XIV's storytelling issues (with comparisons)-Spoilers aheadFollow

As I said in the other thread, there's much that isn't working in XIV's script. I'm keeping out something that is intrinsic in each MMO, that is the "general padding" (quests that just slow you down) because it's done to avoid people completing everything in a couple of minutes. Also this post has dozens of spoilers from both XI and XIV - you have been warned.

XIV's script has quite a few notable issues:

1) Main issue - it's going nowhere at this point. Sometimes they want to be EXXXTREEEMEEE edgy, sometimes they want to be more like classical FF (by bashing the player head with references, not really subtle). Ascians have never been a credible threat. They're Sunday cartoon type villains, who keep plotting for .... something, and keep saying their plans are in motions, except that it's been three years and nothing was really accomplished at this point. HW didn't have them at the center, as the Ascians there were doing basically their own thing. So we got to this point and we still don't know a thing. They summoned the Warrior of Darkness who...did nothing but gloat till this patch (what was even the point then?). Personally speaking, I think they should resolve their presence in the story as soon as possible and move on, they're not a credible threat;

2) Too many times the player character does something stupid, lacking common knowledge or gets into trouble by repeating the same mistakes. Yet for no known reason, he's the Hero. Someone who gets drugged not once, but twice in the same manner shouldn't really be put at the center. Especially when instead of destroying the eyes of the Extremely Big Dragon (TM) which caused issues for ages he/she tosses them in the abyss, promptly to be retrieved by the WoD. Seriously, the WoL is the main ally of the Ascians thanks to the inane stupidity of the plot.

3) Certain plot points are re-coated and re-served. Estinien gets taken over by the eyes....after you kicked his butt in the DRG questline for the same reason, even if the degree of possession isn't the same. This was really stupid. The aforementioned drugging is another example.

4) Too many plot lines. We have the Ishgard turmoil, the Ascians, the Empire, the Ul'dah situation and whatever is planned for 4.0. There's already too many shuffling to do right now, leading to the "This is a Very Important Plot Point but there is another Extremely Important Point you have to do right now" event repeated ad nauseam. This also leads to certain ideas to be almost forgotten (how the Echo works, as shown in the Leviathan cutscene, has almost been forgotten). This also means a lot of characters simply disappear for a long period of time - see Yugiri for example and the Dormans.

5) The sidequest quality, given the limited number of them ranges from the good (Hildibrand, Tam-Tara Hard cutscenes) to the horrible (most class quests).

Allow me to make a few comparisons for the DRK questline in XI and XIV. In XIV there's Fray who is so edgy and DARKNESS because being DRK seems to be Cool Like This (thanks to IV, when the job was defined). Then the level 50+ quests have this emo DRK who just...does stuff. XI had, even in comparison with other FF titles, a slightly different take on the job from a narrative standpoint. The basic setup is the same (using the negative the emotions to obtain power) but save a couple comments made by Zeid when you unlock the job, the whole "getting swallowed by darkness" angle isn't really played. As I mentioned in the other thread, it reminds me of most of Go Nagai's works, in which the hero has to use the same power that fuels his enemies to fight back. Personally speaking, I prefer this approach.

Most of the other class quests have something interesting but mostly go nowhere (see the DRG post-50 quest chain). They feel disconnected from the world and mostly seem there just to fill a quota. In this case I prefer the approach used in late-RoTZ/CoP eras by XI where the sidequests fit nicely in the mission structure (see for example the ****** quests that tie into the final arc of the Windurst missions, or the individual quests for the NPCs in CoP).

6) The game, storywise, doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be. Either tragic or FF-style, with huge mood swings. It wouldn't be bad if there was a clear direction, likable or not. XI, even with the horrible WoTG expansion (save perhaps for the garbage of the mini-expansions) had a simple theme that is usually repeated but it's at least a common point: "There's always another way between two extremes" (see CoP, Adoulin and even Rhapsodies). XIV has nothing of the sort, except throwing FF references with the subtetly of a hammer in the face.

