Warrior of Light: A Mindless Killer

As has been mentioned, complained and cried about several times before: sidequests are not explicitly canon. THE canon quests of XIV are the MSQ, since the game can't assume you've done all the quests involved in every area (like the Crystal Tower, Void Ark and the Warring Triad), even when they introduce completely new characters who SHOULD be brought in to the MSQ (like Unukhalai's knowledge of the shards, to name a not-so-controversial example).

Do you view your WoL as a mindless killer because you chose to take on all the sidequests? That's fine in your personal narrative, and how you play him. Is my WoL a homebody because most I do while online is craft, sell my stuff on the MB and roam around Lavender Beds. Or he has suicidal tendencies because I spend most nights horribly dying in a fantasy crafted by a wandering minstrel where I'm facing off against a sentient tree with 7 other adventurers who may or may not canonicaly be there.

The WoL is a blank slate, but your blank slate is not the same as mine or anyone else's unless it happened in an MSQ.

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Originally Posted by Zetsumei_Tsunarashi

I have done all the DRK quests. To me that narrative is not about justifying your actions, but merely points out the flaw in your character. The fact that you are a merciless killer who has no issue with taking action to appease your own sense of justice despite what effect it may have on others. It really just exemplifies the issue that I've brought up in the OP, but doesn't address the reasoning behind it.

We do things we believe to be right, but not always with the full knowledge of the impact our actions will have on others. When faced with the realization that our actions have in fact caused suffering to someone, our character shrugs it off as if nothing happened, or withholds damning information in order "spare" the individual of further pain. What I'm questioning is whether or not our character actually feels remorse for what they have done, or if they in fact believe they are justified in doing the things they do despite sometimes having a negative impact on people's lives.

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The 60 - 70 DRK questline directly addresses the negative impact our actions have had on the lives of others and our regret about things turning out the way they did. As Thancred bluntly points out to Emmanellain, you make your choice and live with the consequences. If you choose to do nothing, the people you wish to protect may very well be harmed or killed, and it will be your fault. Indirectly. With great power there must also come great responsibility.

"Myste" from the 60 - 70 line is our doubt and remorse, not at how things turned out but that we were forced to do what we were to try and minimize the suffering. You can't predict the consequences of every action, what we do is with the best of intentions, and is generally meant to minimize suffering and death. Our personal moral purity is a small sacrifice to make for that.

As for sidequests? Nobody's forcing you to do any of them. You don't have to agree to assist that guy in getting the stuff from the bird nests. You don't have to kill the birds (you can always run away). You. Choose. To. You, the player.

Please play Spec Ops: The Line if you have not done so. It really examines this issue in great detail.

It's worth noting that as far as the canon lore is concerned nobody's Warrior of Light truly matters. Nobody is important enough to claim that their Warrior of Light is anything more than a 'what if' scenario that exists in a non-canon bubble. What their Warrior of Light would or would not do is completely irrelevant when compared to what the stand in Warrior of Light - the one shown in the official cinematics - is shown to be doing. It's also safe to state that any quest offered in-game, any FATE and any dungeon is something that that Warrior of Light has chosen to tackle.

For better or for worse.

Spec Ops: The Line is a horrible example. Buy a game. Then be made to feel bad for doing an action you have no choice but to do, or to stop playing. Yeah, that's a deep moral crisis right there.

Spec Ops the Line is a terrible example. We are not a character in the story, and even if we were, the story stops until we choose the choice or fight the fight that is in line with the devs' idea of the character.

At the end of the day, it is other people that pay of the consequences of the WoL, not the WoL themselves. It will continue to be like this because the devs cannot truly punish the character, they still have to be able to go to gold saucer and pull their sword out in all the cities at the end of that cutscene.

That we are a puppet that does what its told is kind of a failure in their storytelling. There is not enough buy in to the character's decisions, and thus it seems like they are "your character" going with what the script says.

Well the WoD did not cause destruction just because they did good things but because they defeated too much darkness. So they kinda did their job too good (I still cant quite wrap my head around this..seems to be a Final Fantasy thing) I am not really sure if we defeat darkness if we help innocent people out, or if we do it by killing beings like the Ascian. Also lets not forget that right now we are on the losing side so would it not be bad if we would stop doing good things because the scale is already not balanced to our side?

