So I've gotten a couple of classes to level 30 and while I can see SOME of the game's appeal....
I just really dont understand how people defend how egregiously bad the main quest of ARR is. I needed to get this off my chest
I can completely understand people enjoying the story, since after all everyone has different tastes, but the notion that the meandering monologues with occasional cutscenes that makes use of poorly timed animations using stock emotes is somehow anything above mediocre baffles me.
It's like everyone who plays the game has stockholm syndrome and playing through the main quest while they evangelize it feels like being gaslighted.
I can understand having a main quest that gets a bit slow at times, but what I don't understand is why the game is *intentionally* designed to waste your time. The overwhelming majority of quests simply tell you to a) go to location X and talk to NPC Y, who will likely tell to talk to NPC Z (repeat ad nauseum), or b) go to a mark on your map and right click on it so that your avatar can "interact" with it (a progress bar titled "interacting" literally appears on the screen and fills up over a couple of seconds). What's especially bad is that the game makes you talk to NPCs in the same room seperately. It could just, I dunno, include them in the conversation, but no, you have to run back and forth between them like they're refusing to speak to each other. It's as if the quest designer was under the impression that FFXIV is a game where traveling is the primary mechanic.
And it's not like the idea of MMOs with time wasting drivel quests are unheard of, but FFXIV makes a specific point to REQUIRE you to do massive amounts of these quests in between the parts where the plot actually moves forward, and the game simply does not like you do things until you've done the main quest. You can't do that level 30 dungeon until you spend 2 hours running errands for some NPC that you will never see again. It's not like these quests have aged poorly. These just crappy design by almost any standard unless exclusively following a quest marker is the peak of your gameplay experience.
Every once in a while the main quest will give you a scenario where it basically puts you in an instance for a particular fight that advances the story, usually involving a cutscene or 2.
These scenarios -and I cannot stress this enough- CANNOT be completed with party members. If you are in a party when you try to initiate one of them, it will tell you that you need to leave your party. Which makes the MAIN QUEST of this MMORPG.... single player. And not just "oh once every 5 or 10 levels there's something you can only complete solo" but rather the majority of THE FIRST 50 LEVELS OF THE GAME.
Like, I wanted a game I could play with my friend and we *literally* cannot even do stuff together 90% of the time. You get to do a dungeon together like 3 times before you're at the level for the next dungeon, and then you need to spend 3 hours doing filler quests so that you can spend another half hour running a dungeon together. How..... is this just a normal part of an MMO?
Then I started hearing from people that you can actually buy your way out of the main quest of ARR for around $20, which is, like, buying another game on top of the full price of FFXIV just so that you dont have to be subjected to it. I was reading about it and found this interview with the lead designer:
Where he explains that the price tag isnt because they want to make money but rather because they dont want the story skip to feel required, and that if it were too cheap people would feel pressured to do it.
But I dunno, maybe just design content that isnt so terrible that people want to pay you to get out of it?
I REALLY want to like this game (or maybe I just want to give it a try), but I dont know how to get past the fact that I literally cant just... play the game because the designers made a conscious decision to force me to spend hours upon hours just talking to NPCs in the right order.
/rant