7) Tied to point 2), the NPCs are too active in cutscenes compared to the player. It's absurd that to get a reaction from the GC leaders after what happened in 2.55 you have to talk to them between cutscenes and the player character doesn't do a thing. When the WoD appears the first time the WoL simply stands still to get his/her **** kicked while Thancred arrives to make his Cool Entrance. And that is repeated too many times over the course of 2.0 and 3.0.

HW being self-contained story wouldn't have ben a problem if there was some sort of tangible progress. Instead, we're back at square one with most things (did someone remember the Magical Mcguffin to keep Ascians sealed? Did the Scion forget? Who knows...).

Edited, Sep 21st 2016 11:29pm by xizro

I agree with most of those points. When the story is good, it's REALLY good, but most of the time it just sort of meanders around accomplishing absolutely nothing. There are a million things happening all at once but none of them really seem to matter.

It's interesting how some of the best stories have been the sidequests. The Ixal beast tribe was better and more interesting than most of the main story.



This so much. After three years they're still just sitting in the dark planning and scheming and we don't even know why. I've long since stopped caring about what the Ascians are doing, because they're not actually doing anything at all.

I am going to have a field day with this.

The type of story being generated, I realize, does not appeal to everyone, and those who are not high-minded about this and are willing to delve into the lore and reasoning, and disseminate both are likely to fall off. But for each one of the 'notable issues' you have, I actually have a rebuttle - and in some of them, also a comparison point where your appeal to FFXI falls out of line with my own opinion of FFXI's story good points. Pardon that I will be quoting you in brief for sake of not making this too giant of a post.

As such, I won't be reacting to all of this in one sitting -after realizing just how much I disagree the level of argument you have here. Honestly this sounds less like a criticism and more of a jaded triad mixed with rose tinted glasses of FFXI's storyline presentation.

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It's gone quite a bit, in both directions. In terms of the development of both the player (which we will touch on later, and the current.)

As far as not calling the Acian's a creditable threat, need I remind you that the game started with them in the advantage, and we've done little more than eliminate the of them, and ONE of those eliminations remain questionable (Lahabrea may, in fact, still be alive.) They are the driving influence behind all of our enemies accomplishments, which, for the benefit of those here, I will list.

1. The Calamity, and Bahamut in general - they are the reason why that Elder Primal exists, they are the ones that influenced Nael Darnus to bring Meteor down by planting the Tomestones in his family's possession. The Calamity would not have existed if the Allagan Empire were not given threat.

2. The summoning of the following Primals: Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Leviathan, Ramuh, Shiva, Bismark, Ravana, Bahamut and Odin, and Knights of the Round. Of all of these, the only ones that have reached a permanent solution is Shiva, Bahamut and KtoR. All three of which were only possible because their faith base was removed, either from the revelation of the truth behind them to their people (Shiva, KtoR) or have had said worship base eliminated (Bahamut) - neither of which are solutions that can easily be applied to any of the remaining Primals.

3. The revival of the Triad - The Holy See and his Heavensward were not lead to The Aetherchemical Research Facility out of the goodness of the Ascians hearts. They orchestrated the disruption of the Warring Triads' prison and seeded an ambitious Imperial General there to continually bear the threat of both releasing these said Eikons upon the world (each capable of mimicking the devastation of Bahamut individually if allowed to recover their power.) AND endowing the empire with the means of duplicating said threat.

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Keep in mind that the above is a continual impact on the Game's World. Eorzea will never fully recover from the Calamity within the game's lifespan, the resulting corrupted aether, the impact of exposed Allag secrets such as the Crystal Tower and Omega - which forces the Eorzea Alliance to play at war in order to keep the later and similar secrets in contention and out of the wrong hands.

Primals continually drain the Aether in the surrounding elements EACH time they are summoned, and eliminating them does not return the full amount back into the realm. Meaning, even though the WoL wins the day, it's a win at a loss - especially as it only serves to continually escalate issues - often at the cost of lives.

The Triad's and the Imperial threat are also continual issues. Even if we were to defeat all of the Triad, the secrets of the Aetherchemical Research Institute remain a constant thing to protect from the Primals. Even if we successfully destroy them, the Ascians have set in motion the ambition of the Emprie to crave Allegan secrets - secrets of which that have already been proved to be dangerous for both empire and the world at large (Circa - Ultima Weapon)

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"But what threat has the Ascians proved to me!?" You ask?

