Brevity is the soul of wit: Request to fix the horrible writing on XIV's quests

I'm appalled at how many people fail to get the original message of the OP.

I somewhat agree. I've also noticed various typos. Such as the beginning of one of the Grand Company quests saying the word "thousand" twice in a row and making no sense in doing so.

FFT with the updated script, and Tactics Ogre as well, are absolute gems. I love their writing!

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Originally Posted by Darkvalkyr

I'm appalled at how many people fail to get the original message of the OP.

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Who's not getting the message? The message is "the dialogue is written badly." I don't agree with that message, but that's the message I get from it.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

I don't think you understand what this topic was meant to say. The dialect and vocabulary is fine. What's not fine is that every time you start a quest, you are presented with an entire novel to read and the only way you're interacting with the NPC is by spamming X to make the text go by faster. What makes that worse is that for most quests, once you get past the initial diatribe, you get very little lore text or anything.

Make the NPCs move around or something, give us cutscenes, change the music or tempo, make us answer questions, or simply shorten the dialog. But after the 5th or 6th paragraph of tangentially important backstory that an NPC throws out on our screen, most of us are just hitting X to get rid of it and reading the summary on the journal page.

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ok, first of all, not missing the point, I'm not illiterate, so I enjoy reading, thankyouverymuch, secondly, you wanna complain about spamming x? go start a craft work, pushing enter a couple times in a row because you don't feel like reading the discussion is neither time consuming nor physically tiring to anyone with the body older than three days, second of all, if you want cutscenes and acrobatic NPCs you're free to play a single-player game, this is an MMO, and MMOs don't have super active NPCs.

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Originally Posted by Gavyn

I somewhat agree. I've also noticed various typos. Such as the beginning of one of the Grand Company quests saying the word "thousand" twice in a row and making no sense in doing so.

FFT with the updated script, and Tactics Ogre as well, are absolute gems. I love their writing!

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1) "Thousand thousand" twice in a row could be a weird way of saying "million."

2) The updated FFT is horrible. The script goes out of its way to be condescending to the player, and never says anything simply when it could be said in a convoluted, archaic way (it also irritates me so badly that they retranslated the Samurai skillset to "Iaido" when that word has nothing at all to do with what the skillset does but it sounds "cooler" than the actual Japanese name for it so they went with it instead—really, that example says it all for the PSP translation). Say what you will about the original FFT, but I think it had kind of a poetic charm to the script.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Who's not getting the message? The message is "the dialogue is written badly." I don't agree with that message, but that's the message I get from it.

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It seems to be more that even minor quests will ramble at you for pages and pages in a totally unnecessary way without much to break up the monologue.

If you did a poll you'd find that:

- Most people are uninterested in the lore and just click through the NPC dialogue.

- Some appreciate the lore and effort put into by the writers and localisation team but dislike the volume and verbosity (me included).

- Very few relish reading everything each NPC has to say.

Even if I'm proven wrong in these generalisations, you can cater for all of these, simply by having short initial NPC quest dialogue, and some sort of lengthier version in your Journal for the lore-enthusiasts.

Otherwise, KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and (re)hire an editor. This isn't a text MUD, lengthy dialogue breaks up the flow of the game, and the way it is presented is incongruous and monotonous.

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Originally Posted by Alhanelem

Who's not getting the message? The message is "the dialogue is written badly." I don't agree with that message, but that's the message I get from it.

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Looks like somebody skipped through the OP's monologue....

Meh, I like the dialogue the way it is. A lot. I wouldn't mind flashier cutscenes, but that's not make-or-break for me until 2.0, I know they've already done a lot of really cinematic stuff with cutscenes in this game already, I'm a big boy and can handle textwalls.

That said I would absolutely rolling-around-and-tarupanicking /love/ a Codex type feature. I cannot express enough how happy something like that would make me, even if it came at the expense of dumbing down the quests.

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Originally Posted by Raldo

I would like to see an example given of a quest that XI has done better than XIV (I say XI because it was mentioned in the OP). I fail to see how the delivery is any different.

In XI, most of the sidequests are delivered purely though text, as they are in XIV.
In XI, most of the AF quests are delivered well, with animation and whatnot, as they are in XIV (class quests).
In XI, the main story quests are well done, as they are in XIV.

I don't really see the difference. If you're going to provide an example, provide one with a game where one party cannot speak. I couldn't really understand the correlation to Tactics.

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I may be diverging slightly from the OP's point, but what I have taken away from the original point is this: Fundamentally, FFXIV lacks spice such as dialog. Now in SquareEnix MMOs, you play the part of a silent protagonist. This does not exclude the possibility of dialog, however. The best example I can think of off the top of my head from FFXI would be the Sleepga II line of quests (because they are neither main storyline missions, nor super important quests such as AF quests). In these quests, you follow the exploits of two Tarutaru who are competing streetvendors in Jeuno. The quest introductions are full of dialog between the two NPCs; sometimes they will turn to you, asking for your advice, pausing in the place of your response.

These scenes are quite long, much longer then the posted example by the OP. However, they are for lack of a better word, eventful. Writing, literacy, interest in lore, these things are not limited only to the quantity of text, but the delivery.

I would like to add also, that I love the stories in FFXIV. They are expertly designed in my mind. However, I completely agree with the OP that they are not well delivered when compared to other things we have seen from SE.

I'm not exactly sure how it is much different from the NPC's of Vana'diel, but then again there is 10 years of content in Vana'diel to compare to the very little content we have at this moment.

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Originally Posted by Gavyn

FFT with the updated script, and Tactics Ogre as well, are absolute gems. I love their writing!

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And terrible terrible renaming of so much. /facepalm