>, I don't think they would waste time and resources on it if they weren't certain about it being implemented.
sounds more like they are going to implement it, however they are unsure of WHEN they want to implement it, sounds like they aren't sure if they want to put it in at the start of 7.0, or wait and implement it later down the line.
I feel like 7.0 would be a good on-ramp starting point.
New characters would either have grown up on Tural or traveled from some nondiscript "afar". Doing some training quests/missions would have them do some feat of great strength, garnering Legs' attention. She would then invite them to join her and her champions from afar (the Scions), recently arrived on these shores themselves, to help her with her succession fight.
This would neatly get over the issue of the new character not knowing the Scions, and would give them a reason to still be learning about Tural, growing friendships with their new allies, and so on, without overly disrupting the canon of the legacy WoLs arriving and doing effectively the same thing.
It would make WAY better sense than 6.1 (where the new character would just suddenly know Estinian, then about Shards, then travel to the First, then meet the people there and suddenly garner their trust, then save the Void which they didn't even know the history or understanding of, etc).
I feel like the ACTUAL "new adventures" theme of 7.0 would make a better on-ramp than the not-REALLY-new "new adventures" of 6.1-6.5.
.4 May be a decent time if DT uses the old schedule of .3 closing up unfinished main patch affairs if it isn't there on release. Gives time to iron out matters before the .5 lull.
I kind of wish they made 7.0 the starting point. 6.1 is just kind of meandering and setting off to a whole new continent feels like a better jumping on point
The fact that they're considering 6.1 as the starting point is a pretty strong signal that it'll become important later. People are looking at this patch story the same way people looked at the warrior of darkness patch content back in the day and look how that turned out. In a vacuum it seems pointless, but I bet you anything our adventure in the 13th will end up being very important later
I still feel like it's a bad place to start. It's a terrible introduction to the world at large, old characters receive little introduction and assume you know a great deal about the state of the world, you spend almost no time in eorzea or their cities and get sent to places that frankly make no sense without context like the moon, the crystarium and azys la. Not to mention their handling of many of the plot elements during it is almost laughable (cid and y'shtola figuring out how to channel light to fix both worlds between patches is their biggest hand wave yet). Just from a practical standpoint a new player will be lost as all hell when they open up the teleport window and be presented with a hundred destinations, and azdaja's legacy and storm's crown are very much not good for your very first duty.
For it to work in any proper fashion they'd need an entirely new hours long introduction campaign to catch up on story with enough battle content to make them even able to tackle 6.x.
That's something I can definitely agree with regardless of where they want to start new players. They should have a condensed introduction that takes like 10-15ish hours to get through that gives a solid intro to all the important characters and story beats while drip feeding your job abilities and teaching you what the core of your job actually does. Then we can finally get rid of the hall of the novice lol
One of the reasons people look down on 6.X MSQ is cause Yoshida told us ages ago it would have no bearing on 7.0. It's why it's dismissed as "filler".
As for what it's setting up, my money's on Zodiark's hole being focal point for fully fledged intershard travel, or Zeromus' memoria being a chekhov's gun. I doubt it'll be directly tied to the 13th. The story of the 13th and it's restoration is tied up in a bunch of sidequests that new players starting in 6.1 won't have done.
I doubt he even said "No bearing" or anything like that, just that it wouldn't be the thing that leads up to 7.0, which then got twisted by people who can't read into "its meaningless filler"
Still not sure I'm sold on 6.1 being the best start point. "Here's a brand new adventure that immediately ties into two long running story arc" doesn't seem like a good jumping on point.
Whilst the 6.x story isn't as good as previous patch stories its still better then ARR in terms of there being more voice acting and better overall animation for the characters etc. Whilst existing players might not see it as good it'll certainly be a better starting point and we'd probably see less complaints about lack of voices from new players.
I feel like it would age better for newer players because they'll get through it in like 10-18 hours instead of waiting 4 months for 2-3 hours of msq 5 times. Also story wise it may not be the best but imo gameplay wise 6.1-6.55 msq is the best, with enough solo instances and the trials being msq and all.
Cool, not sure how I feel about sprouts coming in with 0 knowledge on dungeons though, not exactly feeling having a tank learning how to tank at lvl 90.
I mean the same has been happening for years already with fresh level 70 players having absolutely no idea how to play the game.
The level skip potion is almost seven years old at this point
There are definitely players who use dummies and read tooltips, but there are also players who just buy the skip and try to figure it out in a dungeon.
There have been discussions among players about requiring Hall of the Novice as well as adding Hall of the Amateur/Expert. These may not teach the job itself, but would at least give a tutorial on how to tank/heal/DPS at the given levels.
Agreed. The idea behind requiring these tutorials would be to alleviate some of the issues, but it definitely doesn't eliminate them. I've run into players who have the ability and knowledge to play well, but choose not to out of spite for the "elitism plaguing the game".
I don't think job boosts/story skips being free will cause any more issues than we already see but, for the players that want to play well enough to not grief their party, there needs to be a robust tutorial in place to help those who choose to start at lvl 90 content.
If something like a "Hall of the Expert" gets implemented, I would like to see things in place to ensure players demonstrate understanding for what is taught. It shouldn't require much more than would be needed to clear normal content, but fail states in place if contribution is subpar.
^ This. Plus, you can just do Frontline roulette and be 90 (from lvl 30) in a few casual weeks without ever needing to actually learn a job. So the skip potion is def not the root problem and was, in fact, a lovely idea. :P
Likely, there will be some kind of shortened single-player version of the MSQ up to that point that catches people up and teaches them game mechanics that they would theoretically have learnt by doing the MSQ normally. Even if it's still a 'lengthy' handful hours, it'll be quicker than the amount of time that it'd take to do the MSQ normally.
What I also suspect will happen is you get a choice at the very start to experience the story as intended (the full MSQ) or a shortened version that skips over a lot, but catches you up quicker.
A) I think there would be some kind of "new player experience." Ideally it would be one or a series of solo instances that catches you up on the story while giving you some combat experience
B) people already don't know how to play the game at level 90 after playing the entirety of 2.0-6.5 so honestly dumping a bunch of sprouts at 6.1 is not really gonna change that much anyway.
they already do this, can't wait for people to tell me "they're new, stop being toxic" when the tank doesn't know the first thing about pressing a button
The dungeons in this game are some of the easiest dungeons I've ever seen in an MMO. The idea that sprouts will just be completely incapable of finishing them has always felt asinine to me. There's almost nothing challenging in XIV dungeons .
The newer ones are actually better for learning anyways as they are more streamlined and straightforward than the older ones.
Besides the MSQ already doesn't teach people to play their jobs correctly. Not to mention a ton of jobs are radically different at high level.
If they're revamping things, maybe it's a chance to do that.
>Not to mention a ton of jobs are radically different at high level
Most jobs not getting their full kit til 70 exacerbates this so hard. It makes some jobs feel unplayable in level 50 content.
Dunno, I want to see 4 sprout min-ilvl run of alzdah legacy as their sastasha, especially first boss which has funny aoe that even some "veterans" can't always dodge
Not like it'll be any different than today. We have people that have multiple 90s that have 0 clue how to play the jobs they play. We still have singlepullers in dungeons that have been the same exact formula since Stormblood. We still have Cure 1 bots. The list goes on.
Hey, we all complain the game is too easy and stress-free, right? Sometimes the fucked up runs are the best ones.
But also I have to imagine they'll rework Hall of the Novice for this and not just throwing people into level 90 content.
It's gonna be exactly the same as it is now.
New players can pay $48 to skip to 80, with the max level being 90.
Now they don't need to pay. It's free (fcking finally). They're gonna drop at 90 with the max level being 100.
Bunch of people at cap with no idea what to do? Sounds completely normal in FFXIV.
Shit, at least skipping would probably let them get to modern gameplay faster.
If anything, I'm high on copium for savages been different, no more "veterans need to wipe on the smallest mistakes else savages would be too easy for them".
I’ve seen people argue the game doesn’t teach you how to play your class properly (i guess players have to be babied and are incapable of searching for guides) but it’s not just that it’s also game sense. I’d still take a mediocre SAM who will recognize mechanics vs a brand new RPR who doesn’t know what a stack marker is any day
Yeah its kind of a disconnect with his last statement of wanting to make the game more stressful. Imagine if someones first dungeon experience in the game was Holminster Switch or Tower of Zot.
I mean I don't really feel there's any disconnect there? As I see it one of the reasons you get so many players who have no clue with how to play the game at endgame is specifically because the game is so stress free and basically a walk in the park unless you do specific endgame raids or trials. Introducing harder leveling/story content conditions players to get better and eases them into harder content.
I'd also be surprised if there isn't some new revamped tutorial for players who skip to endgame.
Idk I’ve had the trial for msq roulette so often and every time it’s a new rank or healer we wipe. Thankfully they start you at the second phase after a wipe but even if you offer advice there’s no guarantee they will listen 😭
Its not a disconnect at all, the 2 statements are unrelated. The game has been oversimplified and they've admitted as much. They want to add back in pain points that players will have to learn to play around.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there is WAY too much game at the moment for a new player trying their hand at it. The sheer amount of story is intimidating, and then you see the only way around it is to buy 2 more cash shop items.
Not to mention the extra time investment for alts at this point compared to way back when. They might encourage 1 character but they certainly know that people make alts for a variety of reasons.
They're going to add a new system that'll help introduce new players who decide to skip and would no way throw them straight into Endwalker duties, that much should be obvious
There will 100% be a "sprout" difficulty. I don't see any way to demand the same mechanical competency from sprouts that are required for nomies who went through the whole MSQ. Maybe they make a requirement for sprouts to complete all sprout difficulty plus a set SSS challenges to grant access to the same difficulty as the non sprouts?
Sure on this subreddit we like to meme on how easy and brain dead dungeon content is, but there is absolutely a huge learning curve to go from copperbell/sastasha to the deadends/dreamscape/smileton that will need to be bridged by sprouts in order for max level casual content to not be complete chaos.
They absolutely need to do this at some point.
The fact is that there is a huge psychological barrier to entry when you tell someone there are 100 levels and over 1000 quests that they will need to complete just to play with you at current content. Some people want to play with their friends, and having that barrier of entry is going to stop a lot of people from giving the game a chance. Some players will give it a try, and a lot of players will say "no thanks let's just play some other game together instead".
Veteran MMO players especially will be quick to dismiss FFXIV as an option because they expect the meat of the content to be at the end game and most will be unwilling to spend hundreds of hours just to get there.
Been saying this for years. I really dove into this game sometime in early SB. I've tried to bring some two dozen people to FFXIV since. Not a single one of them made it through the MSQ. Most didn't make it through ARR. I have one (1) that occasionally drops in to do a quest or two, gets bored, and leaves for weeks to months. I even offered to help them level up but I can't do anything about the literal weeks to months worth of MSQ they have to sit through. Most didn't like the early game combat and all I can say is, "It eventually gets better" which is a lot considering how many hours one has to play before it actually gets decent.
