I'm starting to think that I should make a series of comprehensive lore videos explaining all the major points of ARR through Endwalker just for people who wanna skip but not be completely clueless as to who/want is happening. lol
This is what My Name is Byf does for Destiny's expansions and while it is a LOT of work, it always does well because you can do either a "Story So Far" or "The Timeline of Eorzea".
@@Lrbearclaw Yeah that's the only thing making me take a deep breath. Breaking down entire expansions in a clear yet efficient manner is gonna take a WHILE. haha
I agree. Some sort of easily digestible format like 20 minute segments covering the events of ARR and the patch marathon. There are so many important sections of what is otherwise a long and arduous climb. People roll their eyes at Moggle Mog but he was the moment we found out that primals weren't gods or necessarily born from faith. Iceheart was when we learned that a person could fuse with a primal and not only that, they could do so without losing control. It also set up a lot of the major global goings on that are the backdrop of big parts of Heavensward. Players that skipped the banquet in Ul Dah are going to be both confused and uninvested in the follow up.
Yeah, the map desperately needs icon toggles included vanilla. Of course there are ah, "workarounds," but the current state is just way too much clutter for a beginner to deal with.
I chose Ul Dah, and I found my way through it. It's pretty straight forward despite complications, but when I visited Limsa I vowed to return as seldomly as possible.
this is honestly why I didn't come back as a sprout the first time around. I tried it again with a different class and ul'dah was much more kind to me this time around
wife and friend both tapped before finishing ARR... its lonely on 14 for me. Biggest complaint i heard.. is SO MUCH BACK AND FORTH.. go here, now go back, oh go over there now go there, now comeback.
Haha, sometimes when i fly around in those old zones i keep thinking to myself that back then i would have run all the way from city to city while also avoding some of the monsters, oh and it took like 1 year before i started using the teleport system in cities :S
Gonna be real, just buy them the ARR skip. When I tried to get my friends into the game, I bought them all the story skip. ARR is an egregious waste of time and you don’t really have to know he relevant story going into heavens ward, especially since they bring up/mention everything throughout the first expansion. You learn everything about the game by the time HW finishes without having to dump 200hrs into ARR. it’s a fun game but ARR is a colossal waste of time.
@@QuestionQuestionMark agreed. I got to a point where I was just done with ARR and skipped. It was pure pain. No one who did the content gradually as it came out really gets that. I started around the beginning of Stormblood and completely missed endgame for that expansion, I hit max level about a week before Shadowbringers came and and that was the first expac that I actually got to play with everyone else.
One thing i think would help is giving new players mounts at like level 5, with full speed too. Also, giving unlimited sprint in big cities. It wouldnt be hard to implement and would help newbies speed along a little faster without skipping story. Just shortens the long slops when you gotta traverse half the map or the go here go back go there again quests.
That would prevent player to player interaction. Duties are airports. You run from point A to point B without stopping. So is not a place to socialize and know people. Limsa is also not the place as is just people talking to their own circle without regard to anyone else. Best experience is in areas where players have to interact with other players in a chill manner.
I agree with this. Sure it would maybe lessen player interaction but it still seems like a really good way to lessen time without rewriting the story. I played through the story on a new account as well as through NG+ with my main account and NG+ went by much faster due to earlier mounts and higher levels. Higher levels is obviously not viable for new players but mounts and unlimited sprint is. It seems especially good for ARR where a lot of quests are grindy fetch quests. Less player interaction is an existing disadvantage though
I don't see how player interaction is an issue here. Level 5 vs level 30 is a drop in the bucket and if people are going through the story as new players > theres a HUGE chance (especially KNOWING that this game is a heavily, HEAVILY story driven 200+hour story game) that they are not simply stopping to stare around at other players. And also lets be honest : Most early game expansion maps are dead - i just finished Heavensward 2 weeks ago and was alone and barely saw other people besides the few like 4 sometimes in the main town. Now i'm in Stormblood and its even worse. Give me that infinite sprint lol and mount speed. I understand it kills exploration, interaction etc etc. But this game has so many systems and longevity via side activities and endgame that it really wouldn't matter > as is, it just artificially lengthens the amount of time for newer players , further worsening their experience. This was probably acceptable or okay BEFORE shadowbringers but anytime after > give it to us.
I think this makes sense in today's gaming scene. I reckon the reason for the pacing before is to prevent clusters of players with the Viewing Cutscene status close to the endpoint NPC for a particular quest. It was prevalent in the previous expansions especially on odd-numbered patches where concurrent players flock those locations/NPCs and the area struggles to load the NPC (this was back when there was PS3 support and my laptop at the time needed some good charcoal to run lol). I think they handled that well these days with the WoL porting into the endpoint NPC/location at the end of some, if not most, quests, as well as splitting paths in the opening quests of the recent expansions. Nowadays, instances are created to handle huge numbers of players concurrently logged in, and those instances these days can substantially hold a number of WoLs (looking at you hunt trains and the grander boss FATEs). While I am more for the leisure walks, taking in the scenery and the locale while traversing the path from one NPC to another, a bit of QoL for those who wish to go a little faster on their quests probably won't hurt. We've seen that already with an improved questing in the later expansions, better map and Aethernet network teleporting within major hubs and cities, but a balance should be struck as it is a Final Fantasy game at the end of the day where the story and immersion are major parts of the journey.
One of the things that I wished you could do with friends as they go through the older content: be able to do Solo Duties with them. It suuuuucks to be playing with someone, doing quests together, having fun, and you suddenly have to drop party to do a solo duty as part of the MSQ. Being able to do them together would be awesome! They would be like miniature trials. Another thing: WoW has the "Quest Sync" system, letting you do a single quest or quest chain with a party member; something like that would be pretty neat. Sync quests with a friend for the duration of the party, then split again. RE: level sync, I still think it would be great to have the option to instead of level synching, you power synch. Keep your full kit, but the potency/recast timers/etc are adjusted so that your power level is appropriate for the content. That lets players keep playing with their full rotation, sprouts get to see the full glory of a high level rotation's visuals/complexity, but you aren't completely melting content in a way that prevents those sprouts from enjoying some of the fun mechanics or learning opportunities of low level dungeons. It would be a technically complex thing to introduce and would definitely need balancing and rebalancing every time you changed an ability, but...
This is absolutely the same obstacle that annoyed me the most. I thought it would be really cool to do NG+ along side my friends who were on the free trial, but there are so many solo duties, you have to disban the party all the time, and then wait for everyone to finish, and then put the party back together, only to have to do it again later. No reason you shouldn't be able to do them with friends. Just have other players not appear in cutscenes, and if it matters, add scaling depending on how many players are in the duty.
Yeah SWTOR has that too - you can join in your friends' class stories. Good system. WoW's quest sync isn't perfect because it doesn't line up with level sync but it's not bad. The real innovation WoW had was Chromie time, letting you do any expansion out of order which is freaking amazing and brought so much life and possibility to levelling rather than being forced to do the same routes over and over again.
I was going to basically say the exact same thing, level sync, solo duties and all. Re: level sync: I've seen the argument that "this would feel bad for sprouts because they would be seeing end game players showing off all these skills they don't even have yet" but like you I'd argue that it would actually feel pretty good for sprouts because they'd be seeing these skills that they'll be able to have sooner or later. Whether a sprout and end game dps of the same job/class, or even different jobs/classes, since every job/class can be done on a single character. Even just as inspiration that one day they'll be showing off their skills for sprouts too. I don't think it could ever sync down to a 1:1 match for power, just for the fact that end game players would have AoE skills that level 15 sprouts don't (especially those poor Lancers) so there's certainly going to be more dps being done just on that merit. But I think one way they could kind of even the balance, let's take a 15 sprout LNC vs. a 90 DRG. Scale the DRGs single-target rotation potency down so that it does the equivalent damage as the 15 LNC's two buttons they have available to them. Example: a basic single target rotation (not factoring in oGCDs for simplicity): 90 DRG True Thrust > Vorpal Thrust > Heavens' Thrust > Fang and Claw > Wheeling Thrust > Raiden Thrust > Disembowel > Chaotic Spring > Wheeling Thrust > Fang and Claw > Raiden Thrust > Vorpal Thrust > Heavens' Thrust > Fang and Claw > Wheeling Thrust etc. 15 LNC just doing True Thrust > Vorpal Thrust over and over in the same ~40 second time period would have the overall same or only slightly lower potency as the 90 DRG. Add a Life Surge for guaranteed crits on the highest potency attacks, 90 DRG gets 2 stacks while 15 LNC gets 1, so the 90 DRG would pull ahead some there. And the 90 DRG would also get Lance Charge, Dragon Sight and Battle Litany they could weave in, but maybe instead of +10% damage or crit rate, they would scale down to +1% in Sastasha and slowly scale up to their full potency in higher level content. So the 90 DRG would still "pull ahead" of the 15 LNC in overall dps, but not drastically. Lance Charge could scale up to it's full 10% by Haukke Manor (syncs to 31) since the 30 LNC/DRG could have it by then, too. Battle Litany would be it's full 10% by Dusk Vigil (syncs to 52), and Dragon Sight reaches it's full 10% by Bardam's Mettle (syncs to 66).
The problem with power syncing vs level synch is the design process. The dungeons, as you face them, are built with a certain set of skills in mind. Yeah, they mess with low level abilities when they rework a job, but they can give them a bit of a boost at low level so they still perform in those dungeons. Now, all that being said, none of that content is particularly hard. But there’s something to be said about preserving the intended experience.
If it wasn't for a medical issue that I had that kept me home bound for 2+ weeks, I never would have started this game. But it turns out, that it was the perfect way to jump into it. I truly believe that if I had tried to start playing under normal circumstances, I probably would have given up.
My sister's great filter was the registration process. Connected a paid registration to her PS account and tried to use the free trial. When I explained what happened she said "NOPE!" and hasn't attempted it since.
Xbox sprout here but long time fan. One thing I can totally see being an issue is new players spending hundreds of hours playing with just npcs so they dont have to wait for queue times FINALLY getting to current content and finding out theyve been learning the game entirely wrong all this time and have tonnes of bad habits ingrained into them.
the cool thing about the npc's is that they actually teach you the mechanics, so you wouldn't really be learning the game entirely wrong, you'd be learning it the right way so you can play that same level (or similar mechanics) with other players. so just watch what the npc's do closely, and follow their lead during boss combats
The thing is that nobody knows solution to this problem. I imagine even the dev team is super conflicted on their solutions and they probably talk about this as much as we do. On one hand this is a Final Fantasy game first and its literally built around the story ,BUT on other hand MSQ keeps getting longer and longer, its a problem that not only never goes away but keeps getting worst. I cant remember when ,but it was around Shadowbringers when YoshiP explained his idea for a solution to this problem, which was and Im paraphrasing. That easiest would be just have a cutoff point in MSQ and everything before that cutoff point wouldnt dissappear into the void but would just be optional like unlocking Alexander or Bozja. And the only problem he found with this idea was that there doesnt seem like a good cutoff point in MSQ (Shadowbringers during that time) and alot of exposition would have had to cram into new MSQ, and it would be just easier and cheaper to rewrite the MSQ. My idea has always been, which was sadly shattered by Dawntrail reveal, that 7.0 would go on like a normal FFXIV expansion but would be written in a way that when 8.0 comes around then they could do MSQ and level squish with a timeskip. So 7.0 would become the new 1 to 50 lvling and 8.0 would become 51 to 60 expansion. and everything before 7.0 would become optional MSQ with instance gameplay. Since they are updating graphics anyway I was hoping for a timeskip so alot of areas would get a little remodel and how things have progressed. But sadly looks like everything is same old with Scions all back togheter for a new adventure. Dont get me wrong, my idea also has alot of flaws like the biggest one is what to do with all the zones and dungeons that come with 2.0 to 6.55 MSQ. I guess they could also be unlockable with a simple storyline, like The Vault, where new players hear a story of what happened lorewise. Thoughts?
They could do as other MMO do and offer a level skip for free when you buy the expansion. But that would be sacriledge to a group of people that worships money as their god.
Yeah, it's a question of what the design objective is. If it's "everyone has the exact same story knowledge base" then the current system achieves that, I guess. If it's "as many people as possible experience the latest story and combat content" then it's failing and needs to be changed. So people will have to come to a consensus about that first. I think you're right, I kinda wish Dawntrail was a "catchup experience" much how WoW intended Dragonflight and BFA to work as "levelling introductions". But WoW is pretty sloppy with the story and FFXIV is much more tightly tied to the lore. So I guess YoshiP thought if that was the route, it'd take some more time to write and polish that it couldn't work on the existing cycle.
@@Anolaana I don't think it'd be too bad to have had Dawntrail or another expac (especially after wrapping up the previous arc) to have been a 'soft reset' of the story and a new starting point. Black desert does something similiar (yes their story is NOTHING compared to this obviously) but they have a system where new players can choose to start at the 'further' point in the main story -and get a cinematic recap of events with some dialogue etc- or the very beginning. New players at the further point I believe get enhanced xp and other bonuses to not be entirely fuk'd in a more progressed area which I get would ruin the leveling experience for some but I think thats a small price to pay if you just want to get to the 'mmo part' of the game. Of course this would probably have to be paid in FF14 since its essentially a story skip but the option would be nice. You're never going to make everyone happy with a game and as is - the story goers are VERY happy with ff14, it's everyone else that needs some QoL so it just goes back to ultimately 'what do you want this game to be?' pretty much like you said. srry i wrote all this just to say you're right hehe
I really can't agree. There IS a major problem, but it's not the length of the story, nor is it really accurate to say that it's story first. The later gameplay is excellent, as is a ton of the side content. And as for the story, generally known as the MSQ, 6.0 is a soft ending and we are now in the sequel. And that ending is built on everything that came before it, and it's a hell of an ending, and back 75% of the game mostly ranges from good to soul-crushingly good. If you don't care about the story at all you can still buy a skip. Unfortunately, I really don't see a good middle ground here like you're suggesting. There is no way to make a clean cut-off, even if they've they openly considered it in the past, short of altering the whole world, a thing almost no one who actually enjoys the game wants. At this point, the game design is pretty much set in stone, and one needs to take it or leave it, like a long-running TV show. Thankfully older content is still made quite relevant through roulettes and things like the Mogtome events, and even Wondrous Tails a bit. But there is still a major problem, actually two of them. One is that honestly that the first 5/6ths of ARR, representing about the first 25% of the total main story, is extremely uneven. There are still high points, and the last ~15-20 hours of ARR are pretty much fine throughout even as it juggles four different major plot threads, because suddenly everything matters and things start to come into focus as we shift completely away from beast tribes. Even the dubbing is improved by then. I'll spare you the four extra paragraphs I wrote and just say this: the biggest issues ARR needs a major all-around revamp. I know there are plot points that cannot be changed, but they can still re-write things, they can give us more of our job kits earlier with watered down skills that get upgraded later, and they can re-dub certain English voices. Those are the big things they need to change. They can also add more voicing in general, and not just to ARR, and they can also tease a few things more with little scenes here and there that pay off much later, but these are very secondary issue.
started in july last year, got to "to be continued" last week, it was 100000% percent worth it, it is now one of my favorite FF games, and im still hungry for more, i cant wait to enjoy an expansion on release when dawntrail comes out :D
I started playing at Endwalker, so the game was already pretty mature by the time I was playing ARR. And I've had a very positive experience. It's been a lot of fun experiencing this for the first time. Conversely, my friend originally started playing ARR back when it was new, in 2013ish. He got to 50, and then he fell away from it. Never went to Heavensward and beyond. But just last year, he picked it up again, and decided to start fresh with a new account. And it's been a real slog for him. Having to sit through ARR a second time, all while people are saying "oh it gets better later on, stick with it!" It's been really hard for him. And I don't really know how to help him here.
Frankly, they could comb through a lot of the earlier expansions to cut the "less important" parts of the MSQ into side-quests and not really impact the general plotline much while making it flow a lot better. They already did that once with ARR and frankly they didn't cut enough out of the ARR MSQ because it's still an absolute slog to get through and it has probably hindered more people from playing the game than anything gameplay-wise ever did.
Absolutely. There’s a ton of story quests (especially in ARR) that have no bearing at all on the overall story. It’s just going to talk to someone about making an item or questioning someone about something. Case in point, that quest where you go question that Roegadyn guy about the Siren, I think it was? Or some primal. And he’s a big liar and you have to challenge him to a rock breaking contest. That was cute and fun but it doesn’t need to be in the main quest. You could 100% turn that into a side quest. There’s countless other fetch quests like that in the main story that don’t add anything to the narrative.
I started a few months before Endwalker. I was able to binge the entire MSQ in about 3 months. Then I played through the Endwalker story when it came out and it was a grind for sure. But it was an amazing experience.
Moogle tome events, and the gold saucer are basically the systems we have for this right now, and theyre fine enough. Itd be nice if maybe we got a few big boss fates dotted all throughout, but that's also easier said than done. If you do have a friend, level an alt job with them, or do new game plus at their side, trust me it helps.
As for level sync, no one likes it, but it's honestly probably the best bad option out of a lot of terrible ones. One needs only to look at blue mage to see how little level scalling matters if abilites are kept the same. Meanwhile a lot of new players need the slow ramp up to learn how to do rotations comfortably. A few jobs could use some low level reworks, but not as many as you might think. If i personally had to be incharge of "make 7.0 an onboarding point" I'd see about spending some developer time on an msq "supper cut" a long solo instance that walked you through arr to ew as a series of solo dungeons basically. Cutscenes between every "boss" of the important clips, wattered down story bosses like nidhog, thorodan, and nidstinian for hw. Frame the whole thing as the WoL remembering each expansion in the days leading up the trip to the new world. Maybe even give you 10 levels of your job at a time with some tutorial of your chosen job while you're at it.
