Personal Lore

[Jaywalker]

I see you guys worrying and all, but honestly I'd like to raise two points. First is if we got the ability to just [...] in any responses, that would address a lot. Should options presented not fit the background you came up with, you can opt out.

Second, if it's a single scene where you just kind of get to see the WoL share some of their background with a friendly NPC or something, you aren't going to get to pour over every nitty gritty detail. You might get to answer stuff like "do you have a home to go to" with "yes/I miss it", "yes/but I hated it there", "no/I wish i did", "no/I didn't need one", etc. Or you could answer questions about family like what SorceressVal mentioned. I do think some of the points Val proposed would be too detailed practically speaking (ex. exact hometown name) and I don't think a movie flashback would work here, but I mean if the options are presented right you could probably even answer stuff as a remarkably lifelike mammet.

The other thing is, I don't think it's needed to force backstory at the beginning. If you have a situation where you can step aside with an NPC of your choice and just talk a little, from a story/character standpoint you have the opportunity to get closer by finally (after a ridiculous number of quests and expansions) share a little about your WoL. Could be a very sweet and moving scene depending on how it's spun, doesn't have to effect the rest of gameplay.

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like in these threads a lot of the reasons people have been nixing possibilities have been out of worry that something will be taken away (like resources or a totally custom backstory) or that something will be imposed that the player isn't into. I get the worry and think it's important not to mess things up like that, but I also think some of this stuff if done in a clever way would pose zero threat. Could offer other players something to feel very excited about at the same time. If you have ways to opt out, nothing's imposed, and there's basically no inconvenience to your gaming then why not allow the features for people who want it?

Btw not asking this as like "ohohoho I am so important so many hypothetical people think the same as me" or anything. I noticed that lodestone sites tend to have comparatively more people who focus on fight mechanics while some other sites have more RPers, more glamour hounds, so on and so forth. Different collections of players seem to gravitate toward different parts of the game and I've seen segments where I seriously suspect certain options would be celebrated if done appropriately. If it was RPers rejecting a thing that would appeal to people super into fight mechanics I'd ask too. Also not looking for any kind of fight here, just chatting.

[Jaywalker]

This is a JRPG. The story isn't about YOU. You're just bearing witness to the events that unfold before you, but your history is largely irrelevant. All that matters is, you were born with the echo and you received Hydaelyn's blessing and you and your band of adventurers (also with echo) are very good at killing primals and general do-gooding.

Respectfully this seems to go against the Dark Knight questline and a lot of elements featured in certain primal fights. I'd argue that it's actually a source of major conflict in the game, depending on what path is chosen. The devs are actively inviting players to examine the idea of a chosen one and what toll being the only one who can do these things takes on a person.

[SannaR]

You see all the worry because they already took away a dungeon so they could add things like Eureka or daidem. That and there's a lot of things they seem to put in the dumbest of ways along with the devs going sorry the servers would explode or something else when asked why things like glamour dressers being outside of inns and squadron rooms or more character customization can't be done or expanded on.

Also a lot of people don't mind things as long as it's optional. You could already look at how much the "choices" we do have are done and where it doesn't even matter in the end. I mean heck I think the only reasons we have a birthday and the chose one of the 12 part because it's a left over from 1.0 and the only time one of those seems to even matter is when you do the fortune reading part of the Valentines day event.

[Jaywalker]

You see all the worry because they already took away a dungeon so they could add things like Eureka or daidem. That and there's a lot of things they seem to put in the dumbest of ways along with the devs going sorry the servers would explode or something else when asked why things like glamour dressers being outside of inns and squadron rooms or more character customization can't be done or expanded on.

Also a lot of people don't mind things as long as it's optional. You could already look at how much the "choices" we do have are done and where it doesn't even matter in the end. I mean heck I think the only reasons we have a birthday and the chose one of the 12 part because it's a left over from 1.0 and the only time one of those seems to even matter is when you do the fortune reading part of the Valentines day event.

I get you on Eureka and diadem in terms of losing a dungeon, but I also think not everything proposed in these threads would inherently carry that level of technical complexity. Let alone time commitment/risk/difficulty. We have a bunch of cutscenes with multiple dialogue options already and there are existing games that use similar mechanisms without issue. Totally understand that this being an MMO + how things were established in ARR shapes what can be done realistically going forward, but I mean written dialogue and cutscenes don't seem like it would be a spaghetti code disaster. In this case it seems like we'd just need a writer who's aware of/sensitive to fan concerns and can present options that don't constrain players. The rest would be within normal capability for what gets done in each expansion.

I do think you're right on about the birthdays though lol. It basically never comes up. We get no presents, no notifications, no cake. Why's it even there anymore? WoL is celebrated across Hydaelyn but everyone forgets their birthday. An absolute tragedy.

[LineageRazor]

The carriage ride "establishing moment" annoys me, actually - because the only motivation options you get (other than not-answering) are fame, money and power. What about "for the adventure"? Seeing new places? Learning things? It seems such an obvious answer, and I dislike that the only choices we get are 'selfish' ones.

Yeah, I agree with this sentiment. It seemed like the carriage ride was trying to shoehorn your character into being a sort of edgy anti-hero type, and didn't leave a lot of room for more optimistic tropes, like lust for adventure or plain ol' altruism. I picked the neurtral "..." options each time, as being the quiet type seemed preferable to the other options I was provided. The sentiment is also portrayed by Derplander's party members in the original 1.0 opening cutscene (particularly the Miqo'te).

As much as I like the Dark Knight quests, I was still slightly uncomfortable about the assumptions they made about your character and how they feel about what they do. I was able to find my comfort zone by rationalizing that it's reasonable to presume that even the most dyed-in-the-wool heroes get tired of the endless struggle after a while...

