My experience playing the MSQ has been… mixed. This video is about why I DON’T plan to skip the FF14 main story quests, but am still struggling to enjoy some of them. It’s also about my experience with the FFXIV community and how they react when I express these feelings…
👁️ I’M LIVE ON TWITCH: https://www.twitch.tv/mrsmothmom
SOCIALS 🦋
» Discord: http://discord.mrsmothmom.com/
» Tumblr: https://mrsmothmom.tumblr.com/
» TikTok: tiktok.com/@mrsmothmom
» Twitter: https://twitter.com/MrsMothmom
source
EDIT: So many comments!! thank you all for sharing your opinion (especially folks with a different perspective). i'll do my best to respond when i can… maybe i should make a follow-up highlighting how folks feel?
i recorded this video a little while ago and i'm now working on the level 40 quests… i will say there's a lot to love and while i don't plan to skip i'm still trying to balance what i bring to stream 🤔
Although it might be frustrating to hear people insisting that every single quest is important, it is for very good reason. So many plot points and little details come back from earlier on in the story, stuff you'd never expect to make a resurgence, and the payoff for these things is worth the early slog. Things that you feel lukewarm on in ARR, get recontextualized and expanded upon further down the line. Yes people will straight up say "you just gotta get past the first 60 hours and get to Heavensward, then the game becomes really good" like it's no big deal. I understand, it feels ridiculous to hear. But from the perspective of those people, ARR is a small fraction of the overall HUNDREDS of hours of story so you can understand both sides.
I wouldn't worry about your viewers being bored of MSQ. People who watch FF streams are complete vampires for story. They know what they're in for and don't mind sitting through the less interesting parts. They're making an investment and excitedly waiting for your mind to be blown when it comes to some of the later story stuff. Is it worth it? I'm an avid ff14 MSQ enjoyer as well as hardcore raider so of course my answer is going to be yes. To put it into an example you might be able to understand: I'd play through the mediocre story of ARR 10x if it meant I could erase my memory and experience the Shadowbringers or Endwalker story for the first time again. That's how much I fell in love with this game's story and world and I definitely had moments of doubt and moments where I felt like quitting early on. I'm glad I didn't.
ARR is SOOOOO bloated, my partner is going crazy trying to get through it, i had a big hiatus between ARR and HW when i did the MSQ and shes being road blocked by ishgard in her cooking and other jobs because of the MSQ, it's worth it in the end but it's such a massive barrier to entry and she would have definitely quit before now if i weren't egging her on
It honestly has better pacing if you skip anything that isn't voice acted, even then the back and fourth you do is insane
find the quest with picture on the description
I recently started playing, and I just try to not think about the sheer AMOUNT of quests that I need to do to be "catched up", because if I knew, I'm sure it would start to feel like a chore and eventually I would burnout 😀 I just go through in my own pace and try to keep the motivation going on consistently
I seriously cannot take anyone serious that puts anime girls as their avatars for videos.
the community is delusional?
I think you'll be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't think ARR & post patch is bloated.
I think streamers conflate what is good for a game with what is good for monetized streaming.
Work on your intros, then worry about voiced cut scenes.
Should be called "why professional streamers quit ffxiv". Not sure the ffxiv community would care ,though, because "fewer professionals = more authentic".
Ignoring the streamers, what you're left with is that the story is not avoidable … unless you skip it … and literally all of it is for free … until you get to Shadowbringers (soon).
Can definitely say, I was not impressed with the ARR MSQ. There is a LOT they can trim from it and leave it still relevant to the story. I don't think I really began to get the "OOH AHH" sensation until somewhere towards the end of Heavensward. Stormblood and beyond is where I really began to enjoy doing the MSQ. Still a lot of filler quests though, kind of wish they'd stop with fillers.
New players have it easy.. when FXIV first came back half the quests we did was get a cup a tea, or this or that even before the main story quest showed up, in recent patches etc they got rid of most of the filler quests as I call them.
If you are only doing MSQ and watch all the cutscenes, you look forward to about 300-400 hours to finish.
and no not all quests are important.
