MSQ

[LianaThorne]

They tightened it up a hair but potential players still bounce off the 100+ hours of mandatory story before endgame (and that's only if they're skipping cutscenes). I certainly do not recommend XIV to anybody but the most hardcore story fanatics and even then I'm very explicit about the amount of story grind there is.

Story gating instances is just as bad as instance gating story and this game has both in spades.

I don't consider myself a hardcore story fanatic in the slightest and still made it through in a month. Maybe because there's more than just the story to keep me interested in pushing forward to end game. I also struggled with the length of the story at some points but kept going because I had goals in mind. I wanted to hit end game crafting, I wanted to do savage raiding, etc. Like, I'm confused why people are surprised at the length of the story when this is an FF game and they generally are story focused over anything else.

If you look at it as putting things behind a wall, there's also a thing called a story skip that you can use to skip to the start of ShB.

Grind it out or P2W, your choice at the end of the day. And like others said, if neither suit your fancy there are plenty of other games out in the world to enjoy.