MSQ

[linayar]

When you hit start, and make a new character, you should receive a prompt which could be either: Experience an overview of the story so far (I believe Kingdom Hearts had something like this in one of the remixes), or "Skip" which would function, essentially, as a MSQ Skip from the Mogstation. With, still, the option to play through the game normally (as in, full MSQ).

As long as choosing skip means you cannot do the MSQ unless you use a different character or use New Game+, I have no problem with that.

My concern is to keep all the "strings" attached and not to disconnect them. The boost does not disconnect the strings. It just marked the relevant quests complete and opened up the relevant content with those MSQ completed.

What I want is for the devs to design the MSQ with those attached strings in mind, thus keeping the importance of the story relative to those contents.

[VelKallor]

MSQ is integral to the FFXIV experience

This, i believe is the key element.

Ive done it two or three times, and in all truth even though I have, there are still tiny gems or nuggets or instances or events I havent done fully, or see new things on the way.

No spoilers, but there have been tiny tweaks all over the place, i tripped over one at the start to Heavensward and was "wait, what, that wasnt there before"......the devs are making small changes, I wont call them easter eggs because that doesnt fit the concept, but small quality of life and nuances have been added and we havent been told...they want us to find them.

The one I saw had me laughing in sheer delight, the smaller details make all the difference.

I DO understand and accept that for many, a skip is a good idea for their own needs..but to be honest, in my estimation, by doing so you miss those tiny changes in the process.

Each has to make their own decision, I wont ever dispute that, just to me, its sad as you actually DO miss out on things you may never have seen before, or have been added along the way. One of the reasons I LOVE FF 14, that these tiny surprises are scattered all over and it makes a world of difference, its a labour of love in so many ways.

Each of us plays as we wish, with all due respect to my FF 14 colleagues, the skip does make it easier to get into latest content..at the same time ( and this is just my feeling ) people miss out on the work the artists and devs and writers have taken such pains to create..all for us to enjoy.

[ZedxKayn]

This, i believe is the key element.

Ive done it two or three times, and in all truth even though I have, there are still tiny gems or nuggets or instances or events I havent done fully, or see new things on the way.

No spoilers, but there have been tiny tweaks all over the place, i tripped over one at the start to Heavensward and was "wait, what, that wasnt there before"......the devs are making small changes, I wont call them easter eggs because that doesnt fit the concept, but small quality of life and nuances have been added and we havent been told...they want us to find them.

The one I saw had me laughing in sheer delight, the smaller details make all the difference.

I DO understand and accept that for many, a skip is a good idea for their own needs..but to be honest, in my estimation, by doing so you miss those tiny changes in the process.

Each has to make their own decision, I wont ever dispute that, just to me, its sad as you actually DO miss out on things you may never have seen before, or have been added along the way. One of the reasons I LOVE FF 14, that these tiny surprises are scattered all over and it makes a world of difference, its a labour of love in so many ways.

Each of us plays as we wish, with all due respect to my FF 14 colleagues, the skip does make it easier to get into latest content..at the same time ( and this is just my feeling ) people miss out on the work the artists and devs and writers have taken such pains to create..all for us to enjoy.

People who don't want to do the story already skip these details in the first place by skipping cutscenes and rushing through dialogue

Tbh that argument of people missing out can be made for literally any content the game has to offer, I'm pretty sure Savage/Ultimate fights take more work than the MSQ to program yet they aren't and shouldn't be mandatory.

[Tommara]

We're already....what, going on 4 expansions come when Endwalker releases this year? If they haven't bothered to change their formula years ago, what makes you think they're going to do it now? Clearly they aren't going to. If decide to do the next big FF MMO, whenever that might be, they could change things. Just uprooting with how everything is programed now will take a good chunk of money (no doubt). I'm no programmer, so I can't say for sure how messy ARR's code is. I'm sure changing the code of an entire game, when centered around the MSQ, could take many weeks to months. You can post your views, but SE isn't going to budge if they didn't when HW came out 6 years(?) ago. At least they eliminated all that needless filler in the base game (which is a good direction imo).