Natural color matches your skin tone better. Can’t believe I made it through the FFXIV msq. It is a slog. I started in middle of shadowbringers. Took me around 350 hours. A few dead hours of doing nothing while attending to work outside of FF. And it exhausts me now to even think of completing FFVII Rebirth and it is “only” 70 hours.
I've heard FF7 Rebirth is around 30 hours if you focus on MSQ and nothing else. But if you decide to 100% all of the side content... That adds another 60 hours or so 😮
I got really burned out doing ARR. The only thing that kept me going was being intrigued by the world enough to just do other things in game for a while before feeling ready to tackle MSQ again. But this was also the only game I was playing at the time. If there had been something else keeping me busy, I might not have bothered. All in all it took me nearly exactly a year to slowly work my way from the very beginning of ARR to the end of Shadowbringers. I love XIV's story dearly, but I really struggle recommending it to anyone, because I had such a rough experience with it myself. I think the story is what makes XIV great, but I can also really understand if that's just not someones cup of tea. Is there a good fix for this? I honestly don't think so. You are either there for the story or well, you just aren't.
Yes, you should! Watching this, I immediately thought of a movie per the game and per expansion. Is watching 5 or so 1 hour movies too much? Not at all if you compare it to time spent playing. I think it would be good for existing players too. So many things from ARR I kind of forgot about or missed as I grinded through it. I joined during Endwalker and so many things story-wise I forgot because there was just soooo much. I remember somewhere over the past year doing main story roulette Ultima “oh shit, thats Thandred as the Ascian?!?” How did I forget or miss that??? Prob because I was so focused on jamming through I skipped through cut a scenes early on, etc. Do it! 🙂
I have to add that a *huge* challenge they have is simple: they lock content behind the story. It isn't just from an MSQ perspective either. Lots and lots of Duties are locked behind quest-lines, which further limits friends being able to play the game together, when a few of the party simply cannot commit hours per day to the game.
FF14's greatest filter is 2.5 seconds and desynced telegraphed attacks to animations. why even have animations if they happen outside of what actually matters?
The core of the issue is in that the MSQ is a solo experience from start to finish. The game forces you to disband parties to carry on with story beats. The MMO side of the game has always been an "End Game" kind of thing, it's just that the goal post for "End Game" has been moved farther away from the starting point by what is now a considerable and daunting amount. Some people say upscale low level players so they can participate in end game stuff like 24 mans, raids etc. I don't think that's a great solution because it will almost always include spoilers (And put people into positions where not knowing their role or abilities is going to be detrimental to those around them. Downscaling to help others can be drastically improved by just letting us keep our full kit but with obviously less power, that being said we're still only "helping" via roulette in that case most of the time anyhow. I think what they did with ARR was the right move, but it needs to be expanded upon considerably. Remove all the filler quests, rescale the EXP you get from the major MSQ beats so that a new player can experience the story (without the filler garbage) while leveling up quickly enough so that getting to that end game goal isn't so daunting.
To be fair, sooner or later the devs are gonna have to do another level squish, which the best place to do that would be in ARR, meaning the devs are gonna have to make a number of skills/abilities get unlocked at earlier levels meaning ARR isn't going to be as boring in terms of what skills and abilities you have available to you. As for incentivizing playing low level ARR content, I'd say that a rework of wonderous tales is a thought that bares merit
For the longest time I was that friend who fell behind. Years ago I first tried 14 and I just stopped because of how long ARR took. It wasn’t until last year that I gave the game another shot and forced myself to get through ARR that I fell in love with the game.
Interesting idea. Golden Sun Dark Dawn had a feature where the dialogue text refering to names, places or events was highlighted and you could click on it, it would then display a quick explanation about said thing. Could be neat for long time players, returners and newbies alike, and if someone skipped some of the MSQ they could quickly know what's up within the same cutscene without having to go to the inn and read a long ass explanation for each character and event mid-msq.
I started playing last year and it took me 6 month to finish the story. But I had time for it because apart from writing my thesis I had no classes. I don't mind the story being this long, but the fact that you MUST do it to unlock 90% of the game can me intimidating for sure, especially if you come from other MMOs where the majority of the content isn't locked behind the story.
The strange part on my end is that a lot of people I knew who went through the entire story thought Endwalker was a good expansion to leave off on. Even though the lore is going to be connected with Dawntrail, people felt they were not ready for another 10 years of story, or at least not yet. Deep down, I think they'll show back up when the next expansion after Dawntrail is announced, but people sure need the break from such a long story.
If a completely new player shells out the money for Dawntrail on top of committing to the monthly sub, chances are they are either super intrigued about Dawntrail specifically or have a friendgroup of endgame players they're excited to play with. In either case they should absolutely get the option to boost at least one job straight to 90 and begin Dawntrail right then and there. Yes the Hydaelyn & Zodiark saga is amazing, but it is also finished now. To the point that the patch MSQ, while tieing up many loose threads, still felt like filler to many. In contrast there seems to be a lot of excitement for the new chapter. Dawntrail is literally a once in a decade opportunity for FF14 to perform this sort of soft progression reset and allow an entry point for new players. I think the devs would be fools not to make this possible. And when the new blood is hooked and have experienced Dawntrail to their hearts' content, they can still go back and experience the rest of the story, preferably via an automated New Game+ prompt. Dawntrail has got to be able to stand on its own feet, narratively and in terms of gameplay, both for the new players, but also to keep the interest of its existing audience. I, for one, am confident that it will, given the amazing jump in presentation quality that we saw in the 6.55 teaser chapter.
It is a must to understand all point of views. I helped some friends who just wanted to do endgame content so I suggered to skip, train them a little with 5 DJ (22,50,60,70,80) and then to latest content. And now they're interested to do MSQ. Just go with what your friend want and show them all the game can provide. Some will continue, other will come back a their leisure time. Thanks for your thoughs.
I started the game in August 2021 along with my wife. And I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan, so to me it wasn't difficult to get immersed with the story. And we managed to finish Shadowbringers storyline mere weeks before Endwalker released. One might say we rushed through the story, but we managed to do quite a lot of the other content before that. To have been able to play with my wife has made playing the game so worthwhile. We didn't know any people playing the game when we started, but now we have a lot of friends we love to play with. And helping newcomers is something we enjoy. It's like we want people to get into this game and ready for Dawntrail. We can hardly wait for it ourselves.
Not sure if this would work, but in my head it feels like it might. If there was an alternate "1 to 90" tl;dr story path you could do that condenses the main story quests of each expac into chunks with dungeon capstones at the end where the player would be level bumped into a level bracket where you would learn how the dungeon down-scaling works where you're limited to skills within that bracket. I don't think it would be easy to condense the story into the main pillars but if it got down to around 50 to 80 hours to reach the entry level of the new expac it would be a lot more approachable for newcomers than it currently is, and for those who want to play the MSQ there's always the new game plus system. It would be a massive undertaking for them to implement but I think it might be worth it.
MSQ has survivorship bias. Everyone who talks about it says to stick with it and thinks it's great, because it's so prominent and so unavoidable that anyone who DOESN'T like it doesn't stick around in the community to complain, they uninstall and leave.
I mean, if people jump into a story-heavy game and complain about the fact there's story, that's on them. Sure, ARR is bumpy given the circumstances of its creation, but the community also isn't collectively wrong in that it subjectively and mechanically improves from HW and onward. Now, the prior is also different than not enjoying the story itself and if someone wants to eventually tap out, that's fine. And yes, we also get the contrarians that slog through what they'll extol as the worst story ever, completely misinterpret or overlook pertinent plot points, and inevitably use that as the foundation of their hatred and how XIV should shift away from story and be... some other kind of MMO that's either numerous and/or has already failed in multiple iterations before. MMO tribalism being what it is, sometimes it's just hate for the sake of hate. Frankly, that's where the whole "suvivorship bias" feels like it's coming from, too. Wanting to feel smarter or more enlightened for not liking "the thing" gets no one nowhere. All of this, of course, is separate from the issue of connecting new players with old. Online gaming being what it is, being behind the curve is rarely a good thing. Making that curve hundreds of hours can be enough to dissuade people from not even trying or giving up. Everyone saying going from 5 to 30 is a couple hours has woefully forgotten their early game experience and making that statement from a perspective of knowledge and over-optimizations. Some may argue it doesn't really matter, and for them it may be true, but there's still that certain je ne sais quoi of first-timing things with friends compared to them carrying you through your first. Fortunately, this isn't an unsolvable issue even if some people think it shouldn't be solved. An option to start people at 90 at Dawntail's beginning can work with a series of crafted cut scene summaries to bring players up to speed on what came before and pertinent connections to the Scions. They wouldn't have to be viewed all at once, or at all if you're weird, but they could still bridge that gap and ideally serve as temptation to go back and work through the story at their own pace in between more modern activities. The framework is arguably already there with NG+ and the idea that SE would be losing out by not selling prior skip points in the store is kinda moot since it doesn't solve the player knowledge and engagement issue. Those freaking out about fresh 90s not knowing their jobs also need to realize tutorial duties can be scripted for this purpose and that they should probably lighten up a little on meta expectation for the first dungeon or two. In fact, they could even disable duty finder for skippers on those initial clears, leaving completion to trusts or fully arranged pre-mades. Regardless, a wipe isn't the end of the world and shaming tanks for not wall-to-walling or healers not max DPSing remains one of the uglier facets of not just XIV, but MMO communities at large.
@@WeisseningBlitz my friend the problem is not story skipper's but job busters trust me if we remove job books we should have people enough capable of playing their job regardless of the fact that they skipped or not. I whould even say that the people who get 0 msq exp have to do way more roulette's So in theory they should be way ahead of other people who have spent their 300 hours watching cutscenes.
@@WeisseningBlitz "ARR is bumpy given the circumstances of its creation, but the community also isn't collectively wrong in that it subjectively and mechanically improves" ARR is the only part of the game where the questing has any sense of danger that isn't just scary music and cutscenes, because it's an actual MMO where you can wander off to the wrong place and get one-shot. The expansions won't even let you into a zone until you're high enough level to fight most the stuff in there (you might need a chocobo, but even that's job dependent.)
My goal this 4th time is to try and actually find someone to play with before I start again. I want to make sure that I end up on a server that fits my interests too (hunting, raiding, pvp, min/max building) so I can meet likeminded individuals and learn from their experiences. Agreed 1,000 times with this video! Engaging with the community is a major part of mmos that the leveling experience in FF struggles to provide. It's happened to me 3 times, each time between lvl 25-35 I feel a burnout. My biggest struggle was coming from an mmo where it's encouraged to form teams/groups to tackle content at all levels, and allows you to modify the difficulty to create a fair challenge for the group you're able to form. I wouldn't want to skip past the content, instead creating functions that incentivize teaming for those who are looking to be social would be nice. The level sync needs help, I'd suggest looking at how city of heroes and now LoTR has modifiers for difficulty that scales xp and currency rewards based on team size and difficulty along the missions. Food for thought, there's no one size fix all direction here.
It would be cool if you had the option to either play the new xpac or start at ARR. But also have like a 15min summary cinematic for each expansion for people who want to start on current content, but also want to know what’s going on. Obviously that would take a crap ton of resources, but 🤷♂️ oh well? Lol I’m one of those new players struggling to stick out the end of ARR to get to the next expansion.
Honestly, if not for doing a little research first, I would have tapped out grind-aina map. Now I’m in the highlands and the back and forth during these last couple of quest is just wildly inefficient. Why do I need to feed 3 different sets of troops before I need to talk to the person I actually want to talk to? That being said, I feel the light at the end of the tunnel for ARR. The grandness of the highlands starts to make me feel like I’m actually in a dangerous place. Thank god for crafting jobs to help me break up the MSQ tedium. Super appreciate all your content and tips! They’ve been extremely helpful and not spoilery
I stopped playing because they made the game feel really lonely and the reward for that is a gross competitive scene. I find when I play now; No one plays the story with me, and everyone talks up the Duty Support. Then when you finish the story everyone is critical and pent up about end game content like as if they are playing competitively and not with friends. I left WoW for similar reasons.
Skip straight to Dawntrail sure would be helpful for us altoholics who have the daunting task of leveling 8 characters all the way through the entire story just to get those island sanctuary framers kits because they decided the base feature should not include even one, single nature element at all anywhere.
I've tried starting my FFXIV journey on three occasions. The first two I gave up somewhere through Realm Reborn' MQ - it's *so* tedious because there's an extreme amount of start at A, go talk to B, go back to A and go to C, then go to A and then go to C again, then back to A, then back to the scions, then back to A, then to the entrance of a dungeon, then back to the scions etc. Sometimes this was fine when there's a story being told - for example, traveling between the capitals after you've completed your prologue is an awesome experience. But going back and forth in an area you don't care about but *need* to do it to progress the MQ is aggravating. It's can feel like being forced to read a schoolbook. The third time, I went in and just enjoyed hanging out with people. Going to concerts, getting a slutmog, golden saucer stuff... and I finally got through Realm Reborn. But by then I was drained. I'd spent maybe a month on building connections with people and now I "got past the worst part" - and my goal was playing a Dancer. Just 10 levels away. But it didn't matter - now I had to go through all the Realm Reborn' Postgame before I could progress and I just couldn't. It's not about the goal, it's the journey - and I love the companions I've made along the way. I just completely lost interest with the goal. I don't want to run around being level 50ish for the rest of my ffxiv existence. So I just quit. For the third time. And since my friends had breaks in Endwalker I could play other games with them, and the concerts I visited are streamed too so... I'm still part of the things I enjoy - just without that eldritch horror. But it's such a bitter experience, because there's *so* many things I love about FFXIV. Maybe I should bite the bullet and buy the skips. I don't know. Thanks for reading my rant.
Hey I have over 2000 hours into the game now and I bought the skip for storm blood because holy shit was it boring. I did the other expansions and they're enjoyable. Don't feel bad for it, but never tell anyone in game they will be stunned and just stand there looking at you. 😂
I have been playing for about 18 months, so I started after EW came out. I started by myself but convinced a friend to join me. We ended up moving to Dynamis, as the quieter vibe was great for both of us. We made new characters and have been levelling them since Feb 2023. We finally started EW about a month ago. He has *promised* me that we'll be finished at least the main part before DT comes out. I have other characters I play when he can't play. I'm omni 90 (both combat and crafting) on the character I'm MSQing with him. We enjoy our time together, and we're enjoying the story. He reminds me what's going on, or I remind him. We talk about where we think it will go. I'm really good at not giving him any info I've gleaned from the copious amount of content I consume. All in all, I think being in VC whenever we play makes a huge difference. I do wish that square enix would cut some of the fat out of its CSs, but I've never been this invested in an MMOs story.
Honestly, if they revamped ARR as a whole.. that would do such a good job at retaining people within free trial.. hell.. tweak Stormblood as well to address some pacing issues due to silly quest objectives, less problematic but still a pain point. MSQ up to 50 and later the patches is where I see the most people give up on the game and giving more fast travel tickets to waking sands ain't gonna cut it :p
Good video, Zepla! It got me thinking about the Roulettes system and whether or not it's an issue. I know I'm guilty of just logging in to do roulettes and logging out again when drought hits. Or opening PF only to see nothing but PUG savage groups and going "no thanks". I know some folks only bother with the Expert roulette, too... As it stands right now the roulette system does not incentivise running the same one repeatedly; instead It's just "go up/down the list"! There's also several pieces of abandoned content in ARR that really do need addressing. Guildhests, Grand Companies, and Adventurer Squadron come to mind as three examples... I do have to take issue with the claim of "FF14 can be solo'd with the duty system" due to 8-player trials and the Crystal Tower alliance raid being mandatory.
I got up through the "main" (non-patch) Stormblood part of the MSQ before falling off for a while, and now I'm having a tough time remembering why Lyse wants to talk to Lalafels at the Golden Saucer. I'm still interested in the story. it's just that momentum is gone, and there's not a "previously on..." thing that I can read and be reminded wtf I'm doing.
I finally got my friend into XIV and they were really invested for a time. They just hated going to through the story quests. I mentioned the skips on the mog station and that was the beginning of the end. They skipped ARR and bought a lvl skip to 70 and they stopped playing very shortly after. I guess it killed any drive to keep exploring because its the same game except now their character was OP. They still loved ARR soundtrack though and listen to that.
