MSQ Needs Further Condensing

[glitteringcosmos]

We aren’t talking about cash shop items are we? We’re talking about pruning/making the story non mandatory. If you would like to discuss that feel free to let me know.

Except that in response to your arguing in circles about making MSQ non mandatory, we are giving you our answer: they already HAVE made it non-mandatory. You HAVE the option of skipping the MSQ in order to “get through” to the content that you want. You keep arguing for something that already exists. And if you REALLY want to skip it that bad without paying, guess what? That’s an option too. It’s called ESC->skip scene.

BDO has very little story, people still go from lvl 1 to past soft level cap which takes longer than anything in this game, with only doing a few quests max. Did they not play through the game? Is that game not a mmo? How do you guys think people are playing other mmos with optional story? That are all doing better than XIV player base wise?

You’re comparing apples to oranges here. XIV ISNT AN AVERAGE MMO. First and foremost it is a JRPG and therefore is story-centric at its core. Besides which, as someone else mentioned, clearly FFXIV is doing something right, because it’s got the 2nd-largest player base of any mmo in the world, second only to WOW. Comparing player bases here undermines your argument.

Making it optional does not hurt anyone, at all or else every other mmo on the market would be dead and gone. The amount of MSQ had to be a problem, hence them removing some of it, one thing businesses will not do is extra work if it doesn’t benefit them at all. The retention rate had to be horrible and the feedback had to reflect too many MSQ to get caught up.

You’re wrong in this instance about businesses not doing extra work if it doesn’t benefit them. Multiple times we’ve gotten content because the developers worked on it on their own time, because they knew the players asked for it and wanted it. That’s how we got flying in ARR zones.

Making it optional does in fact hurt players. Those who want to play the story are already rushed and pressured to skip cutscenes in group content, or risk getting left behind. Making MSQ optional would only exacerbate the issue.

Also most people know they will have to catch up is one thing to gate them with story (long queues if dps which is out of their control) and another to gate with actual progression which is what most people play mmos for...progression.

Progressing through story IS progression. MSQ remains the single best way to level your main job. That’s the incentive to play MSQ for those who aren’t necessarily in it for the story. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, and no amount of snarky comments and whining is going to change that.

Removing the MSQ gate to content is never going to happen in XIV, because there are ALREADY means in place to circumvent it if you absolutely CANNOT be bothered to play it.

[glitteringcosmos]

I will ask again, how much of your game time was spent doing just the story? Was it 80%? I somehow doubt it.

Between the main story, and the job stories, and the role stories, and the relic stories, and the raid stories, and the alliance raid stories, and the deep dungeon stories.... yes, I can easily say I spend 80% of my time playing story. And that’s not including my annual new game plus run. Before you say “locked just behind MSQ,” job and role abilities are locked behind their respective quests too, and some content is even locked behind other optional content (Ivalice gating Bozja, and E4S gating TEA Ultimate, for example) so you can’t have one without the other.

[glitteringcosmos]

Spamming through quests is not "playing through the game" a person still has to go from lvl 1 to max level, that is playing through the game. Regardless of if it's spamming through quests, mob grinding or dungeon grinding getting to max level is playing through the game.

Also in response to this response supposedly quoting me saying: "If you don't do quests you aren't playing the game" -- I never wrote that. Go back and reread all of my comments. Not once did I say that. I'm here to discuss and debate all you want, but DON'T distort what was said to fit your narrative.

[kaynide]

...

Kind of echoing what’s been said, but to reiterate: SE cares very deeply about story, and want people to experience it. They made it very clear when they removed the option to skip cutscenes in the final two 8-man dungeons of 2.0. They don’t want players penalized by wanting to see the story (ie get left behind). If you don’t want to do story content, you can pay so skip it. If you still don’t want to and/or don’t want to pay, why are you playing?

This isn’t meant as a “don’t like it, then leave!!” statement, but rather a request to take a look at the game situation and if you are enjoying some aspect, then great! But if you’re hating it, there are other games that are much better in some aspects or another and maybe try them out? Myself, I check in but I’m kinda done until the next expansion. I could do an alt, or I could catch up on Guildwars or finally dig into Sekiro...

If you are talking about a rush to endgame “where the game really starts” in most MMOs, this one not so much. The end game content has always been fun, but lackluster in the long term.

[glitteringcosmos]

As SE themselves said so, this is not just an MMORPG, it is a Final Fantasy MMORPG... it is a Final Fantasy game too, a main numbered one to top it... the story needs to be there even if it practically resembles a single player story focused RPG. I think they are already trying to balance both as much as they can though there should be improvements.

THANK YOU. I'm not here to preach and say MSQ is perfection (especially not ARR), but XIV is, before anything else, a Final Fantasy game. People need to get that through their heads. Without the story it wouldn't be what makes FF games so great. And my problem with pruning, even though I acknowledge that ARR is a slog, is that not everyone is going to agree with what gets cut out. For example: the quest "The Warden Works in Mysterious Ways." They cut that from the MSQ for utility, because it was a quest which gave you no significant reward utility wise and made you trek across the span of the map. But I argue that it was one of the quests that SHOULD have been left in, given the emotional impact of that scene and its relation to the story arc then AND the revelations we know now, with post 5.4-o-vision. They're never going to make everyone happy no matter what or how much they prune out, so I say they should just leave it as is now. No more cutting, because inevitably someone, somewhere is going to wish they hadn't done it, and I think leaving it as-is is the fairest way to go about it.

If you don’t wanna play the game buy a skip, don’t wanna spend money play somthing else don’t have the whole game bend at your whim

This is it. This is the comment that sums it up.

[Reyketi]

I don't know what you're trying to argue. Executives wouldn't want people to be able to pay for a skip? And how does recommending a skip equate to re-raising a barrier to entry that has already been lowered?

If players use skips, that's good for the corporate side of the company because they get more money upfront.

Also you don't need to sign off in every single post. Stick it in the signature field.

I've explained this, in a previous post.

The latest xpac, skips, and a subscription will cost a new player ~$115.

What will a new player think when they're told they can either play through hundreds of hours of required story just to catch up to their friends/get to the latest content

Or

Pay $115

Best Wishes

-Reyketi

[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.

[Masked-dingus]

I've explained this, in a previous post.



Best Wishes

-Reyketi

Trust me, most of the newcomers, at least mostly oll the ones i know, will gladly pay to skip all the story and actualy '' play '' the (end)game, and that is the only reason why skip exists, because SE understood that

On another note, i red somewhere that SE care deeply about the story, maybe this is true, but as someone who got bored by the neverending Ascian copies, i can't comment on that

[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.

[SturmChurro]

Between the main story, and the job stories, and the role stories, and the relic stories, and the raid stories, and the alliance raid stories, and the deep dungeon stories.... yes, I can easily say I spend 80% of my time playing story. And that’s not including my annual new game plus run. Before you say “locked just behind MSQ,” job and role abilities are locked behind their respective quests too, and some content is even locked behind other optional content (Ivalice gating Bozja, and E4S gating TEA Ultimate, for example) so you can’t have one without the other.

We are talking about Main Story Quest. Much of the "story" of what you have described is end-game content, or "story" content aside from it. You cannot even get to much of the "story" you have described unless you have already done the MSQ. At that point people can skip dialogue to their hearts desire and play with their friends. "Locked behind MSQ" is a big deal, as described by this thread.