Just don't expect change from SE. They won't, probably not until FF14 is over and done with.

Actually, A Realm Reborn's biggest claim to fame is the dev's willingness to correct what wasn't working. That's the only reason why I keep coming back to FF14. Each time I have has been well worth it. I've played most of the PvE focused MMO's since Everquest and FF14 is the only one that play anymore, and has the best MMO community ever (the fact that almost everyone has been civil in this thread is awesome, and I'm in a really nice guild/FC, but there's not much they can do to help get through the MSQ, is there? since the grouping requirements isn't an issue), but I'm currently playing No Man's Sky at the moment and will abandon that when Ark's Genesis 2 is released.

So I'll keep my FF14 subscription active (because I very much want MMO's to survive and I'm betting on this one), even though lately I've been spending most of my time in games that allow me to do whatever I feel like, and every few days or so, log on to FF14 to whittle away the MSQ grind.

Edited Note: by "well worth it", I mean that issues that caused me to quit before have been corrected, for the most part. Only the MSQ being required before moving on to the next expansion remains a reason to quit. (and to be clear, all of the group content should be required before being able to enter a duty finder, it just shouldn't be required for doing the next expansion's content. Any protestions about "but you need to know the story!" fall flat since you can pay to skip them.

[Tommara]

My position's always been that MSQ shouldn't gate the game away in the manner it does, especially when most of it is a drag and, while it's an alright story, it's not going to shatter someone's world to miss it if what they want to do in XIV is located after it.

Like, it's an okay story. It's alright. If someone wants to raid primarily and doesn't care about the narrative, just... let them. Just let people pick an option, or something, that lets them get a massively streamlined story, or just skips it altogether without having to dedicate another chunk of cash for the privilege of not spending 80+ hours clicking on NPCs.

Especially when doing the MSQ is hardly content in and of itself, since it's just a click and point adventure game without anything interesting to do with the games systems and, even when you end up at Thordan with all the build up, the end result is more of a sad joke as your df'd group blows him up in a few minutes and you're back to "click npc, read. Move twenty feet. Click NPC." It's not riveting gameplay, and there's a lot of people who're interested in the gameplay elements that, in XIV, only end up fleshed out at the end game and are miserable to work with before then. I mean, I just go afk on some of the duties on the normal difficulty and somehow win. It's an extremely dull affair.

If the MSQ played like a game and not just the lowest budget movie you could ever ask for, maybe I'd hold a different opinion. But I also don't think the shining feature of a MMO should be the solo player experience, especially when it's more like a solo viewer experience.

Selling a solution to a problem isn't a solution to the problem. At best that's a scam.

And multiple expansions worth of hours to slog through terribly designed quests that promise just about 0 interesting gameplay fun from them is, despite what some people think, a massive turn off to people who do want to play a videogame at the end of the day.

Exactly!

I do want to play video games at the end of the day, and MMO's have been my favorite, although lately I've been leaning toward survival games instead. But I do want MMO's to survive.

Edited Note: I had to add this last part since "Exactly" didn't meet the forum's requirements for being long enough. Although upon further reflection, Alaray nailed it by saying that MSQ shouldn't be gated this way. Reading story should not be used as a gatekeeper before you can play the next expansion. Although absolutely, the story content should remain, just not as a gatekeeper. Gatekeeper requirements should be reserved only for joining public duty finders.

I actually have most fun crafting and gathering, but the latter can't get into zones until my highest level adventurer toon can. A huge step backwards from Everquest2 and other MMO's I've played. And is why I have been spending time in No Man's Sky instead, and Ark before that.

I brought this issue up because I really, really do care about this game. I've been playing Final Fantasy games since it was on the 8-bit Nintendo. Ironically, for their interesting stories.

