The problem with role quests (Summons, dragons, and firstminds, oh my)

First I want to say I did enjoy the endwalker role quests - more than I thought I would, even. Props to all of those involved in making them.

But there's a little bit of a lore problem.

Ok, so, imagine this. A machinist picks up a shotgun. Ok. We don't need a huge story behind this one. The gun guy picked up a shotgun. No great mystery here; it can be as simple as that. (Perhaps a bit more mystery with the robot, though)

But suppose a summoner picks up a phoenix, and maybe an ifrit, titan, and garuda to go along with that - more than just the egis which have been explained. And this happens after the lore goes through some special hoops to explain why summoners can't have a ramuh-egi or anything beyond those basic three. That's a little more curious, isn't it? It would be at least somewhat interesting to know why those limits are being broken now.

But then, especially, there's Dragoons. Dragoons introduced a particular new term: Firstminds. Obviously a reference to something pretty specific, and we can speculate it has to do with early dragons or something given the job, and yet... It does not appear in any quest text in the game. I've looked. The only references are the job action tool tips.

Now, this looks like someone went "Hey lets pull something cool- and mysterious-sounding out of our butts!", but I also kind of doubt the FF14 lore team actually did that. We've got one of the more thorough and consist lore bases for extensive, online games or really just games in general here.

Maybe it'll appear in a future lore book, or maybe it's in a lore book already. But it would be nice to have some info in game. Somewhere. I don't know what the solution is with job-specific quests going the way of the dodo, but there's got to be some way to have it, yeah?

Can we get someone to check some other languages for this? The English translation is known for being a little bit more... prone to artistic liberty, so maybe comparing to Japanese, French or German will give us some more context here.

The loss of job quests was equal parts about finally giving those stories a bit of a cap, and about recognizing those actually have a really poor 'effort to audience share' ratio. Job questlines are a pretty big workload, and one that gets bigger every expansion, but every individual job questline has a low attach rate (since not everyone plays that job) and some are even lower than others. Imagine being the writer that pours their heart and soul into the Scholar job questline, only to find out that people just aren't playing the thing. It's just better use of development resources to... y'know, not do that.

I remember that our power upgrade back from Shadowbringers had something to do with us being powered up by the light/fusing with Ardbert's soul, according to a previous interview. The Summoner thing is likely because they realized they were never going to be able to get away with having a Final Fantasy Summoner class in this game who could only summon 3 things.

It's part of what annoyed me about the Reaper quests. Here's a scythe and job-stone, and oh, now you got a pact with a void ghost. Then you have to do the lv 80 quests for the possession ability, but it's never referenced, you just pop it and get a look similar to the bad guy. I get that they want to avoid tying story to abilities since they change half the abilities with every expansion, but the opposite when the abilities seem to be very integrated just seem odd.

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

Can we get someone to check some other languages for this? The English translation is known for being a little bit more... prone to artistic liberty, so maybe comparing to Japanese, French or German will give us some more context here.

The loss of job quests was equal parts about finally giving those stories a bit of a cap, and about recognizing those actually have a really poor 'effort to audience share' ratio. Job questlines are a pretty big workload, and one that gets bigger every expansion, but every individual job questline has a low attach rate (since not everyone plays that job) and some are even lower than others. Imagine being the writer that pours their heart and soul into the Scholar job questline, only to find out that people just aren't playing the thing. It's just better use of development resources to... y'know, not do that.

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I get the problems with job quests and I'm not advocating their return.

What I'm noting is it's just leaving some lore holes that I rather wish were plugged.

It'd be nice if, from this point forwards, there were golden icon questlines that just explained the lore of the jobs and had job-related story arcs, that don't necessarily require you to be that job to do them. Basically, give us the lore and the stories you can tell for a job, but make it a regular sidequest, possibly with some unique dialogue if you are that job.

And not every job has to have one with each expac, though it'd be nice. But if you make them just sidequest chains, then it can just be the ones the devs feel have a story to tell in the current zones. Like give a dancer lore questline in Thavnair in a patch, and if you are a DNC and it uses the dance company from the DNC quests, then maybe you get recognition. But if not, you can still do it and learn about Dancers.

Basically, decouple job quests from HAVING to be the WoL's job, but give cool easter eggs of acknowledgement if it *is* their job.