Quote Originally Posted by DPZ2 View Post
The entire quest sequence leading up to Titan was greatly reduced during the Great Quest Purge. You may consider these as mere 'fetch quests'.

They are actually there to get you to places you need to go to anyway for the rest of ARR.

You go to the South Shroud (and get the Aetheryte) around the same time you have to go there anyway in order to get your Chocobo Companion started. You go to the Sagoli Desert (and get the Aetheryte) around the same time you have to go there anyway to for your Grand Company hunt log.
Yes it ultimately leads to Titan, but post Brayflox it’s not that bad and mostly on point. I just ran through these last week to get to Titan and it is absolutely still a slog.

Having quests that take us to ARR areas just for the sake of going there is not useful or good storytelling. At this point with the massive xp gain, there is really no drive to work on Grand Company logs until you’re already 50 and want to buy property. And the chocobo thing could just as easily be in the stables where most other chocobo quests are done. It’s just done the way it is to pad things out.

We just really don’t even need to go to several of these zones until later plotwise. They existed in 2.0 and sure might as well use them to pad content in 2.0’s game world. In the current state though, there are other story beats that utilize some of those zones in a much more useful way (like Little Ala Mhigo relating to stormblood), or alternatively job,quests like Whm take us through these zones which is a perfectly valid use.