An epic story saved a world, but now that same story might be Final Fantasy XIV’s undoing.
Final Fantasy XIV Story
When a new player steps into the world of Eorzea, it’s supposed to be an amazing experience. But for many people jumping in during 2025, over a year after the Dawntrail expansion, that sense of wonder is crushed by a huge, unavoidable wall; the Main Story Quest (MSQ).
What used to be Final Fantasy XIV’s best feature—an epic story that changed how MMOs tell stories—has become a massive mountain. To get to the fun endgame content with friends, a new player has to first go on a solo grind that takes hundreds of hours.
The hard truth is that Final Fantasy XIV’s greatest strength has become its biggest weakness. For all its positive work in making it surprisingly accessible for newcomers, the story that saved the game and won awards for expansions like Shadowbringers and Endwalker is now a massive barrier for new players, hurting the game’s future growth.
The sheer amount of mandatory story is an enormous turn-off for newcomers, burning them out and pushing away people who want different things from an MMO. This problem has been made painfully clear by the mixed reviews for Dawntrail, which raises a tough question – if the new story isn’t even a guaranteed masterpiece, can you still force players to grind for 300 hours just to see it?
How Long is Final Fantasy XIV?
While the quality of FFXIV’s story is its legacy, the quantity is the root of its new player problem. With every expansion, the story mountain gets taller.
A new player today has to finish the base game and five full expansions simply to start Dawntrail. It all adds up to a wall that takes hundreds of hours to climb. It is perhaps one of the driving factors behind Final Fantasy XIV becoming the most profitable in the series, but to finish the Dawntrail story, a new player has to spend around 375 hours on the MSQ alone. For someone playing 8-10 hours a week, that’s an 8-10 month commitment just to catch up.
For many, the climb ends before it even starts. The first part of the story, A Realm Reborn (ARR), is known in the community as “The Great Filter.” It’s infamous for its poor pacing and tedious fetch quests, which cause a significant number of new players to quit the game.
Forums are full of posts from people who call it an “unbearable” chore. One player perfectly described the frustration of having to “run around for 20 quests assembling a stupid banquet,” calling it “meaningless garbage” that kills the story’s momentum.
This required path creates a gatekeeping system that goes beyond the story. Almost every major feature is locked behind the MSQ. Want to play the new Viper or Pictomancer jobs from Dawntrail? You have to finish over 300 hours of old story first. Want to join your friends in the newest raid? You can’t, not until you’ve climbed the whole mountain by yourself.
This creates a massive social wall, cutting new players off from the community they joined to be a part of. This design is a “burnout engine,” pushing players to rush through the story, which ruins the experience and ultimately leads to them quitting.
Final Fantasy XIV is Stuck in the Past
While Final Fantasy XIV keeps building its story wall higher, other MMOs have been making it easier for new players to jump in. The genre has largely moved away from strict, linear progression, recognizing that a substantial backlog of old content is a major turn-off.
FFXIV’s rigid, one-way path makes it look old-fashioned compared to its competition.
- World of Warcraft fixed its messy leveling with the “Chromie Time” system. It allows new players to choose their own path through old expansions, getting them to the latest content much faster.
- Guild Wars 2 is all about freedom. New players can jump into big world events with high-level players right away, and the main story is mostly optional, not a gate.
- The Elder Scrolls Online lets you go anywhere and do anything right from the start. Its “One Tamriel” update removed level restrictions, giving players total freedom.
What other MMOs have discovered is that being accessible and giving players freedom is crucial to a game’s long-term success. By sticking to its one-track story, Final Fantasy XIV is stuck in the past.
Can You Skip Final Fantasy XIV Story?
Square Enix and Director Naoki Yoshida know the MSQ is a beast. Yoshida has admitted that it’s a huge time commitment and has said they’ve considered letting players skip to the current expansion. But he still sticks to his guns; the story is the heart of FFXIV, and the emotional payoff comes from the hundreds of hours you put in.
This has led to “solutions” that are just band-aids on a bigger problem. Paid story skips basically sell you a solution to the game’s own bad design, creating high-level players who don’t know how to play their class.
The Duty Support system, which gives you AI teammates for dungeons, is great for solo players but doesn’t fix the real problems: the time sink and being cut off from friends. It’s a huge contradiction – the game is famous for “respecting your time” at the endgame, but it demands hundreds of hours from new players just to get there.
The whole argument for forcing players through the MSQ boils down to one promise; the story at the end is worth the grind. The launch of Dawntrail has, for the first time in years, broken that promise.
As the first chapter in a new saga, Dawntrail’s story has gotten pretty mixed reviews, with many longtime fans calling it a step down. The story feels bloated and stretched out over its 50-hour runtime, with a whopping 21 hours of cutscenes filled with repetitive dialogue. The “summer vacation” plot also doesn’t have the same high stakes or emotional punch as the older expansions.
The result is that it is hard to justify the grind. Why should a new player spend months of their life to reach a story that even veteran fans think is just okay? The MSQ is no longer a “necessary grind to see a masterpiece.” It’s now a “huge wall you have to climb for a story that might just be okay.”
The Path Forward
The problem facing Final Fantasy XIV is the weight of 10 years of story. To stay healthy, the game needs to completely rethink how it brings in new players and give them more options on where to start.
- Let Players Start at the New Expansion: Give new players the option to start in Dawntrail, and allow them to play the old story later with the New Game+ system.
- Create a “Story Mode” Version: Develop a shorter, curated version of the main story that cuts out the filler but keeps the essential plot points, potentially reducing the time needed by more than half.
- Unlock New Jobs and Features Sooner: Don’t lock the cool new jobs from an expansion behind hundreds of hours of old content. Let people play what they paid for.
Final Fantasy XIV is a remarkable achievement, but it has now become a victim of its own success.
The story is now so big that it’s scaring away the new players the game needs to survive. The data shows an unreasonable time investment, players are getting burned out, and other MMOs have already moved on from this old-school design.
The mixed reaction to Dawntrail has only made the problem worse. The question for Square Enix is whether Final Fantasy XIV will be a living game that continually finds new ways to welcome players, or if it will become a beautiful museum that fewer people have the time to explore.