The level 50 quests … I remember I was so burnt out by the absurd number of quests between the end of ARR and the beginning of Heavensward that I actually gave up on the game. Luckily I came back later, and I can confidently say that from Heavensward onwards, it gets way better. Especially Heavensward and Shadowbringers. But I absolutely feel like there's waaaay too many quests through ARR and the post ARR content. I seriously think the point could be brought across without the hundreds of trivial tasks under the MSQ.
solution: buy a boost, replay the sotry at your own pace at a later date.
10000000% correct here
Details and foreshadowing are huge in this game. You will survive ARR. It gets better in the patches and Heavensward is amazing. There are some in ARR that are painful ( lead up to Titan…) But there is a lot of good stuff in there too. And like people have said down below details, details, details come back in the future. My friends and I are actually re-running ARR with the purpose of seeing what we missed. I mean literally brand new character from scratch and yeah back to details and foreshadowing. There are a lot of little things going on that culminate way later in the game. There is stuff us lore lovers missed.
ARR is a slog, it's tough getting past it. Later expansions changes the pace and structure of questing completely.
I thought it was good from the beginning, and I only started solidly playing about five years ago. Granted, I came from WoW, where early on the whole darn thing is a back to back stream of fetch quests with a few unique one spattered in and very little story to speak of. I can remember nearly the entire main story of FFXIV. For WoW…. hold on, I'll have to look it up for you. shrug But I also like story driven games, so I guess it might not feel that way to people who didn't come for a story. It's a Final Fantasy game, epic story is kind of their thing.
But honestly, from what I've seen of what this game came from, even up to lvl 50 is way better then it started out as if you can just roll with it and have fun.
And it's hands down way better then early Guild Wars 2 or WoW where they make you wait for what feels like forever to actually do anything more than a bunch of fetch quests.
I remember feeling like I had to grind in WoW for horrible lengths of time. Playing the MSQ for FFXIV, there was very little grinding actually involved. Early on most of the MSQ keeps you rolling pretty quickly along.
And no, not every single quest is super important. If you just want a bit of cool lore tidbits and and occasionally funny NPC reactions, go play the side quest scattered around darn near every zone. They often do a good job of fleshing out the world the game takes place in.
But yes, the main story quest is the primary vehicle for moving the game along.
here is my honest take on the main story.
ARR = Meh too damn long, last quest went 180 all the sudden which is good and left me sad.
Heavenward = It was amazing, and I was depressed makes me wanting for more
Stormblood = Meh, kinda boring… still boring.
Shadowbringer = IMMACULATE, PHENOMENAL, LEFT ME EMOTIONAL DAMAGE AND DEPRESSED
Heavensward = IMMACULATE, PHENOMENAL, A PERFECT ENDING OF THE BASE GAME. LEFT ME EMOTIONAL DAMAGE AND DEPRESSED AND VERY HAPPY.
ARR is literally a dog water experience for new players, but once you passed that.. It is an amazing roller coaster going through heavensward… then you just boringly cruise Stormblood then jump straight to an amazing roller coaster experience on Shadowbringers till the end of heavensward.
You think it is long? keep in mind that they already cut about the half of what it was! XD
You can legit use a story skip for 1-50 and you won't lose much…just watch a YouTube video of it and you good, Heavenward is where the story starts to get good.
just dont be that one guy who skipped everything in the story AND bought a level boost and then complained about how "the story sucks and the game is bad"
I started skipping almost every cutscene in the msq up to post arr, because I found a 3 hour long story summary of the story up to Heavensward. So I would listen to the portion I skipped through each day I after I finished playing so I would know what I had just been running around doing. Once I got to the very end of post arr I stopped skipping, and I feel totally satisfied with my experience.
my friend opened map and noped out immediately, too many quests, too many symbols
1-50 (ARR) MSQ its just sooooo bloated…
I think your problem is you are trying to speed through 10 years of story telling Yes it's a lot, no that's not a bad thing. It's a feature not a bug.
i know it is a controversial take but i skip all non voice acted quests. I can still keep up with the story pretty well doing that,
Honestly the story doesn't even begin until Stormblood and even then only the last bits setting up Shadowbringers have any real importance.
As someone who started playing about 3 years ago. THE BEST WAY to look into it is *what do you want your audience to join you with*?? There are some FFXIV streamers focus on Story content (which is those who say every quest is important). Those who focus more on Dungeons/Trials/Raids. Achievement hunters. You name it they pretty much exist. There's no real wrong way to go about it.
