Quote Originally Posted by Djuntul View Post
Im a new player and only recently got through the main part of the HW expansion (lvl 64 now). Ignoring ARR (which was kind of a bad intro to the game as the story was very bad) i really like ff14s story. it has some really nice moments from action to even tear jerking. but thats just the culmination of events most of the time. 99% of the story in between those feels like monotonous, repetetive go to x, talk to y with no real purpose. its not actually progressing the story its just "oh theres a primal/empire/ascian threat? lets go find out more about it first. *spends 20 quests talking to different random npcs to find a way to reach threat*, *spends another 20 quests getting said things to reach threah* rinse and repeat. i often find myself detached from the world and story by those boring wow style quests and frankly am suprised as the community seems to glorify the plot like the second coming of jesus christ. i hope it gets more continuiously engaging with stormblood/shadowbringers
It's part of both character and world building. People in other parts of the world don't know who you are, nor do you know them. You've got to build trust.

Many of those seemingly useless things become relevant later. They're doing a good job of tying up loose ends ("why did we have to do that?" 7 patches later "oh that's why that was important to include")

Always jumping straight to combat would make our character feel like a Mary Sue, which quickly gets boring. Fortunately it's rarely 20 quests needed to resolve the mini-story arcs (Titan is still on the long side). It is usually just 5 or 6. It's the more important story arcs that take 20+ quests.

You can always choose to skip dialog and cutscenes if you're getting bored by it but you're going to miss out on a lot of stuff. I'm replaying MSQ right now and frequently posting screenshots to our FC Discord with "remember this dialog and how it seemed just random filler? Feels so different now with what we know after finishing 5.x".