Technically speaking its a terrible game (compared to other MMOs) the way they've dumbed it down outside of the mechs of 1% of challenging content, basically erases any meaning outside of that. People who start late - feel compelled to catch up because the majority of the early game is dead or presents the 'sync = barely any buttons' problem. So they do skip to an endgame that is actually short of any valuable busywork because of the terribly simplified classes. Add to that the homogenization so that people didn't feel like they were missing anything on their favourite job + the 2 min meta. And you're left with all classes being on one character - but the vast majority being little different outside of aesthetic flavor. This is the dumbing down 'trend' that we warned people about. One that ultimately clashes/adds to the things you're pointing out in a less elaborate fashion. The peak of the game is over of course, it's a decade old. Nonethless Yoshida copied WoW to the letter in terms of its tuning over time. As someone who grew up with faster games (combat gameplay) and does enjoy the character design of more grindy/cash shop korean games (like Lost Ark and older) - the redeeming elements of FFXIV were story. Sub paid polish and deeper rotational complexity to make up for the dated net code and janky combat (which was masked by the former). Dumbing it down - exposed gameplay and coding issues in the way that PvP had (faster play). The net result was that for many of us FFXIV was brought down hard by the addition of all the little flaws into one bigger ball. Everything from the laziness in cutscenes (removal of unique racial emoting for example) - to the spelling mistakes in the non-voiced quests (reported a few of those myself). The game feels like a cash cow that they've lost interest in. Since SE has had failure after failure in other areas, hopefully they'll put some effort into the new story that lies ahead. Although I have my doubts that people (new) will see my much draw to Dawntrail as it's not going to be on the level of the past (no real road for the WoL to get anymore powerful than they already are thematically). If newer games then drop and don't make the same mistake of appealing only to the half awake console gamer - the PC crowd will move on. As many of us already have. Gamers maybe aging - but we don't have Alzheimer's just yet. I find the idea of making 99% of the content faceroll and then some + spending half the budget on side content like Sanctuary (which was very short lived) as well as the haphazard nature of the storytelling fairly insulting in some ways. Other games are doing many things better; it's just that FFXIV is established in a genre that has lost a lot of popularity due to that same lack of investment. The fact that they put so little back into the game from money they make on it, mostly to push the remake and single player titles just makes it easier to understand why Yoshida wants to quit the board of directors entirely.
I think it's fine for the most part I got my mom into the game about a year ago, she's in the middle of Stormblood now. Every week, we've found something fun to do together, whether it's Leveling roulettes because I'm trying to get every class leveled, or story dungeons, we've even tried a bit of palace of the dead, and Blue mage. I found my first in-game community by finding someone who put up a Party finder for the synced bahamut raids. Even though I wasn't out of ARR yet, I was already doing High end content because the game let me, and it was fun. And I found a bunch of people who were willing to do it with me and teach me along the way. That was around the time I swapped from Black Mage to Scholar as my main, because Healing was so fun, and I wanted to be more useful to the party. If I had to say anything, I'd make a weekly reward for doing old raids synced. Maybe with min-ilvl and no echo if you really want to be hardcore. If they really want to go all out to make people do these, they could have that content just actually give a piece of current raid gear for beating the whole tier at that level. When the raids are capped, that would essentially mean you can get an extra loot lockout every week for doing and perhaps learning old savage raids. not a big enough advantage to make it mandatory, especially for the effort required, but still would do a lot to incorporate new players into endgame stuff.
uhm..... 200 hours for A Realm Reborn? That is is far from what I experienced when only focussing on the main story. First time going through it was roughly 60 hours to blast through the msq and job quests. That is WITH being a blackmage for the first part of the game. After that I can't say as I was doing a lot of other stuff but 200 is way to much for A Realm Reborn. And I think Heavensward kan be less as well.
I have been playing 14 since its original release and re-release. I use to be extremely active and push for world first clears. But for most of the last 8 years I play with my wife and we play very casually. It absolutely helps that we only play through the story together, but its also a big reason why we are always behind since over the years our schedules wouldn't always allow us to justify paying the sub for a game we could only play together twice a month. Luckily our schedules match up again and we are almost to current content now. Dawntrail will be the first expansion we will get to experience together on launch day and we are both extremely excited for it.
I don't know if they dare do this, but they could use the *Wandering Minstrel* as a story-telling device: - Make chapters of each expansion, cutting up the recaps into chunks, so people can recap at their own pace and not sit through 30 minutes+ recap of the expansion in one sitting. - Have the wandering minstrel tell the story in shorter terms, showing images and small videos of the events during, sometimes using voice lines or cinematics to show the key parts and details and thus also have the player bond and familiarize themselves with the characters. More emotional scenes could be played in full, while go-here-do-this, can usually be recapped with a short sentence. This way, recapping becomes like one would watch on youtube, and be engaging in itself. I would go back and watch that honestly, just for the feels. It would fit the Wandering minstrel lore as well, as he's basically this meta-character of Yoshi-P/the dev team, while still being a storyteller and scribe of the events on Hydaelyn/Aetheris.
When I convinced my friend to join I made an alt to level up with him. we didnt only do the story. being on this alt restricted me to think "Inside the box" rather than focus on stuff outside the box. So we'd spend time doing gathering / crafting and making stuff for my house. we'd do fates. and roulettes. spend time in the gold saucer. do the season events, go on transmog hunts etc. whilst slowly grinding through the story. making it more managable chunks. What was great tho is when we hit heavensward. we like blitzed through it cause it got him hooked and he was so excited like "Lets do more story!!!!" :D it was the same when we reached shadowbringers and endwalker, it was just ARR and stormblood that we had to "Take regular breaks" doing other stuff
Personally, story games don't hold my attention well enough, and I find myself paying attention to a 2nd monitor too much for good progress and to really get into it. I would like them to implement TTS for all non-voice acted script, even if it's a bit janky. ARR, HW and SB are so much reading.
As someone who ended up loving the game, the first time I was playing I quit during the Shadowbringers MSQ 2 quests before the Thancred fight. And it wasn't until a bunch of my friends quit WoW and got into FF14 that I gave it another chance and got hooked. The interesting thing is I was literally 2 quests away from the story ramping and paying off, and if I had made it to that battle I likely would have been hooked and never bothered with Shadowlands. It all worked out in the end for me, but I always wonder how many people have their quit moment near another point in the game that would have hooked them if they had made it. It's tricky to balance between pushing through content you're bored with, AND the effort eventually having a payoff. I think the game could benefit from a FF14 kai option. Give players the option of doing the original story, OR have a version that cuts about 70% of the less important ARR quests, 50% of the HW and SB quests, and maybe 15% of the lore tedious ShB quests. Leave all the important story beats, but trim the mostly unimportant walk/talk/fetch quests that aren't adding much to the story or game experience. Use the newer tech to turn a 2 hour, 10 quest chunk that wasn't very exciting until the end down to a 2-3 quest bit, capped by a scenario that takes a twenty minutes, but still gets the point across and gets people interested in important characters and events. NG+ will give people who do the abridged version a chance to go dive into the original bits that involve elements they find interesting later in the series. Would probably be a satisfying way to kill some downtime during patch lulls for curious players who have come to love the game.
It’s my first rpgmmo for me and I don’t have problem with msq since ARR until stormblood which is very boring for me then it’s good again after ! I never knew why ppl can’t finish ARR but when I started playing I keep in my mind “It’s gonna get better and better” - ffxiv community and my friends ,so I believed them and It really is !
I think what might be a nice compromise is that for each expansion prior to Dawntrail, offer up a fully-voiced MSQ "movie" featuring Your Character. Not just the cutscenes currently in there, but good transitional scenes that make sense of the story of each expansion. Make players go through their class/job quests and give them the option to go through the additional content for the big raids and such, but offer an MSQ expansion movie with a level-skip purchase by expansion. So if you want to skip ARR and play through Heavensward, you get a movie to watch your character engage in the story from the Scions forward, after you do all the beginning game "how to adventure in Eorzea" quests," up until the invitation to the Banquet. Play through HW and when you're done, buy the level-skip and watch the Stormblood movie and pick up gameplay for the Post- StB expansion to lead into Shadowbringers. Possibly throw in a handful of mandatory dungeons and keep making players level job quests and play through the end quest that unlocks the next expansion. In gameplay terms, it's a few hours' commitment to watching a few good movies and some gameplay and you're ready to go. In terms of paying for it on the back end, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would, were it available, buy each and every level expansion after the fact, just so I could sit back and watch MSQ movies that would feature my WoL, be voiced, and tell the story without me having to remember the last story point from a month ago because I had to level another job, got involved in one of the sidequest plots, or didn't make it to the next MSQ point's level right away. I probably wouldn't even use the level skips.
ffxiv as the first mmorpg that ever grabbed and held my attention. no other mmo ever did that before, and any mmo i've tried since i started has still been unable to keep my attention xD my only issue is that i can't play when i can't afford a sub
I agree DawnTrail being the start of a new story ark seems like a great place to make a new starting point for new or returning players, at the same time I totally respect how much the legacy story shapes and affects your journey through the content. Without having some of those past experiences some of those references will be lost. I think there are two concerns coming from new or returning players, fomo from wanting to spend in game time with there friends and the time cost of all of that past content. I think a great idea was allowing them to do that skip to the new content but adding incentives to New Game +, perhaps a new name as well maybe? Get them into experiences they can share with friends but incentivize them to go back and do that older content.
if you skip cutscenes in the msq Realm reborn as a tank takes maybe 40 hours. I recently made a new character, and if someone doesnt care about story they can complete HW and ARR in roughly 50 hours if they follow the msq while only doing daily roulettes to fill in xp gaps. My character made it to HW second credits( end of 3.55) in 2 days, 1 hour and 41 minutes as a warrior. I even spent time leveling both armorer, miner and blacksmith to 30 along the way so without that and replace that with maybe not knowing exactly as much as me and boom. 50-60 hours to do ARR and HW is probably a better estimate now if you skip cutscenes.
The only way I really see a solution to this is moving forward they focus on horizontal progression instead of vertical, meaning level cap stops at say 100 and they implement all new content at that level. I assume the dev team would likely be hesitant to deviate from the structure that has been successful thus far, but I could see that as a means to settle the level cap issue. You could choose which pieces you wish to interact with without the barrier to entry of levels and doing MSQ while still having the option to do so and not missing out on current content.
I think its just a complete no to skipping to the end(if its your first time. Maybe even have a story questionaire of basic plot points, that anyone who played could answer without issue.) That way those into Raiding, and only care about raiding could just focus on that. While those who will care in the long run about story, will focus on story. With the increase of Upper La Noscea, i had hoped theyd add new options for low level zones and improve the old fates. or etc. But wed just have to wait and see. Syncing isnt really a issue.
The part I hate about Level-Sync stuff is that it removes my abilities from being able to be used. And I'm like '... Dude, I went through and levelled my character, I *want* to be able to use my abilities. Can you please just let me? Even if you're powering me down to be able to do so, I just wanna use all my stuff.'
Also you choose to subject yourself to a chance at a low level dungeon by doing roulettes lol. That's why you get a shit ton of exp from it. You choose to let the game decide for you, what duty you get in exchange for exp😂
@@charless.3364 Yeah but I mean like... Wouldn't it be better to go back to the old dungeons and still be able to use my abilities? I mean, I know that'd be a pain to program, with scaling down the power for the level of the dungeon, but... It'd be a nice touch.
I spent about 3500 hours on the Free trial up to them unlocking Stormblood for the trial. Once I completed everything I could do on the trial, is when I signed up for my sub. I've put another 850 hours into my sub to go from Stormblood to Endwalker and I'm just now finishing the Post-EW storyline. So there is definitely a hill to climb when it comes to catching up to your friends but it can be done! Oh and I started playing around this time last year, so I've only been playing a year roughly.
I‘m new to the game and i really enjoy how the free trial and the quest systems of the game refrain from creating fomo. There‘s still so many systems and quirky activities to create some levity in between msq, that i actually enjoy the mmoishness of the fetch quests and the slow world building. Maybe only thing would be visual reworks of the early regions.
I was that friend, once. I have friend who's been playing FFXIV for a long time, and he always told me about how much fun this game was and that I should give it a try. And I did. I made a character, and started playing. I remember feeling so confused by tall the different quest and everything, really. And also, I must confess that I was really weirded out by the "fetish bazaar" as I saw it, with all the different races and whatnot. So I quit. When Endwalker rolled around this friend begged me, to give FFXIV another chance, and this time, he told me "focus on the main story at least until you're done with ARR" and this was was golden advice! By the end of ARR I was hooked and I haven't looked back since.
i started my journey like almost 2 months ago, this is my first mmo so everything was new to me , to be honest the first 20 or 50 hours werent really engaging to me or anything out of this world , it was running from A to B just to get a single dialogue and then go run back to A , the reason i started the game was for the story cause like i said this is my first mmo so the mmo part wasnt really the reason i was playing , but now that i realize the thing that probably stopped me from dropping the game was seeing the amount of people that started the journey with me , there was alot of sprouts running along the same paths i was and it was fun having that company in a way. the story beeing this long kinda adds to deep connection to the characters once you get to end game. right now i am no longer a sprout and just started Endwalker with 400 hours and ive met some nice people along the way , ff14 became my most played game and im honestly going to continue playing it for a long time!
I started playing towards the end of ShB. Even then felt a bit overwhelming but was just so immersed in the story, I was ok with putting off endgame content. Had the option to play with friends that were further at certain points to do ultimates with them as I was getting into ShB
It's complicated for sure, I'm not sure what i'd suggest as a solution. Maybe some kind of condensed ARR+HW+SB+ShB+EW and then into Dawntrail? With the option to go back and experience the full versions of those expansions? Not sure
Level sync is fine, just let us be able to use the skills and abilities we already know. I understand there's a balance issue there but it would be worth the investment to solve.
Ok so as someone who has attempted to cross the ARR 2.0 divide 6 separate times since the games launch. I still don't know what end game looks like or had the time or money investment for a house etc. all because every time I log-in I have 200+ hours of campaign to go through.....kinda makes one want to buy a content skip and work backwards while truly being able to experience it at a pace that works for everyone. This is coming from someone who really likes the way that the story is structured and is currently on their 7th run thru ARR on Beta Xbox, maybe using a trial account to get all the way thru the 'free content' will help with the FoMo
I’m glad to see this issue being brought to the forefront. I’ve played XIV since 2013 and I tried to follow the story in 1.0 through 2.0 and found it confusing and quickly kept losing track of character identities. Fast forward to today and I have completely disregard the story but I love raiding! I agree new players should lean towards leveling up from the ground up to better understand their role if they plan to go into harder content, BUT the story can be a bit too much for some of us. I condone story skipping, but I support classic leveling. I also agree level sync copperbell mines is boring af 😂
As someone who has ALWAYS told players to start at the beginning, I can agree: If you're going to skip. Skip now to Dawntrail (if they make it a thing to do) because now is the start of a brand new story, and the previous story can be condensed into a few paragraphs of need to know info. Just like they did with 1.0 in 2.0.
A friend of mine joined to play with our friend group, but soon gave up because of how long winded and exhausting ARR is. He got really bored less than halfway in, and frustrated because the best thing we could say to him was, "it picks up in Heavensward." He was locked out of most of the zones that our friend group frequented and when we all had MSQ to catch up on, he was completely left behind. I think I was the only person who had the time and energy to play on an alt through some bits of ARR with him, but he still gave up and stopped playing altogether. I don't think ARR is insufferably bad and to be honest I would replay it over Endwalker any day, but for a lot of new players who have seen glimpses of where the story leads, I think the long slog as a brand new adventurer doing new adventurer things can be kind of hard. When I first started, I was completely left out by some former friends and forced to speedrun because I got sick of them telling me about how much fun they were having without me, and ultimately teasing me for not no life-ing the game in order to catch up to them. I've since stopped playing because I lost all interest in the story halfway through the Zero arc, and I was very disappointed in Endwalker, personally. About six people that I knew personally all played before Endwalker, and now all of them have left the game. None of us have played in over a year. I really hope we find a reason to return one day, but I think it would take a lot for us to spend more money in order to try again. After the hundreds of dollars spent as a result of being subbed to the game for years, it has left a very bad taste in my mouth. $15 spent every 2-3 months does accumulate into a pretty hefty number once you've been playing for long enough. And when a lot of that time during the last year I was subbed was spent alone or rushing through an expansion that felt was a waste of my time and money, the realization of how much I had given to the game really started to hurt.
The game is extremely past its prime. Removing most of the HW era team to the single player games and shuffling in the new crew who were pretty much there to run on the hype gained - shows a lot in StB. Shadowbringers saw the newer team blend and find some footing - but End was simply rushed and a showcase of what it looks like when you're bored of your own story. The game can't really recover because of the awful engine it's based on (not without significant investment and overhaul). It's holding back PvP and so many other areas. Where they also have the problem of oversimplifying the main part of any game (gameplay) unless you're engaged in the very 1% of content that pushes people. And the biggest challenge there is actually keeping a group of players together and logging in at the same times. More so in the current world. It's just a complete mess - that for everything it does reasonably - it takes too many steps back. 1 button healers. 2 minute meta hominization which makes the job roster feel too samey. Elements removed from jobs such as Astro cards being identical. It's simply not a great fix for that problem. Endless reworks of jobs. Most of which have been viewed unfavourably because there wasn't any alternative to play (summoner mains). The list goes on. It's a lot to 'pay for' - when you can just watch the MSQ on youtube if you're so inclined; miss all the busywork and payment - and go about your life. Although other MMO offerings lack a lot of the 'overall features' FFXIV might possess. As a benefit of having a sub. They actually offer far more in terms of area depth. Combat? Better in Lost Ark. World exploration? Dead in FFXIV - but definitely not in Gw2. Character customization? FFXIV has it's appeal to the Japanese fans here but in regards to builds and variant gameplay - it's not running anything near to ESO and otherwise. Story telling? Hmm. Parts are ok. Some expacs are going to be hit and miss. But pound for pound they didn't match SWTOR and early bioware. Which were available back then as a metre stick. For what FFXIV does well - you pay for it. As you're suggesting. Unless they really hire new talent or reverse some the changes they've made - the game will remain a short term cash cow. With fast player turn over. That may be viewed as a business success and they are a for profit company. Enough said. But it's a very poor attitude for an MMO. Which is why the WoW exodus was so short. FFXIV has this habit of dabbling into new things for a few weeks - and then the content is ditched and they are off elsewhere. They expand and build upon almost nothing. Even though you can put in the work and make more of a game than is literally there (socially) --- not everyone is a no life streamer like Zepla. They aren't going to see it as investment and the aggregate flaws are going to ultimately lead to what you describe a feeling of wasted time and money. Do yourself a favour and either play games that are far more drop in/out. Or simply play an MMO which has far less linearity. Those games are far more 'active' in terms of MMO features - purely because they don't see themselves as budget RPGs with multiplayer lite features. Yoshidas focus on 'lifestyle gaming' such as Island Sanctuary and the insulting 'if you want any challenge just play ultimate' - shows how little concern there really is for the community beneath the corporate facade.
