Quote Originally Posted by Elexia View Post
^ I did CoP when getting off of the first 2 floors of Promyvion were near impossible as no one had any idea about anything. Aka in 2004.

I'm full in support of this as I love going through challenges and using storyline (with people, MMORPG remember.) and unlocking final areas. Zilart and CoP is why I felt like FFXI was actually a FF game. You don't just wander up to an airship, talk to an NPC and go straight to the Red Moon, nor do you go straight to the northern crater in FFVII not to mention I'm pretty sure you don't talk to Queen Brahne and get sent to the Crystal World, especially "by yourself."

The only issue as stated is when most are said and done with it, but the problem with that mainly is in comparison to FFXI, XI added a new expansion every year basically, Zilart in 2003, CoP in 2004, ToAU in 2006 and WotG in 2007, so people who moved on went to the next line of missions and new people were stuck. XIV we don't even know if they'll have one expansion (for argument sake) or updates that are expansive enough to push everyone forward like that so there's a good chance the same issue wouldn't happen.

In XIV the only real issue was trying to do early GC missions where no one liked helping people, THAT is a more likely problem than from a game design perspective, you can offer 8 million gil to repeat it and people still won't help after awhile.
The biggest problem I have with XIV currently story line wise is I don't feel challenged. There's nothing the game has that reminds me of doing the "Airship" fight or hell even those stupid pots in Sea. Van Darnus was fairly "average" in terms of difficulty, and the riding the airship to the final encounter like you said was sort of dull. Perhaps it would have been cooler to fly that pile of rocks and have us go through a raid or something then fight a beef van darnus. Then again obviously given the overall situation with XIV and ARR, we all know that never would have happened.

Not everyone will agree, but personally for my story content I want the highest difficulty version first. I don't like running through easy mode, then hard mode. Stop wasting my time and let me choose hard first (betters my experience). Then let me unlock future areas that have NMs and/or end game content. That's what I hope to see in ARR.