Would you have chosen a starting area where you could join the Empire?

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Originally Posted by Jaquan

I don't think it would really be feasible..*snip*.

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I'm not so entirely sure about this. As you mentioned one of the Scions scouts you based on an encounter with them during one of your missions that they just so happened to be nearby and investigating something as well. Nothing you did prior to this event really mattered to them and any future impact decisions on whether or not they vouch for you. Just the initial encounter, and from that point on no one ever falls back to that information ever again, you don't have MSQ conversations about the first time you met your recruiting Scion. After fleeing the Empire to Eorzea if not already being there since the Empire already has a foothold in Eorzea via Ports in Limsa, right next to the Shroud there is a huge military base, as well as another one in Mor Dhona, you'd have very little trouble getting to Eorzea or one of the nearby City-States. Then there is the Echo manifesting once you're in Eorzea, almost no one who showed signs of the Echo did not end up in the Scions and since the Echo isn't a big secret amongst well anyone worth mentioning seeing as the Leaders of the City-States seem to know about it, once word that a potential new recruit in one of the Grand Companies has it it's unlikely you'd go unnoticed by the Scions. You're not really breaking the story here, just giving another avenue to arrive at point B. One that might have you see different parts of the game earlier than other players, that's really it. You don't even have to be a Pure-Blood Garlean, the Empire conscripted anyone able to fight into their ranks, Au'Ra, Elezen, Hyur, and so on, some who grew up under Imperial Rule and see themselves as true Garleans despite not being a pure-blood Garleans. I think it'd only impact the starting classes not that Garlemald didn't have people using similar if not identical abilities, and by the time you get your memory stones for jobs, I could easily see you just visiting the quest starting NPC somewhere and then being directed to the person who will have you undertake the job stone giving quest, in short, you're at best just skipping the base class story quest.

I admit I haven't done all the regional starter quests, but I'm fairly sure that you're a blip on the Scion's radar specifically because they cross paths with you in the early quests and know you're fairly legit, they don't just have an Echo Radar. And your introduction to things on a larger scale actually isn't with them; it's after the regional starts, when you act an an envoy between the Grand Companies because of achieving something pretty significant. After the opening three dungeons, then you get sent to the Scions, who already know your deal.

So the limiter for a 1-15 Garlemald opener, if that's really what you were asking for, is actually twofold:

1. You need a Scion to personally know you, at least as 'oh hey, I've seen that person before and know they can hold their own in a fight',
2. You need to be trusted with official business at least enough for one of the grand companies to vouch for you.

Both of those are actually extremely big asks for a Garlean refugee that's basically fresh off the boat. Especially in ARR, as all the Scions are accounted for (so none of them can be in Garlemald), and xenophobia is at an all-time high. You'd basically just have to do the original 1-15 anyway. And... hell, that might not even be enough for a Garlean refugee in ARR. Especially in Limsa, where the boat would've presumably docked, so word would get around pretty fast to be wary of them.

Again, I'm not really on board with a Garlean start on any level, but with the story start we have it's actually not an especially feasible framework for a fresh Garlean refugee. You'd have to put in a fair bit more legwork to plausibly get a Garlean character to the same place as everyone else.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Again, I'm not really on board with a Garlean start on any level, but with the story start we have it's actually not an especially feasible framework for a fresh Garlean refugee. You'd have to put in a fair bit more legwork to plausibly get a Garlean character to the same place as everyone else.

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In order to squeeze what you'd need into the first 15 levels, you'd either end up with something incredibly rushed feeling that moves at a breakneck pace - and not in a good way imo. OR... an incredibly long and indepth questline that would be far and away better than any other starting experience, a huge expenditure of writing and assets for something that ultimately is just going to fold back into the MSQ anyway. I'd prefer the developers spend that time and energy on something else.

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Originally Posted by KariTheFox

In order to squeeze what you'd need into the first 15 levels, you'd either end up with something incredibly rushed feeling that moves at a breakneck pace - and not in a good way imo. OR... an incredibly long and indepth questline that would be far and away better than any other starting experience, a huge expenditure of writing and assets for something that ultimately is just going to fold back into the MSQ anyway. I'd prefer the developers spend that time and energy on something else.

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Yeah, that's exactly what I'm thinking.

The other potential angle is that you have Theoretical Garlean WoL join at a later point that gives it more time in its own story and might be a less weird entry point. My immediate thought is probably Sylph-management, since that gives an extra five levels to the Garlean intro story and the sylph storyline is low-stakes enough that the Scions would conceivably give it to an unproven rando.

