quest design

[HappyHubris]

When I started playing this game, I was immediately struck by the fact it asked me to kill only 3 enemies for a quest. It made me feel like finally an MMORPG had been developed by someone who gets it. That killing 100 enemies is tedious.

So, although it may not be the best quest design, it is certainly not the worst when so many other games will have you farming easy enemies for hours to complete quests which is a whole lot less waste of time than, you know, actually progressing the storyline.

I took hardcore WoW Classic for a spin this year and realized how much I missed real questing after FFXIV. You generally fight mobs in the world, keeping an eye open for patrols, spawns, and other challenges. It feels much more engaging to fight your way into the jungle looking for an enemy leader than to walk to the glowy spot on the ground, clicking, waiting, and having a few easy mobs spawning. It's also much more fun to be given a quest, execute it, and then turn it in than to get drip-fed story by running from place to place and watching cutscenes. For example moving into some ruins to grab an artifact might alert you to the involvement of a notorious cult when you find their acolytes there, or you might see discarded gear from an enemy faction that tells you they tried and failed to do the same thing.

Sure some quests in older MMOs would have low drop rates, but that's a minority of the content. The model is more engaging than FFXIV, as you're engaging with the world instead of doing something entirely else on rails and watching endless dialog cutscenes

[HappyHubris]

I don't think there are easy answers to this because there are a variety of factors involved.

Technology (not everyone has access to the latest in hardware and fastest internet connection speeds), player skill, roleplay immersion (once past 3.0, the WoL's rather unique skill set has been identified and best saved for the situations that demand it, not common combat), the player's own concept of who their WoL is. Quests might feel simple in design but there's still many things underlying them that have to be considered.

This is silly, as MMOs have had engaging quest experiences on what would be considered a toaster today. WoW had massive success with more organic and challenging questing, and much much older-than-FFXIV games figured out things like phasing and interactive quests. My concept of my WoL is more active than running back and forth to watch dialog cutscenes, but I don't get the option to do anything else.

Could SE have taken the game in a more combat focused direction? Yes, but that's not the main story they chose to create. The quests in the MSQ need to reflect the story they want to tell.

I still think there's room for SE to create an optional leveling path to the MSQ for those with no interest in story but they want this to remain close to what SE envisions the Final Fantasy experience to be and a large part of that is story. It's up to the player to decide if the game gives them the experience they're personally looking for, or if they're better off playing other games.

You're creating a false dichotomy between story and combat. Many of these quests could easily be tweaked to reduce spoken exposition and increase engaging combat. Instead of moving to a designated point and spawning 3 enemies, why not have us fight into a building to eliminate the bandit leader? Instead of having a character announce in conversation that they've figured out the enemy plans, have us hunt down and loot enemy lieutenants to read letters that explain their plans. Etc.

Showing rather than telling is important in books and movies as well, and games have a level of interactivity on top of that. You can tell a story without endless "shot-reverse shot-reaction" cutscenes.

I've had alts that I leveled side by side with alts of friends. We'd stay somewhat in character as we chatted during cutscenes or talked about quest dialog.

You can also chat during combat, walking between encounters, etc. Indeed there are more hooks for RP as you're fighting into an area and looking for an objective, instead of watching people talk back and forth.

[HappyHubris]

To me the gold standard of questing has always been Guild Wars 2. The game gives you many options to gain experience: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Exp...ing_experience
-Main story quests
-Completing hearts, which are essentially areas where you can perform several different tasks to "fill up" the heart for experience. So if bandits were attacking a farm you could say kill bandits, put out fires with water, capture escaped livestock, or rescue farmers. Completion rewards currency and XP.
-Vistas: Where there is a point on the map you need to puzzle out a path to with climbing and pathing. You're rewarded with a cinematic vista and XP.
-Waypoints (reaching fast travel points) / Points of interest (reaching specific points on the map)
-Hero challenges (a climbing puzzle, boss, or event that rewards a skill point).
-Gathering nodes.
-Dynamic events, which are like what FATEs should be. Varied objectives that often create branching paths for a zone's story. So for example if you fight off the centaur invasion you might help the farmers rebuild, or if the centaurs are not driven off in time you might lead a revenge strike on their leader. Later on these turn into complex campaigns that involve zone-wide coordinate and culminate in boss battles and impressive loot.
-Adventures, where you are given some sort of challenge with Bronze, Silver, and Gold tiers. It might be an obstacle course with a timer, defusing X mines in a minute, or surviving Y waves in an arena.

FFXIV has the worst questing I've seen in any MMO. The MSQ quests are 90% just watching cutscenes, and it's clear that the developers love movie content and only stick a few gameplay crumbs in to technically make it a game. I dread the MSQ, because it's less interactive than a game and disjointed compared to a movie due to all of the traveling to point X. The open world is just a bland canvas to sprinkle a few fates on and to spawn quest characters on.