what was the original 1.0 story going to be before it was altered for ARR?

i never played 1.0 but i do know that they changed the plot around to where dalamud was falling from the sky in order to usher in ARR

We don't know. The only ones who would know are Hiromichi Tanaka, Oda-san, Koji Fox and likely Yoshi-P. There are some details like Bahamut always being planned to be sealed in Dalamud, but planned for further into the game's life-cycle, but beyond that I don't think there's been too much information about What Could Have Been

Titan and Leviathan were apparently supposed to be in the main story in Legacy, with Titan being the first primal to be fought, but both were cut, possibly due to being too soon after the 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster. Neither made it into Legacy at all.

Hard to say, I mean, the game was so rushed to launch that the story wasn't really ... done ... but for a few introductory quests.
One thing we do know for sure is that the enormous wide open empty world was supposed to be populated by player built structures.
At least in design, principally, the game was to be one where the players collectively built things, like we have the housing areas now,
But on a full game structure scale, not just for glamour.
(Think like the housing plots, but in the open world and much bigger plots, players were to band together in companies and take possession of big areas of land and build on them)
(The concept eventually just became the Free Companies we have now)

It's a concept I thought was really cool, but it's easy to see why they struggled so much to complete it, and obviously never came close to doing so.
Kinda disappointing we won't ever get to see it,
But maybe one day they'll bring something like Moblin Maze Mongers (XI) into XIV, but more refined.
It would be really cool to have player generated areas in game.

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Originally Posted by NefarioCall

Hard to say, I mean, the game was so rushed to launch that the story wasn't really ... done ... but for a few introductory quests.
One thing we do know for sure is that the enormous wide open empty world was supposed to be populated by player built structures.
At least in design, principally, the game was to be one where the players collectively built things, like we have the housing areas now,
But on a full game structure scale, not just for glamour.
(Think like the housing plots, but in the open world and much bigger plots, players were to band together in companies and take possession of big areas of land and build on them)
(The concept eventually just became the Free Companies we have now)

It's a concept I thought was really cool, but it's easy to see why they struggled so much to complete it, and obviously never came close to doing so.
Kinda disappointing we won't ever get to see it,
But maybe one day they'll bring something like Moblin Maze Mongers (XI) into XIV, but more refined.
It would be really cool to have player generated areas in game.

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Tanaka had a lot of really grandiose plans for XIV that were way too ambitious. Another one, that they reportedly spent a lot of time trying to work out, was porting XI characters with their progression intact. Another thing was wanting every single cutscene to be fully mocapped, which look amazing, but I can't even begin to imagine how much time was spent on just the few that there were.

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Originally Posted by NefarioCall

Hard to say, I mean, the game was so rushed to launch that the story wasn't really ... done ... but for a few introductory quests.
One thing we do know for sure is that the enormous wide open empty world was supposed to be populated by player built structures.
At least in design, principally, the game was to be one where the players collectively built things, like we have the housing areas now,
But on a full game structure scale, not just for glamour.
(Think like the housing plots, but in the open world and much bigger plots, players were to band together in companies and take possession of big areas of land and build on them)
(The concept eventually just became the Free Companies we have now)

It's a concept I thought was really cool, but it's easy to see why they struggled so much to complete it, and obviously never came close to doing so.
Kinda disappointing we won't ever get to see it,
But maybe one day they'll bring something like Moblin Maze Mongers (XI) into XIV, but more refined.
It would be really cool to have player generated areas in game.

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Moblin Maze Mongers would be great!

I do remember also there were plans to link FFXI and FFXIV such as traveling between the two worlds but that did not happen would have been interesting if they made Vana'diel one of the shards and we got to travel to there :O

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Originally Posted by MomoCakes

Moblin Maze Mongers would be great!

