The Final Fantasy 14 quest system is just terrible

I play this game almost every day because I enjoy MMO's. This one is a winner if you are a fan of the franchise and enjoy PvE content (which i do.) The game can be acquired for what is actually a very good price at the moment. I hope that this price drop isn't an indication that the series is failing but it has been around for a very long time... who knows?

source

The game is like many others. You have to level up in order to get to more difficult content and for me, mainly this is dungeons and other such scenarios where you will team up with other members of a team. This is where the game really shines. However, I would like to focus on another part of the game where it really really really really do NOT shine: The quest system.

Mando Quests!

This of course means "mandatory quests" and in a shell it is basically stuff that you MUST do in order to progress the story and areas / dungeons that you have access to. If you want additional dungeons, which is the best part of the game, you have to go through these quests. There is no other way to access them. This wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that the things they make you do are just dumb.

A vast majority of these quests have you go to a specified person with a green fire-like icon over their head and initiate conversation at which point they give you an objective. The problem is that these "objectives" often times incorporate walking to some place that is quite far away, suffering through multiple zone loads and then delivering an item. Then, that person will likely give you another objective which incorporates the same aspect of senselessly running really far away and delivering another item. At some point in time there is going to be a fight that you will almost certainly win unless you fall asleep at the wheel (IE, i have been playing for a while now and only died once and it was because i got a phone call.)

source

There is a bunch of dialogue that takes place and even some live-action with voice acting from time-to-time but this accepting of quests happens so friggin often that I don't even read any of the story anymore since most of what they are talking about is just busywork like "I need this wine delivered to the other side of the planet" type scenarios.

So here is what happens with me as far as these quests are concerned.

• I skip all of the dialogue
• i "teleport" to the destination every time
• I skip all cutscenes

I am missing out on a great deal of the story of this game and this is purely because it is poorly designed. There is waaaaay too much of this. I can totally understand why you want to make the game long because your audience demands that of an MMO, right? It wouldn't stay viable for very long if the story wasn't long, but these quests, by and large, don't have anything to do with fighting evil... they are about the transformation of our hero into a Fed-Ex employee.

There are some instance where within the same area there is some stuff, say, on the other side of the room, where you have to go pick them all up, wait for the "interaction bar" on those items, one-by-one and then carry them back to the person who requested them. I mean, that is just dumb. There is extremely little combat in any of these quests.

Basically, i am just saying that when you have an aspect of your game that nobody would ever do unless it were required then maybe this was designed wrong? It is too late to change it now, i realize that, but in the meantime I am going to groan about it, have some breakfast, then log back in and do a few more quests because I have to.

This game is still worth playing, I know it is for me. But in the meantime this aspect of the game is frustratingly cumbersome. I certainly hope that in the future they will look at this and think to themselves "maybe not put something in the game that nobody likes and make it mandatory."