But then that opens a separate problem: you would have to find a completely different way for Theoretical Garlean WoL to hear the introduction to all three grand companies (and their cities), be given the option to join all three grand companies, get the chocobo, do the materia tutorial, and be introduced to Ifrit pretty much verbatim because Ifrit's intro might be one of the most information-dense scenes in the entire game (and also the fact you kill Ifrit is kinda the big defining point in the WoL being the WoL to others). And even then you still hit major losses, because for everyone who didn't start in Ul'dah, the Ifrit leadup is their introduction to Thancred, and you need to know who Thancred is to care about when he gets possessed by Lahabrea.

I do love a good spot of textual intervention, but a big part of trying to rewrite a story is learning what you'd lose by doing it. And especially after the pruning in Shadowbringers patches, it's actually really hard to rewrite ARR like this, because ARR is super dense with all the required worldbuilding and character introductions to make the entire rest of the game story work. It's way harder to segment out FFXIV's story than other MMOs, because FFXIV's story has very few points where a specific story stops and another specific story starts.

To a degree that's why the faction argument comes up, because that actually is a solution to it, albeit one that requires an absurd amount more work and warps the entire game structure around it. You can worry a whole lot less about the question of 'where and how does this alternate start flow most naturally into the main story' if your answer is that it doesn't.

I suppose it depends on whether there's any future plans for the Grand Company system, and how entrenched it is in the game systems. I'm assuming that we're going to be encountering a lot more nation states in the future. I don't really see a significant difference in picking an alternate starting zone only immediately be funneled over to pledge yourself to Eorzean military services. I think a more useful flavor change would be if you could actually sign up to join the Radiant Host or something.

A starting city is not an 'origin' city. We're travellers from elsewhere (which may or may not get explained by a certain storyline). So it's not like you'd be an expat from the Garlean empire, but rather a traveler first arriving in Garlemald from elsewhere. So unless you get forcibly conscripted into the shortest military career in history, it probably makes a lot less of a difference than having more choice over your Grand Company.

The main issue I see with it is practicality. Either a theoretical Garlean PC would have to follow the same story as everyone else (which defeats the point of an alternate story), or you'd need an entirely new experience for nearly the entire game. Considering the sheer length of the game at this point, that's quite a lot of material to redo, and that manpower would take away from other areas of the game.

Alternately, they could just start at a higher level and skip over some of it, but then it's unfair to people who want to play as another race and have to start fresh at level one. Unless you have to have another character up to a certain level first, but the game doesn't particularly promote alt characters, especially on cheaper subs that don't even get all of the alt slots.

Again, I'm not opposed to the idea, I'm just not sure how it would work.

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

Again, I'm not opposed to the idea, I'm just not sure how it would work.

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The only way, if they were to actually design an opening for it at all, would be to set a sequence before the beginning of ARR. The most likely scenario, and the one with evidence behind it, would be that the player is a survivor of the decimated VIIth Legion from 1.0, and after that became an adventurer. Not exactly an impossible achievement given that Kan-E's personal bodyguard achieved that position from that same background in that period of time. And in theory - if you squint and handwave a bit - any current player races could have also been part of the VIIth and come into being an adventurer from that backstory.

Starting cities aren't really places of origin. They're just where the story started. I was always under the impression that even in the current story setup, we're not native denizens of Eorzea, but rather wanderers from elsewhere. Who knows, perhaps the Azem storyline will eventually show us where we're really from.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

Starting cities aren't really places of origin. They're just where the story started. I was always under the impression that even in the current story setup, we're not native denizens of Eorzea, but rather wanderers from elsewhere. Who knows, perhaps the Azem storyline will eventually show us where we're really from.

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No, it's deliberately nebulous in the same way as, like, Skyrim's opening is. You're just put in as 'entering the city' as an opener with it being deliberately vague as to why. Maybe you're a local coming back in from a trip, maybe you're from the boonies finally heading to the big city, maybe you're an immigrant from Dalmasca; you're whatever works for you.

They won't throw that out in favor of More Azem Story. At least, I hope not; I feel like Azem's presence in the story is more to give the player somewhere to slot themselves into this weird world of Amaurot, not to give the WoL some highly specific grand journey.

I don't think that linking the two stories really has any consequence. Every Convocation member had a different life before joining the Convocation and adopting their new identity, and there's nothing to say that they even had to be native Amaurotians to begin with.