I do remember also there were plans to link FFXI and FFXIV such as traveling between the two worlds but that did not happen would have been interesting if they made Vana'diel one of the shards and we got to travel to there :O

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Considering Miqo'te on the First are called Mithra, and multiple areas look like they pull influence from RotZ and CoP, I could see it happening.

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Originally Posted by Daralii

Considering Miqo'te on the First are called Mithra, and multiple areas look like they pull influence from RotZ and CoP, I could see it happening.

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Aren't they Mystel? Hyur do seem to be taking the XI name though (humes).

There are definitely a lot of questions I would love answered about 1.0. There have been a lot of conversation about it back in early 2.0 days in the lore forums.

If you don't know much about that you should give it a look see.

One of the big plot twists of 1.0 which wasn't even known until deva revealed it way later is that the MC was experiencing two different timelines due to the echo. The reveal that the little girl who you meet in Ul Dahs opening video is actually the same person who recruits you into the scions was pretty interesting to me and said a lot about the level of detail and complexity of the early story plans.

Idk, but Ascians were a lot scarier. The one we saw looked like a Grim Reaper with bone wings.

The model is used again in the final heavensward dungeon.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

i never played 1.0 but i do know that they changed the plot around to where dalamud was falling from the sky in order to usher in ARR

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https://gamerescape.com/2018/12/01/f...with-koji-fox/

This interview sheds some light on things related to the original 1.0 story. To quote the most relevant questions and answers (though I recommend you read the whole thing since it's quite interesting):

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GE: Speaking of stuff we talked about before that may have fallen through the cracks… Do you have any updates on the so-called mysterious primal? There was the idea that right after Gaius took Ala Mhigo, he was going to keep going, but a primal halted his advance. It could have happened in ’57; could have happened in ’62.

Koji: That was related to the whole, “What lies deep beneath Silvertear!?” Yes, something stopped his advance. And then there was the trailer beam, tons of primals shooting out. And then there was the seal. What is it sealing? What was going on in there? A lot of this is where the 1.0 story was supposed to go, and there’s a lore reason for that.

When the Calamity happened, it caused a lot of changes to Hydaelyn. Whether that was enough to seal off something that was already sealed, but the seal was getting weak, or… That I don’t know. There could be something like that. The hint was that Gaius was stopped for a reason, and that it was a powerful force. There’s a presence. It wasn’t just Midgardsormr there, it was more of a force, and I can’t say anything more, for now.

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GE: Some things from 1.0, one serious, one humorous. Fans made a big deal out of this old line, Minfilia suggested that those who’d beheld the end of the Walker’s path seemed to her as though they’d seen something either too terrible or too shameful and they were traumatized. Should we be worried?

Koji: I don’t think you should be worried. This also kind of ties to the presence that stopped Gaius’s advance. It would have played out in that direction, and now I don’t think it’s going to. I don’t even know if that presence is still there. I’d have to ask Oda-san. It all kind of led to the endgame content that was supposed to wrap up the original.

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As for 1.0's Titan, there's this cutscene that went wholly unused - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO2QFM2a8PQ

It's hard to remotely piece together what the plot trajectory for 1.x would have been, but playing through one did get a distinct sense for its... feel, and some of the latent themes that were likely to guide it.

1.x, despite giving you the Echo, didn't really force you especially front-and-center. You were just one person who wasn't fated to blissful ignorance about the cycles the world had and would continue to undergo, and could maybe help to piece together the reasons why. Like other worldstories derived from the Fabula Novus mythos, it feels fatalistic and a bit oppressive, though much more open and less directed than its other works (FFIII/-2/-:LR, Agito, and FFXV, especially its original XIII-Versus concept). You're just one person, and the Echo was far less about empowerment than simply escaping the cycles as well as might be possible, through knowledge. To that end, you have slightly mindbender stories in the intros to each citystate where you blur invasively borrowed memories and your present reality that kind of make you question the idea of unseen influence or providence. Did you actually have an impact on Minfilia's early life (back when she went by Ascillia, and was branded the daughter of a spy who her later adoptive mother unwittingly may or may not have helped murder), or was that all in your mind? Iirc, she seems to remember you, as you are/were now/then, some 10+ years later...

