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The game has a lot of fake lore. A good example is the 80 Sins of Sasamo thread. You walk outside the city, see the area called 80 Sins; note that there appears to be 80 steps; associate steps with hardship... and you have an implied lore chunk that at some point there was a Lala named Sasamo who committed some atrocity and constructed and/or drudged the steps as an act of penance. Although there is no actual Lore, just the implication of lore.
It is a pretty big and beautiful world that have given us and one of the most detailed worlds that I have had the pleasure of playing in, but the lore is kind of lacking in my opinion. Just undeveloped if anything; I am sure they will flush it out. Although I am still waiting to hear why Bahamut decided to cancel the apocalypse.
Ps: WoW got to cheat because its been around since the 90s? I bought Final Fantasy back in the 80s for my first Nintendo. Crystals, Espers, Cids - there is a wide base of shared lore in the FF universe :p
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Ironically enough, the lore as it stands at the moment in ARR is far more fleshed out and developed than what it was like right at the start of 1.0 service, or even after six months.
At that stage, there was virtually, nothing explained about the world you were in. Something about the Echo and how ten years earlier a place called Ala Mhigo had been invaded by an evil empire called Garlemald in the north east and how adventurers were basically unemployed soldiers given odd-jobs to keep them occupied, and some basic window dressing about the three cities you start in. But that was it.
I remember when I first started in 1.0, Gridania was my starting city, and as I did the first few story quests (because at that stage there wasn't even sidequests available), I couldn't figure out for the life of me just exactly what Gridania's society was supposed to be. A forest commune of tree-hugging hippy mages, archers and xenophobic stuck-up pikemen?
It was only until after Yoshi took over as Producer and Director, and successive patches finally started the world-building that should have been there from the start did things improve considerably. And ARR is only continuing that. :)
And once the 1.0 forums were added and certain members here started debating and arguing plot details did the questions finally start getting, um, answers. ;) Especially when the Lore section was added and a certain ahriman loremaster start clarifying things here. :D So yeah, thanks to people like Catapult, Moose, Ferne and others I can't remember, did the game's lore finally start making sense (although certain ideas and theories in 1.0 have since been completely blown out of the water by revelations in ARR, and I love it!). :D
So yes, the original poster's statement that FFXIV's lore is 'bad' is quite simply, subjective.