The story is great, but it blatantly gets in the way of the rest of the game

[Tychonius]

The really big problem with the story is simply that it grinds your sense of progression to a screeching halt, and simultaneously gates content so any time you spend on other activities only prolongs how long your progression is capped.

You can't really progress your main class because you have no access to higher level content until you've cleared each expansion and post quests.
You can't progress any alternate classes, because the glut of the quests you're stuck on are max level for where the game has capped your progress.


The MSQ just doesn't meaningfully interact with the reward systems of the game, instead it locks you out of the reward system of the game. It just says "No XP or loot for you until you've done all of this". Sure, you eventually hit the point where you're level 90 on every class you want to play and you have item level 600 gear. Maybe then XP and loot don't really matter anymore and you'll be glad for story quests that keep you entertained. But trapping you in a false endgame for two weeks every so often while there is still endless stuff for you to earn is completely obnoxious.

[TankHunter678]

The really big problem with the story is simply that it grinds your sense of progression to a screeching halt, and simultaneously gates content so any time you spend on other activities only prolongs how long your progression is capped.

You can't really progress your main class because you have no access to higher level content until you've cleared each expansion and post quests.
You can't progress any alternate classes, because the glut of the quests you're stuck on are max level for where the game has capped your progress.


The MSQ just doesn't meaningfully interact with the reward systems of the game, instead it locks you out of the reward system of the game. It just says "No XP or loot for you until you've done all of this". Sure, you eventually hit the point where you're level 90 on every class you want to play and you have item level 600 gear. Maybe then XP and loot don't really matter anymore and you'll be glad for story quests that keep you entertained. But trapping you in a false endgame for two weeks every so often while there is still endless stuff for you to earn is completely obnoxious.

Only ARR suffers from that problem. HW, SB, ShB, all of their post launch patch MSQ can be cleared within a few days and then you are right into the next expansion. And that is if you are intentionally going slow and playing only a few hours per day. You can get it done in 1 day if you sit down and play through it. Not to mention only ARR suffers from the tiny xp rewards in post quests because at the time it was a question of "will the game last to even get a expansion?" where later expansions did not have that issue because the game was stable and not trying to recover from one of the worst launches in video game history.

Which is why they went and massively trimmed the post ARR quests down by just over half. We used to have around 168 quests between ARR and HW.

And the only thing that keeps your main class from progressing is class quests which is the 52-70 block. Aside from that you can easily use the market board to get gear upgrades.
When it comes to alt classes by virtue of the main class being higher they get a baseline +100% xp boost. You can easily get an alt job to level 50 in a weekend with just the hunting log and duty support, much less if you actually do leveling roulette each day.

[Tychonius]

Being able to grind through stuff, buy gear upgrades from the market or grind up other classes aren't a remedy to the problem that actually doing the quest yields no meaningful progress.

[TankHunter678]

Being able to grind through stuff, buy gear upgrades from the market or grind up other classes aren't a remedy to the problem that actually doing the quest yields no meaningful progress.

The progress you are making is progress on the story which develops the world, the characters, and the conflicts that drive the plot. Everything important to a story based game which is what the Final Fantasy franchise has always been about. So as long as you are doing quests you are making progress by FF standards. This is why the dungeons are all behind the MSQ, because unlike WoW you are going into those dungeons for a purpose and the dungeons serve the plot.

If advancing the plot and experiencing the story is not meaningful progress in a game built around that in a franchise built around that to you then just buy the skips. You won't understand a thing and the game is going to feel really hollow really fast and you will likely quit just as quickly because of how short endgame progress is going to be. This game is simply not designed the way WoW is.

[Tychonius]

The progress you are making is progress on the story which develops the world, the characters, and the conflicts that drive the plot. [...]

If advancing the plot and experiencing the story is not meaningful progress in a game built around that in a franchise built around that to you then just buy the skips.

This is a lazy argument. This is literally the only RPG in existence where progression and story don't flow together seamlessly and back each other up, but instead get in each other's way. That is the criticism I have for this game, and I'm not going to accept "If you hate that the story and the progression fight each other you just don't like the story enough" as an argument for why things should be that way.

It's a massive flaw in the game. There is no other RPG I can think of that has this problem or where this would be acceptable.

[kaynide]

This is a lazy argument. This is literally the only RPG in existence where progression and story don't flow together seamlessly and back each other up, but instead get in each other's way.