The people you first get a sense might be Ascians are in fact the future Scions, the operatives of the Path of the Twelve (because, as Minfilia or Tataru put it, as long as you allegedly devote yourself to the pantheon as a whole, people generally let you go anywhere...), spreading cryptic inquiry and doubt while trying to keep an eye out for the changes in the world, geopolitical and more... underlying. The first actual Ascians you see are rather primative, not yet fully migrated into your Shard, and look like a typical empty-cloaked Voidsent. It's hard to say how closely some of what we've seen since could have followed logically from the 1.x trajectory; things were definitely different, but limits due to management, time, and funding make it hard to even get a fair idea of what would have been.

On the whole, all I can really say was the writing was haphazard, but it had some really good good food for thought to stew over and touched on some truly interesting settings components. I'd still like to see a style of writing that allows us engagement with the world without needing to rely overly on power-fantasy or a fully/tightly directed narrative, but if I wouldn't go so far as to guess that 1.x's narrative--given all the resources since afforded to Yoshida--would have been better than what we have.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

Aren't they Mystel? Hyur do seem to be taking the XI name though (humes).

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I thought they were Mithra for some reason. Whoops.

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Originally Posted by Lyndis

The model is used again in the final heavensward dungeon.

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I think they had to change the Ascian Prime design a bit for Heavensward because China's rules against dead/undead imagery forced SE's hand, but for those who are curious, the Ascian Prime is the closest thing we have to how the Paragons looked in 1.0.

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Originally Posted by Lyndis

The model is used again in the final heavensward dungeon.

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Similar design, but altered.

1.0 Ascian:
http://i.imgur.com/b2kJ8.png

Ascian Prime:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/...me_concept.png

(Had to use the concept art since I couldn't find a good screenshot on Google)

Probably being made up on the fly just like everything else in 1.0 really.

Jokes aside I forgot about that Koji interview! It was quite something to see some light being shedded on that. After all, the story must have been by far the most developed aspect of the game that we didn't get to see in its entirety.

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Originally Posted by Lyndis

The model is used again in the final heavensward dungeon.

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Yes, but the sense of life-threatening dread was more apparent in 1.0. When they saw the Ascian they were terrified. Their current cloak and mask form just doesn't have the same impact, it's just "Ascian bad". I could be wrong but I got the feeling in 1.0 that their original intent was for the Ascians to be much more monstrous, where the current iteration is instead just manipulative.

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Originally Posted by Darkstride

Yes, but the sense of life-threatening dread was more apparent in 1.0. When they saw the Ascian they were terrified. Their current cloak and mask form just doesn't have the same impact, it's just "Ascian bad". I could be wrong but I got the feeling in 1.0 that their original intent was for the Ascians to be much more monstrous, where the current iteration is instead just manipulative.

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I think they wanted the ffxiv story to be more transparent. They got rid of a lot of the mystery and made ascians more relatable. For better or for worse.

I think the ascian prime fight was the devs kind of retconing one of their old unsolved mysteries.

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Originally Posted by grinkdaboy

i never played 1.0 but i do know that they changed the plot around to where dalamud was falling from the sky in order to usher in ARR

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No one knows for certain. Based on the handful of quests I remember and before Yoshida took over. The story seemed like it was going to be focused more on the war with the Garleans. I wanna say too on which side can control summoning primals first, but I can't remember if the story involving the first summon, Ifrit was created by Tanaka or Yoshida.

I remember MMM! Running it once got you an eyepatch! You XIV players can get that from any vendor at level 5, but back in the day that was it. You wanted to be a badass, you had to have friends run you through this weird system and then swap your head piece for a while. These are the days before MMOs let you glamour/transmog/whatever so you kept it in your bag and just swapped.