MSQ

[ItMe]

Too bad they cut the quest where an imp disguises itself as one of the scions and you have to throw bombs at everyone to figure out who the fake is.
I liked that quest. It had a lot of good character stuff.

[Penthea]

Too bad they cut the quest where an imp disguises itself as one of the scions and you have to throw bombs at everyone to figure out who the fake is.
I liked that quest. It had a lot of good character stuff.

Really???? Omg I'm so disappointed! That quest made me laugh so much especially at the end. What a shame to remove it.

[wereotter]

Too bad they cut the quest where an imp disguises itself as one of the scions and you have to throw bombs at everyone to figure out who the fake is.
I liked that quest. It had a lot of good character stuff.

I remember being stuck on that quest for DAYS because Melt (one of the A rank hunts in East Shroud) decided to spawn right on top of Yda, and with hunt trains not being a thing at the time, I had to just wait until enough people came around to decide to kill it so I could progress the quest.

[Shougun]

Too bad they cut the quest where an imp disguises itself as one of the scions and you have to throw bombs at everyone to figure out who the fake is.
I liked that quest. It had a lot of good character stuff.

Ideally everything possible could be moved into a side quest, hopefully they can try that in the future. Although I think some trims cannot be done like that as they're done within the quest.

On the quests that would go out of sync I actually believe SE could get into using Echo more. Place a flickering sepia like npc with quest marker to represent echo quests.

A. Echo quests could tell stories you were never part of, which could be neat (great chance to tell stories normally not possible). Perhaps with an echo growth mechanic (experience manipulating your ability), so you can interact with the echo to learn things otherwise not possible (excuse for exp / fighting monsters, though it wont be timetravel just a high powered version of temporarily altering a potential reality, or echo beasts come after you.. that could be a new enemy type lol).

B. Slap stuff like this into that. You skipped the moment to play imp games? Can remember it later, just come back to it.

C. Changes over time that are community based might take advantage of this mechanic, allowing people to say for example see Ishgard restoration partially done (and interact with those entities).

Would need to make a difference between when you are generating a temporary alternate reality vs remembering something you just leap frogged though. For example coming back to do the imp side quest would be a memory you just kind of let slip through the cracks lol.

Also all of those sort of goes on my own fan theory on why we're timeless, which is just that we exist in an almost out of time state- so we could technically be helping one individual in one area and doing the same in another at the same time. Which also might go along with our endless stores of anima, when we are appearing somewhere we are not transferring our anima like a standard teleport everyone else does, but just rather appearing at that time in that location, one of multiple entities of ourselves that exist as a collection. "Why the heck would you think of all that?" lol. Mostly because we have a time bubble sort of issue, and my thought was perhaps not a time bubble exactly for everyone else - just more that we're timeless. So you might be doing a task with someone in the year 1050, and then the next hour working in 2060. There are a few quests that do have this out of order effect, if you do them that way, so just my thought on all that- is we're uniquely broken / out of sync. Sort of a our player is a Tidus of Eorzea like concept (well he was a dream, but the drift of that idea of being 'off'). Maybe go as wild as to say we're the echo itself manifest- birth driven by the mother crystal beckoning us to form, because why not.. lol.

I remember being stuck on that quest for DAYS because Melt (one of the A rank runts in East Shroud) decided to spawn right on top of Yda, and with hunt trains not being a thing at the time, I had to just wait until enough people came around to decide to kill it so I could progress the quest.

Oof. XD

[TheMightyMollusk]

I played Vanilla WoW. Anyone who thinks this game is bad about filler clearly never had to hunt the headless raptors and footless quillboars in the Barrens. Or run across half of a continent, without a mount (because you used to not get a mount at all until level 40), through hostile territory (where getting too close to the other faction's guards would not only aggro them, it would also flag you for PVP), to complete a class quest. And let's not even get into the old attunement quests that you had to complete just to enter some dungeons and raids. Or, for that matter, modern WoW's byzantine requirements to unlock flying post-Pandaria.