Flash back or memories system for old story content. Talk to an NPC where they ask if you remember when your character did xyz. Opens a menu where you can pick what story arc you want to start playing through
I played through 2.0 (the old version) and soon after paid to skip to Shadowbringers, because I wanted to play the MSQ with two friends who were there longer (and had actually played everything). I had intended to do the rest with NG+, but stopped after a few quests into 2.1. I've been looking into it, because my friends tell me HW is up there with ShB, but the quest descriptions in wikis tell me Aymeric and Haurchefant already appear in 2.x, so I don't want to skip that, but I also can't motivate myself to play everything. And right now, when I actually play XIV (instead of Helldivers 2 or various other games), it's either with those friends (still catching up on 6.x or doing Rokkon) or catching up to where they stopped Hildibrand.
I had started playing back when Stormblood was around and I tried to keep at it since a friend had recommended it to me, but I really didn't like the rushed pace of the dungeons and feeling like I never got to actually chat with the people I was adventuring with before they disappeared and I was back playing in the world solo. But it being a Final Fantasy game with a good story and places to explore kept me going. And I loved how they worked the classes with not having to make a new character just to do something else since I'm a habitual class changer. But then I hit the slump near the end of ARR and then I finally got to the garlean base raid dungeons. And surprise surprise, I fell behind, died. Got lost, and just had to sit and wait for the rest of the group to beat through things and have me teleport into the final boss area. It was embarrassing and just compounded what I didn't like about the dungeons and whatnot, and then I put the game down for years until I got sucked into the hype for Endwalker. Being fired up with all the new communities and channels that had popped up over the years, especially Zepla and the rest of you Buns, I fell in love with the game and pushed all the way through each expansion and made and lost friends, joined FC's and loved every minute of it. So for me the filter was feeling like I was pretty much adventuring alone, and it took me forever to get used to people talking in the lil chat window with no chat bubbles. I Hate that there are no chat bubbles for people talking nearby. I know when I started out I probably missed out on quite a few chances to make friends cuz I never knew they were maybe talking to me. Or talking at all.
Counterbalance option: ARR skip free, but make Answers a mandatory in-game cutscene **if** you take that route, just to cut the tedium out, but still give an excellent nutshell of the story to this point. The people looking for these kind of pacing changes will already believe they're "all that", and all ARR does is entertain that idea - which isn't ideal to do for too long. Heavensword makes passing mention to ARR events enough for anyone impatient to piece things together, and content after that is where the true "character investment" comes in. It's enough of a filter to make potential new players still able to work to catch up and learn their classes, going from 50 to 90 (or 100, or whatever), and it's the time when aether currents are introduced. Beyond that, another idea is just allowing synced BLU into content before level 80, because people don't generally respect earlier dungeons anyways, and having some of the absurdity of BLU available helps highlight "there's a lot waiting for you", and makes dungeon runs faster. Hell, I'd absolutely love to run any dungeon with a synced BLU in Duty Finder, because I have a toolkit to handle nearly anything that other party members are wiffing on, and add a level of chaos that's entertaining. Nobody cares about the balance of anything outside of ultimate and savage duties (and if you want to countermand me, take a SCH through Satasha, ignore your fairy, complete the run, then take another run and summon your fairy, ignoring your gcd heal button altogether, and tell me how different the runs are). There's a point and reason to the Great Filter of FFXIV, but the hardcore player that's just after the MMO experience **doesn't care, and will choose something else instead.**
the reason why I love ff14 oposite to other games is how I've never felt rushed to max level. Ive played for thousands and thousands of hours, yet I still do raids, dungeons and everything only for max level in other games (im just lv 70 with 5 jobs after 1 year of playing) everyday)
I literally just renewed my sub tonight and then went to youtube and this video was on my homepage lol, what a coincidence. I was just talking to my friend about how I want to play again but I'm buying a story skip because it's just too damn much. I have like 2k hours in ffxiv and I'm still not through shadowbringers. I quit last time because I was SO bored trying to solo quest and get through the story while my friends were doing current content, trials, raids, maps, the island thing... and I'd look up how much more I have to do and just to beat shadowbringers I still had like 200 quests and that was honestly my quit moment. I don't care that the story is so important I want to play with my friends, I want to do the new cool dungeons and stuff. And as someone who DOES get distracted, like RP, hanging out in the gold saucer, furnishing my apartment and so... so much potd omg I was and still am obsessed with solo potd, it's frankly unreasonable and horrifically outdated to expect someone to dump literally hundreds, if not like in my case because you want to explore the world and hang out with people, 1-2k hours into your game before they can do current content. I'm sorry no story is good enough to warrant that. I'm sure playing it as it comes out feels great but if you're coming into it late like me there were points where I felt like they were straight up disrespecting my time
I tapped out when I finally caught up to current expansion and discovered I hate current expansion mechanics. What kept me engaged and going were the catch up mechanics of the previous expansions. Getting the various currencies, actually having item level caps matter, etc. just aren't fun for me and violently pulled me out of the "just enjoy the story" when the story ends abruptly and you have to do chores to continue.
The biggest problem is that they don't want to let go of our Scion companions. If they did let them go for, say, DT, then we could just be an adventurer again. ARR has an amazingly perfect beginning for starting after other content: a time warp/teleportation. You start off just as an adventurer. ESO handled this problem really well. The main story became an optional story line you can start. You start in later zones if you own a DLC and the start of the main story becomes something that happens AFTER the DLC. It would be really easy for 14 to implement this, but they refuse to let go of the Scions, for better or for worse. When it comes to synced content, I really think that capstone (50, 60, 70, 80, 90) skills should be available synced, and the syncing should account for that. Capstone skills usually embody the entire theme of an expansion's skills while not involving the whole additional rotation. It would provide a preview treat for newer players while not making them sandbags. I know that *seeing* a job and its flashy skills really encourage people to play, and seeing them in practice earlier on would help earlier expacs from feeling so dry, for both new and old players.
Good point with GW2. I also enjoyed that with a friend of mine. Another thing, did you ever party sync in wow since they introduced it? High lvl player keeps all their buttons, damage gets computationally adjusted down. Often times the lower lvl char will even do more dps. All players can participate and do any quests that the lower level player initiates. Even if the high lvl character already did them. It entirely eliminates the friction of leveling together with a friend you're introducing. Imagine this in XIV, which actually has a compelling story you might want to repeat again. Making this single player mmo (worst timeline) a coop experience.
The Unending Codex looked interesting! I hope it contains dictionary word for Jonathas 🙂I love these long stories and as in Skyrim I sometimes do other side and job quests and then continue with main story. It has been long story with recorded gameplay from the very beginning, but I like how there is always something new to learn, even if you have played many hours.
So here's the deal with the MSQ in FFXIV - I feel like it gets a rep for being way longer than it actually is. Don't get me wrong, it's a lengthy journey, but not as overwhelming as some might think. So, my own journey kicked off around the Death Unto Dawn patch (6.5x). From that first step off the carriage in Ul'Dah to those moments staring up at the moon, it took me a solid 102 days. But here's the kicker: I wasn't just rushing through. I dived into all the Alliance Raids, Trials, and Raids, leveled a bunch of jobs to 70+, and got my crafters/gatherers to around 60. And I really took my sweet time with it all. Plus, I'm juggling life as a husband, dad, and holding down a full-time job, so it's not like I was glued to the game every day. From what I've seen, if a newbie hops into the game and just casually strolls through the MSQ, they could hit endgame in about 120 days. But if someone really zeroes in on the MSQ, skipping the side stuff, they could wrap up Endwalker in under a month - and that's without skipping any cutscenes.
I was already thinking about GW2 when you were acknowledging the split between the two games living within FFXIV: the multiplayer endgame and the mostly single-player story game. In particular, my mind jumped to the model GW2 uses for PvP as a way to have a separate game experience using the same avatar. If some of the multiplayer content at endgame could be decoupled from the story (either with a new Bozja-like zone that scales everyone's power and has its own power progression system, or a raid series that deals with baddies that are relatable by the end of ARR and can be accessed and reward players from the end of ARR to Dawntrail), there is space to bridge the gap and give meaningful multiplayer gameplay before reaching endgame. The main required hooks are meaningful rewards from this content for endgame players and novelty to veteran players. Retreading old content isn't going to keep us veterans interested for long, but if the 12 Gods Alliance Raids had been accessible to everyone at lv50+, scaled player power accordingly, and the gear drops scaled every ten levels to be of a useful ilvl, that could have provided space for many players to take on fun group content earlier in the MSQ. Or, if Bozja 2.0 is accessible by a ship out of Limsa Lominsa at level 30+ and anyone can go there and work up a power ladder to unlock emotes and mounts while also earning xp, newer players can participate in that game space alongside veteran players and everyone can experience something new, something rewarding, without requiring much MSQ. There's space for a group content experience to reward newer and veteran players in the same content and make the MSQ feel complemented by the multiplayer endgame instead of feeling like a blockade to the multiplayer endgame. Also: Audio sounded just fine, nice work with post-processing! And old/new hair looks awesome, bunderful even!
I just started the game last week because a friend wanted me to try it. He's already lvl 70 and i'm lagging behind at lvl 28. I'm enjoying it a lot and people have been so incredibly nice, it's a breath of fresh air but if I'm honest, the biggest problem i had was not how long the story seems to be, but the UI, especially the map with how clunky it seems to be. With all these teleports between and in cities and the clunky map, i struggle to get a sense of where I am in the world and where things are located in the world. The early game gives you constantly a LOT of info and it's not presented in the most intuitive way. My friend and I couldn't see eachother on the map if we weren't in the same zone and even if we were, the blue dots are so easy to miss. Is there a way to "right clic to zoom out" on the map, like in wow ? Also having to drop group to do certain "scenario quests", not being able to whisper a friend during certain things is a bit confusing honestly. It feels like I'm fighting against the UI a lot more than necessary. The ground/grass (well, the whole game really) seems to be a bit "blurry" no matter what graphics settings i tried... I can't not talk about the website, it's sooo extremely confusing/frustrating to navigate ! Though, I'd prefer not having the option to skip the early game just to join the endgame with everyone praising the story. I'd just feel like I'd be wasting my time doing all these story quests rather than spending my time at higher levels with my friend. We're doing dungeons together so there's that but if there was more to do with him while leveling, it would be perfect ! Maybe there is and we just don't know it :p
This comment is so late haha but I joined about 3 months ago. Got my main to post heavensward and ARR skipped my alt and got it through the middle of heavensward. As well as getting both of them consistently to floor 131 in POTD. I really struggled with ARR on my main. But I love the Heavensward story and I'm really excited for Stormblood. But I'm recently getting distracted by re running dungeons and practicing maining as a DRK well. I take lots of breaks on my main from the story and do other things cus I figured it's the best time to do it while I still got the sprout tag on. But on my alt I skip through all the dialogue and only relate h cutscenes I like as I already experienced the story properly.
Tried playing with friends. They quit after not too long, the MSQ is just such a drag for a casual to play through. 90% story bloat in a realm reborn that can be removed would make the experience alot better. I'd like to play again but my friends refuse. Even though they know they would actually like the story, its just too much time investment.
my friend who is massive ff fan, starting with 6 and 9 also he loves 15, but he tapped out when we did some late night dungoens for msq, we were both dps, we waited almost 2h for dungeon, I then rolled into healer and never had a problem with queue.
New to FFXIV. Played before, but those memories are lost. Love the content. Enjoying everything alone in free. Will be buying main when I'm at level 70. Is that a southern accent she has?
I don't know if this would be a workable solution, but maybe with Dawntrail being the first expansion with some potential to be a new starting point, a story skip to Dawntrail could come with a slightly altered story that removes references to the ARR - EW storyline, and includes character introductions to the characters we already know. With some sort of an access point to return to Eorzea and play through the older expansions in their natural order if someone chooses to do that after the fact? Obviously this would entail more dev time to make this work though, which might not sit well with everyone. I dunno, just throwing a thought out there, even if its maybe a bad one
that would be a cool idea IMO, that means the WoL from ARR to EW becomes an NPC (which you would also have to customize or maybe they keep it as the promoted midlander) and you are a new character with different motifs... which would essentially mean making 2 stories at the same time which does feel like a lot more work than necessary. they'll never do it but its a cool idea for a different game probably EDIT: i just realized what i wrote is different from your idea LMAO
I think it comes down to the unusual positioning of FFXIV and the particular difficulties that brings. We're talking about a game that has been released for over a decade, and has been popular all along, and continually expanding. It's developed this hyper-diverse playerbase, from sprouts who just installed, to ten-year-vets, and everything in-between. You simply cannot keep everyone happy with such a breadth of perspectives, cemented in over all these years. It's an impossible balance.
It might be helpful if there was a level sync system that went up. Like if your friends from another game want to try out savage with you or just get a feel with the normal raids, that they could queue up with you and play the content with you, and then not have to do a story skip. So they can tackle the story (or not) on their own time and still hang out and do content in the mean time. Could also make some roulettes more engaging if you are leveling a new job at level 30 but could still queue into a level 80 dungeon or raid. Challenges would include how would gear work and where would the motivation be to level up alt jobs (I suppose does that need motivating?) It just kinda sucks to be like "yeah, you want to do this content with us? Well if you start now, you could be here in about 6 months."
Honestly I think what would some what solve this issue would be if you are new around dawntrail you have an option starting in ARR or starting at dawntrail
That's an awful idea. That literally negates the entire games content for the last 10 years if that becomes an option at Dawntrail. If people don't want to play a story from the start, then why are they playing the game to begin with?
@aSinisterKiid as stated in the video some people don't want to play for the story, just play with friends. There is no point forcing people to play a story if they don't want to. Just because you liked it doesn't mean everyone does.
@@wexfordam Yes there is a point to forcing people to play the story. It's literally what makes the game, the game. If someone isn't willing to learn the story to play the game, why are they playing an MMORPG then ? Go play some other game with your friend that isn't an rpg with thousands of hours of hand crafted storytelling. But it is ridiculous to cater to new players who are too lazy to even try to learn what made the game work. It's like buying a book just to read the last chapter, like who does that? You don't just skip to the end of the story because it's too much work to read the whole book.
@@aSinisterKiidThis might be hard to believe, but FFXIV is more than just its story. There are plenty of people who story skipped and are still having fun because the actual *game* is still good. Saying XIV is the story is needlessly reductive, and saying we shouldn't be offering ways to bypass it to people who want it is needless gatekeeping.
@@MatsuzoSF No it isn't needless gatekeeping. It's called having integrity and not selling out. Story skips shouldn't exist. They are for lazy people who want the reward without the effort. And no, FFXIV is not more than its story. It's story is what makes it unique. It's story is why it has more than 15 entries. It's story is what makes it stand apart from the rest of the community. If you aren't willing to earn your way to the reward, then you don't deserve it. Money isn't a cure-all to just get a shortcut to what you want. There isn't a single game in the industry that should sell story skips or power leveling. It's a corrupt greedy practice taking advantage of lazy people.
Starting during Stormblood and FFXIV being my first ever MMORPG I had a blast. A friend got me into playing, and we did the entirety of the story together. Though during ARR times we really only did MSQ and once done with ARR we stopped playing for about a year I think ^^ But aside from Stormblood the whole MSQ was an absolutely fantastic journey for me. I'd never consider a story skip for it, after all the MSQ is what (most likely) makes most people fall in love with the game. And yes there's many other things to do besides MSQ, but ... cmon, it's MSQ ^^ and even if it takes time to get through it (working a full-time job, I can definitely relate) it's there for whenever one has time. So everybun can enjoy the beauty of MSQ at their own pace. Btw love how you changed your haircolor ingame too ^^
I'm starting to think that I should make a series of comprehensive lore videos explaining all the major points of ARR through Endwalker just for people who wanna skip but not be completely clueless as to who/want is happening. lol
This is what My Name is Byf does for Destiny's expansions and while it is a LOT of work, it always does well because you can do either a "Story So Far" or "The Timeline of Eorzea".
I think that would be a great idea and you would be a great person to do it!
Do it. I'd watch.
Especially if you start with OG FF14 instead of ARR.
@@Lrbearclaw Yeah that's the only thing making me take a deep breath. Breaking down entire expansions in a clear yet efficient manner is gonna take a WHILE. haha
I agree. Some sort of easily digestible format like 20 minute segments covering the events of ARR and the patch marathon. There are so many important sections of what is otherwise a long and arduous climb. People roll their eyes at Moggle Mog but he was the moment we found out that primals weren't gods or necessarily born from faith. Iceheart was when we learned that a person could fuse with a primal and not only that, they could do so without losing control. It also set up a lot of the major global goings on that are the backdrop of big parts of Heavensward. Players that skipped the banquet in Ul Dah are going to be both confused and uninvested in the follow up.
My friend didn't tap out - he was KO'd by the Limsa map.
Yeah, the map desperately needs icon toggles included vanilla. Of course there are ah, "workarounds," but the current state is just way too much clutter for a beginner to deal with.
