Quote Originally Posted by VirusOnline View Post
At some point we need an MSQ TLDR and allow new characters to play/start at the expansion before the current.
No that's absolutely atrocious. Why would you even care about the story if your experience is through a TL'DR? Do you approach a several-installment-long novel series and go "I want to skip to the latest book and just have a TL'DR of the previous installments?". You want to just be able to jump in at any random part of the story you feel like and experience in completely seperate and out of context? This story, and any properly told story, doesn't work that way. It's a long, overarching narrative, it's not meant to be experienced at whatever moment in the several-years long storyline you feel like, it's a start-to-finish type of story.

On top of that, unlike WoW, you are playing as the canonical main character. It wouldn't make any sense for a new player to just jump in whatever random zone in whatever expansion because not only would it be completely out of context it wouldn't even make any sense to them. You're not playing as some random, faceless adventurer you're playing as the main character who has an actual face and name. That type of approach works when there's basically no story at all and you aren't playing an actual character, or you just don't care about the story and just want the option to play whatever content straight from the begining. This isn't a proper theme-park game so that's not going to work.

If you actually care about the story than why would you want to experience it in such a way? May as well just buy a skip at that point. While yes, it's gotten very long, but if you're actually playing the game for the story it's just more content to experience and not an obstacle. The game up to stormblood is completely free, the story and all the other content prior to that expansion. I'm sure what they'll do is start making even more expansions free. Why does a new player need to jump to the latest expansion? There isn't any rush, the content isn't going anywhere, it's not like WoW where content becomes irrelevant permanently after the next patch.

This entire "gotta get to the latest expansion ASAP" argument that's been repeated ad infinitum throughout MMO's in general is predicated on FOMO, a consequence of games like WoW which make all their content irrelevant as soon as the next patch arrives so as to encourage you to FOMO in so you don't miss out. FF doesnt have that problem since they have managed to do what every one of these games should have done all along and keep their content relevant. You aren't forced to do anything, either go through the content as it was meant to be experienced (half of which is completely free), or just buy a skip. But WoW's approach to storytelling is objectively horrendous, it fundamentally fails at basic storytelling and no game, least of all FF, should be trying to replicate it.