't even feel like a Final Fantasy game. At least in other Final Fantasy games, there was game play between story. Besides the random duty, you really are in cut scene mode for 250 hours.

Now I enjoy the game and don't plan on quitting. My only problem is I've met people on other Data Centers, and would like to roll another character on their center, but seriously can't stomach going through these MSQ's and this story again. Once is enough for a life time. I also don't believe the solution should be give them more money than simply them providing a system that if you have any characters on any data center that has completed the MSQ's, you should be able to automatically have completed the MSQ on that account on any new character. Don't care about starting at level 1. I don't need to do another 250+ hours of content I've already done, just to play on another center.