What I find really fascinating is whenever a mythological figure picks up different names and different stories as the concept spreads across different cultures. I think it would be fantastic if every Ancient civilization from the landmasses of Meracydia to the New World had its own 'wanderering trickster deity' figure, and that Azem was merely one name out of many.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

No, it's deliberately nebulous in the same way as, like, Skyrim's opening is. You're just put in as 'entering the city' as an opener with it being deliberately vague as to why. Maybe you're a local coming back in from a trip, maybe you're from the boonies finally heading to the big city, maybe you're an immigrant from Dalmasca; you're whatever works for you.

They won't throw that out in favor of More Azem Story. At least, I hope not; I feel like Azem's presence in the story is more to give the player somewhere to slot themselves into this weird world of Amaurot, not to give the WoL some highly specific grand journey.

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Necessary though it may have been, with how much cultural erasure they've been engaging in lately in regards to anything Ancient I find it unlikely they'll continue to engage in the Azem plotline beyond the tangential.

Absolutely. The Garlean empire was one of the most interesting factions in the game. Would be cool if you could have stuck with them rather than defecting to the Alliance. Even if you did defect to the Alliance, that right there is a more interesting backstory to the WoL than any of the other starts.

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Originally Posted by SentioftheHoukai

Necessary though it may have been, with how much cultural erasure they've been engaging in lately in regards to anything Ancient I find it unlikely they'll continue to engage in the Azem plotline beyond the tangential.

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...so can I ask what cultural erasure there was? Because we learned about the Ancients at the tail end of 5.0, only within the context of Amaurot, and in 6.0 we went to Elpis, which was... essentially a government department of Amaurot. That sounds like there is exactly one culture in the Ancient world to our knowledge, and we have never once left it or received knowledge of the existence of others. There's a mention of other cities that fell to the End of Days before Amaurot, but no indication that they were actually of other cultures. Basically, if Amaurot is New York, we don't know if it was Tokyo or Chicago that got wiped out.

I mean I don't like the Ancient storyline as a whole for a lot of reasons, but nothing has suggested that it wasn't essentially a one-world government in the first place; in fact, given the Convocation makes decisions for and sacrifices portions of the entire planet's population, my best guess is that it was essentially one-world.

I think that it would be great if the story was able to draw a distinction between 'Amaurotians' and 'Ancients'. I would love to learn about other societies of 'Ancients' that have their own unique values, beliefs, and knowledge systems, and see how their differences of opinion with the Amaurotians helped shape modern Etheirys. If the Amaurotians were backing Allag, for example, could there not have been someone else backing the Meracydians? A society of 'Ancients' that considered the Amaurotians and their stuffy Convocation to be short-sighted in their plans? I think that if you want to create interesting clashes, you really need a setup that doesn't link everything back to a single puppeteer. I think that the writers are smart to move away from a Ptolemaic system which places Amaurot at the center of the universe.

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Originally Posted by Lyth

If the Amaurotians were backing Allag, for example, could there not have been someone else backing the Meracydians?

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Well, that wouldn't happen because the Unsundered Ascians were the only survivors of the Sundering, and they were all from Amaurot. So even if there were other nations, they've been dead for too long to be relevant anyway.

Which I think is why Amaurot being effectively one-world (or at least, the only part of the Ancient world we care about enough to discuss) is both correct and probably the right thing for them to do. The Ancient world is basically a total dead-end for the game's story narratively; it's a society that's extremely dead, it has no survivors, and existed so long ago that all remnants are basically just dust in the wind. Continuing to fill in the Ancient world does absolutely nothing for the game's present-day, where all the still-living characters, nations and events are. Filling it in would be like spending a whole season of Better Call Saul on the daily life of the peasantry of the Roman Empire; just because they both existed within the same timeline, doesn't mean that one has any impact on the other and that it wouldn't be a waste of time.

If they wanted to make a whole game set in Amaurot, then they could go ahead and make all the other contemporary nations they want, and I would go ahead and not play it. But in a game that's spent most of its story twelve thousand years after Amaurot, I think doing that would be a waste when we could instead make content about something current like--looping back to the actual focus of the topic--Garlemald's once-occupied territories.

It's hard to really say for sure, though. The Amaurotians, for all of their supposed power, wisdom, and knowledge, were blindsided by a lack of awareness about dynamis. Which should naturally you to ask the question: what else didn't they know about?