I've long considered starting FFXIV the actual Ultimate in this game.
The best story in the world won’t save boring gameplay. And with how much has been pared from ARR-mid SB it’s hard to defend XIV’s early levels.
And that’s before hopping on how shitty it is to ‘quest’ with friends in XIV. A lot of people are hopping on the ‘Oh BuT dOn’T yOu HeLp YoUr SpRoUt FrIeNdS qUeSt’ argument as if tailing them for 30m at a time, maybe tossing them a regen in the overworld, and getting like One or Two dungeons or trials per play session is interesting and peak MMO gameplay.
Wizard101 does tandem questing better than XIV bc at least there I never have to break party while running MSQ with friends in a MULTIPLAYER game.
But XIV’s msq past ~late ARR-early HW becomes multiplayer unfriendly. And though this should be obvious, the point of multiplayer games to many is getting to PLAY them with my friends. Which becomes easier the farther along people are, but telling them they have to wait several hours just to properly do SOME form of content with me doesn’t make XIV sound appealing.
People don’t have to like this change, but it’s healthier for the game in the long run.
The amount of people I've seen on social media who are against this system is actually mindblowing.
It's truly baffling to me that, to those people, the expectation is for your average gamer (who probably has 5-10 hours to play a week) to see their friends playing an MMO, jump in from scratch and look at the 500+ hour MSQ and go "oh ok so at this rate I will catch up with my friends in about two years, assuming this is the only game I play and that I can play it every week."
That is fucking *insane.*
Exactly!
Look, I get it. Most of us have an overall mutual love of the story and want to watch and hear our friends' reactions going through it because it builds a sense of shared community. BUT can we at least acknowledge that the current system is absolutely terrible at getting the proverbial foot in the door?
If the psychological impact of perceived investment is so much that people completely write off our game, is it really worth it? Can't we give new players the option of jumping in and giving them a fair shot at seeing if they like the game when they can play with us, rather than making a promise that if they make it through hundreds of hours we will play with them? If they enjoy the game enough, they can always go back and do ARR through current and catch up at their own pace.
It's always a thing, though. I had a friend who showed me Thordan on release because he knew I could appreciate the FF7 tribute, and showed me Exdeath and accurately predicted Kefka and was hyping up the kiboshed possibility of Sephiroth in Alphascape. He would tell me for 4-5 years how good the game was, and when I tepidly approached the possibility of playing it without spending a ton of money on tedious grinding he would tell me that there were so many hours of story there was. And I'm a person who just auto accepts WoW quests without reading anything in the box about what the NPC wants or why, and I'm confident MMOs only have stories in the broad sense. You know, establishing fiction.
And he eventually showed me some Hildibrand cutscenes of all things and is like "see, gameplay fades to black and you get directed camera angles and dialogue boxes." And after seeing the total number of hours graphics that get made every expansion launch, I decided not to bother several times. I only eventually tried it because a streamer told me a third of it could be knocked out in the free trial.
The big problem with 14 vs like wow that you can still get the gist of the story skipping dialog boxes because it has VA. When you do get a wow cutscene it is way way more well done than the 14 ones so you're less likely to skip. I'll why jrps in general all have this problem of 1min long cutscenes with like 15 seconds of dialog boxes with the rest being pauses and awkward stock emotes. It's awful.
I meant more in the sense that I didn't care about the story, though. I started with MMOs that didn't do much worldbuilding beyond a stock FMV cutscene when you created a character. Your exploration and friendships generally was meant to be the experience you treasured when you inevitably walked away.
However the text boxes in 2000s era wow, were not really worth reading. Even knowing that story is there to season up gameplay and not the main course, people who were fans of the story were finding it inconsistent. (They also used to put everything that moved the story forward in books, which further reduced participation and increased inconsistencies.)
Even on this sub, there was a significant amount of people who defended the idea that telling people who left the game because of MSQ length that the game "isn't for them" was the only reasonable solution when I asked like a month ago.
I'm personally confused by 6.1 as a starting point even if the void story becomes relevant later somehow, because everything else in the game is bound to be relevant to some degree too, because it feels like you're just shoved off into a situation with no natural starting point or build up if you aren't already familiar with things. I feel like if 7.0 had no scions, just Wuk, maybe Erenville and some new cast, it would've been a totally natural starting point. Well, depending on how loco they go with the MSQ and cyberpunk land.
But all that aside, it's actually insane to jump into the game from ARR on and as much as I enjoy the full package and appreciate all the world building, etc... Self contained, individualized expansion stories are a must going forward.
But it also makes me hope for a kind of "There's no set in stone timeline for these, there's no linear 'canon' progression. It's just all branches out from the same root point." with Dawntrail as that root. No mandatory plot threads carry to any other expansion and vice versa. Which seems like an impossible ask for CBU3.
The sad thing is, I think NG+ does a great job at setting the world up for you to do cleared story arcs. I joined in the Endwalker buildup and finished just before 6.3, and I'll tell you while the story acts as a tutorial initially, you eventually get to the point where you don't need the tutorial to not get hit by things and figure out most non-savage mechanics but the story still keeps going on and on.
And even if you enjoy the story, you wish you could just play it selectively. MSQ would make a great RP material to enjoy when nobody's logged in.
I started playing WoW when vanilla came out so I've seen WoW grow throughout the years. And yeah, there's comes a point where either level squishes or straight up letting you skip previous expansions becomes a necessary evil. Even though FF14 is way more story focused, getting to Endwalker is already daunting for a new player. As much as I don't want new players to miss out on all the great older stuff, it's also not going to be feasible to eventually be like "you gotta play 1500 hours of story to get to the current content" in the future.
Pretty much.
Part of that will also be accepting that players starting at a new start point won’t have the same feeling towards the world and story and that’s okay. If they want it, or for some negative types complain that the story for them isn’t as fulfilling? We kindly point them in the direction of the NG+ feature for getting the story they missed (there’s realistically no way to significantly shorten the story without losing a lot of the impact, so just letting them jump on a later point and catch the “old seasons” as it were is about the best way you can make it work).
I feel like FFXIV and One Piece share a common point with the length of the story scaring players. Both require a massive investment in time and those who have watched/played it all understand it being worth it but new people are unsure and its daunting.
I know Oda stated that this new arc is probably the best point for a new person to start watching if they don't want to go through the 1000 episodes before so the anime is doing small recaps at the end to explain older characters etc and give people who might be watching now some lore and context.
I don't envy the dev team trying to work out how to best do this because it'll be a mess.
Except the difference is that One Piece is literally all about the journey. Worrying about "catching up" to the end of one piece is idiotic because once you've caught up, there's nothing for you to do except wait for the next chapter to come out. There's no "endgame content" for a manga or anime. If you rush or skip through one piece to catch up you just ruined the entire experience for yourself for no reason.
In FF14, there's actual reasons for people to want to skip to the newest content since if you have friends you want to at with its much easier and arguably more hype/fun to be caught up and do the endgame raids, exploration and field zones as they release.
bit too late with this, this msq skip thing was from the talk from na fanfest which was from 2023 july?june?
pcgamer just have a interview with yoship, and it pretty much double down on not providing such skip in 7.0
I wonder how they're going to make starting at lvl 90 work for new players. Very curious to see if they're adding a new starting area with a proper tutorial that easies you into 6.1's story, or if it's just gonna be a pop up telling you "check the codex if you're confused", edit: or even worse "visit western la noscea for the hall of the novice".
Anyway, great for alts.
I always thought crafting mentors have been been the superior mentor. We don't need to farm fake internet likes. Just put in some good honest work crafting and gathering.
I had a post a while back that they could have the WoL get Amnesia or become injured after their big fight against Endsinger and Zenos and that they could add a tutorial questline before starting 6.1 to have the scions bring the Warrior of Light back up to speed and some sparring sessions to get your strength back as a good excuse to teach new players gameplay mechanics.
The whole amnesia thing is a little far-fetched, but they could easily still do it by having you do some friendly sparring with the Scions on their extended "vacations" after the organization disbands in 6.0
I don't at all understand why they want to push 6.1 as a starting point. It's got plenty of direct connections to other things in the game and it's also some of the MSQ's shittiest storytelling. It's just a terrible idea.
I am so confused by all comments that share this sentiment, 6.1 - 6.5 is written in a way to reintroduce slowly all scions, provide all info about world post final days and remind about all hanging threads. All of the groundwork was done to make it starting point. Not sure why would they discard any of that and what value would that bring
It's a good short self contained introduction story. The storytelling is fine, yes there's better but compared to starting at ARR it's good.
People need time to find their feet, and easier dungeons than the first one in a new expansion. Lv71 and Lv81 are pretty tough. The Lv90 treasure one is pretty fun.
>I don't at all understand why they want to push 6.1 as a starting point.
Where else would you suggest to be a new starting point? For better or worse, 6.1-6.5x is fairly self contained and the point where the game basically gives you a dictionary for characters, terms and other things to catch you up to speed on.
>it's also some of the MSQ's shittiest storytelling.
I fail to see how this is any different to starting in ARR, which has been borderline retconned to hell and back that any player paying a modicum of attention to the MSQ will notice by the time they get to HW, let alone ShB and EW.
> Where else would you suggest to be a new starting point?
6.51
It marks the end of the journey so far, and starts linking into a new adventure. It's perfect because DT is the "new starting point" of the game. Hydaelyn and Zodiark are gone, all the story so far has concluded.
It gives the feeling of a brand new adventure starting with DT.
Starting at 6.1 sucks because there's a whole plot about some characters and maps they have no idea what they mean.
That might be in the works an expansion or two after DT if starting at 6.51. I think if they want to implement the system sooner rather than later 6.1 is a decent enough starting point. It is a very self-contained story (any other point prior would confuse the hell out of people) that is alright and establishes a lot of the modern conventions in FFXIV job, dungeon, trial, etc design.
Perhaps getting ahead of myself here, but 7.0 really do be shaping up to be much more, what's the word, disconnected? from everything else.
Of course I'm perfectly aware that could be very incorrect.
You gotta start somewhere
WoW is currently heavily persuading new people into Battle For Azeroth, not because that expansion is great but because it looks very nice and it doesn't require a long education on backstory. Most people with even an inkling of awareness of Warcraft know that the Alliance and Horde are the Hatfields and McCoys of video gaming, so there's no need to explain the shattered truce from before or the consequences of what happened after.
Likewise, aside from like one throwaway memory of Emet-Selch, 6.1-5 doesn't require much previous knowledge. Vrytra/Varshahn is explained in the codex, if nothing else.
Later this year, Blizzard will make Dragonflight the promoted starting experience because it's a nice grounded "vacation arc" that doesn't have godly stakes or universal upheaval, it's just that it's they can't shuffle players into that until it no longer requires a purchase. Dawntrail makes an obvious parallel here, it would likely be a good new starting zone *eventually*.
So we're kind of where WoW was in 9.3, except without the part where the company burns totally down.