Personal opinion – the Post ARR quests are hard to get through. Sometimes it is helpful to have an audience to get you through it so you don't get annoyed. I had the same struggle with Stormblood expansion. Heavensward and Shadowbringers are very heavy story focused expansions, which is why they get such critical acclaim for what they have. So I would say take a moment and figure out what do you wanna share with your stream (do you want to say do msq offline till you get to a trial or dungeon flagged quest?) Maybe get a poll of feedback from your audiene and find out what they want to watch.
HOPE THAT HELPS!!! <3
What do you need a list of quests for if the game tells you which ones are important already? Meteor quest? Do. Blue quest? Do. Yellow quest? I meannnnnnn if you want to
You're not wrong.
FF14 has a very loyal player base who tend to focus on the stuff they love and ignore stuff that's not so good. They're also great at promoting the game so tend to do a bit of a sales pitch to new players.
The truth is, you need to do the MSQ – the core story quest. Everything else? You can safely ignore. There's a lot of side quests but most of them are just for flavour and worth ignoring (with a few exceptions like the ones to unlock the barber, the transmog feature, and other class unlocks).
Which are the important quests?
If it has an instance (a dungeon, a fight, a 'something' at the end of it) then it's important.
Thats about… 12 or so between level 1 and 50?
But if you only watch them you wont have a clue what's going on, who the characters are, why this is important etc…
I think you either need to decide that only the instances matter (i.e. things that send you on a duty) and ignore the rest – or commit and do it all.
And as much as people are moaning about the level 50 wall, I've been doing them myself for the last 3 weeks and, seriously, the quests have become so much more streamlined I've found it a massive improvement. And the Crystal Tower is definitely the most fun thing in the game so far!
I am a veteran since beta, like all my peers, we organically experience the MSQ at an intended pace. MSQ was never meant to be binge worthy content. And the advice they gave you about all MSQ is critical, I'll have to agree. A simple thing and most hated thing like wine fetch quests early on in ARR is used as part of the whole grand scheme way later. No, it's not the way you think. The best way to explain it is imagine you are an inventor who have made something that changed the world. And during the interview, they asked you about your method of that invention. You start with the boring and mundane stuff that lead you to the idea before getting into how it was made. I hope that made sense. Anyway, don't worry too much about being entertaining. Believe us, we know, try to think of it as we are vampires. We stick around for the juicy bits to sink our teeth onto.
As one of the few people that genuinely does see the merit and good off ARR and post ARR, all of that story is a bloated nightmare 100%. The problem though, is that a significant portion of those quests ESPECIALLY post ARR are riddled with pretty import bits of info that make later events in the story make significantly more sense. From my own experience though, you can basically skip a majority of the quests in ARR up until around when you start doing stuff in Mor Dhona. The unfortunate bit for if you only want to do "the interesting stuff" though, is that, once you're in HW and beyond, the statement that "everything is important" is basically entirely true… And yes, there are boring/sluggish parts in basically all of the expansions, but those parts usually still have pretty important information for understanding later, super interesting and important parts of the story. This is all unfortunately the tradeoff of playing a now technically 13 year old MMO.
Edit: Something I just remembered – I have told all of my friends that I've gotten into the game that ARR will 100% become a slog and you can very very easily become burnt out. But the light at the end of the tunnel is HW. People LOVE that expansion. And I would say that that is due in a lot of ways to the much tighter pacing, much more focused narrative, and significantly improved and much more common voice acting. The voice acted scenes are probably the biggest help to not becoming burnt out. As you go through the game the become much more intricate and common. It is worth the time, it is worth the slog. Just probably don't try to blast through it super fast, as much as you would probably want to.
I started playing in October and have just now caught up on MSQ. I was prepared for how tedious ARR would be, but what I was not prepared for was the other instances of poor pacing/lulls in the story. All of the main Stormblood MSQ (not including the patches) and parts of Endwalker were an absolute slog to get through. We just triggered some star ending calamity and we're visiting rabbits on the moon for several hours? All in all the story has been great, but it is a huge time commitment and you aren't gonna have fun for part of it.
cut half hell no the story takes it time and builds up to the ending and a lot of stuff like 20 or 30 that u don't care about come back like 70 and your like omg wow just making those numbers up but u get what I'm talking about
Being honest
Played arr quests last year January February
Realm reborn, skip it if you want, but do watch a video about the story so far there so you don't go blind into heavensward.