All we know from the 'Final Days' and the Sundering is about what happened specifically to Amaurot, the supposed center of the universe (and even with that there are still pieces of the puzzle that we're uncovering). Who's to say what the impact was like the other side of the world, to beings that may or not have had the same soul densities, who may or may not be native to the star, and who may or may not have even depended on aether-based practices to begin with? I think if there's a running theme about 'broadening your horizons' through travel, then we can't entirely take anything for granted. The only thing that you can do is keep an open mind and see where the story takes us.

In short, I don't think that the story needs to be fixated on the past, but I wouldn't be surprised if there was much more to the 'Ancient' world than the Amaurotians were even aware of.

I can't see the story ever managing a "separate entry point" that allows the character to not be involved in earlier parts of the plot. It would just wall off the ability to ever call back to anything before that point without having to provide a second alternate version of events, and I think it would be to the game's detriment. When it's written the way it is with a main character who has done distinct and significant things, and built personal relationships with a lot of people, creating an alternate narrative for some players means they have to restrict how deeply they can reference the single existing narrative.

Some games have two-sided narratives but it isn't a necessity, however sympathetic the other side may or may not be.

If we do ever get a "skip to season 2" opportunity for new players, I would sooner expect that they make it explicitly "you are fast-forwarding through season 1 but your character did still go through all those things".

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Originally Posted by Iscah

If we do ever get a "skip to season 2" opportunity for new players, I would sooner expect that they make it explicitly "you are fast-forwarding through season 1 but your character did still go through all those things".

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I doubt they'll ever do this either, because it devalues perfectly legitimate parts of the game, but it really would be the smartest thing to do.

Means that you don't need to write in a new way to meet Ifrit, for example, you can just go 'yeah this happened previously'. Maybe open with a truncated 'the story so far' thing, like... I believe one of the Mass Effects did when it hit a platform it wasn't on yet, but I can't recall exactly which one.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

I doubt they'll ever do this either, because it devalues perfectly legitimate parts of the game, but it really would be the smartest thing to do.

Means that you don't need to write in a new way to meet Ifrit, for example, you can just go 'yeah this happened previously'. Maybe open with a truncated 'the story so far' thing, like... I believe one of the Mass Effects did when it hit a platform it wasn't on yet, but I can't recall exactly which one.

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When 3 was ported to the Wii U without the first two, they made a sort of interactive digital comic that let you make some of the major decisions from the first games. I've heard it wasn't very thorough about it, though.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Well, that wouldn't happen because the Unsundered Ascians were the only survivors of the Sundering, and they were all from Amaurot. So even if there were other nations, they've been dead for too long to be relevant anyway.

Which I think is why Amaurot being effectively one-world (or at least, the only part of the Ancient world we care about enough to discuss) is both correct and probably the right thing for them to do. The Ancient world is basically a total dead-end for the game's story narratively; it's a society that's extremely dead, it has no survivors, and existed so long ago that all remnants are basically just dust in the wind. Continuing to fill in the Ancient world does absolutely nothing for the game's present-day, where all the still-living characters, nations and events are. Filling it in would be like spending a whole season of Better Call Saul on the daily life of the peasantry of the Roman Empire; just because they both existed within the same timeline, doesn't mean that one has any impact on the other and that it wouldn't be a waste of time.

If they wanted to make a whole game set in Amaurot, then they could go ahead and make all the other contemporary nations they want, and I would go ahead and not play it. But in a game that's spent most of its story twelve thousand years after Amaurot, I think doing that would be a waste when we could instead make content about something current like--looping back to the actual focus of the topic--Garlemald's once-occupied territories.

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See, that's where you're wrong Cleretic. The things I've been seeing, recent plot-wise they bring up the Ancients rather frequently but default to vilifying them every time they do so. Meanwhile, conversely every time Venat is brought up she's literally venerated as being responsible for everything good in the world. Case in point, the conclusion to the recent Omega quests. They offer platitudes to appease the backlash they failed to see coming but top it off with a message encapsulating the beliefs they think we should embody. FORGE AHEAD but forget the Omicrons and Sir, they failed the test and as such should be looked back on as what not to do.... no, wait lets ignore history and our own failings all together and just move forward.


.....Come to think of it, just watch the Twelve end up being creations of Hydaelyn meant to "safeguard the Star after she's gone" or something equally asinine. Hasn't she done enough? Is she not enough of a SANKTA already, with enough deeds to her name for Eorzea to canonize her as the "one true Supreme Deity that saved us all, forget those immortal losers what were their names again?"

No I wouldn't.