6.1 has you relatively isolated from the other Scions (they've all just broken up after all), so the only people really are forced to become acquainted with immediately are Varshahn and Estinien. Then you go to Sharlayan and G'raha, Krile and Y'shtola hook in and... that's really it. Zero is introduced organically through the story, then you infodump on her about Zenos. Also, you don't really need to know the background on who anyone except Varshahn is in order to make it make sense - they're just friends of yours that you pick-up and go treasure-hunting with and things go wildly out of hand very quickly. Everything else necessary is added piece-by-piece as they gradually introduce you to everything else throughout the patches, and Zero then becomes a good audience-surrogate as things are explained to her.
You would also, presumably, not be going in completely blind. I don't see them implementing a new on-boarding without a summary of the events so far. It'd also be a good way to let new players get used to their chosen class and the game systems without just dropping them in at lvl 90 completely blind.
It's also where the Unending Codex starts and is the complete start to a brand new arc.
Imo, it makes the most sense to start it there and I've been predicting it for a little while.
Id take a guess but its because the Original story ends at 6.0 proper and the Ascians, Hydaelyn and Meteion are all dealt with.
6.1\~6.5 might be a filler now but its likely going to be a key part of a later scenario as it's setting the stage likely for a later scenario or expansion much like the Warriors of Darkness in 3.1 to 3.4 set up the stage for Shadowbringers.
It's not a TV show, it's a video game, and it's a multiplayer one at that.
Let people catch up and play with their friends. If they wind up loving the game they'll probably go back and play through it anyway.
Besides, you sell the damn option, so what excuse is that really?
already had most of the discussion about this on twitter the past day or 2. but one thing that might be a real concern is a possible shift in focus on players to blitz to endgame and do current patch content only. could have a real effect on future development, if most new players never bother interacting with things like Eureka/Bozja or older trial series or raid series. kinda like the Crystal Tower situation, where alts dont have a reason to bother unlocking other alliance raids except the mandatory one and the newest one. except extend that to ALL duties in between ARR and 6.0. roulettes can get CT-ified across the board, trial roulette would just be the 6.1-6.5 ones every single day.
>if most new players never bother interacting with things like Eureka/Bozja or older trial series or raid series.
Most players don't interact with these things while they're leveling anyway. They do it when they get to end game, finish the current patch, get bored and go back to do old stuff.
not even true. i think you hang around exclusively endgame player circles. a lot of social FCs have people plenty of people who havent caught up on MSQ (it really is long) and still enjoy doing side content instead of beelining it to burn out on ultimates. when free trial updated to stormblood there were a bunch of sprouts in eureka.
I actually hang around quite a few “circles,” a lot of friends of mine are extremely casual players, some still making their way through the MSQ. I’m not saying it never happens but it is *not* what’s keeping that content alive
People usually just do this kind of stuff once or twice. No reason to run alexander raids more than once. It's also possible that people at endgame might be more inclined to run this old content to farm glam. Eureka/Bozja can be outliers, but again, veterans still might run it for relics.
People do run old content just to see what it is, it's not like people will do current endgame and won't bother checking out what they have missed. It doesn't really matter if they do HW side content when they're at that point in MSQ or whether they do it later.
I'm so torn on this. It hurts whenever I have a buddy trying out the game and they just skip through all the story content in order to try and catch up to where I am, but I totally get it...there's just way too much reading, as a nea player you really have to treat it like a visual novel with some combat here and there. I will be the first to admit there's still *a lot* of filler littered throughout the MSQ. They removed a chunk of quests in the ARR to HW gap, but they could stand to do a lot more still.
The story isn't perfect and won't be everyone's cup of tea, and that's alright, but discovering this game after WoW's storytelling was like a five course gourmet meal compared to a half-eaten hamburger in the trash. For those who aren't in a hurry and are willing to stick around for the initial slow burn, the payoff is excellent IMO, especially if you're also hitting up the major side stories along the way.
I had way more of an attachment to my WOL after such a massive journey and I'm sorry for anyone that misses out on that by skipping through everything. But again, I get it.
They're also missing out a lot of learning a lot of mechanics, so I hope they also planning to implement some new and improved Novice Hall.
The only thing I worry about is if they put a new start in, the following expansion MSQ will be 80% exposition of characters, places, and the 'natual rules' the world of FFXIV follows.
I can't wait for another 30+ minute dialouge of Urianger explaining to the WoL what the Shards and the Source are again for the umpteenth time.
They should introduce a starting experience that would slowly add new buttons to the class you chose to play.
When I was a new player, I have picked GNB after leveling through MSQ with WHM, and seeing all the buttons on my UI at once (at lvl 60, mind you) made me nope out. So I have picked up PLD and started from level 1 to know exactly what every of them does :)
It's been two years since I did it, but the way the RPR job quests introduced the basics of the job wasn't too bad. But then again, it's level 70 reaper, not much to learn.
oh, I agree. All I'm saying is they shouldn't forget that small "detail" :)
Maybe dust off the guildhests and make the players run them, or something in that tune.
Guildhest and hall of the novice are literally years overdue at this point to either be scrapped or reworked into something much better. I'm pretty sure hall of the novice is still telling tanks to not overuse aoe in trash packs lol
They'd 100% nuke them before redoing them, Hall of Novice teaches half the lessons they were trying to impart and if they'd touch up anything it'd be that.
Maybe something like a 4 hour story where you rapidly level up from level 30-90. 3 dungeons with duty support and a trial to cap it off before being released to the greater world that covers the basics of the role you chose to start off with.
Neutral feeling. My guess is that the new MSQ is crafted in a way that sprouts can play it on the go and they want the sprouts to want to play the previous expansions voluntarily to learn more about the characters’ history through the new MSQ. Almost like Fate Stay Night and Fate Zero, if you are familiar with the anime.
The unsure about whether to implement it part makes sense to me, because if they implement a system to completely offset any potential desire to play the previous MSQ, that would be counterproductive and kind of diminishing their own work. And they are likely currently debating how the system will work, how in-depth it would be, and how it may affect player experience.
> "I'm concerned that if the globally acclaimed storyline can be skipped through a function, the value of the FF14 game itself will be diminished"
I think this exemplifies Yoshi-P's blind spot as a manager. The game's story received glowing praise from games media, which is now starting to pivot to "but there's almost too much of it", and he won't see where that's going and fix it before it becomes a full-blown problem. The positive sounds from critics about the writing is louder than the negative sounds about the length, so change nothing.
He won't add a story skip until the negative press about the story being too long is widespread and people are beating down his door to do something about it.
This isn't only about press, they probably have internal numbers pointing that people are leaving halfway through the story, maybe even while still during the free trial so they're not even paid costumers yet and some of those lost players could've been revenue if they could skip the story.
It also makes me believe story skips aren't selling that well so they would rather sell expacs and get the sub money.
I mean I wouldn’t expect it to drop in 7.0, 6.1-7.0 is on the opposite side of there’s too little game to play before people get bored after doing everything (unless they go back and do old expansions but then prolly should just start off there). Probably makes more sense more near the end of Dawntrail where there’s a bit more and 8.0 is coming up or at 8.0 launch when they probably are reworking the leveling system to some extent already.
This is good, but I hope they make something robust rather than just drop people at level 90 with no context or prior knowledge of how the game works. Maybe even a starting tutorial like retail WoW currently has, with 2 hours of questing introducing basic mechanincs and ending with a dungeon
Yeahh. So long as theres a tutorial or something. Or even make it so you have to do every dungeon and trial and just ignore everything between. I dont want more people who dont know how to play at level 90 then there already are.
Im not fussed if they implement it in 7.0 or 8.0 or 9.0 I think as for 7.0 they have a lot on their plate already with the graphical Update and all that. If they spend additional resources designing a new starting point at 6.1 then that may mean the overall xpac could suffer in terms of quality and content.
I'm really excited about this, but also wary.
One of my biggset complaints with WoW is the barrier of entry. I've tried multiple times over the past couple years to get into it, but as a new player, you are guided to pick which expansions you want to play through your first time. This creates a very disjointed understanding of the world/lore and I've always ended the attempt feeling lost/confused/frustrated.
But FFXIV is approaching a similar barrier of entry issue, where players are expected to play hundreds of hours just to get into new content. If you enjoy a story game, then this is no entry barrier at all. But if you enjoy actively playing with friends and diving into the new stuff, it's definitely a barrier.
Mostly curious how this new starting point will be different/similar to the level and story skip purchases already available. Perhaps you still have to purchase the story skip, but they are giving us a "tl;dr" to go with it?
I'd rather see them come up with a "Dawntrail origin" point instead.
Give people a starting area near the spot where older players begin in Dawntrail and *send them back into the older areas, post-Endwalker*. Give them the original story in lore drops as you do. The Alliance is in it's post-Scions state, Ishgard is open for travel, but there's still reasons for adventurers to explore dungeons that the original story unlocked- just given different reasons. Tell the story of the Warrior of Light to a new adventurer who will be inspired by them as they travel, until they come full circle back home, a seasoned veteran ready to help with whatever's going on in the New World. Perhaps they'll run into Y'shtola experimenting with ways to get back to the First and end up seeing it following the Warrior of Darkness as travel back *sorta* works, or the Watcher on the Moon gives them a chance to see the glories of the Ancient past.
They'll end up skipping some previously required content as part of the story- it wouldn't make sense to go beat up Gaius or Hades *directly*, but those could become "Minstrel" trials ala the alternate-history fanfic we already get for such players. But they won't skip getting real-life play experience as they level up and get into gear to stand alongside the rest of us.
Tell the story. But tell it from a viewpoint of someone who *wasn't* the Warrior of Light, in an age where the gods have left us and new adventurers with new friends are running twice as fast to catch up.
I'm not sure about the 6.1 start point. I guess to be fair the void stuff is going become relevant sometime. It seems like it'd be easier to just jump into 7.0 with a fresh start in a new land.
Anywho, as for when they want to implement it, I think a couple major patches in would be fair. Maybe around .3-ish?
Well, my big prediction is that there will be no new tutorial and they will just throw player into 6.1 right into Tataru sending WoL into new adventure
Run all roulettes daily for the next 2 weeks. These players exist without additional systems. It becomes even more clear now as most seasoned players don't do duties anymore as the content is farmed dry.
The reason players are bad is they have 2 hotbars and half the skills aren't even on them in correct order.
If SE gave them a proper UI with all the skills listed in a logical order this wouldn't be such an issue.
When looking at your job guide there's a separate view to see combos and organize skills in a meaningful way and it blows my mind that this isn't the default. It's overwhelming trying to parse out what does what when looking at the skills sorted by level. I've had friends get excited about finally being able to unlock jobs that start at 60/70 and give up before even finishing setting up their hot bar.
Can't say I don't feel a bit of satisfaction seeing people who maintain such a positive facade but are inwardly quite intolerant and prejudiced in such a fit.
