Eventual second lorebook fear

So, since I think they are going to add a new lorebook eventually, I have this nagging fear.
I hate retcons, I think that they are just as bad as Seymour Skinner beign actually an imposter, it's essentially punishing who actually paid attention to the show/book/whatever.
Since the third warcraft chronicles book had some retcons to the first one, do you believe it can be a possibility that it can happen here too?
I mean there are some retcons that I can go with, when the explanation is plausible, like a cure for tempering, since we are told that tempering is permanent, but we've seen examples where the primal relinquished the possesion of someone as such the tempering beign permanent can be traced by a lack of knowledge of the tempering itself in the spoken races.
Maybe a transcript was found that changed some historical datas and some historical moments were altered by the victors, that said do you share this fear or I'm beign paranoid?

Probably paranoid. After 2.0, the amount of "recons" in FFXIV is practically zero. Like, you have to go very far out of your way to find inconsistencies and even then, a lot of it is that we, the players, have less information then the devs do.

One of the strengths of FFXIV's storytelling is that we get information very organically (see FFXIII for the reverse, curse you Dataloge). There aren't very many info-dumps for the sake of info-dumps. Instead we usually get the basic information on a subject and only when that subject becomes more important do we get the nity-grity details. Like, we'd known that Hydaleyn and Zodiark were opposing each other in 2.0, but it wasn't until 3.4 that we figured out the exact cosmology concerning them. There was no need for that information to come up earlier in the game, so it didn't.

Honestly, one of the best parts about reading the First Lore Book was seeing how much information the devs plan out "behind the scenes" never makes it into the game. However, none of that "missing" information contradicts the game or is necessary for understanding what is going on in the game. If anything, the extra information adds a lot of consistency to what we already knew. It's kinda like seeing what the inside of a clock looks like.

So yeah, most people wanted a 2nd Lore Book as soon as the first one came out because there was barely any recons.

I don't know if you read my rather long post on the astrologian questline, but the short version is that the *first* lorebook already apparently tried to retcon that quest's timeline. (Either that or they somehow failed to cross-check their character profiles against what was said in the quests.)

I wouldn't mind if they had to retcon something (occasionally) if they fully announce it and say "okay we got this wrong, please ignore the information in X, here's the correct version". I'm sure it must take an incredible amount of planning to keep all these plotlines running over years, and keep everything consistent.

Haven't read that I'll do probably tomorrow I'm quite beat right now but thanks anyway

Honestly SE is pretty good at avoiding retcons in FF14. Certainly a lot tighter than Warcraft tends to be. Its worth noting that for much of the lore, including the lore books, they leave themselves some wriggle room by presenting the lore as if it was from an in world source. Thus there is never a guarantee that anything you don't personally witness is 100% right. It also means you often need information from several sources to form a true image of events that play out. Regardless, the lore team puts a lot of time and effort into ensuring things make sense or at least there is a logical explanation about something being different to what we thought it was before. Changes done right can feel like discoveries rather than retcons and that can spill into all sorts of interesting speculation.

Its worth noting that there was a thread on this forum after the book came out where Koji Fox, one of the people involved in the creation and translation of the book, interacted with us to identify inconsistencies and errors and provide corrections. Poor Koji felt rather bad and embarrassed about the errors in his translation but it is bound to happen occasionally.

I can only speak from personal experience, but as far as I know, the team loathes retcons as much as you do and will only actively do them when they have no choice. However, this requires some specificity.

Retcon is short for retroactive continuity, and specifically refers to any new story information which explains or changes previous story information (or attaches a new significance to it). Only certain types of retcons are the kind everyone seems to hate.

For example, the team seems to love relying on additive retcons (new information does not create a paradoxical contradiction, but may explain, change context, or reframe existing information) and, more rarely, altering retcons (a contradiction seems to exist, but new information attempts to explain it away). They're used under the pretext of "People are dumb." / "Poor assumptions were made." / "New revelations!". Example: the time we tried to predict Ishgard's bastard feudalism structure and couldn't reconcile 1.0's mention of a duke (the Hildibrand script has a great joke about this that flies right under the radar for most).

The general feeling seems to be that if it makes sense in-world that this mistake could have happened - that's where it happened. Organic information gathering, narrative puzzle solving, writing your way out of a pickle. Altering retcons are rarely perfectly clean; even today if you look too closely at a longitudinal study of Nael van Darnus, you can see the stitches.

What more people are worried about are subtraction retcons ("That never happened. We're ignoring that.") and revision retcons (directly editing the source material). Every time something like this has happened, we were given an apology and explanation. It clearly bothered the team as much as players, if not more.

