Game Design Concepts that the Devs and Playerbase has Forgotten

[Magikazam]

1. This isn't an arcade game. Not every game needs to be styled after arcade games to be enjoyable. If you want the immediate gratification that an arcade style game can provide, play one. There are thousand of free to play games available to choose from.

This has nothing to do with Arcade game. People don't love being forced into long tutorial or just, bunch of back to back cutscene that lock you from doing what you want. FFXIV take 15 levels b4 giving you the option to even travel to other town or just do a dungeon, In those levels, you just get to play a very generic story that barely introduce scion and basic lore for each town. I could go on, but it no secret that FFXIV early game is bad in more than one way. People who get past the slug early game often do so cause they come in with the knowledge the game become better later on.

2. This game is built around the story. You can skip most of it if you want but that's going to leave a poor experience. Are you sure this is the game you want to be playing when there are plenty out there where the story is just an afterthought?

What if people don't like the story that much but like other part of the gameplay, or worst yet, what if they just want to play some new contents with their friendgroup? Having most of the content being locked behind story has it downside. Like, let say I got a friend who ''new'' into the game and he see me grinding Eureka and ask how to get there to play with me. Well, we can't just do something silly like grind one of his class to level 70 and walk him to Kugane. He need to complete MSQ up to stormblood end.

It seriously weird how people act like there litteraly no possible alternative to playing trought the whole thing or paying extra cash to skip it. I could even add that it funny for a game where story is important to lock tons of lore out of player reach cause we can't play 1.0 anymore.

1. 4. Good game design will be different things to different players.

Not really, it pretty clear what is considered good design or not. What people can argue on is how some bad game design can be used to it advantage. Take the exemples I just gave above with the MSQ. Locking all the content in a MMO behind a long story quest is bad design. Most people play MMO to interact with friends or just other people so locking them like that limit their options a lot until they spend hours into the game. HOWEVER, most people don't mind, cause that encourage you to go trough the important story and you can talk about and share the good moment you had in it with your friend group.