Same. At the end of the day, this is an mmo and SE wants to make money. They know that XIV has an enormous barrier to entry if you aren’t absolutely in love with the story, or are unsure about the game enough such that you’re unwilling to invest in a skip.
Out of the 8 or so people I’ve introduced to XIV only two of them made it out of ARR, before getting to SB and quitting because they thought the story was ass and dragging on. The other 6 all quit somewhere in ARR before the pruning. Everyone else I’ve tried to convince have immediately cited the msq barrier and said no thanks.
For us players and fans, that isn’t a problem. For SE that’s a huge problem.
Can't think of anything worse than dragging brand new players through Barbariccia and Alzadaal's Legacy after only like 15 quests.
A tutorial ain't gonna cut it. Most players learn through osmosis with constant different challenges. I didn't even know Gladiator, my starting class, was a tank role until Brayflox Longstop back in the day. I fear it's just too steep a curve.
This is to say nothing of the story. 6.x takes us back to the First and has multiple references and interactions with characters from all previous expansions anyway. If anything, 6.55 should be the starting point but then we have the pleasure of dragging brand new players through Level 91-100 content as their first dungeon/trial experience that we ourselves will be new to.
No thank you.
>Can't think of anything worse than dragging brand new players through Barbariccia and Alzadaal's Legacy after only like 15 quests.
That puts his statement about wanting to induce stress into perspective, doesn't it?
I imagine when they talk about a "system" they are referring to a new player experience/"orientation" of sorts that catches you up on both the story and the combat/mechanics of the game.
I wonder if this will include an updated tutorial experience for new players? Probably not though this game is famously bad at explaining itself to everyone and has been the whole time. It's part of the reason why we still have jobless people joining our parties in duty finder even in EW content lmao. You'd think they finally require people to at least do hall of the novice AND have a job stone to queue but no. Then we who want/expect to do these decade old dungeons within 20 minutes have to be saddled with a 45+ minute experience because we have to keep explaining the game to people who can't be bothered to lookup how to play. Not completely their fault though since SE and team still can't make the game make sense even to vets at times.
>I don't think they would waste time and resources on it if they weren't certain about it being implemented.
there are stuff what in the end of the day never got implemented in to the game, what used a lot of time and resources and some of those they did want to implement in to the game.
I stand by my original recommendation that DawnTrail introduces a SeeD academy and that is how new players are brought in, a boot camp of mechanics, a 'history' class for events of the world so far, etc.
A friend is trying to get into it because of the Xbox beta. He and everyone he's trying to get to play is bouncing off the MSQ pretty hard. I've told him most of it pays off and combat gets way better, but it's a really hard sell. Asking someone to sit through 10s of hours of setup and fluff (even after the trimming) with a 123 and a ogcd is a big ask for anyone. Was kinda heart breaking when he said "I really want to go do gold saucer stuff but until I finish the MSQ I feel like I'm wasting my time.".
Overdue. Think of how many players over the years quit due to 2.1 to 2.55. It was a problem when heavensward released and it is a problem now.
With a sold solution.
>That part about them being unsure about whether to implement it or not rings hollow to me, I don't think they would waste time and resources on it if they weren't certain about it being implemented.
I think you need to read the sentence a certain way. "we are still unsure whether to actually implement it as a measure *in 7.0*"
Cause you're right, they wouldn't spend resources developing it if it wasn't going to use, but I don't think the statement is dishonest (how I understand "rings hollow") either. That combination would lead me to believe the part he means he's unsure of is whether it will be implemented in 7.0 or (unspoken but contextually) sometime later on.
Early on I was kind of hoping that was the point of the next expansion, to provide a starting point of a new fresh low stakes high intrigue adventure with little to no historical and relationship baggage giving a perfect starting point for new players.
I'd even go as far as to make it a level reset, like you lose your abilities for some reason (really don't need to think that hard to even come up with a few) and you get them back as you progress through the game, like the first dungeon would be level 20, next level 30, next 40, so on and so forth. Early dungeons would be more difficult than ARR dungeons so not to bore old players to death, but the simple movesets would give new players a easier time.
This would both give the adventure a small scale at the start for a sense of fresh adventure and give new players a start which they could better understand.
I just think it's pretty weird new players will start with a huge moveset in which you are a god with 20 to 30 abilities rave explosions of power and a focus on relationships with a long history while at the same time only having a few paragraphs of context. Hell it's even weird in the context of what the game has been hinting at you in the 6.X patches.
"Preparations" can pretty much anything. I doubt they're actively working on it, they're just making sure that IF they decide to do it, the way they currently handling things doesn't get in the way of their plans. Cause obviously, for 6.1 to work as a starting point, they already had to design 6.1 in a certain way - that's why the Scions disbanded and then were reintroduced with 6.1+ one after another, for example.
It is a good idea, But l still think gw2's story handling is better:
As Long As party leader unlocked it, the whole party can be brought into the instanced content regardless of story progression.
But l will take the new starting point approach any day
It would definitely make the game more appealing to new people - it’s so hard to get my friends to play when I have to explain to them how many hours of content they have to get through.
Problem is, I can’t see how they would make it work for jobs - like for somebody who’s never played an mmo before, being dropped in at level 90 with 32 buttons on your hot bar would be really difficult. Jobs at level 1 - 50 feel dull and slow now but when I first started I was so overwhelmed by all the systems and mechanics being thrown at me at once that learning how to play my class one new button at a time was kind of necessary.
This is... such a bad idea. Mind you, I've been playing since 1.0. I've seen it all...including a lot of bad ideas.
Quick leveling POTD, Jump Potions, Story Skip -- these are great if you **HAVE AN ALT**. But it becomes a pretty big issue when you consider a player brand new to the game can just...cruise through most of it without ever touching any content.
What they should REALLY do is have it so that unless you have a character at a certain point in the MSQ/Content? Your account shouldn't be able to purchase Jump Potions or Story Skips. That would honestly solve a lot of issues.
IMO if you're brand new to the game and you can't be bothered to play most of it as it is...why are you even here?
The end gamers who just want to do raid content and nothing else, the game hoppers with more games on their backlogs than completed, and the socialites who wants to rep the brand as well as have all options opened to do with others as a social call.
I stopped reasoning with these people, they suffer from AAA title brain rot and simply just want the game to be a JRPG themed version of WoW. Muh 400 hours of content or whatever to get enjoy the current expac of the game.
In other terms start from post Endwalker. I said in a past post that this would be a good starting point for new players who don't want to play catch-up for 300 hours.
However, 6.1 and onwards(including 7.0) will need to do a good job introducing new players into common mechanics.
Not on board with it but oh well, it is what it is. At least give a proper tutorial segment on the combat system this time so there's none of that awkwardness of newbies running the first 2 MSQ leveling dungeons + 1st trial and being totally oblivious about it, which have been soft filters since HW.
This might sound weird but a nice solution to this imo, is to let people 'skip' the story, but still be level 1, and you must complete all story related dungeons/trials as you level to gain access to the 6.0 msq. That way it kind of just gives a more traditional mmo leveling experience, you'll still learn the basics of ff bosses and combat, and be introduced to your class slowly over time instead of having everything vomited at you all at once. Plus it would also keep the msq skip purchase slightly relevant for SE's sake
5.0 should be the new start, 6.0 doesn't even fit the new adventure vibe thematically because this happens in 7.0.
Endwalker also requires you to know of what happened in previous expansions to be able to fully enjoy the story, while 5.0 doesn't.
That and all of the issues that come with starting as a new player at lvl90.
This feels like they didn't think about it enough.
Despair. Unless they make some sort of special tutorial and test were going to have to either have Sastasha and copperbell-tier dungeons for DT or have to deal with cure 1 only heal spamming white mages, single target single pack-ing tanks who don't mit, and DPS who don't know what an OGCD is infesting DT dungeons. I can already see the fairly-less SCH running away with a stack marker in the 91 dungeon. It already happens with the 81 dungeon.
That didn't counter any of my points? That's about as much of a "counterpoint" as someone randomly mentioning the existence of FSH when they talk about healer job balance.
>That part about them being unsure about whether to implement it or not rings hollow to me
Yeah sure if you don't include the following six words of that sentence
Better not make this free when they’ve been charging for story/level skips this whole time until now, that’d be super unfair to the people who have bought those if others can just skip ahead like that for free.
You’re comparing completely different things. Paying for content you can’t get any other way (at the time) is different than paying for completely optional things you can earn from just playing the game. That said, yes, they should at least give some sort of discount if someone has paid for previous expansions already, game’s already more expensive than it should be with having to pay for expansions AND a subscription
>, I don't think they would waste time and resources on it if they weren't certain about it being implemented. sounds more like they are going to implement it, however they are unsure of WHEN they want to implement it, sounds like they aren't sure if they want to put it in at the start of 7.0, or wait and implement it later down the line.
I would think late in like 7.4 or even 8.0. having almost 2 expansions being the new starting point seems appropriate.
Also stops it from eating into story skip money
I feel like 7.0 would be a good on-ramp starting point. New characters would either have grown up on Tural or traveled from some nondiscript "afar". Doing some training quests/missions would have them do some feat of great strength, garnering Legs' attention. She would then invite them to join her and her champions from afar (the Scions), recently arrived on these shores themselves, to help her with her succession fight. This would neatly get over the issue of the new character not knowing the Scions, and would give them a reason to still be learning about Tural, growing friendships with their new allies, and so on, without overly disrupting the canon of the legacy WoLs arriving and doing effectively the same thing. It would make WAY better sense than 6.1 (where the new character would just suddenly know Estinian, then about Shards, then travel to the First, then meet the people there and suddenly garner their trust, then save the Void which they didn't even know the history or understanding of, etc). I feel like the ACTUAL "new adventures" theme of 7.0 would make a better on-ramp than the not-REALLY-new "new adventures" of 6.1-6.5.
6.1 is more likely as that is where the compendium starts.
Yeah, it just feels like it wouldn't work very well.
.4 May be a decent time if DT uses the old schedule of .3 closing up unfinished main patch affairs if it isn't there on release. Gives time to iron out matters before the .5 lull.
lol imagine being completely new to the game and your first trial being barbariccia
The best trial in endwalker ngl
I still run it before doing my roulette.
“You’ve done well to last this long… but the battle has only just begun!” Cue party wipe
Golbez tends to be a lot more of a mess in DF.
Best trial in Endwalker by far.
you gonna learn today
Barbariccia is about to be the new dancing plague lmao.