Keep in mind, MMOs are forever. Avoiding retcons entirely eventually just becomes a prohibitive menace. Moreover, the internal documents relating to 1.0, and especially the change in narrative trajectories between 1.0 and ARR, were obviously not anywhere near as consistent and complete as Oda, Koji, et al. have made it appear. The idea that "THE LORE" is a monolithic object that is occasionally represented mistakenly is itself mistaken, and on top of that text bugs and misleading phrasing can slip through the cracks when the workload gets heavy even when the lore is solid.
(Report them to the LOC forum.)

For how hard they've worked to maintain the illusion and work towards it being a reality, and for how often they take it upon themselves to write out of a puzzle the hard way, I try to just let it go when a revision occurs, lol. They probably stressed over it more already than I ever will, I'm not gonna complain about it (even if I will joke a little).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Anonymoose

What more people are worried about are subtraction retcons ("That never happened. We're ignoring that.") and revision retcons (directly editing the source material). Every time something like this has happened, we were given an apology and explanation. It clearly bothered the team as much as players, if not more.

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That's why the astrologian quest information bugs me. The lorebook puts certain events in the backstory "fifteen years ago" and directly at the time of the Sharlayan exodus, instead of "almost twenty" and specifically prior to that happening. It messes with character ages as well, and I don't know which version is supposed to be the correct one.

I'd been hoping I might get an official response to my other post here since I'd seen that some older lore discussions got replies from the dev team, but it hasn't happened. Is there any more direct way to contact them? (I would assume you can't just PM them... or can you? Is there etiquette about this, or are normal users just blocked from sending messages to them? I haven't tried in case it 'works' but you're not supposed to do it.)

Or has it possibly been addressed somewhere else, and if so then where would I look to see if it's been resolved? I read through the lorebook errors topic a while ago but nobody mentioned it there.


By the "LOC forum" do you mean Localisation? I hadn't been in there before but I'll be making use of it from now on when I notice typos and things. I assume I can't use it for asking about the more complex lore information though? I don't think my questions would fit into the "specifically language-related" rule as set out in the 'welcome' topic.

EDIT: On further thought, even though the timeline might be beyond the scope of the localisation forum, the variable facts between questlines might be worth asking about.

I was idd talking about subtraction and revision retcons in fact, which I know feels unwarranted because of how great the lore team has been so far, it's just that seeing retcons happening in wow lore in 1-2 years of reestaiblishing the lore, kinda scared me.
Ofc I was not saying that they shouldn't release a new lore book, to me lore book are kinda a relic since they are essentially enciclopedias of a setting, I can like with some erratas or addition to it because they make sense it's when they say that previous lore entries are no longer canon that pisses me off.

I get your concern as someone who has followed WoW lore for a long time. Frankly Blizzard has been almost notoriously bad at keeping track of their own lore in the past or retconning for the sake of 'the rule of cool'. Comparatively they have actually improved in recent times even if it still happens. All I can say is that from my experiences with the two games the FF14 team are a lot more on point and take a lot more care with the lore, writing and story, particularly when it comes to consistency.

As I said, Koji Fox, one of the guys who is involved with the games lore (and writes a lot of the lyrics for the music) has posted here before and we have gotten corrections, clarifications and changes before but its something they take very seriously.

Case in point is this thread:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...95#post3935095

I had forgot about that thread, I must say that I now remember why I like this team very much, I feel like much of my fears have been dispelled, thank you everyone for taking your time with me

Personally my fear of the second lorebook is that we're never going to get one.

Mainly because both Koji Fox and Natsuko Ishikawa (and I believe anyone else interviewed about it) has made it clear that the lorebook was done essentially on their own time, on top of their existing workload, without getting any further compensation for it. So I don't know if they feel up to putting out another one under the same conditions.

Sorry about missing that last part - yes, LOC is short for Localization. That forum is mostly for reporting misspellings, bad grammar, misleading word choices (that were not intended as deliberate misinformation), etc.

However, things that result in bad consistency of lore or bad continuity are also "text bugs". If the inconsistency is unintended and English-exclusive, they'll just nuke it and phrase it better. However, Koji Fox is more or less the top of the localization totem pole and works closely with world lore head Banri Oda, so if the lore at large is broken somewhere, the LOC team will just keep passing it up the chain until it gets to someone who can fix it. Sometimes an update hits all 4 languages at once later on.

I thought they already said they wanted to make a second lorebook?

Thanks. Can I just make a post in the localisation forum that links to my other post, or should I reword it to be a bit more concise?

As a role-player a lore book is an invaluable asset to work with. So I'd definitely like to see a second if at all possible. I believe the demand for the first was fairly high and it sold like hot cakes?

^Yup. It's on it's 3rd print run already.

I think it partially comes down to if they have time. They need to do the Lore book on top of their existing workload so its quite a lot for them to produce it.

I'm currently playing a D&D5 campaign set in XIVverse. Our DM used my Encyclopedia Eorzea and XIV website (and these forums as well) to make it. A second lorebook would be a big help to him to expand the campaign.

(we're playing normal D&D5 classes and are trying to come up with "prestige classes" to have FF jobs in it)