[pathwriter]

I wouldn't mind if they'd release both missions and quests simultaneously. When all is said and done, we're going to be getting two expansions' worth of story and about half an expansion's worth of content. Hurray, Campaign, and I guess ANNMs as though we didn't already have enough instanced battles with crappy drop pools. Oh, and a couple of HNMs. Where's Limbus? Where's Salvage? Where are the XP camps that compete with bloody ToAU? East Ronfaure is nice, but that's the start and end of it unless you're a Beastmaster.

[Corrderio]

I haven't started em yet. I might after this update, though. How are the storylines so far anyways? I heard the CSs are nice, I've seen videos, but haven't gotten any solid opinions yet. All I ever hear is complaining the missions are few and far between. lol

Not too bad, Sandy is fairly dull. Bastoks is getting interesting so in the septemper/octorber update it should be good. Windy is so far the best, which i'm ashamed to admit since I hate windurst with a passion.

But the biggest challenge is as always finding people willing to help.

[Griss]

all i can say is *Fap*

[Zaft]

If they really wanna extend FFXI's life through missions, they should do it some other way. It's been almost 2 (3?) years since WotG has been released, and the story still hasn't reached any form of climax. 2 missions every 6 months is unacceptable.

It hasn't been 2 years yet, it was released 11/20/2007, but I do agree that this is kind of lackluster. However, at least they've been adding other fun things to keep us interested. It's not like they just completely stopped except for the mission updates.

[Akujin]

Hrm. Bah.

I'm sighing with resignation that I may infact have to return to this dreaded, awful, life consuming, brilliant, beautiful and orgasmic game. I go through quite the phases, dont I?

Well, I stopped back in december, followed the cutscnes of the main missions through Kaoz's youtube videos, so I'm up to speed on things, but unfortunately that also means my own guy is sorta behind if I did want to persue things within the main storyline.

I see the obvious similiarties between the young dancer and the horned beauty. But the question is..what happened to twist her so, if this was infact, what she became as an adult? Quite the transformation really.

I'm also somewhat curious to what she's laying up/leaning against in that picture, large, green, somewhat crystalized..magicite I'm guessing.

And why complain about the rate they release content? The cutscenes are still good and (personal thoughts) better than any other mmo's out there presently. Would you rather they take their time to make sure everything is good and finely tuned in their cutscene releases, or just rush it and have something half-assed to get you through.

Obviously, if you choose the latter, then you actually dont care about quality and the storylines and just want whatever goodies comes at the end of the storyline. But, to each their own.

[pathwriter]

What other MMO uses in-game cutscenes? WoW has incorporated a handful down the years, but I literally mean less than six and the ones I've seen have simply been fly-overs.

[Prothescar]

Admittedly, Guild Wars uses a lot of cut scenes.

[spira]

I have nothing against the missions / mission-quests and their CS. In fact, i think they're the best ever in the game thus far. This is why whenever I see like mission-teaser announcements, i'm not woried. Square-Enix always delivers in this aspect. At least the main development team knows what its doing..

case in point: April update: WotG mission-quest CS from any individual nation leg totally beat ACP CS out of the water. They're that good, and the difference is that obvious. Then again, they've been at this for years. The ACP team is totally new to this.

Whilst I am happy with the quality of the CS, I can't say the same about the pace of delivery of the missions. Understandably the missions are episodic in nature... they come in little chunks, little instalments. I'm quite fine with that, but the time interval between them is far too long.

What I think SE should really be doing is that they should separate story updates from the core version updates, or place 1 story update in between each core version update...
The mission updates are highly divisible from the content that come from major patches, apart from unlocking new areas, but that can be timed to coincide with a real version update.
Clearly, something is wrong if the last instalment of the storyline (and since WotG uses alternate updates for mission and nation-quest) was 6 months ago. It was bad enough with ToAU's 3 months... and at least with CoP they released them in hefty chunks with sizeable difficulty..

[Corrderio]

case in point: April update: WotG mission-quest CS from any individual nation leg totally beat ACP CS out of the water. They're that good, and the difference is that obvious. Then again, they've been at this for years. The ACP team is totally new to this.

I hope the other 2 addons are better. ACP had next to nothing close to a storyline, and the ending... wow... just wow at how horrible it was.

[Nanako]

I hope the other 2 addons are better. ACP had next to nothing close to a storyline, and the ending... wow... just wow at how horrible it was.

But... but... the crystal! It spun! A lot!

ACP was just awful. The cutscenes just seemed so lifeless (the fucking crystal had more personality than most of the NPCs), it had too much pointless busywork, only had one meaningful battle, and that truly dreadful ending.

I like WoTG's story, but it's too damn dragged out. Although I hate the xp loss for the city quests. I'm worried that at the rate the expansion is progressing it may never have any meaningful endgame.

[.Sotek.]

If they keep at the same pace, you'll see more missions and hopefully, Walk of Echos, in 6 months.
However, I find it much more likely we'll get Castle Vazhl next mission update then Walk of Echos after that. So 12 months.
Wasn't FFXIV coming out in a year?

[Corrderio]

By the time WotG is done XIV will be nearly out I'm assuming. SE said they have a years worth of updates still, but if you think about it that's not saying a whole lot since updates are 3-4 months each now.

[Blackmoon]

all i can say is *Fap*

indeed

[Akujin]

Guild Wars does indeed have quite a the amount of cutscenes, but I wouldnt put them on par with the depth and enjoyment level FFXI offers. But, thats just my opinion.

[Symbios]

WOTG's story sucks.

The animation and cutscene quality is top-notch, but this is a six-year old game- you can only make it look so good, so right now the crappy story is really standing out. What has happened so far in this story? Well, when you take the sum of the time they spend just wasting time, here's what we know: Lilisette wants to save her father, and Lady Lilith is doing things for reasons.

Keeping this in mind, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: This story is almost over, and the only thing we know is that someone is going to do something at some place at some time for some reason. This story isn't about anything.

As far as the quests go, like I said, mixed bag. The only reason I have liked the Windurst (S) quests is because of the characters- not much is actually happening(Yes, they're plotting, but we don't see any effects of what they're plotting so it's just a convoluted mess). Bastok (S) finally has some crap happening but they're obviously not continuing that in this patch, and the Sandy (S) quests are barely worth mentioning.

[Hyanmensire]

Oh, I thought that Sandy (S) quests were the best out of the 3 last patch, why are they not worth mentioning?

[Symbios]

Might just be me, but this whole "throwing children into war" theme has been done to death, and they're not really doing anything interesting with it, just grinds on my nerves watching a lot of those cutscenes because they're really hackneyed.

Of course if you enjoy it, I'm happy for you. Unlike a certain other "expansion" I can't accuse this storywriting team of not at least trying.

[Hyanmensire]

I gotta admit it's not my favorite theme either out of the 3, but at least stuff happened there (and the ending had a mediocre cliffhanger, even)

[pathwriter]

Might just be me, but this whole "throwing children into war" theme has been done to death

Really? Care to cite some examples. It's certainly not something that gets explored much in FFXI.

[Symbios]

It was more as a general statement rather than referring to FFXI specifically, actually. Using children to evoke basic emotions from your audience is a pretty cheap way to get things done. I feel no more sad for these kids than I do for Aldo in the opening cutscene, and the opening cutscene only lasted a couple minutes and had barely any dialogue.

Spoiler! --Click here to view--

I don't feel anything for these kids other than what I am supposed to feel by default- a bunch of kids getting injured and dying is something that's supposed to be uncomfortable to watch by default, but this never really goes beyond that. To compound this, it's not like the one they killed was one who we were supposed to care about anyway, he was completely a window dressing character.