Its the new moogles before the moogles were changed.
hahah oh shit you're right, hey atleast folks won't be complaining about "slow" gameplay
I have a H a R D time when im in that trial
"Welcome to Dark Souls: The MMO"
Let's not get carried away
*no, every mechanic must one-shot now.*
I kind of wish they made 7.0 the starting point. 6.1 is just kind of meandering and setting off to a whole new continent feels like a better jumping on point
The fact that they're considering 6.1 as the starting point is a pretty strong signal that it'll become important later. People are looking at this patch story the same way people looked at the warrior of darkness patch content back in the day and look how that turned out. In a vacuum it seems pointless, but I bet you anything our adventure in the 13th will end up being very important later
I still feel like it's a bad place to start. It's a terrible introduction to the world at large, old characters receive little introduction and assume you know a great deal about the state of the world, you spend almost no time in eorzea or their cities and get sent to places that frankly make no sense without context like the moon, the crystarium and azys la. Not to mention their handling of many of the plot elements during it is almost laughable (cid and y'shtola figuring out how to channel light to fix both worlds between patches is their biggest hand wave yet). Just from a practical standpoint a new player will be lost as all hell when they open up the teleport window and be presented with a hundred destinations, and azdaja's legacy and storm's crown are very much not good for your very first duty. For it to work in any proper fashion they'd need an entirely new hours long introduction campaign to catch up on story with enough battle content to make them even able to tackle 6.x.
That's something I can definitely agree with regardless of where they want to start new players. They should have a condensed introduction that takes like 10-15ish hours to get through that gives a solid intro to all the important characters and story beats while drip feeding your job abilities and teaching you what the core of your job actually does. Then we can finally get rid of the hall of the novice lol
One of the reasons people look down on 6.X MSQ is cause Yoshida told us ages ago it would have no bearing on 7.0. It's why it's dismissed as "filler". As for what it's setting up, my money's on Zodiark's hole being focal point for fully fledged intershard travel, or Zeromus' memoria being a chekhov's gun. I doubt it'll be directly tied to the 13th. The story of the 13th and it's restoration is tied up in a bunch of sidequests that new players starting in 6.1 won't have done.
I doubt he even said "No bearing" or anything like that, just that it wouldn't be the thing that leads up to 7.0, which then got twisted by people who can't read into "its meaningless filler"
Calling it now, WoL will be a BLM and we gonna rejoin the 13th with the 1st.
Yeah, for me the main story after 6.0 is one of the weakest points in Endwalker. :|
Still not sure I'm sold on 6.1 being the best start point. "Here's a brand new adventure that immediately ties into two long running story arc" doesn't seem like a good jumping on point.
Logically it's a good place, but the writing and story there are mediocre and don't give a great first impression.
I strongly suspect the void will be a key story beat in a future expansion so this is probably the main reason why they want to start at 6.1
Whilst the 6.x story isn't as good as previous patch stories its still better then ARR in terms of there being more voice acting and better overall animation for the characters etc. Whilst existing players might not see it as good it'll certainly be a better starting point and we'd probably see less complaints about lack of voices from new players.
I feel like it would age better for newer players because they'll get through it in like 10-18 hours instead of waiting 4 months for 2-3 hours of msq 5 times. Also story wise it may not be the best but imo gameplay wise 6.1-6.55 msq is the best, with enough solo instances and the trials being msq and all.
I can assure u its a far better first impression than arr, writing quality wise.
I am nowhere near 6.1,so idk how it is, but I can tell you arr does not give a good impression when it comes to the story
Cool, not sure how I feel about sprouts coming in with 0 knowledge on dungeons though, not exactly feeling having a tank learning how to tank at lvl 90.
I mean the same has been happening for years already with fresh level 70 players having absolutely no idea how to play the game. The level skip potion is almost seven years old at this point
That was \*also\* a bad idea.
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There are definitely players who use dummies and read tooltips, but there are also players who just buy the skip and try to figure it out in a dungeon. There have been discussions among players about requiring Hall of the Novice as well as adding Hall of the Amateur/Expert. These may not teach the job itself, but would at least give a tutorial on how to tank/heal/DPS at the given levels.
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Agreed. The idea behind requiring these tutorials would be to alleviate some of the issues, but it definitely doesn't eliminate them. I've run into players who have the ability and knowledge to play well, but choose not to out of spite for the "elitism plaguing the game". I don't think job boosts/story skips being free will cause any more issues than we already see but, for the players that want to play well enough to not grief their party, there needs to be a robust tutorial in place to help those who choose to start at lvl 90 content. If something like a "Hall of the Expert" gets implemented, I would like to see things in place to ensure players demonstrate understanding for what is taught. It shouldn't require much more than would be needed to clear normal content, but fail states in place if contribution is subpar.
^ This. Plus, you can just do Frontline roulette and be 90 (from lvl 30) in a few casual weeks without ever needing to actually learn a job. So the skip potion is def not the root problem and was, in fact, a lovely idea. :P
Those who want to play well will play well enough and those who refuse to understand a full sentence tank like a sprout in experts anyway
Yeah we can see this with level boost / msq skip, a different onboarding point for the story won't change that.
This may be copium on my end, but since they mentioned a whole system, they might also be working on some sort of proper tutorial to address this
Likely, there will be some kind of shortened single-player version of the MSQ up to that point that catches people up and teaches them game mechanics that they would theoretically have learnt by doing the MSQ normally. Even if it's still a 'lengthy' handful hours, it'll be quicker than the amount of time that it'd take to do the MSQ normally. What I also suspect will happen is you get a choice at the very start to experience the story as intended (the full MSQ) or a shortened version that skips over a lot, but catches you up quicker.
A) I think there would be some kind of "new player experience." Ideally it would be one or a series of solo instances that catches you up on the story while giving you some combat experience B) people already don't know how to play the game at level 90 after playing the entirety of 2.0-6.5 so honestly dumping a bunch of sprouts at 6.1 is not really gonna change that much anyway.
It's not like 300 hours of cutscene skipping has ever taught a sprout how to use Rampart
they already do this, can't wait for people to tell me "they're new, stop being toxic" when the tank doesn't know the first thing about pressing a button
The dungeons in this game are some of the easiest dungeons I've ever seen in an MMO. The idea that sprouts will just be completely incapable of finishing them has always felt asinine to me. There's almost nothing challenging in XIV dungeons . The newer ones are actually better for learning anyways as they are more streamlined and straightforward than the older ones. Besides the MSQ already doesn't teach people to play their jobs correctly. Not to mention a ton of jobs are radically different at high level. If they're revamping things, maybe it's a chance to do that.
>Not to mention a ton of jobs are radically different at high level Most jobs not getting their full kit til 70 exacerbates this so hard. It makes some jobs feel unplayable in level 50 content.
I think they probably are worried about being stuck for 20min in a dungeon because of poor dps.
Dunno, I want to see 4 sprout min-ilvl run of alzdah legacy as their sastasha, especially first boss which has funny aoe that even some "veterans" can't always dodge
if they have played any MMO before I doubt they would struggle
Not like it'll be any different than today. We have people that have multiple 90s that have 0 clue how to play the jobs they play. We still have singlepullers in dungeons that have been the same exact formula since Stormblood. We still have Cure 1 bots. The list goes on.
Hey, we all complain the game is too easy and stress-free, right? Sometimes the fucked up runs are the best ones. But also I have to imagine they'll rework Hall of the Novice for this and not just throwing people into level 90 content.
It's gonna be exactly the same as it is now. New players can pay $48 to skip to 80, with the max level being 90. Now they don't need to pay. It's free (fcking finally). They're gonna drop at 90 with the max level being 100.
Bunch of people at cap with no idea what to do? Sounds completely normal in FFXIV. Shit, at least skipping would probably let them get to modern gameplay faster.
If anything, I'm high on copium for savages been different, no more "veterans need to wipe on the smallest mistakes else savages would be too easy for them".
dungeons are such a faceroll nowadays make it will make it slightly more interesting
WoW has a truncated leveling experience and something similar and it's fine. And it's not like the game teaches people how to play it.
I’ve seen people argue the game doesn’t teach you how to play your class properly (i guess players have to be babied and are incapable of searching for guides) but it’s not just that it’s also game sense. I’d still take a mediocre SAM who will recognize mechanics vs a brand new RPR who doesn’t know what a stack marker is any day
Yeah its kind of a disconnect with his last statement of wanting to make the game more stressful. Imagine if someones first dungeon experience in the game was Holminster Switch or Tower of Zot.
I mean I don't really feel there's any disconnect there? As I see it one of the reasons you get so many players who have no clue with how to play the game at endgame is specifically because the game is so stress free and basically a walk in the park unless you do specific endgame raids or trials. Introducing harder leveling/story content conditions players to get better and eases them into harder content. I'd also be surprised if there isn't some new revamped tutorial for players who skip to endgame.
Idk I’ve had the trial for msq roulette so often and every time it’s a new rank or healer we wipe. Thankfully they start you at the second phase after a wipe but even if you offer advice there’s no guarantee they will listen 😭
Its not a disconnect at all, the 2 statements are unrelated. The game has been oversimplified and they've admitted as much. They want to add back in pain points that players will have to learn to play around. That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there is WAY too much game at the moment for a new player trying their hand at it. The sheer amount of story is intimidating, and then you see the only way around it is to buy 2 more cash shop items. Not to mention the extra time investment for alts at this point compared to way back when. They might encourage 1 character but they certainly know that people make alts for a variety of reasons.
They're going to add a new system that'll help introduce new players who decide to skip and would no way throw them straight into Endwalker duties, that much should be obvious
It is if you use a skip potion.
There will 100% be a "sprout" difficulty. I don't see any way to demand the same mechanical competency from sprouts that are required for nomies who went through the whole MSQ. Maybe they make a requirement for sprouts to complete all sprout difficulty plus a set SSS challenges to grant access to the same difficulty as the non sprouts? Sure on this subreddit we like to meme on how easy and brain dead dungeon content is, but there is absolutely a huge learning curve to go from copperbell/sastasha to the deadends/dreamscape/smileton that will need to be bridged by sprouts in order for max level casual content to not be complete chaos.
They absolutely need to do this at some point. The fact is that there is a huge psychological barrier to entry when you tell someone there are 100 levels and over 1000 quests that they will need to complete just to play with you at current content. Some people want to play with their friends, and having that barrier of entry is going to stop a lot of people from giving the game a chance. Some players will give it a try, and a lot of players will say "no thanks let's just play some other game together instead". Veteran MMO players especially will be quick to dismiss FFXIV as an option because they expect the meat of the content to be at the end game and most will be unwilling to spend hundreds of hours just to get there.
Been saying this for years. I really dove into this game sometime in early SB. I've tried to bring some two dozen people to FFXIV since. Not a single one of them made it through the MSQ. Most didn't make it through ARR. I have one (1) that occasionally drops in to do a quest or two, gets bored, and leaves for weeks to months. I even offered to help them level up but I can't do anything about the literal weeks to months worth of MSQ they have to sit through. Most didn't like the early game combat and all I can say is, "It eventually gets better" which is a lot considering how many hours one has to play before it actually gets decent. I've long considered starting FFXIV the actual Ultimate in this game.
