MSQ Needs Further Condensing

[Soge01]

Honestly, the only way you can condense anything and keep it staying fully functional with minimal to no problems is if you call upon Ultimecia the do it for you.

[Ammokkx]

Speaking of anecdotal evidence, by the way

I see a lot of "The friends I introduce quit because of the story" n'd all that, but I'm both a friend that got introduced and I introduced a friend of mine on top. Both me and my friend absolutely love the story in the game and it's the thing that kept us playing.

That obviously means there's nothing wrong with the story and should keep it as-is, right?

Well, no, but that exact kind of reasoning is what I've mostly been seeing on the "cut down on it" side of things. The most reasonable arguments in this thread are the ones who actually point to specific sections of the story and say "cut those" instead of just blanket going "cut stuff" since the latter is pretty worthless.

Also, I don't think skipping the story is an invalid way to play. Not everyone's going to care and that's alright. Thing is, while I don't force my "you should watch the story" viewpoint on you by making cutscenes mandatory or something to that effect, neither should you be forcing the "who cares about the story" viewpoint by trying to hamstring the experience for others through making everything open to the player. It doesn't make a lick of sense for you to be in Norvandt without the Exarch yeeting your soul first, and making that area open to the player without that specific context does hamper the enjoyability to me. Landing in Lakeland and getting the 'ol "oldest joke in the book" treatment when you say night is meant to be dark is one hell of an entrance, and arriving at the Crystarium is a pretty grand occasion for it. The city is beautiful and grandiose and stands as a testament to the resilience of the people willing to build a new life. Just making it an area you have blanket access to without first going through all those steps just takes away from the experience and would reduce the immersion inside of the world.

One of the biggest problems facing WoW's story is that you're just some guy who was there. While this approach works for some, others feel slighted by how their character isn't really relevant to anything that happens, ever. FFXIV's mandatory story and high focus on your personal adventure is, whether you like it or not, a big part of the game's core design.

We do have endgame content, this is true, but we also have so much content before that which will always be relevant due to the duty roulette system. The game doesn't just want you to experience what's at the end, but also what's come before. If you'd rather not, this is also fine, it gives you that option. But stuff like the level 60 and 70 raids are still accessible, the queue times don't take forever and, most importantly, they have a story to tell that it wants you to experience for yourself.

Not all of the story content is good, but the MSQ is kind of the window in which the game frames itself. And, as others have said, there are plenty of options to make it go by much faster. Just skipping the cutscenes alone makes it a chain of quests that get you to level really quickly (and you can purposefully die in duties so you can select the "very easy" option after) and if you can't even be bothered to take the time to do that, a level skip is available that gets you up to speed on latest content. I don't really agree with the practice of monetizing this, but at the very least it signals to the average player that it is not what you are meant to do to experience the base game.

The biggest pushback seems to be from people who want to play alternate characters, and that seems somewhat reasonable on the surface, but you can do pretty much everything save the starting city story quests and a few branching paths on one character. The game doesn't really encourage alts at all, even if it allows them. That being said, I think if you had a character who completed the story up to a certain point, it wouldn't be unreasonable to be allowed to start a character that has reached an equal point of progression. Unfortunately, with level skips being a thing, there's very little chance of this happening.

[Xeronia]

Have people actually went back and played it after the cut? I found 2.4 was now a jarring horribly paced mess due to the cuts and the Crystal Braves plot feels rather slapped together with all the cuts it received. Don't get me wrong there are other areas that could use some better flow adjustments to them but overall aside from 2.4 the rest of the ARR patch content flowed pretty well. Base ARR only felt long towards the end which well it is the ending you can't adjust much there that wasn't already removed.

[glitteringcosmos]

Have people actually went back and played it after the cut? I found 2.4 was now a jarring horribly paced mess due to the cuts and the Crystal Braves plot feels rather slapped together with all the cuts it received. Don't get me wrong there are other areas that could use some better flow adjustments to them but overall aside from 2.4 the rest of the ARR patch content flowed pretty well. Base ARR only felt long towards the end which well it is the ending you can't adjust much there that wasn't already removed.