I chose Ul Dah, and I found my way through it. It's pretty straight forward despite complications, but when I visited Limsa I vowed to return as seldomly as possible.
this is honestly why I didn't come back as a sprout the first time around. I tried it again with a different class and ul'dah was much more kind to me this time around
@@Anolaana Friend of a friends is curious what such a workaround would be called?
huh, that is very strange. I love the Limsa city and I see 0 issue with its map.
My friend tapped out right around the point where he was asked to deliver some asshole's boiled egg in the msq
Can I offer you an egg in this trying time?
If they can cut down on the MSQ anywhere, it's these types of quests!
@@Laticia1990 Those ARE the ones they cut out. the leadup to titan was about 3-4 times longer in fetch quests before the purge
@@shineko79it's still nowhere near short enough. ARR has barely any substance outside of the final quests
Don't blame him. That's the kind of stupid shit they need to keep out of the MSQ. But they won't, because it's an MMO.
Has anyone ever counted how many times characters nod to each other in cutscenes?
Ikr!
How to get through the Great Filter: *drink every time you see a nod
someone on reddit did a month ago
wife and friend both tapped before finishing ARR... its lonely on 14 for me. Biggest complaint i heard.. is SO MUCH BACK AND FORTH.. go here, now go back, oh go over there now go there, now comeback.
Yea... I got the FFXV car mount when it came out basically just to drive my friends around the MSQ to speed up that slog. Not ideal at all.
Haha, sometimes when i fly around in those old zones i keep thinking to myself that back then i would have run all the way from city to city while also avoding some of the monsters, oh and it took like 1 year before i started using the teleport system in cities :S
Gonna be real, just buy them the ARR skip. When I tried to get my friends into the game, I bought them all the story skip. ARR is an egregious waste of time and you don’t really have to know he relevant story going into heavens ward, especially since they bring up/mention everything throughout the first expansion. You learn everything about the game by the time HW finishes without having to dump 200hrs into ARR. it’s a fun game but ARR is a colossal waste of time.
@@QuestionQuestionMark ARR skip wont help because whole MSQ is like this. Developers need to improve quests design.
@@QuestionQuestionMark agreed. I got to a point where I was just done with ARR and skipped. It was pure pain. No one who did the content gradually as it came out really gets that. I started around the beginning of Stormblood and completely missed endgame for that expansion, I hit max level about a week before Shadowbringers came and and that was the first expac that I actually got to play with everyone else.
One thing i think would help is giving new players mounts at like level 5, with full speed too. Also, giving unlimited sprint in big cities. It wouldnt be hard to implement and would help newbies speed along a little faster without skipping story. Just shortens the long slops when you gotta traverse half the map or the go here go back go there again quests.
That would prevent player to player interaction. Duties are airports. You run from point A to point B without stopping. So is not a place to socialize and know people. Limsa is also not the place as is just people talking to their own circle without regard to anyone else. Best experience is in areas where players have to interact with other players in a chill manner.
not a fan of this idea D: besides, getting it at lvl30 instead of lvl5 is like what, 2h later? theyll be fine
I agree with this. Sure it would maybe lessen player interaction but it still seems like a really good way to lessen time without rewriting the story. I played through the story on a new account as well as through NG+ with my main account and NG+ went by much faster due to earlier mounts and higher levels. Higher levels is obviously not viable for new players but mounts and unlimited sprint is. It seems especially good for ARR where a lot of quests are grindy fetch quests. Less player interaction is an existing disadvantage though
I don't see how player interaction is an issue here. Level 5 vs level 30 is a drop in the bucket and if people are going through the story as new players > theres a HUGE chance (especially KNOWING that this game is a heavily, HEAVILY story driven 200+hour story game) that they are not simply stopping to stare around at other players. And also lets be honest : Most early game expansion maps are dead - i just finished Heavensward 2 weeks ago and was alone and barely saw other people besides the few like 4 sometimes in the main town. Now i'm in Stormblood and its even worse. Give me that infinite sprint lol and mount speed. I understand it kills exploration, interaction etc etc. But this game has so many systems and longevity via side activities and endgame that it really wouldn't matter > as is, it just artificially lengthens the amount of time for newer players , further worsening their experience. This was probably acceptable or okay BEFORE shadowbringers but anytime after > give it to us.
I think this makes sense in today's gaming scene.
I reckon the reason for the pacing before is to prevent clusters of players with the Viewing Cutscene status close to the endpoint NPC for a particular quest. It was prevalent in the previous expansions especially on odd-numbered patches where concurrent players flock those locations/NPCs and the area struggles to load the NPC (this was back when there was PS3 support and my laptop at the time needed some good charcoal to run lol).
I think they handled that well these days with the WoL porting into the endpoint NPC/location at the end of some, if not most, quests, as well as splitting paths in the opening quests of the recent expansions. Nowadays, instances are created to handle huge numbers of players concurrently logged in, and those instances these days can substantially hold a number of WoLs (looking at you hunt trains and the grander boss FATEs).
While I am more for the leisure walks, taking in the scenery and the locale while traversing the path from one NPC to another, a bit of QoL for those who wish to go a little faster on their quests probably won't hurt. We've seen that already with an improved questing in the later expansions, better map and Aethernet network teleporting within major hubs and cities, but a balance should be struck as it is a Final Fantasy game at the end of the day where the story and immersion are major parts of the journey.
One of the things that I wished you could do with friends as they go through the older content: be able to do Solo Duties with them.
It suuuuucks to be playing with someone, doing quests together, having fun, and you suddenly have to drop party to do a solo duty as part of the MSQ.
Being able to do them together would be awesome! They would be like miniature trials.
Another thing: WoW has the "Quest Sync" system, letting you do a single quest or quest chain with a party member; something like that would be pretty neat. Sync quests with a friend for the duration of the party, then split again.
RE: level sync, I still think it would be great to have the option to instead of level synching, you power synch. Keep your full kit, but the potency/recast timers/etc are adjusted so that your power level is appropriate for the content. That lets players keep playing with their full rotation, sprouts get to see the full glory of a high level rotation's visuals/complexity, but you aren't completely melting content in a way that prevents those sprouts from enjoying some of the fun mechanics or learning opportunities of low level dungeons.
It would be a technically complex thing to introduce and would definitely need balancing and rebalancing every time you changed an ability, but...
This is absolutely the same obstacle that annoyed me the most. I thought it would be really cool to do NG+ along side my friends who were on the free trial, but there are so many solo duties, you have to disban the party all the time, and then wait for everyone to finish, and then put the party back together, only to have to do it again later. No reason you shouldn't be able to do them with friends. Just have other players not appear in cutscenes, and if it matters, add scaling depending on how many players are in the duty.
Yeah SWTOR has that too - you can join in your friends' class stories. Good system.
WoW's quest sync isn't perfect because it doesn't line up with level sync but it's not bad. The real innovation WoW had was Chromie time, letting you do any expansion out of order which is freaking amazing and brought so much life and possibility to levelling rather than being forced to do the same routes over and over again.
I was going to basically say the exact same thing, level sync, solo duties and all.
Re: level sync: I've seen the argument that "this would feel bad for sprouts because they would be seeing end game players showing off all these skills they don't even have yet" but like you I'd argue that it would actually feel pretty good for sprouts because they'd be seeing these skills that they'll be able to have sooner or later. Whether a sprout and end game dps of the same job/class, or even different jobs/classes, since every job/class can be done on a single character. Even just as inspiration that one day they'll be showing off their skills for sprouts too.
I don't think it could ever sync down to a 1:1 match for power, just for the fact that end game players would have AoE skills that level 15 sprouts don't (especially those poor Lancers) so there's certainly going to be more dps being done just on that merit. But I think one way they could kind of even the balance, let's take a 15 sprout LNC vs. a 90 DRG. Scale the DRGs single-target rotation potency down so that it does the equivalent damage as the 15 LNC's two buttons they have available to them. Example: a basic single target rotation (not factoring in oGCDs for simplicity):
90 DRG True Thrust > Vorpal Thrust > Heavens' Thrust > Fang and Claw > Wheeling Thrust > Raiden Thrust > Disembowel > Chaotic Spring > Wheeling Thrust > Fang and Claw > Raiden Thrust > Vorpal Thrust > Heavens' Thrust > Fang and Claw > Wheeling Thrust etc.
15 LNC just doing True Thrust > Vorpal Thrust over and over in the same ~40 second time period would have the overall same or only slightly lower potency as the 90 DRG.
Add a Life Surge for guaranteed crits on the highest potency attacks, 90 DRG gets 2 stacks while 15 LNC gets 1, so the 90 DRG would pull ahead some there. And the 90 DRG would also get Lance Charge, Dragon Sight and Battle Litany they could weave in, but maybe instead of +10% damage or crit rate, they would scale down to +1% in Sastasha and slowly scale up to their full potency in higher level content. So the 90 DRG would still "pull ahead" of the 15 LNC in overall dps, but not drastically. Lance Charge could scale up to it's full 10% by Haukke Manor (syncs to 31) since the 30 LNC/DRG could have it by then, too. Battle Litany would be it's full 10% by Dusk Vigil (syncs to 52), and Dragon Sight reaches it's full 10% by Bardam's Mettle (syncs to 66).
The problem with power syncing vs level synch is the design process. The dungeons, as you face them, are built with a certain set of skills in mind. Yeah, they mess with low level abilities when they rework a job, but they can give them a bit of a boost at low level so they still perform in those dungeons.
Now, all that being said, none of that content is particularly hard. But there’s something to be said about preserving the intended experience.
If it wasn't for a medical issue that I had that kept me home bound for 2+ weeks, I never would have started this game. But it turns out, that it was the perfect way to jump into it.
I truly believe that if I had tried to start playing under normal circumstances, I probably would have given up.
My sister's great filter was the registration process. Connected a paid registration to her PS account and tried to use the free trial. When I explained what happened she said "NOPE!" and hasn't attempted it since.
Well she aint smart
Xbox sprout here but long time fan. One thing I can totally see being an issue is new players spending hundreds of hours playing with just npcs so they dont have to wait for queue times FINALLY getting to current content and finding out theyve been learning the game entirely wrong all this time and have tonnes of bad habits ingrained into them.
the cool thing about the npc's is that they actually teach you the mechanics, so you wouldn't really be learning the game entirely wrong, you'd be learning it the right way so you can play that same level (or similar mechanics) with other players. so just watch what the npc's do closely, and follow their lead during boss combats
I guess I had blocked that scene of Legolas jumping up the falling bridge from my memory, thanks for that xD
I refer to it as "that time legolas ran up the down escalator."
They need to remove more of the tedious “Go here so you can be told to go there” quests.
The thing is that nobody knows solution to this problem. I imagine even the dev team is super conflicted on their solutions and they probably talk about this as much as we do.
On one hand this is a Final Fantasy game first and its literally built around the story ,BUT on other hand MSQ keeps getting longer and longer, its a problem that not only never goes away but keeps getting worst.
I cant remember when ,but it was around Shadowbringers when YoshiP explained his idea for a solution to this problem, which was and Im paraphrasing. That easiest would be just have a cutoff point in MSQ and everything before that cutoff point wouldnt dissappear into the void but would just be optional like unlocking Alexander or Bozja. And the only problem he found with this idea was that there doesnt seem like a good cutoff point in MSQ (Shadowbringers during that time) and alot of exposition would have had to cram into new MSQ, and it would be just easier and cheaper to rewrite the MSQ.
My idea has always been, which was sadly shattered by Dawntrail reveal, that 7.0 would go on like a normal FFXIV expansion but would be written in a way that when 8.0 comes around then they could do MSQ and level squish with a timeskip. So 7.0 would become the new 1 to 50 lvling and 8.0 would become 51 to 60 expansion. and everything before 7.0 would become optional MSQ with instance gameplay. Since they are updating graphics anyway I was hoping for a timeskip so alot of areas would get a little remodel and how things have progressed. But sadly looks like everything is same old with Scions all back togheter for a new adventure. Dont get me wrong, my idea also has alot of flaws like the biggest one is what to do with all the zones and dungeons that come with 2.0 to 6.55 MSQ. I guess they could also be unlockable with a simple storyline, like The Vault, where new players hear a story of what happened lorewise.
Thoughts?
They could do as other MMO do and offer a level skip for free when you buy the expansion. But that would be sacriledge to a group of people that worships money as their god.
Yeah, it's a question of what the design objective is. If it's "everyone has the exact same story knowledge base" then the current system achieves that, I guess. If it's "as many people as possible experience the latest story and combat content" then it's failing and needs to be changed. So people will have to come to a consensus about that first.
I think you're right, I kinda wish Dawntrail was a "catchup experience" much how WoW intended Dragonflight and BFA to work as "levelling introductions". But WoW is pretty sloppy with the story and FFXIV is much more tightly tied to the lore. So I guess YoshiP thought if that was the route, it'd take some more time to write and polish that it couldn't work on the existing cycle.
@@Anolaana I don't think it'd be too bad to have had Dawntrail or another expac (especially after wrapping up the previous arc) to have been a 'soft reset' of the story and a new starting point. Black desert does something similiar (yes their story is NOTHING compared to this obviously) but they have a system where new players can choose to start at the 'further' point in the main story -and get a cinematic recap of events with some dialogue etc- or the very beginning. New players at the further point I believe get enhanced xp and other bonuses to not be entirely fuk'd in a more progressed area which I get would ruin the leveling experience for some but I think thats a small price to pay if you just want to get to the 'mmo part' of the game. Of course this would probably have to be paid in FF14 since its essentially a story skip but the option would be nice. You're never going to make everyone happy with a game and as is - the story goers are VERY happy with ff14, it's everyone else that needs some QoL so it just goes back to ultimately 'what do you want this game to be?' pretty much like you said.
srry i wrote all this just to say you're right hehe
I really can't agree. There IS a major problem, but it's not the length of the story, nor is it really accurate to say that it's story first. The later gameplay is excellent, as is a ton of the side content. And as for the story, generally known as the MSQ, 6.0 is a soft ending and we are now in the sequel.
And that ending is built on everything that came before it, and it's a hell of an ending, and back 75% of the game mostly ranges from good to soul-crushingly good. If you don't care about the story at all you can still buy a skip.
Unfortunately, I really don't see a good middle ground here like you're suggesting. There is no way to make a clean cut-off, even if they've they openly considered it in the past, short of altering the whole world, a thing almost no one who actually enjoys the game wants. At this point, the game design is pretty much set in stone, and one needs to take it or leave it, like a long-running TV show. Thankfully older content is still made quite relevant through roulettes and things like the Mogtome events, and even Wondrous Tails a bit.
But there is still a major problem, actually two of them. One is that honestly that the first 5/6ths of ARR, representing about the first 25% of the total main story, is extremely uneven. There are still high points, and the last ~15-20 hours of ARR are pretty much fine throughout even as it juggles four different major plot threads, because suddenly everything matters and things start to come into focus as we shift completely away from beast tribes. Even the dubbing is improved by then.
I'll spare you the four extra paragraphs I wrote and just say this: the biggest issues ARR needs a major all-around revamp. I know there are plot points that cannot be changed, but they can still re-write things, they can give us more of our job kits earlier with watered down skills that get upgraded later, and they can re-dub certain English voices. Those are the big things they need to change.
They can also add more voicing in general, and not just to ARR, and they can also tease a few things more with little scenes here and there that pay off much later, but these are very secondary issue.
Plenty of people know the solution. We've been telling the XIV team the solution for years now.
started in july last year, got to "to be continued" last week, it was 100000% percent worth it, it is now one of my favorite FF games, and im still hungry for more, i cant wait to enjoy an expansion on release when dawntrail comes out :D
I started playing at Endwalker, so the game was already pretty mature by the time I was playing ARR. And I've had a very positive experience. It's been a lot of fun experiencing this for the first time.
Conversely, my friend originally started playing ARR back when it was new, in 2013ish. He got to 50, and then he fell away from it. Never went to Heavensward and beyond. But just last year, he picked it up again, and decided to start fresh with a new account. And it's been a real slog for him. Having to sit through ARR a second time, all while people are saying "oh it gets better later on, stick with it!" It's been really hard for him. And I don't really know how to help him here.
Frankly, they could comb through a lot of the earlier expansions to cut the "less important" parts of the MSQ into side-quests and not really impact the general plotline much while making it flow a lot better. They already did that once with ARR and frankly they didn't cut enough out of the ARR MSQ because it's still an absolute slog to get through and it has probably hindered more people from playing the game than anything gameplay-wise ever did.
Absolutely. There’s a ton of story quests (especially in ARR) that have no bearing at all on the overall story. It’s just going to talk to someone about making an item or questioning someone about something.
Case in point, that quest where you go question that Roegadyn guy about the Siren, I think it was? Or some primal. And he’s a big liar and you have to challenge him to a rock breaking contest. That was cute and fun but it doesn’t need to be in the main quest. You could 100% turn that into a side quest. There’s countless other fetch quests like that in the main story that don’t add anything to the narrative.
I started a few months before Endwalker. I was able to binge the entire MSQ in about 3 months. Then I played through the Endwalker story when it came out and it was a grind for sure. But it was an amazing experience.
Moogle tome events, and the gold saucer are basically the systems we have for this right now, and theyre fine enough. Itd be nice if maybe we got a few big boss fates dotted all throughout, but that's also easier said than done. If you do have a friend, level an alt job with them, or do new game plus at their side, trust me it helps.
As for level sync, no one likes it, but it's honestly probably the best bad option out of a lot of terrible ones. One needs only to look at blue mage to see how little level scalling matters if abilites are kept the same. Meanwhile a lot of new players need the slow ramp up to learn how to do rotations comfortably. A few jobs could use some low level reworks, but not as many as you might think.