Ascian's influence has slain your compatriots on multiple occasions. It was an Ascian that enabled the empire to ransack the Waking Sands, slaying characters that were as old as 1.0, to those who were wise enough to catch onto it.

It took the death of a supporting character to claim our first High Ascian kill. Our second kill ripped the key to Azys La directly out of our hands and gifted it to the Holy See, which we were only able to penetrate ourselves in and approach at the sacrifice of yet another character, one we had spent the bulk of an expansion journeying with. To say nothing of Lord Haunchfant, who may be alive right now if the Holy See had dismissed his plan to try to one-up the Ascians by taking their offer of power and turning it on them.

And let's not forget the Students of Baldessean - who were wiped out save for Krile, including their entire island base - leaving us bereft of those who were funneling us Intel for every major Primal incursion up until that point.

Whatever 'progress' we have made has always come at cost, at sacrifice - and even then, our progress is tainted by the fact that we're simply perpetuating the cycle of violence for short-term gains. Only have we ever been able to achieve countering their most heavy handed plays, and only then after a major and significant loss in the Calamity. It's not as if they're not a credible threat - more that they're a constant threat who's danger is often foolishly overlooked - which fits their motif.

We've only scratched the surface of their plot and their motives, and already we've leader, from the confession of the Word of the Mother herself (yet another loss on our part) that this war is a one of continual loses. We're only now growing aware of why there is a conflict and a goal to begin with. Ascians aren't so much the Cartoon villains, that was Lahabrea and those who sided with his methods. As a larger entity, there is far more going on.
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Thus is the consequence of trust. We think it stupidity because we are the audience, granted secondary perspectives an access the information the Warrior of Light does not have. It's easy being an armchair critic - but I would wager you would make many more mistakes than our esteemed WoL.

Also, when were we drugged twice? The first time we were drugged, at least in the main plotline was in Falcon's Nest, in plain public - which was directly contrary to the first time we ever SAW someone drugged, which was in the privacy, and presumed protection, of the Sultana's own bed chamber.

See the difference here? The situations were completely contrasted - and it was completely feasible for the WoL to have their guard down in either case. Keep in mind, WoL did express distrust and fearfullness of having a private drink with Ameryc.

As far as the Eyes - they were at this point presumed devoid of both power and spirit. And after a heated battle, and desperate attempt to save a friend from a horrid fate (to the point of possibly hallucinating) In this state, vritually anyone would be inclined to listen to the command of a trusted friend. Especially seeming those four were presumably the only witnesses to the act.

What was it you said later on in this thread? That the WoDs showed up briefly and then did nothing for so long? By what rights would WoL have to presume to be suspicious? Your assertion also presumes that the WoL had the direct and immediate means to destroy both eyes right then and there. If such were so easy, do you not think that Estenian's speech in ARF would have not been to destroy the eyes as opposed to hide them away as he spoke before being possessed? Presuming that you know better than the dialogue is often a reader's mistake.
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No, actually this is the incorrect perspective. Estenian once was so consumed by his quest for vengeance that he gave his will, temporarily, over to Nidhogg's influence in trade for more power - that is when he lost himself the first time. It was then feigned off as Estenian losing to the Dragon's influence, as opposed to his own weakness. One was temptation, the other was takeover - the them was the same - Vengance - but the nuance is important here. And the truth of the matter was, there was no 'repeat' of themes - this was a continuing theme. But you're entitled to your opinion on it just the same. But, without it, a lot of the tension in the story is lost - as is currently the point of Estenian's story which was very neatly pointed out in his bed-ridden speech to your perspective. His was the story of the dark temptation of vengeance, that was never concluded in DRG's storyline, and was given far more importance in Heavensward - as, IMO, such a lesson should be.

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That's going to be it for this section. I will reply to the next tomorrow sometime. I won't be entertaining replies until I've completed the whole thing, as a gain, a whole is both comprised of all of its pieces, and greater than the simple sum of - much like the way FFXIV continuously attempts - even if it does not universally succeed. I'll touch more on that later.