I'm replaying it now in NG+ and I agree with you. But it boils back down to my earlier comment, that no matter what gets removed and what gets left in there's always going to be someone who disagrees with what gets changed. I wish they'd left well enough alone, to be honest.

[SavishSalacious]

This is not the game for you OP. This games main focal point is that of every other FF game, story.

You don’t like story, you want raids and dungeons and end game content, I think there’s a game for you. It’s called wow. Go play it.

I do agree that the fetch quests should be removed but even then some of them are like tv shows where you learn more about the characters and what not at the end of a filler episode. (Who remembers tv shows being 22-26 episodes per season)

[Reyketi]

This is not the game for you OP. This games main focal point is that of every other FF game, story.

You don’t like story, you want raids and dungeons and end game content, I think there’s a game for you. It’s called wow. Go play it.

I do agree that the fetch quests should be removed but even then some of them are like tv shows where you learn more about the characters and what not at the end of a filler episode. (Who remembers tv shows being 22-26 episodes per season)

I've read comments exactly like yours, above, many times, with respect to this topic.

However, the precedent is already set, with the condensation of the MSQ.

SE thinks the length of the MSQ is a problem, your preferences, or mine, are irrelevant.

Best Wishes

-Reyketi

[SnowVix]

I've read comments exactly like yours, above, many times, with respect to this topic.

However, the precedent is already set, with the condensation of the MSQ.

SE thinks the length of the MSQ is a problem, your preferences, or mine, are irrelevant.

Best Wishes

-Reyketi

they trimmed the fat. there's no more fat to be trimmed, without affecting the meat itself.

[Kamatsu]

they trimmed the fat. there's no more fat to be trimmed, without affecting the meat itself.

See, to these ppl - that's the problem. too much meat. They want to bypass dinner and go straight to desert. IE bypass the story and get into repetitive grinding of the same dungeons, trials, and raids.... as a small percentage of MMO players want to do in MMO's. Read their comments and you'll see... they want MSQ either completely removed for them (ie 100% optional) or gutted for everyone... just so they can get to max level and grind away.

Yes they are a small percentage of the MMO gaming community, that has in too many games receieved abnormally high dev attention for their numbers.

Classic example is WoW - a classic 'raid' styled MMO, where the story (up till say the last 5? years) was completely ignorable and a big focus of dev's was, and is, on raids. Yet if you go back in time to Dev interviews and comments back in 2010-2012... you'll see that up to that point only around 7-8% of their active player base had ever stepped into a Raid. So a MMO that was so heavily raid-orientated... couldn't even get 10% of it's playerbase into these same raids that Dev's wpent a lot of time working on. This is why they were doing things such as moving the top raid from vanilla wow to the base raid in WotLK, working on and adding in "looking for raid", then tying in more and more story elements into the raiding system... to firstly encourage ppl into raiding, and when that didn't work... to force them to do at least parts of the LFR raids to be able to get through the expansions.

If a game such as WoW, a raid-centric MMO, has to use force to get ppl to raid... cuz less than 10% would do it otherwise, it says exactly how big the "rush to endgame and grind" playerbase it. These stat's in regards to raid players was backed up by comments from other games such as LotRO, STO & ST:TOR who all stated the % of players involved in their hardcore/endgame content was small.


As for the "Well, SE already cut some story down so it'll happen again" commentary - what they cut was parts of the MSQ that have been complained about for many years, by both story-driven/focused players and those less inclined to worry about the story. In fact, the sections they shortned are the only area's I've seen ppl stating it was a slog and should be removed/re-worked. So SE have done that... and without shitting over the story, doubt you'll see much more cut from the game.

Going back to the WoW / FFXIV comparison - While WoW pretty much stayed raid-focused (to the point of forcing it on ppl who didn't want to raid), XIV took a different angle. It focused more on the story, and everything else was additional stuff to appease the different taste's of the different players. Mostly story, with some dungeon/raid/trial grinding for those who did, PvP for those who did, glamor for those who wanted to be all pretty & such, crafting & MB for those types, etc.

