The Story

Completely agree. The story lacks memorable characters, theme and most of all clarity. They are also tied to the player actions in a very superficial way. In most cases there is no gameplay involved at all in the missions and your grocery list consists of listening to people talk about things that don't affect you in any way.

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Originally Posted by RathSkybreaker

The whole point i'm trying to get across is that if you take XIV's story in comparison to most of stories of past Final Fantasies, you seem a bit disappointed thus far, not to say there isn't hope for 2.0.

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I actually like the storyline, but IMO, it has a lot of issues that should be adressed:

A - The quests are set up in a way so crafters can complete them, therefore instead of offering boss battles and the sort, they just made the "challenge" be simply walking around a lot. Yoshi-P said this will be adressed

B - The quests are too spread up, and there are quests that are needlesly long (most of the early quests could easily be split in half with 1-2 level gaps to unlock the next part) and others are ridiculously small and useless (rank 42 quest, anyone?)

C - The cutoff between the city states quests and the path of the twelve arc is too abrupt. They build up nice plots and then suddenly reset it all and don't expand the city states stories at all after rank 20 quest.

D - ....just to cutoff the path of the twelve storyline at the rank 46 quest and stop making new storyline quests to continue.

And because of all that

E - The characters aren't as well developed as they could be.



And I don't expect any of this to change before 2.0. Yoshi-P has already stated they won't focus on the main storyline before they fix everything and finish the seventh umbral era plot....

Spoiler:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPV8CnMYjwo#t=8m30s

But, yes it feels like the main story is really all over the place. You have garleans, something going on with the echo, then beastmen summoning primals. It might be because Yoshi is taking the story to a different direction that Tanaka was aiming for. Not to mention, it seems like they are aiming to tell a story for changing the entire face of the world when moving to 2.0.

As for allowing players to "parley" in main mission was an interesting touch, but could have been done a bit better. I've always saw it as the non-aggressive solution to missions, such as negotiation. Not all battles should be won by simply slaughtering everyone.

Such as the mission Toll of the Warden, where two beastmen tribes are bickering at each other. You are given the choice to either

1. Talk the beastmen down so they don't kill each other, via parley.
2. Kill all the beastmen

Honestly, I felt it was more morally correct to just talk them down, but it's more fun of course to just kill them all.

Granted, that not ALL situations should be viable to negotiation, such as the last main mission storyline to date. However, there still should be some situation where it is applicable.

There are a few problems with parley which made it not fun

• It requires no character progression, meaning no EXP or leveling for parley
• There are no new abilities you can earn in parley by playing parley.
• It's the same simplistic minigame you play regardless of how advance in the game you are.
• No new challenges arises from the minigame.

Tell you the truth, we haven't even gotten deep into FFXIV's story enough to be disappointed. I liked where the story was going, but the cliffhanger was off putting. I understand the situation however, due to the developers changing how we transition through the story line, and we are getting more 7th Umbrel Era content through the new year.

Also, RoZ and CoP were my favorites. Especially since both their stories collided together. I agree with the other poster in here that the content should be episodic to one big story. Not leave you at a major cliffhanger, but at the same time, make us look forward to the next entry into the story.

The worst part about CoP was Prishe, now bare with me here.

She is really an adult, but the magicite stuck in her body kept her a kid.

I am a male hume paladin, a holy knight.

She decides for the sake of "showing you the magicite" which is in here chest... yeah... awkward.

Someone who is watching me would more than likely have the wrong idea.