Wow Hyrist, looking forward to Part 2!

This thread isn't exactly what I thought it would be, but oh well. It's nice seeing all the plot point refreshers -- much has happened since 2.0 launched.

Hio, you should start a blog about things you enjoy about FFXIV. I'd read it out of sheer curiosity.

That said, a few points about storyline in XIV:

- Content difficulty doesn't affect storytelling. No explanation needed.

- The Heavensward storyline was a big improvement over the ARR storyline in terms of flow and delivery of the main story. Far fewer fetch quests than in ARR, and looks like that's the direction going forward, which is great.

- The Heavensward storyline FELT like a Final Fantasy game. Good emotion, erring a bit on the side of emo/melodramatic, but not so much that it was annoying. This is a problem with recent FF single-player games, and I'm glad this hasn't spilled over into XIV. Also, HW had great character development. The only thing about the HW storyline I really didn't like was that Ysayle died... (I only say I didn't like it because I enjoyed her character so much. But her death seemed like the ultimate price for bringing a peace between man and dragon.)

- The transition content since the end of the main HW expansion story has been MUCH better than the post-ARR transition content. The Final Steps of Faith battle was tuned just right for being challenging without being frustrating, and the quality of the cutscenes that followed was a nice reward. Yeah, if that were me in real life (and if there were such things as dragons, etc.) I wouldn't have thrown the eyes into the abyss. If the eyes couldn't be destroyed, I'd have commissioned Gerolt to build me an epic treasure chest that nobody would ever be able to open, and I'd have found someplace secluded to bury the eyes deep beneath the earth, perhaps protecting them with an intricate web of traps and wards... but look at "common sense" from a storytelling perspective, and it's much simpler to just throw them into the deep abyss where they'd likely never be found.

- Hey guys, this is a video game story... a Final Fantasy story, no less... perhaps lighten up a bit? I'm finding the tone of the recent story content to be right on the mark. If I want dark and gritty, I'll play Dragon Age. (The first one, btw. The second one was "meh" and I'm not as impressed as I thought I'd be with Inquisition.)

- The ARR storyline felt a little too contrived at times, especially after the seriousness of Yoshi-P's storyline to bring 1.x to an end. Too many fetch quests in ARR, too... the complaints about the WoL spending too much time running errands and waiting tables were legit (even though most didn't know him as the WoL yet, that was still bothersome). Very glad they fixed this with HW.

- Job quests aren't a huge factor for me in judging overall storyline. Let's face it -- they weren't that great in FFXI, either. I enjoyed the paladin and ninja job quests, and bard was fine, but I wasn't impressed with the dragoon quests (which I only did to level 50).

- Sidequests are improving. The dev team hit a home run by building out Edda's storyline, and they need to do more of that going forward. Hildebrand is a fun diversion, but I prefer the more thoughtful storylines.

I don't want to spend too much time talking about FFXI, but you can't have a XIV thread without making comparisons to XI. So I'll throw in these points, too:

- I enjoyed much of FFXI's storyline, cover to cover. There was never an "ARR" phase where I felt the writers were stumbling, but XI also didn't have the early upheaval that XIV did.

- In hindsight, I think XI's storyline would have seemed overly simple and possibly unfulfilling if not for the long delays between content updates.

And one more comment about both FFXIV and FFXI, and really about storytelling in the modern gaming industry:

Technology plays a role in how we perceive storytelling, and I'm a big believer that stories that involve more imagination are almost always better. That's why even the greatest video games will never touch the greatest books.

To a degree, video games have always robbed us of the opportunity to visualize, but this has grown "worse" as graphics have improved. When we play games like FFXIV, there's much less to the imagination about character appearance/movement/etc. than back when we played the original 8-bit FF. Heck, even the difference between FFXIV and FFXI is pretty striking.

Now, not only are we increasingly robbed of visualization, but we're also robbed of other senses. What would this character sound like? How would that line be delivered? We're no longer given complete freedom to let our imaginations fill in the blanks in the perfect ways we envision; instead, it's up to a game developer to do it for us... and that's always going to be problematic.