What does this even mean?

Also I could -literally- list several rpgs where progression doesn’t flow with the story, even going so far as hindering it.

Ultima Exodus being infamous, where leveling up is both a punishment and largely meaningless.

[Tychonius]

What does this even mean?

Also I could -literally- list several rpgs where progression doesn’t flow with the story, even going so far as hindering it.

Ultima Exodus being infamous, where leveling up is both a punishment and largely meaningless.

Yes in Ultima Exodus your stats are raised separately from your level and you can choose whether or not you want to level up. So if you increase your stats to max without touching your level you are proportionally more powerful than many of the monsters the game throws at you. It's also a game from 1983 and this type of advancement system hasn't really been copied to other games or is considered anything other than a flawed design.

Flawed advancement systems exist in many games. Probably the biggest one that comes to mind is Elderscrolls IV: Oblivion, where putting all the skills you don't want to use as your main skills gives you a much more powerful character because you only level up when your main skills go up, so as long as you don't put any of the skills you want to use as main skills you can raise them to 100 while the game still considers you level 1 and scales all content to level 1.

Neither of those are examples of a game where the story and the advancement work against each other though. they are simply games where the advancement system is badly designed and the most powerful characters are created by not using the system in the most intuitive way. That's simply not the same as a game where the story fits so badly into the natural progression of a player that you need to be artificially capped for significant lengths of time just so the story can be told.

But, more importantly, even if you could name other games with the same problem, how does that somehow excuse the existence of the problem here?

[Xirean]

This is a lazy argument. This is literally the only RPG in existence where progression and story don't flow together seamlessly and back each other up, but instead get in each other's way. That is the criticism I have for this game, and I'm not going to accept "If you hate that the story and the progression fight each other you just don't like the story enough" as an argument for why things should be that way.

It's a massive flaw in the game. There is no other RPG I can think of that has this problem or where this would be acceptable.

I'm confused how the two fight each other. Can you explain this?

[Tychonius]

I'm confused how the two fight each other. Can you explain this?

Essentially people enjoy multiple aspects of a game at the same time. They enjoy the challenge of a game, they enjoy expressing themselves through a game, they enjoy socializing through a game, they enjoy experiencing a narrative in a game, and they also enjoy a sense of progression in a game.

The most common conflict between different aspects of a game is challenge vs. expression. People want to express themselves through a game, which includes character customization, costuming, but also playing the classes or races that they think are coolest. People also want to take on the challenge of the game, which means being pushed toward building a powerful character. If the game isn't challenging enough to need a powerful character, or if being a powerful character excludes you from playing your favorite class or race then people would say the game is unbalanced. Developers strive to make sure that all the options you can pick as a means to express your individual preferences are also valid as a means to take on the challenge of the game. What's being balanced is two different reasons people enjoy the game so that they don't come into conflict.

What's coming into conflict here is people wanting to experience the narrative of a game, and people wanting to have a sense of progression. In order to experience the story your progression is simply put on hold for weeks at a time. The only way around it is to story skip and miss a large chunk of the narrative. Two aspects of the game that should be enjoyed simultaneously are put into conflict with each other, which makes the overall experience much worse.

Now, much like you have people who don't care about expression at all and simply play whatever is most powerful, or people who don't care about challenge at all and are perfectly fine playing a weak character or an easy game you also have people who don't care about progression or narrative at all. Most people care at least a little bit about all of these though, and having to forego any one of them makes the game feel a lot worse.

[Amenara]

Now that I am reading more posts the question I have for people opposed to making the MSQ gate less content is how does affect your ability to play or your enjoyment of the game? The MSQ teaches you nothing about how to play your character or be good at the game so making less of it mandatory won't affect the quality of players at your level or in dungeons you are doing, even more so with dungeons in ARR and soon to be every expansion soloable. If you choose to go back and make an alt and go through the entirety of the MSQ that should be a choice you can make, but if you would rather just skip the post ARR MSQ and move to HW I don't see why that is an issue.

And for the argument about just buying a story skip, doesn't that invalidate any point you would make about the importance of playing through the story? If the story is so important why would SE give you the option to purchase a way to skip it? Why not let people skip the post expansion content if they just want to keep pushing forward with their characters instead of holding them back to sit through story they may or may not care about?