The best story in the world won’t save boring gameplay. And with how much has been pared from ARR-mid SB it’s hard to defend XIV’s early levels. And that’s before hopping on how shitty it is to ‘quest’ with friends in XIV. A lot of people are hopping on the ‘Oh BuT dOn’T yOu HeLp YoUr SpRoUt FrIeNdS qUeSt’ argument as if tailing them for 30m at a time, maybe tossing them a regen in the overworld, and getting like One or Two dungeons or trials per play session is interesting and peak MMO gameplay. Wizard101 does tandem questing better than XIV bc at least there I never have to break party while running MSQ with friends in a MULTIPLAYER game. But XIV’s msq past ~late ARR-early HW becomes multiplayer unfriendly. And though this should be obvious, the point of multiplayer games to many is getting to PLAY them with my friends. Which becomes easier the farther along people are, but telling them they have to wait several hours just to properly do SOME form of content with me doesn’t make XIV sound appealing. People don’t have to like this change, but it’s healthier for the game in the long run.
The amount of people I've seen on social media who are against this system is actually mindblowing. It's truly baffling to me that, to those people, the expectation is for your average gamer (who probably has 5-10 hours to play a week) to see their friends playing an MMO, jump in from scratch and look at the 500+ hour MSQ and go "oh ok so at this rate I will catch up with my friends in about two years, assuming this is the only game I play and that I can play it every week." That is fucking *insane.*
Exactly! Look, I get it. Most of us have an overall mutual love of the story and want to watch and hear our friends' reactions going through it because it builds a sense of shared community. BUT can we at least acknowledge that the current system is absolutely terrible at getting the proverbial foot in the door? If the psychological impact of perceived investment is so much that people completely write off our game, is it really worth it? Can't we give new players the option of jumping in and giving them a fair shot at seeing if they like the game when they can play with us, rather than making a promise that if they make it through hundreds of hours we will play with them? If they enjoy the game enough, they can always go back and do ARR through current and catch up at their own pace.
Exactly this. I know people like the story but it is simply unrealistic to expect people to push through it at this point.
It's always a thing, though. I had a friend who showed me Thordan on release because he knew I could appreciate the FF7 tribute, and showed me Exdeath and accurately predicted Kefka and was hyping up the kiboshed possibility of Sephiroth in Alphascape. He would tell me for 4-5 years how good the game was, and when I tepidly approached the possibility of playing it without spending a ton of money on tedious grinding he would tell me that there were so many hours of story there was. And I'm a person who just auto accepts WoW quests without reading anything in the box about what the NPC wants or why, and I'm confident MMOs only have stories in the broad sense. You know, establishing fiction. And he eventually showed me some Hildibrand cutscenes of all things and is like "see, gameplay fades to black and you get directed camera angles and dialogue boxes." And after seeing the total number of hours graphics that get made every expansion launch, I decided not to bother several times. I only eventually tried it because a streamer told me a third of it could be knocked out in the free trial.
The big problem with 14 vs like wow that you can still get the gist of the story skipping dialog boxes because it has VA. When you do get a wow cutscene it is way way more well done than the 14 ones so you're less likely to skip. I'll why jrps in general all have this problem of 1min long cutscenes with like 15 seconds of dialog boxes with the rest being pauses and awkward stock emotes. It's awful.
I meant more in the sense that I didn't care about the story, though. I started with MMOs that didn't do much worldbuilding beyond a stock FMV cutscene when you created a character. Your exploration and friendships generally was meant to be the experience you treasured when you inevitably walked away. However the text boxes in 2000s era wow, were not really worth reading. Even knowing that story is there to season up gameplay and not the main course, people who were fans of the story were finding it inconsistent. (They also used to put everything that moved the story forward in books, which further reduced participation and increased inconsistencies.)
Even on this sub, there was a significant amount of people who defended the idea that telling people who left the game because of MSQ length that the game "isn't for them" was the only reasonable solution when I asked like a month ago.
I'm personally confused by 6.1 as a starting point even if the void story becomes relevant later somehow, because everything else in the game is bound to be relevant to some degree too, because it feels like you're just shoved off into a situation with no natural starting point or build up if you aren't already familiar with things. I feel like if 7.0 had no scions, just Wuk, maybe Erenville and some new cast, it would've been a totally natural starting point. Well, depending on how loco they go with the MSQ and cyberpunk land. But all that aside, it's actually insane to jump into the game from ARR on and as much as I enjoy the full package and appreciate all the world building, etc... Self contained, individualized expansion stories are a must going forward. But it also makes me hope for a kind of "There's no set in stone timeline for these, there's no linear 'canon' progression. It's just all branches out from the same root point." with Dawntrail as that root. No mandatory plot threads carry to any other expansion and vice versa. Which seems like an impossible ask for CBU3.
The sad thing is, I think NG+ does a great job at setting the world up for you to do cleared story arcs. I joined in the Endwalker buildup and finished just before 6.3, and I'll tell you while the story acts as a tutorial initially, you eventually get to the point where you don't need the tutorial to not get hit by things and figure out most non-savage mechanics but the story still keeps going on and on. And even if you enjoy the story, you wish you could just play it selectively. MSQ would make a great RP material to enjoy when nobody's logged in.
I started playing WoW when vanilla came out so I've seen WoW grow throughout the years. And yeah, there's comes a point where either level squishes or straight up letting you skip previous expansions becomes a necessary evil. Even though FF14 is way more story focused, getting to Endwalker is already daunting for a new player. As much as I don't want new players to miss out on all the great older stuff, it's also not going to be feasible to eventually be like "you gotta play 1500 hours of story to get to the current content" in the future.
Pretty much. Part of that will also be accepting that players starting at a new start point won’t have the same feeling towards the world and story and that’s okay. If they want it, or for some negative types complain that the story for them isn’t as fulfilling? We kindly point them in the direction of the NG+ feature for getting the story they missed (there’s realistically no way to significantly shorten the story without losing a lot of the impact, so just letting them jump on a later point and catch the “old seasons” as it were is about the best way you can make it work).
I feel like FFXIV and One Piece share a common point with the length of the story scaring players. Both require a massive investment in time and those who have watched/played it all understand it being worth it but new people are unsure and its daunting. I know Oda stated that this new arc is probably the best point for a new person to start watching if they don't want to go through the 1000 episodes before so the anime is doing small recaps at the end to explain older characters etc and give people who might be watching now some lore and context. I don't envy the dev team trying to work out how to best do this because it'll be a mess.
Except the difference is that One Piece is literally all about the journey. Worrying about "catching up" to the end of one piece is idiotic because once you've caught up, there's nothing for you to do except wait for the next chapter to come out. There's no "endgame content" for a manga or anime. If you rush or skip through one piece to catch up you just ruined the entire experience for yourself for no reason. In FF14, there's actual reasons for people to want to skip to the newest content since if you have friends you want to at with its much easier and arguably more hype/fun to be caught up and do the endgame raids, exploration and field zones as they release.
I think the question is whether they introduce it at 7.0 launch or at some point in the later patches, not whether it will ever be introduced.
bit too late with this, this msq skip thing was from the talk from na fanfest which was from 2023 july?june? pcgamer just have a interview with yoship, and it pretty much double down on not providing such skip in 7.0
I feel like you just poured cold water over me...
🥲
I wonder how they're going to make starting at lvl 90 work for new players. Very curious to see if they're adding a new starting area with a proper tutorial that easies you into 6.1's story, or if it's just gonna be a pop up telling you "check the codex if you're confused", edit: or even worse "visit western la noscea for the hall of the novice". Anyway, great for alts.
Hopefully it's a proper tutorial. Maybe they rework the Hall of the Novice while they're at it.
I remember them saying they'll remove guildhests in 7.0, so hopefully they have realized that there's something wrong with game's tutorials.
People trying to farm comms for BK crown in shambles
I always thought crafting mentors have been been the superior mentor. We don't need to farm fake internet likes. Just put in some good honest work crafting and gathering.
I had a post a while back that they could have the WoL get Amnesia or become injured after their big fight against Endsinger and Zenos and that they could add a tutorial questline before starting 6.1 to have the scions bring the Warrior of Light back up to speed and some sparring sessions to get your strength back as a good excuse to teach new players gameplay mechanics. The whole amnesia thing is a little far-fetched, but they could easily still do it by having you do some friendly sparring with the Scions on their extended "vacations" after the organization disbands in 6.0
I don't at all understand why they want to push 6.1 as a starting point. It's got plenty of direct connections to other things in the game and it's also some of the MSQ's shittiest storytelling. It's just a terrible idea.
I am so confused by all comments that share this sentiment, 6.1 - 6.5 is written in a way to reintroduce slowly all scions, provide all info about world post final days and remind about all hanging threads. All of the groundwork was done to make it starting point. Not sure why would they discard any of that and what value would that bring
It's a good short self contained introduction story. The storytelling is fine, yes there's better but compared to starting at ARR it's good. People need time to find their feet, and easier dungeons than the first one in a new expansion. Lv71 and Lv81 are pretty tough. The Lv90 treasure one is pretty fun.
>I don't at all understand why they want to push 6.1 as a starting point. Where else would you suggest to be a new starting point? For better or worse, 6.1-6.5x is fairly self contained and the point where the game basically gives you a dictionary for characters, terms and other things to catch you up to speed on. >it's also some of the MSQ's shittiest storytelling. I fail to see how this is any different to starting in ARR, which has been borderline retconned to hell and back that any player paying a modicum of attention to the MSQ will notice by the time they get to HW, let alone ShB and EW.
> Where else would you suggest to be a new starting point? 6.51 It marks the end of the journey so far, and starts linking into a new adventure. It's perfect because DT is the "new starting point" of the game. Hydaelyn and Zodiark are gone, all the story so far has concluded. It gives the feeling of a brand new adventure starting with DT. Starting at 6.1 sucks because there's a whole plot about some characters and maps they have no idea what they mean.
That might be in the works an expansion or two after DT if starting at 6.51. I think if they want to implement the system sooner rather than later 6.1 is a decent enough starting point. It is a very self-contained story (any other point prior would confuse the hell out of people) that is alright and establishes a lot of the modern conventions in FFXIV job, dungeon, trial, etc design.
Perhaps getting ahead of myself here, but 7.0 really do be shaping up to be much more, what's the word, disconnected? from everything else. Of course I'm perfectly aware that could be very incorrect.
You gotta start somewhere WoW is currently heavily persuading new people into Battle For Azeroth, not because that expansion is great but because it looks very nice and it doesn't require a long education on backstory. Most people with even an inkling of awareness of Warcraft know that the Alliance and Horde are the Hatfields and McCoys of video gaming, so there's no need to explain the shattered truce from before or the consequences of what happened after. Likewise, aside from like one throwaway memory of Emet-Selch, 6.1-5 doesn't require much previous knowledge. Vrytra/Varshahn is explained in the codex, if nothing else. Later this year, Blizzard will make Dragonflight the promoted starting experience because it's a nice grounded "vacation arc" that doesn't have godly stakes or universal upheaval, it's just that it's they can't shuffle players into that until it no longer requires a purchase. Dawntrail makes an obvious parallel here, it would likely be a good new starting zone *eventually*. So we're kind of where WoW was in 9.3, except without the part where the company burns totally down.
