Serafim_94

You guys don't have 10 years of 'story" content though that warrants such a paid skip. Most of that 10 year content can be sidelined. Main quest line can be done rather easily and doesn't take that long. The main problems are New war and mastery rank progression, with honorary mention of its 24h lockout per failure. If we're talking about condensing the new player experience, those 2 are the main problems in need of fixing. New war should get the ability to do it in chunks, or entirely skip it to get to the Narmer era and get the quest done later. Yes, it will kinda invalidate the quest, but it's better than invalidating entire storyline. Mastery progression should lose the lockout on the test at the very least. Other than that, I don't know how it can be meaningfully sped up, but it really should. It's a bigger timesink than running story quests before New war.

There's no 40 story missions in WF though. If we're talking aspecifically about the main quests, there's Natah, Second dream, Chains of Harrow, War within, Sacrifice and New war. Each of those except New war can be cleared in an evening, so that's about a week of pretty lazy gameplay to catch up. The real time stops are MR checks, starchart progress (which is arguably more time consuming than those missions), and New war itself.

So far the worst case of gating I've run into was not the story progress, but SP and Arbitrations (and their respective mods) gated behind the FULL star chart clear. We tried to play SP circuit for giggles with one of our friends who's extremely behind us, game said "#*!% you lol, go clear every map node", and that was it. The problem with gating isn't the quests. It's specifically Zariman, its nodes being counted towards starchart unlocking, and it being locked behind New war for... for what reason exactly? They aren't connected. With the way Zariman is introduced, it can just be plugged literally anywhere. At the very least, make Zariman NOT count towards basic chart progression. That alone will unlock a big chunk of the game for players who don't want to deal with story just yet. Better yet, find a way to not lock Zariman and the whole upcoming Void arc behind New war, because that particular quest is 90% of a problem with quest gating in the game. Maybe rework New war, IDK.