Yes, this is veering off of script quality (we already veered away from that), but considering technology absolutely matters if we're going to compare FFXI and FFXIV. A lot of those short, low-dialogue cutscenes and NPC texts that we loved so much in FFXI would probably seem inadequate or downright silly if brought to the technological standards of FFXIV.

Edited, Sep 22nd 2016 9:48am by Thayos

I don't know about that. While some of the story pieces were pretty straightforward (nations, ToAU) others were stupidly complicated and often nonsensical (CoP, WotG.) I did the later parts of CoP in fairly quick succession and to this day I'm still not quite sure what happened there. (And if I hadn't already beaten RoZ I would have been even MORE confused.)

It's not cherry picking, it's what the guy in charge said as recently as gamescom and interviews posted on major Japanese media publications this past week. Just because the exact example was something someone asked about, doesn't negate the fact Yoshida has said that content difficulty does affect the storytelling in some fashion especially because like some players on the OF, he's said "people could just go to youtube anyway" and if something blocks your players from story, a lot of people won't experience the story. No one really asks about the faceroll content because chances are there's no story related to it in the same format. Majority of the dungeons don't even have accompanying cutscenes, especially optional dungeons, you usually get the story before (then unlock dungeon) then you get the story after if it's main storyline. With the raid content, you're usually getting the story in between floors.

That's why people asked specifically about Alexander's story because they were curious about the direction in 3.4, we already know the MSQ direction in 3.4. So it's not biasness, unless you'd consider someone asking about the Eikon storyline as being biased because they want changes to it, which someone did ask, and yoshida explained that Sophia will be easier than Nidhogg Ex but more mechanically driven. Think back to all of the complaints about the final 3.0 dungeon and how people were pissed off that you couldn't progress the dungeon until EVERYONE has viewed (or skipped) the cutscene. Yoshida said he'll never do that again for a storyline dungeon. So the ONE time they actually use a new format, the "majority playerbase" complained. So as much as some people love to say "biased", people tend to ask about certain things for a reason, being biased isn't one of them.



Yeah, that's why I said when you really think about the storylines, they're really not all that bright and happy kind of things they appear to be. They have good endings, with the exception of a few, but it depends on how you immerse yourself in it, which is why I like the FF games and why XIV ARR+s story irks me so much, there's a lot of potential that seems to just not get met.



With the way they showed us how they compose the cutscenes of XI and all the work that goes into them, I think it'd actually be the opposite and would be vastly superior to XIV's given the right tools. For example 1.x's cutscenes were considered better in some aspects because the engine used was purely cinematic which unfinished nature aside, is why it had the problems it did (think of making a game on a calculator, it can work but it wasn't designed for it) a lot of XI's cutscenes were broken down in parts because of the custom engine being something developed in the mid 90s, I'm sure you've redone or finished up some of the recent XI storylines, comparing Vanilla/Zilart to ToAU > RoV shows an obvious improvement, that's what I mean by the comparison job quests in XI had an obvious quality improvement as they got better developing and why you'd figure XIV's would be the best given not only experience, but tools available. They already cherry pick when to actually use voice acting, which technically shouldn't degrade the quality in any fashion, even if it is an MMORPG because there's different teams working on different parts of even 1 cutscene, so that's why yoshida was saying sometimes things aren't that great because of time restrictions, Alexander was used as an example because people were asking about the decisions behind the Coil > Alexander jump and how the story hasn't been well received.

The branched Luminous engine they used for XIV can handle quite a bit, someone on 2ch even ported the first "20 minutes" of FFXI onto it, which clearly due to the fact it's a licensed engine by SE it can't be posted, but needless to say, SE is really giving the "bare minimum" for XIV, it shows and it's obvious and their last reports mysteriously left out DQX and XIV despite always using it for reference points. People hate to see things like "don't waste time with x" but in 4.0 it just won't be surprising if we only get 1 dungeon per update since they already dropped dungeons in the path to 3.x in order to give us "better, varied content."



Edited, Sep 24th 2016 8:12am by Theonehio