[Iscah]

Btw not asking this as like "ohohoho I am so important so many hypothetical people think the same as me" or anything. I noticed that lodestone sites tend to have comparatively more people who focus on fight mechanics while some other sites have more RPers, more glamour hounds, so on and so forth. Different collections of players seem to gravitate toward different parts of the game and I've seen segments where I seriously suspect certain options would be celebrated if done appropriately. If it was RPers rejecting a thing that would appeal to people super into fight mechanics I'd ask too. Also not looking for any kind of fight here, just chatting.

Are you saying that you're seeing this conversation as "people who like fight mechanics rejecting a proposition that would appeal to RPers"? Because I think it's the opposite.

I'm not quite an RPer, but I love this game for characters and story. The "undefined" nature of the player-character means that I've had to invent the details myself, and I have multiple distinct characters. I'm still foggy on the details of their pasts, to varying degrees, but I know I don't want to see all of them get the same fill-in-the-blanks backstory. (I rationalise their same current-story by the fact they're actually traveling together.)

As I said before - if it was established from the start that this character had a clear story, I wouldn't mind so much, but when I've been left to come up with my own characters (and I do feel like they're my own, even if they're following a preset story) then it's jarring when the game puts them "out-of-character" or suddenly drops critical new details that we should have always known about "ourselves".

I'd be much less bothered if this was a game with a fixed character, and we were learning more details about that character. But this is my individual character, which makes me feel protective about them in a way that I wouldn't care about in a different story.



Also, this forum is in an odd place as far as discussing lore and story goes. Discussions "should" take place here in the Lore forum, ideally, but it seems that the majority of forum users don't even look in here. Sometimes story discussions get launched in General Discussion (where 90% of forum conversation takes place) but as soon as they gain any degree of busy-ness they get shifted here by the mods - and usually die because none of the people who were involved are coming here to continue discussing it.

As much as I like the Dark Knight quests, I was still slightly uncomfortable about the assumptions they made about your character and how they feel about what they do. I was able to find my comfort zone by rationalizing that it's reasonable to presume that even the most dyed-in-the-wool heroes get tired of the endless struggle after a while...

I hated the Dark Knight quests, especially when they put specific words in my character's mouth that they'd never say even at their most frustrated. And the very dark descriptions in the journal entries - hating people for being weak and that sort of thing.

I rationalised it by deciding that Fray wasn't my character's dark side at all, but a separate entity that had taken over and was trying very hard to convince us that he's really part of us.

Don't know how long I can continue to insist on that take, but certainly for the Lv30-50 storyline.

[Jaywalker]

Snip

Naw, I was just giving an example in the bolded bit. Point I was trying to make was more that different people have different tastes in general. Sometimes the fight mechanics versus story oriented players bit does happen but here I get the sense that it's more there are different opinions on a gameplay possibility. Mentioned elsewhere but a lot of the time on this site people seem to get nervous about that difference in case it takes something away or imposes on them, and near as I can tell that concern seems like it's happening here. Ex. I love the dark knight questline and think it adds a lot of depth and interest, but I also understand how it wouldn't fit with every WoL and how it wouldn't be every player's cup of tea. I get you don't want that interpretation forced on your WoL and that's fair, but I also don't think dark knight's questline should not exist because there are plenty of other, lighter quest options available too. And if you want to play the job but don't want that quest to be canon for your WoL, I don't see any reason not to make a headcanon around the way skip potions work for example. Tbh I could see that being really interesting writing even, sometimes simple scenarios are. Overall feeling is people have varied tastes and it helps keep stuff interesting.

I'm actually not an RPer either, for what it's worth. I'm kind of similar to you though in the sense that I have a main and several alts who I've developed various personalities for, some with distinct backstories while others are works in progress. I also like to keep things "original flavor" in the sense that they generally don't run in direct contradiction to canon storytelling. I hardly expect that the game would be able to account for everything every player can come up with, but I don't think things would need to be as limited as you've voiced by any means. I'm saying this from both the standpoint of being a writer myself and from having played other games where backstory options were presented. Also I'm used to liking works where there are a lot of versions of canon, so for me picking and choosing what seems appropriate is pretty normal.

In FFXIV (particularly with the huge range in race, location, and tone options) it wouldn't be beneficial for SE to make any backstory stuff too specific. I truly don't think you'd need to worry about that. And like I said, [...] as a reply option frees things up. So if even with very broad, simple options, if say your WoL is in fact a sentient animated fungus and has zero family to speak of... when asked you can [...] and maintain that lol.

But stuff like "do you have family", "do you have a home", "do you have any regrets", "were you happy before all these WoL misadventures"... that's pretty harmless I think. I personally like when there are dialogue options for my WoL, but if you don't then the [...] includes you too.

I generally figure it's better to have more options for people than less though, as long as it can be done sensibly and well. Me chattering here is mainly because I do think there's a way to do this without running into the stuff you're concerned about (which I think are fair points!), and I'm just bouncing ideas on this around.

On forum placement ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not my forum/not my call but this seems like it might be okay since it's more about where/how personal lore might hypothetically be implemented than discussing established lore? Idek.

Also Iscah! This is delayed/unrelated, but I didn't see initially in that design challenge thread and edited in additional info, but using existing pics would be fine if you want to do it! :O

[Ilan]

snip...

How can someone dislike one of the two only good class stories in this game?

[SannaR]

They dislike how it shows their characters in that it doesn't match how their character behaves.

[Gula]

They dislike how it shows their characters in that it doesn't match how their character behaves.

I will skip Job cutscenes entirely for this reason.