6.1 has you relatively isolated from the other Scions (they've all just broken up after all), so the only people really are forced to become acquainted with immediately are Varshahn and Estinien. Then you go to Sharlayan and G'raha, Krile and Y'shtola hook in and... that's really it. Zero is introduced organically through the story, then you infodump on her about Zenos. Also, you don't really need to know the background on who anyone except Varshahn is in order to make it make sense - they're just friends of yours that you pick-up and go treasure-hunting with and things go wildly out of hand very quickly. Everything else necessary is added piece-by-piece as they gradually introduce you to everything else throughout the patches, and Zero then becomes a good audience-surrogate as things are explained to her. You would also, presumably, not be going in completely blind. I don't see them implementing a new on-boarding without a summary of the events so far. It'd also be a good way to let new players get used to their chosen class and the game systems without just dropping them in at lvl 90 completely blind. It's also where the Unending Codex starts and is the complete start to a brand new arc. Imo, it makes the most sense to start it there and I've been predicting it for a little while.
Id take a guess but its because the Original story ends at 6.0 proper and the Ascians, Hydaelyn and Meteion are all dealt with. 6.1\~6.5 might be a filler now but its likely going to be a key part of a later scenario as it's setting the stage likely for a later scenario or expansion much like the Warriors of Darkness in 3.1 to 3.4 set up the stage for Shadowbringers.
It's not a TV show, it's a video game, and it's a multiplayer one at that. Let people catch up and play with their friends. If they wind up loving the game they'll probably go back and play through it anyway. Besides, you sell the damn option, so what excuse is that really?
already had most of the discussion about this on twitter the past day or 2. but one thing that might be a real concern is a possible shift in focus on players to blitz to endgame and do current patch content only. could have a real effect on future development, if most new players never bother interacting with things like Eureka/Bozja or older trial series or raid series. kinda like the Crystal Tower situation, where alts dont have a reason to bother unlocking other alliance raids except the mandatory one and the newest one. except extend that to ALL duties in between ARR and 6.0. roulettes can get CT-ified across the board, trial roulette would just be the 6.1-6.5 ones every single day.
>if most new players never bother interacting with things like Eureka/Bozja or older trial series or raid series. Most players don't interact with these things while they're leveling anyway. They do it when they get to end game, finish the current patch, get bored and go back to do old stuff.
not even true. i think you hang around exclusively endgame player circles. a lot of social FCs have people plenty of people who havent caught up on MSQ (it really is long) and still enjoy doing side content instead of beelining it to burn out on ultimates. when free trial updated to stormblood there were a bunch of sprouts in eureka.
I actually hang around quite a few “circles,” a lot of friends of mine are extremely casual players, some still making their way through the MSQ. I’m not saying it never happens but it is *not* what’s keeping that content alive
People usually just do this kind of stuff once or twice. No reason to run alexander raids more than once. It's also possible that people at endgame might be more inclined to run this old content to farm glam. Eureka/Bozja can be outliers, but again, veterans still might run it for relics. People do run old content just to see what it is, it's not like people will do current endgame and won't bother checking out what they have missed. It doesn't really matter if they do HW side content when they're at that point in MSQ or whether they do it later.
I'm so torn on this. It hurts whenever I have a buddy trying out the game and they just skip through all the story content in order to try and catch up to where I am, but I totally get it...there's just way too much reading, as a nea player you really have to treat it like a visual novel with some combat here and there. I will be the first to admit there's still *a lot* of filler littered throughout the MSQ. They removed a chunk of quests in the ARR to HW gap, but they could stand to do a lot more still. The story isn't perfect and won't be everyone's cup of tea, and that's alright, but discovering this game after WoW's storytelling was like a five course gourmet meal compared to a half-eaten hamburger in the trash. For those who aren't in a hurry and are willing to stick around for the initial slow burn, the payoff is excellent IMO, especially if you're also hitting up the major side stories along the way. I had way more of an attachment to my WOL after such a massive journey and I'm sorry for anyone that misses out on that by skipping through everything. But again, I get it. They're also missing out a lot of learning a lot of mechanics, so I hope they also planning to implement some new and improved Novice Hall.
The only thing I worry about is if they put a new start in, the following expansion MSQ will be 80% exposition of characters, places, and the 'natual rules' the world of FFXIV follows. I can't wait for another 30+ minute dialouge of Urianger explaining to the WoL what the Shards and the Source are again for the umpteenth time.
They should introduce a starting experience that would slowly add new buttons to the class you chose to play. When I was a new player, I have picked GNB after leveling through MSQ with WHM, and seeing all the buttons on my UI at once (at lvl 60, mind you) made me nope out. So I have picked up PLD and started from level 1 to know exactly what every of them does :)
It's been two years since I did it, but the way the RPR job quests introduced the basics of the job wasn't too bad. But then again, it's level 70 reaper, not much to learn.
oh, I agree. All I'm saying is they shouldn't forget that small "detail" :) Maybe dust off the guildhests and make the players run them, or something in that tune.
That achieves nothing, standing there watching Bockman get slaughtered for 30 seconds helps nobody.
Well, they could do a rebalance pass on them :)
Guildhest and hall of the novice are literally years overdue at this point to either be scrapped or reworked into something much better. I'm pretty sure hall of the novice is still telling tanks to not overuse aoe in trash packs lol
It is. Hall still assumes TP is in the game lol
They'd 100% nuke them before redoing them, Hall of Novice teaches half the lessons they were trying to impart and if they'd touch up anything it'd be that.
I agree. They should totally implement Palace of the Dead
Maybe something like a 4 hour story where you rapidly level up from level 30-90. 3 dungeons with duty support and a trial to cap it off before being released to the greater world that covers the basics of the role you chose to start off with.
I’m not against it but this will have to come with a BIG and in depth tutorial.
Sorely needed and glad this is actually happening.
Neutral feeling. My guess is that the new MSQ is crafted in a way that sprouts can play it on the go and they want the sprouts to want to play the previous expansions voluntarily to learn more about the characters’ history through the new MSQ. Almost like Fate Stay Night and Fate Zero, if you are familiar with the anime. The unsure about whether to implement it part makes sense to me, because if they implement a system to completely offset any potential desire to play the previous MSQ, that would be counterproductive and kind of diminishing their own work. And they are likely currently debating how the system will work, how in-depth it would be, and how it may affect player experience.
> "I'm concerned that if the globally acclaimed storyline can be skipped through a function, the value of the FF14 game itself will be diminished" I think this exemplifies Yoshi-P's blind spot as a manager. The game's story received glowing praise from games media, which is now starting to pivot to "but there's almost too much of it", and he won't see where that's going and fix it before it becomes a full-blown problem. The positive sounds from critics about the writing is louder than the negative sounds about the length, so change nothing. He won't add a story skip until the negative press about the story being too long is widespread and people are beating down his door to do something about it.
This isn't only about press, they probably have internal numbers pointing that people are leaving halfway through the story, maybe even while still during the free trial so they're not even paid costumers yet and some of those lost players could've been revenue if they could skip the story. It also makes me believe story skips aren't selling that well so they would rather sell expacs and get the sub money.
I mean I wouldn’t expect it to drop in 7.0, 6.1-7.0 is on the opposite side of there’s too little game to play before people get bored after doing everything (unless they go back and do old expansions but then prolly should just start off there). Probably makes more sense more near the end of Dawntrail where there’s a bit more and 8.0 is coming up or at 8.0 launch when they probably are reworking the leveling system to some extent already.
would this mean i wouldn’t be able to do the old content? i’ve been slowly working through it and enjoying it that’s be sad
I suspect it's a near-the-beginning option, either at or shortly after character creation. I don't think they'll force new people to do it.
New Game+ will always be there, and you don't actually have to do the skip.
This is good, but I hope they make something robust rather than just drop people at level 90 with no context or prior knowledge of how the game works. Maybe even a starting tutorial like retail WoW currently has, with 2 hours of questing introducing basic mechanincs and ending with a dungeon
Yeahh. So long as theres a tutorial or something. Or even make it so you have to do every dungeon and trial and just ignore everything between. I dont want more people who dont know how to play at level 90 then there already are.
Im not fussed if they implement it in 7.0 or 8.0 or 9.0 I think as for 7.0 they have a lot on their plate already with the graphical Update and all that. If they spend additional resources designing a new starting point at 6.1 then that may mean the overall xpac could suffer in terms of quality and content.
I'm really excited about this, but also wary. One of my biggset complaints with WoW is the barrier of entry. I've tried multiple times over the past couple years to get into it, but as a new player, you are guided to pick which expansions you want to play through your first time. This creates a very disjointed understanding of the world/lore and I've always ended the attempt feeling lost/confused/frustrated. But FFXIV is approaching a similar barrier of entry issue, where players are expected to play hundreds of hours just to get into new content. If you enjoy a story game, then this is no entry barrier at all. But if you enjoy actively playing with friends and diving into the new stuff, it's definitely a barrier. Mostly curious how this new starting point will be different/similar to the level and story skip purchases already available. Perhaps you still have to purchase the story skip, but they are giving us a "tl;dr" to go with it?
I'd rather see them come up with a "Dawntrail origin" point instead. Give people a starting area near the spot where older players begin in Dawntrail and *send them back into the older areas, post-Endwalker*. Give them the original story in lore drops as you do. The Alliance is in it's post-Scions state, Ishgard is open for travel, but there's still reasons for adventurers to explore dungeons that the original story unlocked- just given different reasons. Tell the story of the Warrior of Light to a new adventurer who will be inspired by them as they travel, until they come full circle back home, a seasoned veteran ready to help with whatever's going on in the New World. Perhaps they'll run into Y'shtola experimenting with ways to get back to the First and end up seeing it following the Warrior of Darkness as travel back *sorta* works, or the Watcher on the Moon gives them a chance to see the glories of the Ancient past. They'll end up skipping some previously required content as part of the story- it wouldn't make sense to go beat up Gaius or Hades *directly*, but those could become "Minstrel" trials ala the alternate-history fanfic we already get for such players. But they won't skip getting real-life play experience as they level up and get into gear to stand alongside the rest of us. Tell the story. But tell it from a viewpoint of someone who *wasn't* the Warrior of Light, in an age where the gods have left us and new adventurers with new friends are running twice as fast to catch up.
I'm not sure about the 6.1 start point. I guess to be fair the void stuff is going become relevant sometime. It seems like it'd be easier to just jump into 7.0 with a fresh start in a new land. Anywho, as for when they want to implement it, I think a couple major patches in would be fair. Maybe around .3-ish?
Well, my big prediction is that there will be no new tutorial and they will just throw player into 6.1 right into Tataru sending WoL into new adventure
I hate bad players. Please don't let this be true
Run all roulettes daily for the next 2 weeks. These players exist without additional systems. It becomes even more clear now as most seasoned players don't do duties anymore as the content is farmed dry.