Can we really look at all these side quests that judgmental? Maybe in story we tried to gather all the trinkets without harming anyone but the birds arrived and attacked anyway. Also who knows if those are not human-eaters too, they are at least no small birds like our real life ones.

Yes we might have to kill Garlean soldiers that are maybe just forced into this but we cant just assume that for every Garlean soldier that we meet. If we go and not kill those that attack us then we would be killed instead and thus we simply have no other choice. Also we do see in the story that we also leave enemies alive in some battles so we dont even know if they are all death. (And yes we are still in a war situation thus killing is sadly part of that and at the same time we should not confuse ingame things with canon story parts. I am quite sure that we did not really kill thousands of monsters/humans/animals in our true story. The big amount of kills are just ingame mechanics that have to be there to make a fun game. But yes we still killed people but those people are also attacking us, they barely try to talk it out and they would kill us too.)

And I always got a bit of feeling that people are painting our wrong doings as way more than all the things that we do good. Next to killing beings we are also helping lots of innocent people, we are doing lots of quests for those that lots of people would not even interact with and we even help out the beast tribes. We are trying to end wars and we also try to talk people out of doing things. We sometimes even give others second chances and lets not forget all the other good deeds that we do on top of saving the world from horrible beasts. (Like helping out Zhloe and thus helping out these children) We do some grey moral things but most of the time we are doing quests in the believe of helping those in need and I cant really count that many situations were we truly are doing something horrible.

The only real questionable act outside of the main story which I remember is the relict quest line. Other than that we are normally going against people that are not truly innocent. So I would not say that we are mindlessly slaying them but that its sadly necessary.

And I agree with Cilia. Nothing that Hydaelyn did until now is bad. We know that Minfilia came to her out of her own free will, we ourselves are not truly forced to help her (she even says that we should think, hear, feel) and she even said that she is not able to help much without someone that does it for her. And since she is also losing the war she is way to weak to do much anyway. Helping us put her in an even worse shape but she did it since we are her only hope left. As soon as she got some power back she used it to help the WoD and there is no ingame hint that she did something bad to them so we should assume that she truly helped them.

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Originally Posted by Zetsumei_Tsunarashi

My point is, we don't have a choice. We take the tasks we are given blindly without wondering about the effects of our actions because "helping people" is the "right thing to do". What if we refused to help that person search for those trinkets ? We would have never angered the bird mother in the first place and would not have had to kill it. Were those trinkets really that important ? Would the man have been fine without them ? Did those birds really have to die ? That's the kind of thing I've been questioning myself about lately.

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Then we could never do anything because nobody will ever know what will happen. We could have just killed some helpless animal or we could have just killed a beast that would grow more and more in numbers thus endangering the people later on. We could have not given this man the trinkets and he would not be worse of, or we did not do it and later on one of his children died from hunger. We simply dont know. Also we as the player do have a choice, we simply can just ignore a side quest.

In the end with great power comes great responsibility thus we can theoretically change the situation into something worse if we do something but doing nothing would be imo even worse because that would mean that we could have changed it for the better too but decided to just watch and do nothing at all.

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Originally Posted by Theodric

It's worth noting that as far as the canon lore is concerned nobody's Warrior of Light truly matters. Nobody is important enough to claim that their Warrior of Light is anything more than a 'what if' scenario that exists in a non-canon bubble. What their Warrior of Light would or would not do is completely irrelevant when compared to what the stand in Warrior of Light - the one shown in the official cinematics - is shown to be doing. It's also safe to state that any quest offered in-game, any FATE and any dungeon is something that that Warrior of Light has chosen to tackle.

For better or for worse.

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Can we truly say that every single quest, fate, dungeon and other stuff is truly canon for the derplander? Because seeing the amount of fates for example makes it hard to believe that he did all of them because unlike us, he does have a certain amount of hour per day. Also if all quests counts, does that mean that Hildibrand is 100% canon, or the rising event? Does that mean that derplander knows that he is just part of a game? If we start and just say that every quest counts then we will have to also count those that dont make sense. Also does it mean that derplander is a master in every single job available, since they have quests too?