Going on a personal anecdotal commentary here - I played WoW for just over 10 years. During that time I was a part of various different guilds on different servers. I was in 1 of the top raiding guilds that pushed for world 1st's come dungeon & raid releases (I was in the B/C team, so more casual raiding for me), as well as a few 'casual' guilds which just focused on playing, doing stuff we had fun with, etc.

The raiding guild was tiny in comparison to the social guilds. Our competitor raiding guilds were tiny as well. The social guilds had huge # of active players all doing various different things. Most were slowly working through the story, but some were focused on doing crafting, some were into doing RP (not ERP) stuff, some were just having fun grinding reps where possible without raids, some did do casual raiding, etc. They were hectic as hell with in-game chat going non-stop, multiple different channels on voice-chat for ppl... way, way, way bigger and more active and spread out in what they were doing in the game than the raiding guild.

We also had connections to other social guilds... which were all the same as ours - big, boisterous, full of ppl doing story, old dungeons, crafting, rp'ing, pvp, etc. It's bizarre when you consider it... here we were playing a supposed raid MMO... yet the vast majority of it's playerbase had absolutely no interest in raids.

Back to XIV - I see these threads come up now and again, and it's usually the same tired old arguments about "We just want to get to endgame without paying", as well as "SE should do this cuz there's HUGE amounts of ppl who would come play and they'd profit big time from it", etc. Always a vocal minority screeching for it.

You know what - I support you. Let SE add in a different sub - same cost as the current sub, so no quibbling about paying extra or such.. You pay that sub and no MSQ for you. You'll have every dungeon, trial, alliance raid and raid unlocked from the start. However you can *only* do these dungeons, trails, & raids with ppl on the alternative sub. You don't have to worry about subbing, you get access to all hubs in the game from the start... but can do no side-quest's, no beasttribe quest's... nothing PvE related other than grinding dungeons, trials, and raids with like-minded ppl.

[van_arn]

You know what - I support you. Let SE add in a different sub - same cost as the current sub, so no quibbling about paying extra or such.. You pay that sub and no MSQ for you. You'll have every dungeon, trial, alliance raid and raid unlocked from the start. However you can *only* do these dungeons, trails, & raids with ppl on the alternative sub. You don't have to worry about subbing, you get access to all hubs in the game from the start... but can do no side-quest's, no beasttribe quest's... nothing PvE related other than grinding dungeons, trials, and raids with like-minded ppl.

Asinine. There are plenty of people that skip to the current era, find out the story is actually pretty cool, and go back and catch up storywise.

Furthermore, when 2.0 launched the length of the MSQ was reasonable. It's now pretty much eight times longer, and it's slated to increase to nine when the new expansion drops.

That is too long to expect a new player to sit through before they get to the "good part." And yes, gameplay-wise, it takes that long to get to content that isn't nerfed intentionally or unintentionally by class changes over the years or too-generous stat sync.

It's extremely easy to lose perspective on just how long the MSQ is if you've kept up with it for a while. I don't say we should just dump people at the endgame, but there needs to be a way onboard players faster so they get to the "real" game within 30-40 hours that isn't a lazy copout of just skipping players with a potion.

A trilogy of books with an amazing ending isn't an amazing trilogy if most people can't suffer through to the end. The same concept applies to the MSQ, even though this is an MMO. Story is story, and a well-told story cannot be a well-told story if it overstays its welcome.

Abridgment for new players is mandatory with a story this long. Keep the full-length scenario in New Game+.

[Reyketi]

See, to these ppl - that's the problem. too much meat. They want to bypass dinner and go straight to desert.

The MSQ can be likened to an undercooked porkchop.

There are varying qualities of meat.

I prefer filet mignon, as opposed to the undercooked porkchop.

Best Wishes

-Reyketi