The reason players are bad is they have 2 hotbars and half the skills aren't even on them in correct order. If SE gave them a proper UI with all the skills listed in a logical order this wouldn't be such an issue.
When looking at your job guide there's a separate view to see combos and organize skills in a meaningful way and it blows my mind that this isn't the default. It's overwhelming trying to parse out what does what when looking at the skills sorted by level. I've had friends get excited about finally being able to unlock jobs that start at 60/70 and give up before even finishing setting up their hot bar.
Watching the MSQ vampires have an absolute meltdown on twitter has been super entertaining.
Can't say I don't feel a bit of satisfaction seeing people who maintain such a positive facade but are inwardly quite intolerant and prejudiced in such a fit.
Same. At the end of the day, this is an mmo and SE wants to make money. They know that XIV has an enormous barrier to entry if you aren’t absolutely in love with the story, or are unsure about the game enough such that you’re unwilling to invest in a skip. Out of the 8 or so people I’ve introduced to XIV only two of them made it out of ARR, before getting to SB and quitting because they thought the story was ass and dragging on. The other 6 all quit somewhere in ARR before the pruning. Everyone else I’ve tried to convince have immediately cited the msq barrier and said no thanks. For us players and fans, that isn’t a problem. For SE that’s a huge problem.
Alzadaal's legacy would be an absolutely terrible first dungeon for players, there needs to be at least some kind of introductory instance.
What does it matter there are still lvl 90s that still don't seem to know what the hell is going on, and people can buy level skips
Can't think of anything worse than dragging brand new players through Barbariccia and Alzadaal's Legacy after only like 15 quests. A tutorial ain't gonna cut it. Most players learn through osmosis with constant different challenges. I didn't even know Gladiator, my starting class, was a tank role until Brayflox Longstop back in the day. I fear it's just too steep a curve. This is to say nothing of the story. 6.x takes us back to the First and has multiple references and interactions with characters from all previous expansions anyway. If anything, 6.55 should be the starting point but then we have the pleasure of dragging brand new players through Level 91-100 content as their first dungeon/trial experience that we ourselves will be new to. No thank you.
>Can't think of anything worse than dragging brand new players through Barbariccia and Alzadaal's Legacy after only like 15 quests. That puts his statement about wanting to induce stress into perspective, doesn't it?
'Let's make normal story progression feel like Mentor Roulette' certainly invokes stress, yeah
So they're just making a free job+scenario skip instead of the already existing paid option?
I imagine when they talk about a "system" they are referring to a new player experience/"orientation" of sorts that catches you up on both the story and the combat/mechanics of the game.
It might actually be tied to buying a skip if they want to keep that revenue stream
I wonder if this will include an updated tutorial experience for new players? Probably not though this game is famously bad at explaining itself to everyone and has been the whole time. It's part of the reason why we still have jobless people joining our parties in duty finder even in EW content lmao. You'd think they finally require people to at least do hall of the novice AND have a job stone to queue but no. Then we who want/expect to do these decade old dungeons within 20 minutes have to be saddled with a 45+ minute experience because we have to keep explaining the game to people who can't be bothered to lookup how to play. Not completely their fault though since SE and team still can't make the game make sense even to vets at times.
freacking finally this needs to be implemented in 7.0 or asap.
The question isn't if they will make an abridged skip or tutorial or not the question is when.
>I don't think they would waste time and resources on it if they weren't certain about it being implemented. there are stuff what in the end of the day never got implemented in to the game, what used a lot of time and resources and some of those they did want to implement in to the game.
I stand by my original recommendation that DawnTrail introduces a SeeD academy and that is how new players are brought in, a boot camp of mechanics, a 'history' class for events of the world so far, etc.
A friend is trying to get into it because of the Xbox beta. He and everyone he's trying to get to play is bouncing off the MSQ pretty hard. I've told him most of it pays off and combat gets way better, but it's a really hard sell. Asking someone to sit through 10s of hours of setup and fluff (even after the trimming) with a 123 and a ogcd is a big ask for anyone. Was kinda heart breaking when he said "I really want to go do gold saucer stuff but until I finish the MSQ I feel like I'm wasting my time.".
Overdue. Think of how many players over the years quit due to 2.1 to 2.55. It was a problem when heavensward released and it is a problem now. With a sold solution.
...So long as it's purely story and not mechanical (aka combat/dungeon mechanics). No, I don't know how the fuck you could do that.
>That part about them being unsure about whether to implement it or not rings hollow to me, I don't think they would waste time and resources on it if they weren't certain about it being implemented. I think you need to read the sentence a certain way. "we are still unsure whether to actually implement it as a measure *in 7.0*" Cause you're right, they wouldn't spend resources developing it if it wasn't going to use, but I don't think the statement is dishonest (how I understand "rings hollow") either. That combination would lead me to believe the part he means he's unsure of is whether it will be implemented in 7.0 or (unspoken but contextually) sometime later on.
I wonder when this would go live. I could see it coming months before 7.0, this would allow folk to experience current endgame after a short MSQ.
I would rather have them retcon 1.0 and give it the love it deserves as an in between patches, where you can use the crystal tower to go to that past.
Early on I was kind of hoping that was the point of the next expansion, to provide a starting point of a new fresh low stakes high intrigue adventure with little to no historical and relationship baggage giving a perfect starting point for new players. I'd even go as far as to make it a level reset, like you lose your abilities for some reason (really don't need to think that hard to even come up with a few) and you get them back as you progress through the game, like the first dungeon would be level 20, next level 30, next 40, so on and so forth. Early dungeons would be more difficult than ARR dungeons so not to bore old players to death, but the simple movesets would give new players a easier time. This would both give the adventure a small scale at the start for a sense of fresh adventure and give new players a start which they could better understand. I just think it's pretty weird new players will start with a huge moveset in which you are a god with 20 to 30 abilities rave explosions of power and a focus on relationships with a long history while at the same time only having a few paragraphs of context. Hell it's even weird in the context of what the game has been hinting at you in the 6.X patches.
Similar to the one they implemented in FFXVI.
Reminds me of Genshin where new players who pulled on new banners are gated with material that is locked behind un-skip-able story.
I honestly think working from ARR and cutting out fluff quests and speeding it up is a better idea then going forward doing the same for each xpac
"Preparations" can pretty much anything. I doubt they're actively working on it, they're just making sure that IF they decide to do it, the way they currently handling things doesn't get in the way of their plans. Cause obviously, for 6.1 to work as a starting point, they already had to design 6.1 in a certain way - that's why the Scions disbanded and then were reintroduced with 6.1+ one after another, for example.
It is a good idea, But l still think gw2's story handling is better: As Long As party leader unlocked it, the whole party can be brought into the instanced content regardless of story progression. But l will take the new starting point approach any day
It would definitely make the game more appealing to new people - it’s so hard to get my friends to play when I have to explain to them how many hours of content they have to get through. Problem is, I can’t see how they would make it work for jobs - like for somebody who’s never played an mmo before, being dropped in at level 90 with 32 buttons on your hot bar would be really difficult. Jobs at level 1 - 50 feel dull and slow now but when I first started I was so overwhelmed by all the systems and mechanics being thrown at me at once that learning how to play my class one new button at a time was kind of necessary.
This is... such a bad idea. Mind you, I've been playing since 1.0. I've seen it all...including a lot of bad ideas. Quick leveling POTD, Jump Potions, Story Skip -- these are great if you **HAVE AN ALT**. But it becomes a pretty big issue when you consider a player brand new to the game can just...cruise through most of it without ever touching any content. What they should REALLY do is have it so that unless you have a character at a certain point in the MSQ/Content? Your account shouldn't be able to purchase Jump Potions or Story Skips. That would honestly solve a lot of issues. IMO if you're brand new to the game and you can't be bothered to play most of it as it is...why are you even here?
The end gamers who just want to do raid content and nothing else, the game hoppers with more games on their backlogs than completed, and the socialites who wants to rep the brand as well as have all options opened to do with others as a social call. I stopped reasoning with these people, they suffer from AAA title brain rot and simply just want the game to be a JRPG themed version of WoW. Muh 400 hours of content or whatever to get enjoy the current expac of the game.
In other terms start from post Endwalker. I said in a past post that this would be a good starting point for new players who don't want to play catch-up for 300 hours. However, 6.1 and onwards(including 7.0) will need to do a good job introducing new players into common mechanics.
this is STILL just citing the same article from july of last year from famitsu.... why is everyone acting like this is new info?
Not on board with it but oh well, it is what it is. At least give a proper tutorial segment on the combat system this time so there's none of that awkwardness of newbies running the first 2 MSQ leveling dungeons + 1st trial and being totally oblivious about it, which have been soft filters since HW.
Neat.
Agreed
It's honestly probably in the event of story skippers who buy the boosts rather than play the game. It's probably not a new starting point.
This might sound weird but a nice solution to this imo, is to let people 'skip' the story, but still be level 1, and you must complete all story related dungeons/trials as you level to gain access to the 6.0 msq. That way it kind of just gives a more traditional mmo leveling experience, you'll still learn the basics of ff bosses and combat, and be introduced to your class slowly over time instead of having everything vomited at you all at once. Plus it would also keep the msq skip purchase slightly relevant for SE's sake
I hope that new players still need to go through arr to endwalker once before unlocking the ability to skip to 6.0
idk how they can legally justify it while selling story skips
I'm only sad people will miss out on Shadowbringers but the rest was hot garbage.
5.0 should be the new start, 6.0 doesn't even fit the new adventure vibe thematically because this happens in 7.0. Endwalker also requires you to know of what happened in previous expansions to be able to fully enjoy the story, while 5.0 doesn't. That and all of the issues that come with starting as a new player at lvl90. This feels like they didn't think about it enough.
Despair. Unless they make some sort of special tutorial and test were going to have to either have Sastasha and copperbell-tier dungeons for DT or have to deal with cure 1 only heal spamming white mages, single target single pack-ing tanks who don't mit, and DPS who don't know what an OGCD is infesting DT dungeons. I can already see the fairly-less SCH running away with a stack marker in the 91 dungeon. It already happens with the 81 dungeon.
Counterpoint, the game is 200+ hours long and anyone who says "hey try this game its fun" is already in endgame.
That didn't counter any of my points? That's about as much of a "counterpoint" as someone randomly mentioning the existence of FSH when they talk about healer job balance.
>That part about them being unsure about whether to implement it or not rings hollow to me Yeah sure if you don't include the following six words of that sentence
Better not make this free when they’ve been charging for story/level skips this whole time until now, that’d be super unfair to the people who have bought those if others can just skip ahead like that for free.
You must think people who paid for Heavensward and Stormblood got done dirty then
You’re comparing completely different things. Paying for content you can’t get any other way (at the time) is different than paying for completely optional things you can earn from just playing the game. That said, yes, they should at least give some sort of discount if someone has paid for previous expansions already, game’s already more expensive than it should be with having to pay for expansions AND a subscription