I would go so far and say that only the MSQ is 100% canon and for all the other things it depends on the view of the creators. Anyway that would make that poor man a completely overworked person that can be in a lot of places really fast and does a lot of good things too (and some bad).

But how many humans do we actually kill? It feels to me that we actually don't kill many besides Garleans. For example in the dungeons we mostly kill animals or beasts and the humans are just Garleans. In trials it's primals or Ascians.

In sidequests we don't kill that many humans either unless they did something bad in the first place.

It's more like we're trying to get through some areas in the world where animals/beasts are trying to eat us alive.
The example of us stealing a bird's egg and the mother coming to defend it seems very rare. I don't remember many of those in stormblood unless it's those where the beasts are killing people passing by and we need to lower their numbers.

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Originally Posted by Grayve

Spec Ops: The Line is a horrible example. Buy a game. Then be made to feel bad for doing an action you have no choice but to do, or to stop playing. Yeah, that's a deep moral crisis right there.

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You do not have "no choice." You always have a choice. That's the entire point. You might not know what you're getting into, but if you find the story that morally objectionable, you will stop playing the game, or at least stop following the story / doing the sidequest. You had a choice. You. Made. Your. Choice. Live with the consequences.

Spec Ops: The Line doesn't get the point across for you? How about Undertale?

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Originally Posted by Kallera

Spec Ops the Line is a terrible example. We are not a character in the story, and even if we were, the story stops until we choose the choice or fight the fight that is in line with the devs' idea of the character.

At the end of the day, it is other people that pay of the consequences of the WoL, not the WoL themselves. It will continue to be like this because the devs cannot truly punish the character, they still have to be able to go to gold saucer and pull their sword out in all the cities at the end of that cutscene.

That we are a puppet that does what its told is kind of a failure in their storytelling. There is not enough buy in to the character's decisions, and thus it seems like they are "your character" going with what the script says.

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See above.

It's a limitation of MMORPG gameplay. We were able to freely walk the streets of Ul'dah just days after Nanamo's supposed assassination at our hands. That confuses me more than anything, but I know that we need access to the facilities in Ul'dah for various reasons... so I let it slide. The only thing we lost access to was the Rising Stones.

The Warrior of Light is your puppet. Whatever s/he does is a direct consequence of your influence over him/her. If you have that much of an issue with a request someone makes of your character... don't accept it. That's all there is to it. But the consequences are on your shoulders either way.

In the case of the bird nests and killing the birds? You didn't have to talk to the guy. You didn't have to go out to the bird nests. You didn't have to pick through the bird nests. You didn't have to kill the birds (running away is an option). You didn't have to take the stuff back to the guy. You. Chose. To. The same goes for literally every quest in the game, side or no. Accept responsibility for your actions. All video games are Skinner boxes; just as lab rats aren't forced to press the lever for their cheese, you aren't forced to do anything in the game. You. Choose. To.

The game can be awkwardly ambiguous about whether or not you're actually killing the NPCs you fight at times, too.

Some quests do specifically state that they're still alive and will face appropriate punishment in the aftermath.

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Originally Posted by Alleo

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Most of the side quests serve the same purpose as the MSQ's - they flesh out the game world and reveal important lore and events. You can make the argument that some side story content such as Hildibrand exists in a little bubble of its own but beyond that...

The Warring Triad quests are tied heavily to the MSQ's. A lot of minor side quests only open up after completing certain milestones within the MSQ's too. Some of them are very in-depth, too, revealing a lot of stuff about a particular area or telling a story that fleshes out specific characters to a decent extent.

I feel like it does a disservice to the development team to act like they're irrelevant or not necessarily canon. FATE's, too, reveal a lot of interesting lore that serves to flesh out the game world. We learn about what sort of threats plague a particular region, the habits of specific types of monsters and so on.

It's also very unfortunate to see posts pushing blatant headcanon so heavily upvoted within this thread. Though I suppose that only serves to cement my belief that a handful of the regulars here aren't interested in the canon lore so much as their own personal interpretation of it. Surprisingly, I see more in-depth and nuanced discussions surrounding lore on the FF14 Reddit and general discussion sub-forum these days.