Heavensward is top1 or 2 of best story in the game, so try your best to keep up with the slow start of the first 10 quests then you'll start to get engaged into it
Yeah don't try to "catch up." Try to enjoy the experience.
I only started FF14 at the end of Stormblood and the beginning of Shadowbringers. It took me 2 years before I caught up. I mean I literally made it to the end of Shadowbringers a few months before Endwalker…
And there ARE alot of between expansion quests.
But they also give you new jobs that start at lvl 50 or lvl 60 or lvl 70.
If you have leveled your main job to the point where you aren't getting xp, switch jobs for a bit.
But no I don't think they are ALL mission critical to the over all narrative, but from what I understand MSQ cannot be skipped, but since one character can do all jobs, you only ever have to do it once.
Trying to stream your entire MSQ journey is a fool’s errand. Don’t do it. The problem is that until Heavensward, things are very scattershot. A quest may be entirely fluff but have one detail that becomes important for a very important quest later on, or you may have a series of quests that as a whole set up the entire next arc but individually you’re delivering packages. The problem is that there are so many quests, no one is gonna be able to tell you which are “important” without literally spoiling the content for you, because sometimes what is “important” is a side detail, rather than the thing you’re actually doing.
I played FFXIV since the 1.0 days up to now with a few hiatus from time to time. Back in ARR and Heavensward days, I used to read every quest texts and watch every cutscenes. But now, I mainly focus on the Main story, the alliance raids quests series and the raiding quests. At some point you got to choose what you find appealing or what's important to you. Many players in FFXIV are very much into knowing every story details and I think that's what they find fun and that's totally fine.
So all in all, choose what you find fun! If you like to put every pieces of the puzzles to get the big reveals later then I suggest you to follow in detail the main story and the class/job quests. If you're more into exploring the world and have a more casual approach to the lore and focus more on the ''good parts'' then put the most focus on voice acting cutscenes. Usually by just watching the cutscenes with voice acting, you don't miss on much of the story and where It leads you next.
Welcome to Final Fantasy 14! Enjoy yourself 🙂
The MSQ that really drags and I think has excessive (even after culling it, what 3 times now by Square?) is ARR/Post ARR and Stormblood. I rejoiced when I got into Shadowbringers, the story flows a lot better than Stormblood. ARR drags, Heavensward is fairly well focused and progresses as a story in a reasonable fashion. Stormblood took on to broad of an idea and so you literally are jumping between continents, doing half here, half there, then back again, then again back to the other continent to continue. It ends up being so BIG and there is so much globe trotting that I became very sore with the story and just wanted it done. The story is GOOD, but it's HUGE.. in terms of narrative "space". It's so big I just stopped caring and wanted it done. Shadowbringers was back to that Heavensward tight focused story telling with a close focus that keeps you engaged in the narrative and doesn't waste time on meaningless content nor does it have you crossing continents with half of a story unfinished (on pause) till you get the other half of the story going, then it pauses and you go back to the previous one and it moves forward. That was the problem with stormblood. Big, rambling, literally two stories in one. Endwalker is similarly tight, but less tight of a narrative than Shadowbringers.
The best way I've tried to put it for interested players who are new to MMOs or maybe MMOers that are used to a certain style of rushing to the end is actually a direct quote from the Producer/Director. It is a Final Fantasy game first, and an MMO second. Mind, it's still an AMAZING mmo when you are caught up, endgame content is a lot of fun and fairly challenging if you go into higher difficulties, but thanks to game sync and a lot of enthusiastic vets wanting to show their newer friends at least some fragment of what they went through when patches were current, it's fairly easy to say…
Take your time! Play it like it's a normal RPG. Enjoy yourself, just immerse into the worldbuilding and don't worry about the massive undertaking. I think when I first started I just explored around and did stupid stuff so much I ended up in ARR for a year (Heavensward had just come out and this was before the first time they trimmed down the Realm Reborn quests, I would never expect someone to hang out at level 50 this long in 2024 haha). I know it feels like such a weird take for all of the MSQ to be mandatory, but it really is all so so important. Not down to the details necessarily, but more to build up your experiences as you grow as an adventurer. The story plays a lot on the long haul and the humble beginnings from which you came, and it does actually give you nods and validation for remembering the small stuff that can feel really magical when you take your time.