If i personally had to be incharge of "make 7.0 an onboarding point" I'd see about spending some developer time on an msq "supper cut" a long solo instance that walked you through arr to ew as a series of solo dungeons basically. Cutscenes between every "boss" of the important clips, wattered down story bosses like nidhog, thorodan, and nidstinian for hw. Frame the whole thing as the WoL remembering each expansion in the days leading up the trip to the new world. Maybe even give you 10 levels of your job at a time with some tutorial of your chosen job while you're at it.
Natural color matches your skin tone better.
Can’t believe I made it through the FFXIV msq. It is a slog. I started in middle of shadowbringers. Took me around 350 hours. A few dead hours of doing nothing while attending to work outside of FF.
And it exhausts me now to even think of completing FFVII Rebirth and it is “only” 70 hours.
I've heard FF7 Rebirth is around 30 hours if you focus on MSQ and nothing else. But if you decide to 100% all of the side content... That adds another 60 hours or so 😮
I got really burned out doing ARR. The only thing that kept me going was being intrigued by the world enough to just do other things in game for a while before feeling ready to tackle MSQ again. But this was also the only game I was playing at the time. If there had been something else keeping me busy, I might not have bothered. All in all it took me nearly exactly a year to slowly work my way from the very beginning of ARR to the end of Shadowbringers.
I love XIV's story dearly, but I really struggle recommending it to anyone, because I had such a rough experience with it myself. I think the story is what makes XIV great, but I can also really understand if that's just not someones cup of tea.
Is there a good fix for this? I honestly don't think so. You are either there for the story or well, you just aren't.
Yes, you should! Watching this, I immediately thought of a movie per the game and per expansion. Is watching 5 or so 1 hour movies too much? Not at all if you compare it to time spent playing.
I think it would be good for existing players too. So many things from ARR I kind of forgot about or missed as I grinded through it. I joined during Endwalker and so many things story-wise I forgot because there was just soooo much. I remember somewhere over the past year doing main story roulette Ultima “oh shit, thats Thandred as the Ascian?!?” How did I forget or miss that??? Prob because I was so focused on jamming through I skipped through cut a scenes early on, etc.
Do it! 🙂
I have to add that a *huge* challenge they have is simple: they lock content behind the story. It isn't just from an MSQ perspective either. Lots and lots of Duties are locked behind quest-lines, which further limits friends being able to play the game together, when a few of the party simply cannot commit hours per day to the game.
well, then do the quest lines, do the story, ... play the game?
FF14's greatest filter is 2.5 seconds and desynced telegraphed attacks to animations.
why even have animations if they happen outside of what actually matters?
The core of the issue is in that the MSQ is a solo experience from start to finish. The game forces you to disband parties to carry on with story beats. The MMO side of the game has always been an "End Game" kind of thing, it's just that the goal post for "End Game" has been moved farther away from the starting point by what is now a considerable and daunting amount. Some people say upscale low level players so they can participate in end game stuff like 24 mans, raids etc. I don't think that's a great solution because it will almost always include spoilers (And put people into positions where not knowing their role or abilities is going to be detrimental to those around them. Downscaling to help others can be drastically improved by just letting us keep our full kit but with obviously less power, that being said we're still only "helping" via roulette in that case most of the time anyhow.
I think what they did with ARR was the right move, but it needs to be expanded upon considerably. Remove all the filler quests, rescale the EXP you get from the major MSQ beats so that a new player can experience the story (without the filler garbage) while leveling up quickly enough so that getting to that end game goal isn't so daunting.
To be fair, sooner or later the devs are gonna have to do another level squish, which the best place to do that would be in ARR, meaning the devs are gonna have to make a number of skills/abilities get unlocked at earlier levels meaning ARR isn't going to be as boring in terms of what skills and abilities you have available to you. As for incentivizing playing low level ARR content, I'd say that a rework of wonderous tales is a thought that bares merit
Thanks for all the content over the years
For the longest time I was that friend who fell behind. Years ago I first tried 14 and I just stopped because of how long ARR took. It wasn’t until last year that I gave the game another shot and forced myself to get through ARR that I fell in love with the game.
Interesting idea. Golden Sun Dark Dawn had a feature where the dialogue text refering to names, places or events was highlighted and you could click on it, it would then display a quick explanation about said thing. Could be neat for long time players, returners and newbies alike, and if someone skipped some of the MSQ they could quickly know what's up within the same cutscene without having to go to the inn and read a long ass explanation for each character and event mid-msq.
I started playing last year and it took me 6 month to finish the story. But I had time for it because apart from writing my thesis I had no classes. I don't mind the story being this long, but the fact that you MUST do it to unlock 90% of the game can me intimidating for sure, especially if you come from other MMOs where the majority of the content isn't locked behind the story.
The strange part on my end is that a lot of people I knew who went through the entire story thought Endwalker was a good expansion to leave off on. Even though the lore is going to be connected with Dawntrail, people felt they were not ready for another 10 years of story, or at least not yet. Deep down, I think they'll show back up when the next expansion after Dawntrail is announced, but people sure need the break from such a long story.
If a completely new player shells out the money for Dawntrail on top of committing to the monthly sub, chances are they are either super intrigued about Dawntrail specifically or have a friendgroup of endgame players they're excited to play with.
In either case they should absolutely get the option to boost at least one job straight to 90 and begin Dawntrail right then and there. Yes the Hydaelyn & Zodiark saga is amazing, but it is also finished now. To the point that the patch MSQ, while tieing up many loose threads, still felt like filler to many. In contrast there seems to be a lot of excitement for the new chapter.
Dawntrail is literally a once in a decade opportunity for FF14 to perform this sort of soft progression reset and allow an entry point for new players.
I think the devs would be fools not to make this possible. And when the new blood is hooked and have experienced Dawntrail to their hearts' content, they can still go back and experience the rest of the story, preferably via an automated New Game+ prompt.
Dawntrail has got to be able to stand on its own feet, narratively and in terms of gameplay, both for the new players, but also to keep the interest of its existing audience. I, for one, am confident that it will, given the amazing jump in presentation quality that we saw in the 6.55 teaser chapter.
"start a new character with your friend." Yeah, too bad FFXIV is pretty alt-unfriendly when it comes to all those mog station purchases on one's main.
It is a must to understand all point of views. I helped some friends who just wanted to do endgame content so I suggered to skip, train them a little with 5 DJ (22,50,60,70,80) and then to latest content. And now they're interested to do MSQ. Just go with what your friend want and show them all the game can provide.
Some will continue, other will come back a their leisure time.
Thanks for your thoughs.
I started the game in August 2021 along with my wife. And I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan, so to me it wasn't difficult to get immersed with the story. And we managed to finish Shadowbringers storyline mere weeks before Endwalker released. One might say we rushed through the story, but we managed to do quite a lot of the other content before that. To have been able to play with my wife has made playing the game so worthwhile. We didn't know any people playing the game when we started, but now we have a lot of friends we love to play with. And helping newcomers is something we enjoy. It's like we want people to get into this game and ready for Dawntrail. We can hardly wait for it ourselves.
Not sure if this would work, but in my head it feels like it might.
If there was an alternate "1 to 90" tl;dr story path you could do that condenses the main story quests of each expac into chunks with dungeon capstones at the end where the player would be level bumped into a level bracket where you would learn how the dungeon down-scaling works where you're limited to skills within that bracket.
I don't think it would be easy to condense the story into the main pillars but if it got down to around 50 to 80 hours to reach the entry level of the new expac it would be a lot more approachable for newcomers than it currently is, and for those who want to play the MSQ there's always the new game plus system.
It would be a massive undertaking for them to implement but I think it might be worth it.
MSQ has survivorship bias. Everyone who talks about it says to stick with it and thinks it's great, because it's so prominent and so unavoidable that anyone who DOESN'T like it doesn't stick around in the community to complain, they uninstall and leave.
I mean, if people jump into a story-heavy game and complain about the fact there's story, that's on them. Sure, ARR is bumpy given the circumstances of its creation, but the community also isn't collectively wrong in that it subjectively and mechanically improves from HW and onward. Now, the prior is also different than not enjoying the story itself and if someone wants to eventually tap out, that's fine. And yes, we also get the contrarians that slog through what they'll extol as the worst story ever, completely misinterpret or overlook pertinent plot points, and inevitably use that as the foundation of their hatred and how XIV should shift away from story and be... some other kind of MMO that's either numerous and/or has already failed in multiple iterations before. MMO tribalism being what it is, sometimes it's just hate for the sake of hate. Frankly, that's where the whole "suvivorship bias" feels like it's coming from, too. Wanting to feel smarter or more enlightened for not liking "the thing" gets no one nowhere.
All of this, of course, is separate from the issue of connecting new players with old. Online gaming being what it is, being behind the curve is rarely a good thing. Making that curve hundreds of hours can be enough to dissuade people from not even trying or giving up. Everyone saying going from 5 to 30 is a couple hours has woefully forgotten their early game experience and making that statement from a perspective of knowledge and over-optimizations. Some may argue it doesn't really matter, and for them it may be true, but there's still that certain je ne sais quoi of first-timing things with friends compared to them carrying you through your first. Fortunately, this isn't an unsolvable issue even if some people think it shouldn't be solved.
An option to start people at 90 at Dawntail's beginning can work with a series of crafted cut scene summaries to bring players up to speed on what came before and pertinent connections to the Scions. They wouldn't have to be viewed all at once, or at all if you're weird, but they could still bridge that gap and ideally serve as temptation to go back and work through the story at their own pace in between more modern activities. The framework is arguably already there with NG+ and the idea that SE would be losing out by not selling prior skip points in the store is kinda moot since it doesn't solve the player knowledge and engagement issue. Those freaking out about fresh 90s not knowing their jobs also need to realize tutorial duties can be scripted for this purpose and that they should probably lighten up a little on meta expectation for the first dungeon or two. In fact, they could even disable duty finder for skippers on those initial clears, leaving completion to trusts or fully arranged pre-mades. Regardless, a wipe isn't the end of the world and shaming tanks for not wall-to-walling or healers not max DPSing remains one of the uglier facets of not just XIV, but MMO communities at large.
@@WeisseningBlitz my friend the problem is not story skipper's but job busters trust me if we remove job books we should have people enough capable of playing their job regardless of the fact that they skipped or not. I whould even say that the people who get 0 msq exp have to do way more roulette's So in theory they should be way ahead of other people who have spent their 300 hours watching cutscenes.
@@WeisseningBlitz "ARR is bumpy given the circumstances of its creation, but the community also isn't collectively wrong in that it subjectively and mechanically improves"
ARR is the only part of the game where the questing has any sense of danger that isn't just scary music and cutscenes, because it's an actual MMO where you can wander off to the wrong place and get one-shot. The expansions won't even let you into a zone until you're high enough level to fight most the stuff in there (you might need a chocobo, but even that's job dependent.)
My goal this 4th time is to try and actually find someone to play with before I start again. I want to make sure that I end up on a server that fits my interests too (hunting, raiding, pvp, min/max building) so I can meet likeminded individuals and learn from their experiences.
Agreed 1,000 times with this video! Engaging with the community is a major part of mmos that the leveling experience in FF struggles to provide. It's happened to me 3 times, each time between lvl 25-35 I feel a burnout. My biggest struggle was coming from an mmo where it's encouraged to form teams/groups to tackle content at all levels, and allows you to modify the difficulty to create a fair challenge for the group you're able to form.
I wouldn't want to skip past the content, instead creating functions that incentivize teaming for those who are looking to be social would be nice.
The level sync needs help, I'd suggest looking at how city of heroes and now LoTR has modifiers for difficulty that scales xp and currency rewards based on team size and difficulty along the missions.
Food for thought, there's no one size fix all direction here.
It would be cool if you had the option to either play the new xpac or start at ARR. But also have like a 15min summary cinematic for each expansion for people who want to start on current content, but also want to know what’s going on. Obviously that would take a crap ton of resources, but 🤷♂️ oh well? Lol
I’m one of those new players struggling to stick out the end of ARR to get to the next expansion.
Honestly, if not for doing a little research first, I would have tapped out grind-aina map. Now I’m in the highlands and the back and forth during these last couple of quest is just wildly inefficient. Why do I need to feed 3 different sets of troops before I need to talk to the person I actually want to talk to? That being said, I feel the light at the end of the tunnel for ARR. The grandness of the highlands starts to make me feel like I’m actually in a dangerous place. Thank god for crafting jobs to help me break up the MSQ tedium. Super appreciate all your content and tips! They’ve been extremely helpful and not spoilery
I stopped playing because they made the game feel really lonely and the reward for that is a gross competitive scene. I find when I play now; No one plays the story with me, and everyone talks up the Duty Support. Then when you finish the story everyone is critical and pent up about end game content like as if they are playing competitively and not with friends. I left WoW for similar reasons.
Skip straight to Dawntrail sure would be helpful for us altoholics who have the daunting task of leveling 8 characters all the way through the entire story just to get those island sanctuary framers kits because they decided the base feature should not include even one, single nature element at all anywhere.
I've tried starting my FFXIV journey on three occasions. The first two I gave up somewhere through Realm Reborn' MQ - it's *so* tedious because there's an extreme amount of start at A, go talk to B, go back to A and go to C, then go to A and then go to C again, then back to A, then back to the scions, then back to A, then to the entrance of a dungeon, then back to the scions etc. Sometimes this was fine when there's a story being told - for example, traveling between the capitals after you've completed your prologue is an awesome experience. But going back and forth in an area you don't care about but *need* to do it to progress the MQ is aggravating. It's can feel like being forced to read a schoolbook.
The third time, I went in and just enjoyed hanging out with people. Going to concerts, getting a slutmog, golden saucer stuff... and I finally got through Realm Reborn. But by then I was drained. I'd spent maybe a month on building connections with people and now I "got past the worst part" - and my goal was playing a Dancer. Just 10 levels away. But it didn't matter - now I had to go through all the Realm Reborn' Postgame before I could progress and I just couldn't.
It's not about the goal, it's the journey - and I love the companions I've made along the way. I just completely lost interest with the goal. I don't want to run around being level 50ish for the rest of my ffxiv existence. So I just quit. For the third time. And since my friends had breaks in Endwalker I could play other games with them, and the concerts I visited are streamed too so... I'm still part of the things I enjoy - just without that eldritch horror. But it's such a bitter experience, because there's *so* many things I love about FFXIV. Maybe I should bite the bullet and buy the skips. I don't know.
Thanks for reading my rant.
Hey I have over 2000 hours into the game now and I bought the skip for storm blood because holy shit was it boring. I did the other expansions and they're enjoyable. Don't feel bad for it, but never tell anyone in game they will be stunned and just stand there looking at you. 😂
I have been playing for about 18 months, so I started after EW came out. I started by myself but convinced a friend to join me. We ended up moving to Dynamis, as the quieter vibe was great for both of us. We made new characters and have been levelling them since Feb 2023. We finally started EW about a month ago. He has *promised* me that we'll be finished at least the main part before DT comes out. I have other characters I play when he can't play. I'm omni 90 (both combat and crafting) on the character I'm MSQing with him. We enjoy our time together, and we're enjoying the story. He reminds me what's going on, or I remind him. We talk about where we think it will go. I'm really good at not giving him any info I've gleaned from the copious amount of content I consume. All in all, I think being in VC whenever we play makes a huge difference. I do wish that square enix would cut some of the fat out of its CSs, but I've never been this invested in an MMOs story.
Honestly, if they revamped ARR as a whole.. that would do such a good job at retaining people within free trial.. hell.. tweak Stormblood as well to address some pacing issues due to silly quest objectives, less problematic but still a pain point. MSQ up to 50 and later the patches is where I see the most people give up on the game and giving more fast travel tickets to waking sands ain't gonna cut it :p
Good video, Zepla! It got me thinking about the Roulettes system and whether or not it's an issue. I know I'm guilty of just logging in to do roulettes and logging out again when drought hits. Or opening PF only to see nothing but PUG savage groups and going "no thanks". I know some folks only bother with the Expert roulette, too... As it stands right now the roulette system does not incentivise running the same one repeatedly; instead It's just "go up/down the list"!
There's also several pieces of abandoned content in ARR that really do need addressing. Guildhests, Grand Companies, and Adventurer Squadron come to mind as three examples...
I do have to take issue with the claim of "FF14 can be solo'd with the duty system" due to 8-player trials and the Crystal Tower alliance raid being mandatory.
I got up through the "main" (non-patch) Stormblood part of the MSQ before falling off for a while, and now I'm having a tough time remembering why Lyse wants to talk to Lalafels at the Golden Saucer. I'm still interested in the story. it's just that momentum is gone, and there's not a "previously on..." thing that I can read and be reminded wtf I'm doing.
I finally got my friend into XIV and they were really invested for a time. They just hated going to through the story quests. I mentioned the skips on the mog station and that was the beginning of the end. They skipped ARR and bought a lvl skip to 70 and they stopped playing very shortly after. I guess it killed any drive to keep exploring because its the same game except now their character was OP. They still loved ARR soundtrack though and listen to that.
