MSQ

[Shougun]

Probably not until the end of the saga, so at 7.0, but I imagine if they keep ffxiv as their flagship that there will be a sort of alternative intro, option. 200-300 hours to get to content someone was actually interested, and content designed more modern and competently, is going to become increasingly unacceptable to many types of players who would have otherwise been interested in the game.

On a personal evaluation of the game(s), I felt ARR had some interesting moments, many generally fun moments, usually story was interesting, minus getting people soup.., but there were a few moments I pushed through both in gameplay and story (absolutely not the worst mmo experience I've had, obviously what would be the point of playing a game you think was bad lol, but there were sections or moments that I did because I needed to do them, as the primary reason for engagement). Overall I also don't think the intro, past the cool cutscenes, is as engaging as one might hope. Imo FFXIV ages (evolves) well, improving and getting better as you go. Probably a primary reason I want to see the team with all their experience make a new one, right from the beginning. But it's fine if they want to carry on, they can obviously, just that I don't think all their best ideas and experiences are represented in earlier work and making that mandatory tunnel longer than the longest most well received sRPGs out there doesn't seem like the brightest idea to me.

To be clear I don't regret doing all the MSQ, lol, I enjoy the story- I can just see this sales pitch getting worse and worse each time they stack more onto it (better if you're deeply invested into stories first, worse if you're into gameplay and getting to the best experiences you had invested money for- since most hear about an mmo during media pushes like expansion releases), and I think utalizing MSQ+ replayability with a different intro could be good benefit (optionally). I bet the free to HW feature has helped a lot though, made the pitch far less aggressive sounding.