Protip in terms of filtering out side quests though! If it has a picture when you click the npc, it probably has a better multiquest story. If it doesn't it's likely fetch. 🙂
Oh goodness this ended up long, sorry about that. Welcome to Eorzea, hope you have a good time!
MSQ was supposed to be done in blocks, not a marathon of 4 expansions+patches in one go.
new people to the game try to power through everything and literally burn themselves out thinking its world of warcraft and you need to level to max and do endgame.
The content.. is the story. Take your time, experience stuff at relative level (Arr extremes at 50 ect ect) and just have fun.
The msq isn't skippable tho. you can skip entire xpacs, but not individual quests.
Greetings! I feel that what most people mean about the "mission critical" aspect is that many things you experience have narrative pay off later or are later referenced in some meaningful way. In other words, even if something isn't exciting it still plays into the larger story at some point, especially npcs. Additionally, a pattern some ff14 players have done in terms of streaming is to do (some) MSQ content off stream and then once you hit a dungeon (there are points at which you can unlock multiple dungeons at once after various story segments at specific level brackets like level 50/60/70) you go live or maybe try to hype up the next "big" moment in the journey. At minimum all blue colored quests are must-do's.
It becomes more and more obvious as you go, especially post-50, when these significant story and/or content access moments happen which can give you a burst of content to work with. The downside is that once you engage with that, there is another interim of quest walls before the next flood of content comes your way. The best I can suggest is to keep playing and a proper cadence of streaming alongside the content you are (about) to gain access to becomes more clear. There are certain dungeons especially that always get a reaction out of the community but I won't say more.
Hello MrsMoth, I've been playing FFXIV for 5 years now and I will be honest people will say that most story quests are mission critical because it ties towards characters that will later on be important. What I will say that yes, the story is very long It took me almost more than a month to get past ARR but that is while I am working and reading all the dialog, around 2.0 there are what I'd like to call "filler quests" that are not important. A Realm Reborn ends around level 50, then you are guided to Heavensward. Square Enix has noticed this problem with A Realm Reborn being very long for new players so they cut half of the "filler content" and it is not so long anymore. I will say that in this order your "Job quests" is the most important quests, then Story Quests are the second important, and Blue Quests you will see around as they unlock Dungeons and More. You can ignore the side quests as they are not important! I hope you manage to get through and have fun! Please do not burn yourself out as you can do other stuff as well than grind story! I hope this helps.
I love the story dearly with all my heart… but to say 100% of the ARR patch quests are worth reading is bogus lol. There's a reason they cut down those quests, and the community still wants them to be cut down further. Getting a friend to play the game is so hard when the ARR quests are so dudzy
FFXIV really is primarily an RPG, I started doing the story, made some friends who had finished it and thought it would be nice to do current content as it came out with them. There was a spreadsheet with every expansion how many hours of cutscenes, dialogue, how long the quest should take, and it put me at hundreds of hours of catchup time.
Since my interested in FFXIV was as a MMORPG primary and not RPG primary, I story skipped and don't regret it because I met a lot of great people that I could actually do things with.
Veteran's are very quick to forget about just how much time it takes to get through the MSQ, what was boring and what was not.
Also just started playing very recently and so far I'm having an absolute blast. I've been bringing the MSQ to unlock dungeons and some of the more multi-player oriented content; but I think it's important to remember that it's an MMO, which means it is meant to be played over the course of a long time. I'm not a streamer and I'm a pretty casual player, so our needs and desires are probably different; but you should feel comfortable playing the game how you want and at your own pace. As you've said: not all of the MSQ quests are extraordinarily interesting or engaging; but I feel like there have been plenty of parts in the MSQ so far that act as a good point to break away and do sidequests to level up alt classes or just catch your breath and experience other things.