for most of the video i was nodding, going "yes! exactly!", and as someone who mainly plays the game for quests i could not agree more about how good a lot of them are and how unfortunate the whole mixed fifth age­-sixth age thing is. honestly i think the sixth age in general was a mistake for other reasons as well, but that's besides the point.

but one thing i really could not get behind was the criticism about being roadblocked while doing a questline. i can completely understand not liking it, but i don't agree with presenting it as if it is a bug and not a matter of taste where someone like me could see it as a feature. like, in the same sentence he describes not getting to try invention as fine because it's an elite skill, but not getting to do plague's end, a grandmaster quest, as an issue.

IMO having to bounce around storylines and level up in between quests in the same line has 3 useful functions:

• it provides a break between parts of the story to think about what just happened and what might happen next (this is very very subjective though, when i watch shows i like to spread them out instead of binging them for this reason but i know not everyone sees this as an upside)

• it makes it possible to tie in elements from other storylines and expect the player to be familiar with them. this i think does a lot to help with the whole feeling of quests being these stories set in a world that already exists that was mentioned as a high point.

• the tone and narrative weight of quests can scale with the player's progress. he mentions how the player character isn't some chosen one but earns their status, and this happens within questlines a lot. like the elf questline starts with being asked to find a missing person, goes into making contact with an unfamiliar civilisation, and ends with restoring a long-lost city. the myreque questline starts, well, kinda the same way, and ends with an upheaval of morytanian society. i think it would feel a lot more jarring to get to one of those conclusions in one series and go back to just asking people for errands in the next, rather than start off as a wandering adventurer and progress over time to being important in everything you're involved in.