After nearly 6 years in development, Final Fantasy XIV has evolved to a game of an immense scale and size. 3 major expansions – Heavensword, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers – unproportionately expanded on its story. Now, every new player coming to the game is met with numerous hours of enticing gameplay, even before the end-game fun begins.
If you have a lot of friends playing Final Fantasy XIV for years, as a new player – you have two choices. Either to sink weeks upon weeks of gaming in order to catch up with the main storyline, or skip it entirely. It seems that the developers are trying to tackle the issue and attempts to make the main storyline of Final Fantasy XIV more compact.
In the latest “Letter from the Producer” thread on the Square Enix forum, the team behind the MMORPG confirmed that the main quest line for A Realm Reborn will be trimmed down, thus soon allowing new players to catch up faster.
“We’re working on adjusting the A Realm Reborn main scenario to be more compact, and are aiming for patch 5.3.”
5.3 doesn’t seem too far off, so that might mean that the team behind the title has been working on this for a while. However, we still have a lot of doubts about it – will the shortened story make sense? How well the story that was expanding for 6 years can be compacted without losing its beauty and depth? We’ll just have to wait to get our answers.
For now, we still have some time to experience Final Fantasy XIV at its fullest with all the added fat, including the grindy bits too. If you don’t like the idea of losing some of the core content and don’t mind playing for weeks or even months in order to get it – starting the game now is probably your last chance to experience it all. Later, you’ll only be able to get the short version.
