Let this be a warning to people who persist because the fans of this game keep telling you "it gets better, just stick with it".
It does not. If you don't like the game in the first 20 hours, you're not going to like the rest of it. I wanted to test this for myself and I stuck with it until the end of "An End to the Song" quest in Heavensward 3.3 since a lot of people told me that's the peak of the story. Here is how the game's main quest story is structured, and even though the Heavensward writing was definitely better than ARR's writing, this structure persisted.
-You get a quest
-The quest is talking to a political figure in a room for half an hour explaining to you what's happening in the world.
-you run to go talk to another person
-every single character has to explain to you how they feel about what just happened, in detail
-you repeat this for 10 quests
-finally you see something interesting happens
-there are another 10 quests where you have to hear every character plan out their next move and explain how they feel about what just happened to each other
-you queue up for a dungeon/trial and see a resolution
-the next 10 quests are characters talking about how they feel
-repeat
The story has high moments but they are drawn out and the rest of the story is poorly paced filler that detracts from the good parts. This game has no idea of the concept of "show, don't tell". I don't WANT to hear how characters feel about something, I would much rather try to insinuate it through their expressions, mood, tone, and personality. I took a break from the game after completing Heavensward and I forgot nearly the entire story in that time because it offers you nothing to think about at all, nothing is up to interpretation, it just spends an excruciating amount of time sitting you down in a room telling you how you should think and feel about everything rather than just letting you experience it.
Additionally this structure creates a gigantic disjoint between the story and gameplay. The NPCs you are experiencing the story with are not the people who you are running the dungeons/trials with, those are other players who are also supposedly extremely special powerful chosen ones just like you. When characters died I didn't feel sad because even though the game TOLD me they were traveling and fighting with me, when I actually was playing the game that is not what was happening, I was running around alone and fighting with random people in a matchmaking system. This game's story could be a visual novel with static JPGs and it would functionally be the same. None of the quests have any worthwhile objectives, most of them are literally running and teleporting back and forth between the same extremely small areas of the map and talking to people. There is almost no non-instanced content to do, there is very little reason to have a giant world to explore with other players. You read the massive exposition dumps, you use the duty finder to queue up for group content, you actually get to play a video game for a small amount of time, and you repeat. Every expansion takes about 40 hours and I am extremely burnt out already so I can't really see myself catching up to the current one.
It is a shame because I really like a lot about this game. I loved the first alliance raid with its FF3 references, I love the idea of an open-world Final Fantasy MMO since I grew up playing the older games. I love the world and music, I like the raids and dungeons. It's just that the bits of content that make the game worth it isn't worth enduring the grueling slog that is the MSQ. Unfortunately everything I have read online indicates the MSQ is the main draw of playing the game.
However, if you are enjoying the MSQ and you do like this game's writing, as I'm sure many people will given its popularity, then absolutely stick with it. Just don't let the game become a sunk cost fallacy if you aren't having fun. I spent 130 hours playing this but I could have realized it wasn't for me about 30 hours in.
It does not. If you don't like the game in the first 20 hours, you're not going to like the rest of it. I wanted to test this for myself and I stuck with it until the end of "An End to the Song" quest in Heavensward 3.3 since a lot of people told me that's the peak of the story. Here is how the game's main quest story is structured, and even though the Heavensward writing was definitely better than ARR's writing, this structure persisted.
-You get a quest
-The quest is talking to a political figure in a room for half an hour explaining to you what's happening in the world.
-you run to go talk to another person
-every single character has to explain to you how they feel about what just happened, in detail
-you repeat this for 10 quests
-finally you see something interesting happens
-there are another 10 quests where you have to hear every character plan out their next move and explain how they feel about what just happened to each other
-you queue up for a dungeon/trial and see a resolution
-the next 10 quests are characters talking about how they feel
-repeat
The story has high moments but they are drawn out and the rest of the story is poorly paced filler that detracts from the good parts. This game has no idea of the concept of "show, don't tell". I don't WANT to hear how characters feel about something, I would much rather try to insinuate it through their expressions, mood, tone, and personality. I took a break from the game after completing Heavensward and I forgot nearly the entire story in that time because it offers you nothing to think about at all, nothing is up to interpretation, it just spends an excruciating amount of time sitting you down in a room telling you how you should think and feel about everything rather than just letting you experience it.
Additionally this structure creates a gigantic disjoint between the story and gameplay. The NPCs you are experiencing the story with are not the people who you are running the dungeons/trials with, those are other players who are also supposedly extremely special powerful chosen ones just like you. When characters died I didn't feel sad because even though the game TOLD me they were traveling and fighting with me, when I actually was playing the game that is not what was happening, I was running around alone and fighting with random people in a matchmaking system. This game's story could be a visual novel with static JPGs and it would functionally be the same. None of the quests have any worthwhile objectives, most of them are literally running and teleporting back and forth between the same extremely small areas of the map and talking to people. There is almost no non-instanced content to do, there is very little reason to have a giant world to explore with other players. You read the massive exposition dumps, you use the duty finder to queue up for group content, you actually get to play a video game for a small amount of time, and you repeat. Every expansion takes about 40 hours and I am extremely burnt out already so I can't really see myself catching up to the current one.
It is a shame because I really like a lot about this game. I loved the first alliance raid with its FF3 references, I love the idea of an open-world Final Fantasy MMO since I grew up playing the older games. I love the world and music, I like the raids and dungeons. It's just that the bits of content that make the game worth it isn't worth enduring the grueling slog that is the MSQ. Unfortunately everything I have read online indicates the MSQ is the main draw of playing the game.
However, if you are enjoying the MSQ and you do like this game's writing, as I'm sure many people will given its popularity, then absolutely stick with it. Just don't let the game become a sunk cost fallacy if you aren't having fun. I spent 130 hours playing this but I could have realized it wasn't for me about 30 hours in.