[Chie_M]

I played Vanilla WoW. Anyone who thinks this game is bad about filler clearly never had to hunt the headless raptors and footless quillboars in the Barrens. Or run across half of a continent, without a mount (because you used to not get a mount at all until level 40), through hostile territory (where getting too close to the other faction's guards would not only aggro them, it would also flag you for PVP), to complete a class quest. And let's not even get into the old attunement quests that you had to complete just to enter some dungeons and raids. Or, for that matter, modern WoW's byzantine requirements to unlock flying post-Pandaria.

Mankrik's wife is enough of a meme from those days to make threads like this laughable.

[Shougun]

Mankrik's wife is enough of a meme from those days to make threads like this laughable.

There were some filler quests of epic proportions in WoW, indeed- although I kind of like travel quests sometimes. Like was mentioned by another, sometimes contrast is great (you want it to be good contrast though, bad contrast is just filler- with some subjective values on bad). First time I went somewhere in WoW or FFXI (both games with more travel sense than FFXIV) I was absolutely in love with the idea. Missing the boat to get to the exp party which caused a 25 minute MINIMUM delay in playing what was intended (FFXI), was legendarily painful. That Zelda quest in WoW that was cross world and stuff, was quite fun.

On a side note (to TheMightyMollusk as well), just because someone does something worse doesn't inherently take away the point. The point itself may be wrong or right, on it's own merits, but it is largely irrelevant if another game did something worse. Like "but my friends let me do that, why can't you let me run in the active street!!!!" Or kind of reminds me of throw aside improvement because "back in my day we had it worse" lol. Sure, someone else did something worse- that wasn't the point though and it really shouldn't matter either (if the point itself is valid, which would be the argument anyways). Filler is named filler because it's filler, not because it was engaging fun content- ideally your game has zero filler (Realistically and practically is a different story Xd. . .). Contrast, quiet moments, etc, doesn't necessarily automatically equate to filler.

As said the later dinner in FFXIV was nice, but I remember some mindnumbing tasks in ARR which seem to have been removed (trimmed) anyways going off of Otter's post (which is awesome for other people's first time experience), and of course sure a lot of filler in WoW too, but I don't think people are trying to make WoW better, or that there is anything to gain by dissing WoW in that it does worse at something- at least when attempting to provide feedback to / for FFXIV. Which on contrast (calm zen vs hero in the burning village) vs filler- different than saying a steak sandwich is made purely of steak and everything else is filler (bun, vegetables, sauce), clearly a steak sandwich needs more than just steak- that contrast is important else.. well you don't have the sandwich in this case lol, but that you don't want your steak to have secret meat lol (you order steak, not horse bum - filler would be that which is just an undesirable distraction or low quality (with of course a heaping sense of subjectivity, which can make it more difficult to discuss).

[Tommara]

Stop thinking of it like "an obstacle at the end of the MSQ", because it is part of the MSQ. There is pre-credits MSQ and there is post-credits MSQ. It's a serialised story and if you arrive late, you need to catch up.

And from the perspective of someone who enjoys the story, adding that many fluffy optional quests that can't drive the main plot forward and can't be referenced later (except in further side stories) would not be a benefit.

Additionally, if they can't tell this story across the post-credits phase, they're just going to have to stuff it into the pre-credits phase and make that even longer.

Unless you pay to skip it all.

[Iscah]

Unless you pay to skip it all.

I don't see what relevance that has to my argument. Paying to skip it doesn't make it any less part of the story than the pre-credits part.

Also see my second post above.

[Tommara]

I don't see what relevance that has to my argument. Paying to skip it doesn't make it any less part of the story than the pre-credits part.

Also see my second post above.

You're right.

I don't have any issues wrt paying. If I could pay them to skip the MSQ content, I would, if only I could do them when I felt like like it. Can you?