Is this their new strategy to force people to do Character Quests?

Last year we got the Natlan region and the devs worked it out where each rare character would get their own Character Quest but it'd be changed into something called the Tribal Chronicle. In order to unlock certain major rewards, you needed to complete the "Tribal Reputation" which was the new Reputation system that all the previous regions had to unlock those same rewards. What made the tribal thing different was that there were 6 separate parts each with their own Tribal Chronicle and only through doing the Tribal Chronicle could you unlock the Bounties and Requests sections to level up. This therefore meant that you were forced to do all of the Character Quests for these major Natlan Characters. Before Natlan, Character Quests were optional and I for one just didn't bother doing them. (that way one day in the far future when there's nothing else to do, I would still have that)

The Tribal Chronicles did have one drawback though which is that each one had to relate more to the tribe than to the character starring in it. This meant doing 2 prequel parts to the Character Quest that were really tedious and didn't always fit into the Character Quest's narrative. Two of these were done collectively though so the narrative did work but I think that also increased the cost of production since the major character would be there for all 3 parts instead of just the last part. More voice lines means more $$ for the actor.

But I think I'd be ok with Tribal Chronicles for Nod-Krai if the alternative is playing a random Character Quest during the middle of a hectic Archon Quest. This is essentially 1 full hour's worth of a side story in the middle of us dealing with a crisis. Imagine Superman going to save the world but he spots some thieves robbing a store and stops rushing off to fight Darkseid to deal with them first. Considering Nefer's story had nothing to do with what we were in the middle of, I'm sure they could have saved this story for another day.

In fact that's how it used to be. You either had for example Childe's story as an optional thing to do after you finished the Liyue Archon Quest or later on there were Albedo and Xiao's quests which were integrated into the events for those versions. For example, Albedo's introduced us to Dragonspine where the Festering Desire sword related to Albedo's "brother" would be uncovered in the event and he was dealing with it. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Sumeru-based event for this current version will also relate to Nefer's story so it could have been used then instead of making this already too long Archon Quest 1 full hour longer.

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