Technically speaking its a terrible game (compared to other MMOs) the way they've dumbed it down outside of the mechs of 1% of challenging content, basically erases any meaning outside of that. People who start late - feel compelled to catch up because the majority of the early game is dead or presents the 'sync = barely any buttons' problem. So they do skip to an endgame that is actually short of any valuable busywork because of the terribly simplified classes. Add to that the homogenization so that people didn't feel like they were missing anything on their favourite job + the 2 min meta. And you're left with all classes being on one character - but the vast majority being little different outside of aesthetic flavor. This is the dumbing down 'trend' that we warned people about. One that ultimately clashes/adds to the things you're pointing out in a less elaborate fashion. The peak of the game is over of course, it's a decade old. Nonethless Yoshida copied WoW to the letter in terms of its tuning over time. As someone who grew up with faster games (combat gameplay) and does enjoy the character design of more grindy/cash shop korean games (like Lost Ark and older) - the redeeming elements of FFXIV were story. Sub paid polish and deeper rotational complexity to make up for the dated net code and janky combat (which was masked by the former). Dumbing it down - exposed gameplay and coding issues in the way that PvP had (faster play). The net result was that for many of us FFXIV was brought down hard by the addition of all the little flaws into one bigger ball. Everything from the laziness in cutscenes (removal of unique racial emoting for example) - to the spelling mistakes in the non-voiced quests (reported a few of those myself). The game feels like a cash cow that they've lost interest in.
Since SE has had failure after failure in other areas, hopefully they'll put some effort into the new story that lies ahead. Although I have my doubts that people (new) will see my much draw to Dawntrail as it's not going to be on the level of the past (no real road for the WoL to get anymore powerful than they already are thematically). If newer games then drop and don't make the same mistake of appealing only to the half awake console gamer - the PC crowd will move on. As many of us already have. Gamers maybe aging - but we don't have Alzheimer's just yet. I find the idea of making 99% of the content faceroll and then some + spending half the budget on side content like Sanctuary (which was very short lived) as well as the haphazard nature of the storytelling fairly insulting in some ways. Other games are doing many things better; it's just that FFXIV is established in a genre that has lost a lot of popularity due to that same lack of investment. The fact that they put so little back into the game from money they make on it, mostly to push the remake and single player titles just makes it easier to understand why Yoshida wants to quit the board of directors entirely.
I think it's fine for the most part I got my mom into the game about a year ago, she's in the middle of Stormblood now. Every week, we've found something fun to do together, whether it's Leveling roulettes because I'm trying to get every class leveled, or story dungeons, we've even tried a bit of palace of the dead, and Blue mage.
I found my first in-game community by finding someone who put up a Party finder for the synced bahamut raids. Even though I wasn't out of ARR yet, I was already doing High end content because the game let me, and it was fun. And I found a bunch of people who were willing to do it with me and teach me along the way. That was around the time I swapped from Black Mage to Scholar as my main, because Healing was so fun, and I wanted to be more useful to the party.
If I had to say anything, I'd make a weekly reward for doing old raids synced. Maybe with min-ilvl and no echo if you really want to be hardcore. If they really want to go all out to make people do these, they could have that content just actually give a piece of current raid gear for beating the whole tier at that level. When the raids are capped, that would essentially mean you can get an extra loot lockout every week for doing and perhaps learning old savage raids. not a big enough advantage to make it mandatory, especially for the effort required, but still would do a lot to incorporate new players into endgame stuff.
uhm..... 200 hours for A Realm Reborn?
That is is far from what I experienced when only focussing on the main story.
First time going through it was roughly 60 hours to blast through the msq and job quests.
That is WITH being a blackmage for the first part of the game.
After that I can't say as I was doing a lot of other stuff but 200 is way to much for A Realm Reborn.
And I think Heavensward kan be less as well.
I have been playing 14 since its original release and re-release. I use to be extremely active and push for world first clears. But for most of the last 8 years I play with my wife and we play very casually. It absolutely helps that we only play through the story together, but its also a big reason why we are always behind since over the years our schedules wouldn't always allow us to justify paying the sub for a game we could only play together twice a month. Luckily our schedules match up again and we are almost to current content now. Dawntrail will be the first expansion we will get to experience together on launch day and we are both extremely excited for it.
I don't know if they dare do this, but they could use the *Wandering Minstrel* as a story-telling device:
- Make chapters of each expansion, cutting up the recaps into chunks, so people can recap at their own pace and not sit through 30 minutes+ recap of the expansion in one sitting.
- Have the wandering minstrel tell the story in shorter terms, showing images and small videos of the events during, sometimes using voice lines or cinematics to show the key parts and details and thus also have the player bond and familiarize themselves with the characters. More emotional scenes could be played in full, while go-here-do-this, can usually be recapped with a short sentence.
This way, recapping becomes like one would watch on youtube, and be engaging in itself. I would go back and watch that honestly, just for the feels. It would fit the Wandering minstrel lore as well, as he's basically this meta-character of Yoshi-P/the dev team, while still being a storyteller and scribe of the events on Hydaelyn/Aetheris.
When I convinced my friend to join I made an alt to level up with him. we didnt only do the story. being on this alt restricted me to think "Inside the box" rather than focus on stuff outside the box. So we'd spend time doing gathering / crafting and making stuff for my house. we'd do fates. and roulettes. spend time in the gold saucer. do the season events, go on transmog hunts etc. whilst slowly grinding through the story. making it more managable chunks. What was great tho is when we hit heavensward. we like blitzed through it cause it got him hooked and he was so excited like "Lets do more story!!!!" :D it was the same when we reached shadowbringers and endwalker, it was just ARR and stormblood that we had to "Take regular breaks" doing other stuff
Personally, story games don't hold my attention well enough, and I find myself paying attention to a 2nd monitor too much for good progress and to really get into it.
I would like them to implement TTS for all non-voice acted script, even if it's a bit janky. ARR, HW and SB are so much reading.
As someone who ended up loving the game, the first time I was playing I quit during the Shadowbringers MSQ 2 quests before the Thancred fight. And it wasn't until a bunch of my friends quit WoW and got into FF14 that I gave it another chance and got hooked. The interesting thing is I was literally 2 quests away from the story ramping and paying off, and if I had made it to that battle I likely would have been hooked and never bothered with Shadowlands.
It all worked out in the end for me, but I always wonder how many people have their quit moment near another point in the game that would have hooked them if they had made it. It's tricky to balance between pushing through content you're bored with, AND the effort eventually having a payoff.
I think the game could benefit from a FF14 kai option. Give players the option of doing the original story, OR have a version that cuts about 70% of the less important ARR quests, 50% of the HW and SB quests, and maybe 15% of the lore tedious ShB quests. Leave all the important story beats, but trim the mostly unimportant walk/talk/fetch quests that aren't adding much to the story or game experience. Use the newer tech to turn a 2 hour, 10 quest chunk that wasn't very exciting until the end down to a 2-3 quest bit, capped by a scenario that takes a twenty minutes, but still gets the point across and gets people interested in important characters and events.
NG+ will give people who do the abridged version a chance to go dive into the original bits that involve elements they find interesting later in the series. Would probably be a satisfying way to kill some downtime during patch lulls for curious players who have come to love the game.
It’s my first rpgmmo for me and I don’t have problem with msq since ARR until stormblood which is very boring for me then it’s good again after ! I never knew why ppl can’t finish ARR but when I started playing I keep in my mind “It’s gonna get better and better” - ffxiv community and my friends ,so I believed them and It really is !
I think what might be a nice compromise is that for each expansion prior to Dawntrail, offer up a fully-voiced MSQ "movie" featuring Your Character. Not just the cutscenes currently in there, but good transitional scenes that make sense of the story of each expansion. Make players go through their class/job quests and give them the option to go through the additional content for the big raids and such, but offer an MSQ expansion movie with a level-skip purchase by expansion. So if you want to skip ARR and play through Heavensward, you get a movie to watch your character engage in the story from the Scions forward, after you do all the beginning game "how to adventure in Eorzea" quests," up until the invitation to the Banquet. Play through HW and when you're done, buy the level-skip and watch the Stormblood movie and pick up gameplay for the Post- StB expansion to lead into Shadowbringers. Possibly throw in a handful of mandatory dungeons and keep making players level job quests and play through the end quest that unlocks the next expansion. In gameplay terms, it's a few hours' commitment to watching a few good movies and some gameplay and you're ready to go.
In terms of paying for it on the back end, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would, were it available, buy each and every level expansion after the fact, just so I could sit back and watch MSQ movies that would feature my WoL, be voiced, and tell the story without me having to remember the last story point from a month ago because I had to level another job, got involved in one of the sidequest plots, or didn't make it to the next MSQ point's level right away. I probably wouldn't even use the level skips.
It would be amazing to see a level sync system similar to GW2 where you have access to your max level abilities with scaled down potency
ffxiv as the first mmorpg that ever grabbed and held my attention. no other mmo ever did that before, and any mmo i've tried since i started has still been unable to keep my attention xD
my only issue is that i can't play when i can't afford a sub
I agree DawnTrail being the start of a new story ark seems like a great place to make a new starting point for new or returning players, at the same time I totally respect how much the legacy story shapes and affects your journey through the content. Without having some of those past experiences some of those references will be lost. I think there are two concerns coming from new or returning players, fomo from wanting to spend in game time with there friends and the time cost of all of that past content. I think a great idea was allowing them to do that skip to the new content but adding incentives to New Game +, perhaps a new name as well maybe? Get them into experiences they can share with friends but incentivize them to go back and do that older content.
if you skip cutscenes in the msq Realm reborn as a tank takes maybe 40 hours. I recently made a new character, and if someone doesnt care about story they can complete HW and ARR in roughly 50 hours if they follow the msq while only doing daily roulettes to fill in xp gaps. My character made it to HW second credits( end of 3.55) in 2 days, 1 hour and 41 minutes as a warrior. I even spent time leveling both armorer, miner and blacksmith to 30 along the way so without that and replace that with maybe not knowing exactly as much as me and boom. 50-60 hours to do ARR and HW is probably a better estimate now if you skip cutscenes.
The only way I really see a solution to this is moving forward they focus on horizontal progression instead of vertical, meaning level cap stops at say 100 and they implement all new content at that level. I assume the dev team would likely be hesitant to deviate from the structure that has been successful thus far, but I could see that as a means to settle the level cap issue. You could choose which pieces you wish to interact with without the barrier to entry of levels and doing MSQ while still having the option to do so and not missing out on current content.
I think its just a complete no to skipping to the end(if its your first time. Maybe even have a story questionaire of basic plot points, that anyone who played could answer without issue.)
That way those into Raiding, and only care about raiding could just focus on that.
While those who will care in the long run about story, will focus on story.
With the increase of Upper La Noscea, i had hoped theyd add new options for low level zones and improve the old fates. or etc.
But wed just have to wait and see.
Syncing isnt really a issue.
The part I hate about Level-Sync stuff is that it removes my abilities from being able to be used. And I'm like '... Dude, I went through and levelled my character, I *want* to be able to use my abilities. Can you please just let me? Even if you're powering me down to be able to do so, I just wanna use all my stuff.'
Use the limited level roulette function. it will let you do dungeons near your level for roulettes
Also you choose to subject yourself to a chance at a low level dungeon by doing roulettes lol. That's why you get a shit ton of exp from it. You choose to let the game decide for you, what duty you get in exchange for exp😂
@@charless.3364 Yeah but I mean like... Wouldn't it be better to go back to the old dungeons and still be able to use my abilities? I mean, I know that'd be a pain to program, with scaling down the power for the level of the dungeon, but... It'd be a nice touch.
I spent about 3500 hours on the Free trial up to them unlocking Stormblood for the trial. Once I completed everything I could do on the trial, is when I signed up for my sub. I've put another 850 hours into my sub to go from Stormblood to Endwalker and I'm just now finishing the Post-EW storyline. So there is definitely a hill to climb when it comes to catching up to your friends but it can be done! Oh and I started playing around this time last year, so I've only been playing a year roughly.
I‘m new to the game and i really enjoy how the free trial and the quest systems of the game refrain from creating fomo. There‘s still so many systems and quirky activities to create some levity in between msq, that i actually enjoy the mmoishness of the fetch quests and the slow world building. Maybe only thing would be visual reworks of the early regions.
I was that friend, once.
I have friend who's been playing FFXIV for a long time, and he always told me about how much fun this game was and that I should give it a try.
And I did. I made a character, and started playing. I remember feeling so confused by tall the different quest and everything, really. And also, I must confess that I was really weirded out by the "fetish bazaar" as I saw it, with all the different races and whatnot. So I quit.
When Endwalker rolled around this friend begged me, to give FFXIV another chance, and this time, he told me "focus on the main story at least until you're done with ARR" and this was was golden advice! By the end of ARR I was hooked and I haven't looked back since.
i started my journey like almost 2 months ago, this is my first mmo so everything was new to me , to be honest the first 20 or 50 hours werent really engaging to me or anything out of this world , it was running from A to B just to get a single dialogue and then go run back to A , the reason i started the game was for the story cause like i said this is my first mmo so the mmo part wasnt really the reason i was playing , but now that i realize the thing that probably stopped me from dropping the game was seeing the amount of people that started the journey with me , there was alot of sprouts running along the same paths i was and it was fun having that company in a way. the story beeing this long kinda adds to deep connection to the characters once you get to end game. right now i am no longer a sprout and just started Endwalker with 400 hours and ive met some nice people along the way , ff14 became my most played game and im honestly going to continue playing it for a long time!
Leaving a comment for engagement's sake! Keep up the vids and the bun puns! Also, nice hare colour!
I started playing towards the end of ShB. Even then felt a bit overwhelming but was just so immersed in the story, I was ok with putting off endgame content. Had the option to play with friends that were further at certain points to do ultimates with them as I was getting into ShB
It's complicated for sure, I'm not sure what i'd suggest as a solution. Maybe some kind of condensed ARR+HW+SB+ShB+EW and then into Dawntrail? With the option to go back and experience the full versions of those expansions? Not sure
Level sync is fine, just let us be able to use the skills and abilities we already know. I understand there's a balance issue there but it would be worth the investment to solve.
Ok so as someone who has attempted to cross the ARR 2.0 divide 6 separate times since the games launch. I still don't know what end game looks like or had the time or money investment for a house etc. all because every time I log-in I have 200+ hours of campaign to go through.....kinda makes one want to buy a content skip and work backwards while truly being able to experience it at a pace that works for everyone.
This is coming from someone who really likes the way that the story is structured and is currently on their 7th run thru ARR on Beta Xbox, maybe using a trial account to get all the way thru the 'free content' will help with the FoMo
ARR should be streamlined so new people can get through it faster. There's a lot of fetch quest padding in there.
I’m glad to see this issue being brought to the forefront. I’ve played XIV since 2013 and I tried to follow the story in 1.0 through 2.0 and found it confusing and quickly kept losing track of character identities. Fast forward to today and I have completely disregard the story but I love raiding! I agree new players should lean towards leveling up from the ground up to better understand their role if they plan to go into harder content, BUT the story can be a bit too much for some of us. I condone story skipping, but I support classic leveling. I also agree level sync copperbell mines is boring af 😂
As someone who has ALWAYS told players to start at the beginning, I can agree: If you're going to skip. Skip now to Dawntrail (if they make it a thing to do) because now is the start of a brand new story, and the previous story can be condensed into a few paragraphs of need to know info. Just like they did with 1.0 in 2.0.
A friend of mine joined to play with our friend group, but soon gave up because of how long winded and exhausting ARR is. He got really bored less than halfway in, and frustrated because the best thing we could say to him was, "it picks up in Heavensward." He was locked out of most of the zones that our friend group frequented and when we all had MSQ to catch up on, he was completely left behind. I think I was the only person who had the time and energy to play on an alt through some bits of ARR with him, but he still gave up and stopped playing altogether. I don't think ARR is insufferably bad and to be honest I would replay it over Endwalker any day, but for a lot of new players who have seen glimpses of where the story leads, I think the long slog as a brand new adventurer doing new adventurer things can be kind of hard. When I first started, I was completely left out by some former friends and forced to speedrun because I got sick of them telling me about how much fun they were having without me, and ultimately teasing me for not no life-ing the game in order to catch up to them. I've since stopped playing because I lost all interest in the story halfway through the Zero arc, and I was very disappointed in Endwalker, personally. About six people that I knew personally all played before Endwalker, and now all of them have left the game. None of us have played in over a year. I really hope we find a reason to return one day, but I think it would take a lot for us to spend more money in order to try again. After the hundreds of dollars spent as a result of being subbed to the game for years, it has left a very bad taste in my mouth. $15 spent every 2-3 months does accumulate into a pretty hefty number once you've been playing for long enough. And when a lot of that time during the last year I was subbed was spent alone or rushing through an expansion that felt was a waste of my time and money, the realization of how much I had given to the game really started to hurt.
The game is extremely past its prime. Removing most of the HW era team to the single player games and shuffling in the new crew who were pretty much there to run on the hype gained - shows a lot in StB. Shadowbringers saw the newer team blend and find some footing - but End was simply rushed and a showcase of what it looks like when you're bored of your own story. The game can't really recover because of the awful engine it's based on (not without significant investment and overhaul). It's holding back PvP and so many other areas. Where they also have the problem of oversimplifying the main part of any game (gameplay) unless you're engaged in the very 1% of content that pushes people. And the biggest challenge there is actually keeping a group of players together and logging in at the same times. More so in the current world. It's just a complete mess - that for everything it does reasonably - it takes too many steps back. 1 button healers. 2 minute meta hominization which makes the job roster feel too samey. Elements removed from jobs such as Astro cards being identical. It's simply not a great fix for that problem. Endless reworks of jobs. Most of which have been viewed unfavourably because there wasn't any alternative to play (summoner mains). The list goes on. It's a lot to 'pay for' - when you can just watch the MSQ on youtube if you're so inclined; miss all the busywork and payment - and go about your life.
