In the months before the MSQ revamp, Naoki Yoshida told Eurogamer that the quests they were going to remove from the MSQ would remain as optional side quests for people who didn't want to miss out on the original content or any of the lore.

"Those quests that are decommissioned, we didn't really remove them completely," he says. "We moved them to side quests. For anyone who has the time and wants to dig more for lore and stuff like that, then they can spend time on it."

( https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...to-new-players )

However, that does not appear to have happened. I'm currently leveling a new character and I have yet to find a previously-required Main Story Quest that has been converted into a sidequest. Both the GamerEscape and ConsoleGamesWiki wikis seem to indicate that all the quests removed from being a mandatory part of the MSQ have simply been removed entirely from the game. I can't find a single one that has become an optional sidequest instead.

It also does not appear as though the quests can be replayed with New Game Plus, even if your character completed those quests in the past, before the MSQ was truncated. The quests appear to be completely gone from the game.

Was Yoshi-P misquoted or mistranslated in the Eurogamer article? Or are the former main story quests still going to return as sidequests in the future?

I would personally like to see these missing quests return as strictly optional sidequests. They could be unlocked through progression in the MSQ, and made available either through the NPCs that originally offered them or through New Game Plus. The scripting for the quests already exists, so I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to make them available again to players that know where to seek them out.

Give us a way to hang out with Miner Tataru again!