[Alleo]

People who don't want to do the story already skip these details in the first place by skipping cutscenes and rushing through dialogue

Tbh that argument of people missing out can be made for literally any content the game has to offer, I'm pretty sure Savage/Ultimate fights take more work than the MSQ to program yet they aren't and shouldn't be mandatory.

So basically the solution is alreay in game. Either skip the cutscenes or buy a skip potion. Also Savage and Ultimate arent mandatory because they are not the main part of the game. Which is exactly what others said: MSQ is one of the if not the biggest point of this MMO. The team cares so much about story telling that every part of it, even things like Eureka have a story to it. Ultimate and savage are just there for the people that enjoy it. Just like gathering or crafting. None of those things are really mandatory either.

And its not as easy as to just make the story optional. Nearly every dungeon and trial is connected to the story. Do you just want to be able to unlock them without having any clue on whats going on? No reason to be there? Just so that you can run through a dungeon or do a trial? Or is this about reaching the endgame faster?

I actually have most fun crafting and gathering, but the latter can't get into zones until my highest level adventurer toon can. A huge step backwards from Everquest2 and other MMO's I've played. And is why I have been spending time in No Man's Sky instead, and Ark before that.

As someone that also is more into the crafting and gathering part of the game I do understand your frustration. But the zones are also deeply connected to the story itself. It wont make sense to gather at Azys Lla if you had not found it first in the story. Maybe Everquest2 simply had it not that way and that is fine.

Also NMS and Ark (games I also quite like) are no MMO. They are bascially sandbox games.

[ReynTime]

A perfect speedrun from Lv1 sprout to 2.55 in a single session, as a healer, in a preferred server, takes a little over 16 hours. And that's just before Heavensward.

That's way more than most offline story driven game speedruns. The ability to individually skip cutscenes and not read dialogue really isn't a very good solution for someone who's only interested in unlocking the content asap and not in the fetch quests.

That's at least 2~3 months of "skipping story" for a non-speedrunner to make it to 5.5. With possibility of it being a month or two longer because there will be points during which they might have to grind higher item level.

[DPZ2]

The critique is that it's a bad design for a MMORPG that hurts player retention a whole lot and making it optional would improve the new player experience tremendously.
Now let's see the mental gymnastics to say that "no, it's actually good".

Despite the critique presented, this MMORPG has been successful with its current design. You may call it bad design for your idea of the perfect MMORPG. Given the design of the single-player RPG's produced by the company, an MMORPG based on the same design - a storyline you go through while approaching max level - fits perfectly.

It's not what you want, but it is the company's vision of what they want.

[ZedxKayn]

Tbh there isn't much left to be said.

Keep in mind though, if everything related to the MSQ was as perfect as yall want to believe, they wouldn't have trimmed ARR a couple patch ago, and that was just a tiny band-aid on an ever-expanding gaping wound. The more patches the game gets, the worse the issue will be.

[Kozh]

Tbh there isn't much left to be said.

Keep in mind though, if everything related to the MSQ was as perfect as yall want to believe, they wouldn't have trimmed ARR a couple patch ago, and that was just a tiny band-aid on an ever-expanding gaping wound. The more patches the game gets, the worse the issue will be.

1) no one said it was perfect

2) they trimmed it because of y'all whiners who can't stop complaining how long it was. Now every patch is so short you can complete them under 4 hours. Maybe 6 if you reaaaaly stretch it out.

You keep saying it's hurting player retention, but I also have seen people skipping to endgame content, only to be bored by it because there's not new savage raid every month, and left the game.

Not saying this problem doesn't happen, but maybe it feels much more prominent since you are the one who has this problem. Most players, especially Japanese players, are satisfied with how ffxiv works, so I doubt they'll change the system. So either pay the skip potion, or play another games that's to your liking.

And to the other dude: "the game barred you from having mmo interaction before spending 20ish hours"

Are you sure about that? Because satasha, the first dungeon which you need to party with other players, is fairly close to the start of the game. And nothing really prevents you from interacting with people in limsa/quicksand/etc.