Although other MMO offerings lack a lot of the 'overall features' FFXIV might possess. As a benefit of having a sub. They actually offer far more in terms of area depth. Combat? Better in Lost Ark. World exploration? Dead in FFXIV - but definitely not in Gw2. Character customization? FFXIV has it's appeal to the Japanese fans here but in regards to builds and variant gameplay - it's not running anything near to ESO and otherwise. Story telling? Hmm. Parts are ok. Some expacs are going to be hit and miss. But pound for pound they didn't match SWTOR and early bioware. Which were available back then as a metre stick.
For what FFXIV does well - you pay for it. As you're suggesting. Unless they really hire new talent or reverse some the changes they've made - the game will remain a short term cash cow. With fast player turn over. That may be viewed as a business success and they are a for profit company. Enough said. But it's a very poor attitude for an MMO. Which is why the WoW exodus was so short. FFXIV has this habit of dabbling into new things for a few weeks - and then the content is ditched and they are off elsewhere. They expand and build upon almost nothing. Even though you can put in the work and make more of a game than is literally there (socially) --- not everyone is a no life streamer like Zepla. They aren't going to see it as investment and the aggregate flaws are going to ultimately lead to what you describe a feeling of wasted time and money. Do yourself a favour and either play games that are far more drop in/out. Or simply play an MMO which has far less linearity. Those games are far more 'active' in terms of MMO features - purely because they don't see themselves as budget RPGs with multiplayer lite features. Yoshidas focus on 'lifestyle gaming' such as Island Sanctuary and the insulting 'if you want any challenge just play ultimate' - shows how little concern there really is for the community beneath the corporate facade.
Flash back or memories system for old story content. Talk to an NPC where they ask if you remember when your character did xyz. Opens a menu where you can pick what story arc you want to start playing through
I played through 2.0 (the old version) and soon after paid to skip to Shadowbringers, because I wanted to play the MSQ with two friends who were there longer (and had actually played everything). I had intended to do the rest with NG+, but stopped after a few quests into 2.1. I've been looking into it, because my friends tell me HW is up there with ShB, but the quest descriptions in wikis tell me Aymeric and Haurchefant already appear in 2.x, so I don't want to skip that, but I also can't motivate myself to play everything.
And right now, when I actually play XIV (instead of Helldivers 2 or various other games), it's either with those friends (still catching up on 6.x or doing Rokkon) or catching up to where they stopped Hildibrand.
I had started playing back when Stormblood was around and I tried to keep at it since a friend had recommended it to me, but I really didn't like the rushed pace of the dungeons and feeling like I never got to actually chat with the people I was adventuring with before they disappeared and I was back playing in the world solo. But it being a Final Fantasy game with a good story and places to explore kept me going. And I loved how they worked the classes with not having to make a new character just to do something else since I'm a habitual class changer.
But then I hit the slump near the end of ARR and then I finally got to the garlean base raid dungeons. And surprise surprise, I fell behind, died. Got lost, and just had to sit and wait for the rest of the group to beat through things and have me teleport into the final boss area. It was embarrassing and just compounded what I didn't like about the dungeons and whatnot, and then I put the game down for years until I got sucked into the hype for Endwalker.
Being fired up with all the new communities and channels that had popped up over the years, especially Zepla and the rest of you Buns, I fell in love with the game and pushed all the way through each expansion and made and lost friends, joined FC's and loved every minute of it. So for me the filter was feeling like I was pretty much adventuring alone, and it took me forever to get used to people talking in the lil chat window with no chat bubbles. I Hate that there are no chat bubbles for people talking nearby. I know when I started out I probably missed out on quite a few chances to make friends cuz I never knew they were maybe talking to me. Or talking at all.
Counterbalance option: ARR skip free, but make Answers a mandatory in-game cutscene **if** you take that route, just to cut the tedium out, but still give an excellent nutshell of the story to this point. The people looking for these kind of pacing changes will already believe they're "all that", and all ARR does is entertain that idea - which isn't ideal to do for too long.
Heavensword makes passing mention to ARR events enough for anyone impatient to piece things together, and content after that is where the true "character investment" comes in.
It's enough of a filter to make potential new players still able to work to catch up and learn their classes, going from 50 to 90 (or 100, or whatever), and it's the time when aether currents are introduced.
Beyond that, another idea is just allowing synced BLU into content before level 80, because people don't generally respect earlier dungeons anyways, and having some of the absurdity of BLU available helps highlight "there's a lot waiting for you", and makes dungeon runs faster. Hell, I'd absolutely love to run any dungeon with a synced BLU in Duty Finder, because I have a toolkit to handle nearly anything that other party members are wiffing on, and add a level of chaos that's entertaining. Nobody cares about the balance of anything outside of ultimate and savage duties (and if you want to countermand me, take a SCH through Satasha, ignore your fairy, complete the run, then take another run and summon your fairy, ignoring your gcd heal button altogether, and tell me how different the runs are).
There's a point and reason to the Great Filter of FFXIV, but the hardcore player that's just after the MMO experience **doesn't care, and will choose something else instead.**
the reason why I love ff14 oposite to other games is how I've never felt rushed to max level. Ive played for thousands and thousands of hours, yet I still do raids, dungeons and everything only for max level in other games (im just lv 70 with 5 jobs after 1 year of playing) everyday)
I literally just renewed my sub tonight and then went to youtube and this video was on my homepage lol, what a coincidence. I was just talking to my friend about how I want to play again but I'm buying a story skip because it's just too damn much. I have like 2k hours in ffxiv and I'm still not through shadowbringers. I quit last time because I was SO bored trying to solo quest and get through the story while my friends were doing current content, trials, raids, maps, the island thing... and I'd look up how much more I have to do and just to beat shadowbringers I still had like 200 quests and that was honestly my quit moment. I don't care that the story is so important I want to play with my friends, I want to do the new cool dungeons and stuff. And as someone who DOES get distracted, like RP, hanging out in the gold saucer, furnishing my apartment and so... so much potd omg I was and still am obsessed with solo potd, it's frankly unreasonable and horrifically outdated to expect someone to dump literally hundreds, if not like in my case because you want to explore the world and hang out with people, 1-2k hours into your game before they can do current content. I'm sorry no story is good enough to warrant that. I'm sure playing it as it comes out feels great but if you're coming into it late like me there were points where I felt like they were straight up disrespecting my time
I tapped out when I finally caught up to current expansion and discovered I hate current expansion mechanics. What kept me engaged and going were the catch up mechanics of the previous expansions. Getting the various currencies, actually having item level caps matter, etc. just aren't fun for me and violently pulled me out of the "just enjoy the story" when the story ends abruptly and you have to do chores to continue.
The biggest problem is that they don't want to let go of our Scion companions. If they did let them go for, say, DT, then we could just be an adventurer again. ARR has an amazingly perfect beginning for starting after other content: a time warp/teleportation. You start off just as an adventurer.
ESO handled this problem really well. The main story became an optional story line you can start. You start in later zones if you own a DLC and the start of the main story becomes something that happens AFTER the DLC. It would be really easy for 14 to implement this, but they refuse to let go of the Scions, for better or for worse.
When it comes to synced content, I really think that capstone (50, 60, 70, 80, 90) skills should be available synced, and the syncing should account for that. Capstone skills usually embody the entire theme of an expansion's skills while not involving the whole additional rotation. It would provide a preview treat for newer players while not making them sandbags. I know that *seeing* a job and its flashy skills really encourage people to play, and seeing them in practice earlier on would help earlier expacs from feeling so dry, for both new and old players.
"Bunderstanding" amazing video congrats on getting the mount ❤
Zepla has some seriously bunderrated puns.
Good point with GW2. I also enjoyed that with a friend of mine.
Another thing, did you ever party sync in wow since they introduced it?
High lvl player keeps all their buttons, damage gets computationally adjusted down. Often times the lower lvl char will even do more dps.
All players can participate and do any quests that the lower level player initiates. Even if the high lvl character already did them.
It entirely eliminates the friction of leveling together with a friend you're introducing. Imagine this in XIV, which actually has a compelling story you might want to repeat again. Making this single player mmo (worst timeline) a coop experience.
Your natural hair colour really looks spectacular! Dark hair and brown eyes are the best.
The Unending Codex looked interesting! I hope it contains dictionary word for Jonathas 🙂I love these long stories and as in Skyrim I sometimes do other side and job quests and then continue with main story. It has been long story with recorded gameplay from the very beginning, but I like how there is always something new to learn, even if you have played many hours.
So here's the deal with the MSQ in FFXIV - I feel like it gets a rep for being way longer than it actually is. Don't get me wrong, it's a lengthy journey, but not as overwhelming as some might think.
So, my own journey kicked off around the Death Unto Dawn patch (6.5x). From that first step off the carriage in Ul'Dah to those moments staring up at the moon, it took me a solid 102 days. But here's the kicker: I wasn't just rushing through. I dived into all the Alliance Raids, Trials, and Raids, leveled a bunch of jobs to 70+, and got my crafters/gatherers to around 60. And I really took my sweet time with it all. Plus, I'm juggling life as a husband, dad, and holding down a full-time job, so it's not like I was glued to the game every day.
From what I've seen, if a newbie hops into the game and just casually strolls through the MSQ, they could hit endgame in about 120 days. But if someone really zeroes in on the MSQ, skipping the side stuff, they could wrap up Endwalker in under a month - and that's without skipping any cutscenes.
I was already thinking about GW2 when you were acknowledging the split between the two games living within FFXIV: the multiplayer endgame and the mostly single-player story game. In particular, my mind jumped to the model GW2 uses for PvP as a way to have a separate game experience using the same avatar. If some of the multiplayer content at endgame could be decoupled from the story (either with a new Bozja-like zone that scales everyone's power and has its own power progression system, or a raid series that deals with baddies that are relatable by the end of ARR and can be accessed and reward players from the end of ARR to Dawntrail), there is space to bridge the gap and give meaningful multiplayer gameplay before reaching endgame.
The main required hooks are meaningful rewards from this content for endgame players and novelty to veteran players. Retreading old content isn't going to keep us veterans interested for long, but if the 12 Gods Alliance Raids had been accessible to everyone at lv50+, scaled player power accordingly, and the gear drops scaled every ten levels to be of a useful ilvl, that could have provided space for many players to take on fun group content earlier in the MSQ. Or, if Bozja 2.0 is accessible by a ship out of Limsa Lominsa at level 30+ and anyone can go there and work up a power ladder to unlock emotes and mounts while also earning xp, newer players can participate in that game space alongside veteran players and everyone can experience something new, something rewarding, without requiring much MSQ. There's space for a group content experience to reward newer and veteran players in the same content and make the MSQ feel complemented by the multiplayer endgame instead of feeling like a blockade to the multiplayer endgame.
Also: Audio sounded just fine, nice work with post-processing! And old/new hair looks awesome, bunderful even!
I just started the game last week because a friend wanted me to try it. He's already lvl 70 and i'm lagging behind at lvl 28. I'm enjoying it a lot and people have been so incredibly nice, it's a breath of fresh air but if I'm honest, the biggest problem i had was not how long the story seems to be, but the UI, especially the map with how clunky it seems to be. With all these teleports between and in cities and the clunky map, i struggle to get a sense of where I am in the world and where things are located in the world. The early game gives you constantly a LOT of info and it's not presented in the most intuitive way. My friend and I couldn't see eachother on the map if we weren't in the same zone and even if we were, the blue dots are so easy to miss. Is there a way to "right clic to zoom out" on the map, like in wow ?
Also having to drop group to do certain "scenario quests", not being able to whisper a friend during certain things is a bit confusing honestly. It feels like I'm fighting against the UI a lot more than necessary. The ground/grass (well, the whole game really) seems to be a bit "blurry" no matter what graphics settings i tried...
I can't not talk about the website, it's sooo extremely confusing/frustrating to navigate !
Though, I'd prefer not having the option to skip the early game just to join the endgame with everyone praising the story. I'd just feel like I'd be wasting my time doing all these story quests rather than spending my time at higher levels with my friend. We're doing dungeons together so there's that but if there was more to do with him while leveling, it would be perfect ! Maybe there is and we just don't know it :p
This comment is so late haha but I joined about 3 months ago. Got my main to post heavensward and ARR skipped my alt and got it through the middle of heavensward. As well as getting both of them consistently to floor 131 in POTD. I really struggled with ARR on my main. But I love the Heavensward story and I'm really excited for Stormblood. But I'm recently getting distracted by re running dungeons and practicing maining as a DRK well. I take lots of breaks on my main from the story and do other things cus I figured it's the best time to do it while I still got the sprout tag on. But on my alt I skip through all the dialogue and only relate h cutscenes I like as I already experienced the story properly.
Never joined FFXIV with friends so I always enjoyed it at my own pace. 8 yrs later that's how I still play the game
Tried playing with friends. They quit after not too long, the MSQ is just such a drag for a casual to play through. 90% story bloat in a realm reborn that can be removed would make the experience alot better.
I'd like to play again but my friends refuse. Even though they know they would actually like the story, its just too much time investment.
my friend who is massive ff fan, starting with 6 and 9 also he loves 15, but he tapped out when we did some late night dungoens for msq, we were both dps, we waited almost 2h for dungeon, I then rolled into healer and never had a problem with queue.
New to FFXIV. Played before, but those memories are lost. Love the content. Enjoying everything alone in free. Will be buying main when I'm at level 70. Is that a southern accent she has?
I don't know if this would be a workable solution, but maybe with Dawntrail being the first expansion with some potential to be a new starting point, a story skip to Dawntrail could come with a slightly altered story that removes references to the ARR - EW storyline, and includes character introductions to the characters we already know. With some sort of an access point to return to Eorzea and play through the older expansions in their natural order if someone chooses to do that after the fact? Obviously this would entail more dev time to make this work though, which might not sit well with everyone.
I dunno, just throwing a thought out there, even if its maybe a bad one
that would be a cool idea IMO, that means the WoL from ARR to EW becomes an NPC (which you would also have to customize or maybe they keep it as the promoted midlander) and you are a new character with different motifs... which would essentially mean making 2 stories at the same time which does feel like a lot more work than necessary. they'll never do it but its a cool idea for a different game probably
EDIT: i just realized what i wrote is different from your idea LMAO
I think it comes down to the unusual positioning of FFXIV and the particular difficulties that brings. We're talking about a game that has been released for over a decade, and has been popular all along, and continually expanding. It's developed this hyper-diverse playerbase, from sprouts who just installed, to ten-year-vets, and everything in-between. You simply cannot keep everyone happy with such a breadth of perspectives, cemented in over all these years. It's an impossible balance.
It might be helpful if there was a level sync system that went up. Like if your friends from another game want to try out savage with you or just get a feel with the normal raids, that they could queue up with you and play the content with you, and then not have to do a story skip. So they can tackle the story (or not) on their own time and still hang out and do content in the mean time.
Could also make some roulettes more engaging if you are leveling a new job at level 30 but could still queue into a level 80 dungeon or raid.
Challenges would include how would gear work and where would the motivation be to level up alt jobs (I suppose does that need motivating?)
It just kinda sucks to be like "yeah, you want to do this content with us? Well if you start now, you could be here in about 6 months."
Honestly I think what would some what solve this issue would be if you are new around dawntrail you have an option starting in ARR or starting at dawntrail
That's an awful idea. That literally negates the entire games content for the last 10 years if that becomes an option at Dawntrail. If people don't want to play a story from the start, then why are they playing the game to begin with?
@aSinisterKiid as stated in the video some people don't want to play for the story, just play with friends. There is no point forcing people to play a story if they don't want to. Just because you liked it doesn't mean everyone does.
@@wexfordam Yes there is a point to forcing people to play the story. It's literally what makes the game, the game. If someone isn't willing to learn the story to play the game, why are they playing an MMORPG then ? Go play some other game with your friend that isn't an rpg with thousands of hours of hand crafted storytelling. But it is ridiculous to cater to new players who are too lazy to even try to learn what made the game work. It's like buying a book just to read the last chapter, like who does that? You don't just skip to the end of the story because it's too much work to read the whole book.
@@aSinisterKiidThis might be hard to believe, but FFXIV is more than just its story. There are plenty of people who story skipped and are still having fun because the actual *game* is still good. Saying XIV is the story is needlessly reductive, and saying we shouldn't be offering ways to bypass it to people who want it is needless gatekeeping.
@@MatsuzoSF No it isn't needless gatekeeping. It's called having integrity and not selling out. Story skips shouldn't exist. They are for lazy people who want the reward without the effort. And no, FFXIV is not more than its story. It's story is what makes it unique. It's story is why it has more than 15 entries. It's story is what makes it stand apart from the rest of the community. If you aren't willing to earn your way to the reward, then you don't deserve it. Money isn't a cure-all to just get a shortcut to what you want. There isn't a single game in the industry that should sell story skips or power leveling. It's a corrupt greedy practice taking advantage of lazy people.
Starting during Stormblood and FFXIV being my first ever MMORPG I had a blast. A friend got me into playing, and we did the entirety of the story together. Though during ARR times we really only did MSQ and once done with ARR we stopped playing for about a year I think ^^ But aside from Stormblood the whole MSQ was an absolutely fantastic journey for me. I'd never consider a story skip for it, after all the MSQ is what (most likely) makes most people fall in love with the game. And yes there's many other things to do besides MSQ, but ... cmon, it's MSQ ^^ and even if it takes time to get through it (working a full-time job, I can definitely relate) it's there for whenever one has time. So everybun can enjoy the beauty of MSQ at their own pace.
Btw love how you changed your haircolor ingame too ^^