The Unending Codex

This is a really cool addition to the game that I've wanted pretty much since 2.0!

However, I do feel it's a bit of a weird decision to lock it behind the 6.1 MSQ. I'm sure everyone can do with a reminder of things from time to time, but surely people who are relatively new to the game are among some of the most in need of a handy lore reference?

Spoilers are an issue, especially with how some of the profiles are written - if it were changed to something that was updated through progress I think several of them would have to be rewritten entirely, which I recognise this would make more work for the devs. But I thought I would make the suggestion regardless, knowing quite a few people who take their time to progress through the story.

They might retroactively add additional expac specific content in the future and change when we get access to it. There’s always room for iteration. I think it’d be awesome if they put the short stories in game in this thing, and hope they consider adding that as a part of it in future. Maybe having them unlock via quest milestones/achievement completion to avoid spoilers.

I love the feature. And I love how it looks. The Devs who have come up with the new UI skins and interfaces have really done a great job, imo. The art really keeps that old school adventure game journal feel. Heck I’d love for them to offer a reskin option for the quest journal along the lines of this or the achievement log.

It's a pretty complex project, when you think about it. It's not enough to just 'unlock' an entry for a concept as a one time event. It has to evolve with the player's knowledge, or else you risk spoiling them with something that they're not supposed to know at that point in the story. If you think back to the likes of FFT's codex, some characters had two or three entries that updated after a critical plot event happened to them or they were killed off.

This is a convenient place to introduce it because it's the start of a new story arc, which allows them keep a 'revision history' tied to individual quests going forward. I could see them slowly filling out lore entries on events from the previous storyline, but retroactively connecting them to specific quests and deciding how much of the entry you're allowed to see at a given point in time seems like it would be really time consuming.

I get the feeling the Unending Codex will need a far more robust manner of organization than it currently has (ie "All", "People", and "Concepts") when the game starts really piling on the entries.

Also probably some means of cross-referencing and cross-linking. For example, we can't describe Aymeric without talking about Archbishop Thordan, and we can't talk about Archbishop Thordan without talking about the Dragonsong War. Each of which are worth full entries in their own right, but it would be good to link them, like some sort of in-game wiki.

I'm also wondering how we'll be able to obtain the entries of people who are no longer around and whose stories are done, like Ysayle or Livia. Or if we'll get entries for side-content characters, like the Four Lords.

It does get a bit amusingly understandable when some of the entries go into some detail about the primary story the character has been on, eg Estinien and his childhood and time as a Dragoon and as Nidhogg's thrall, and then for more recent Endwalker events it just goes "and then they contributed to solving the Final Days".

I wonder if one alternative is to treat earlier entries as collectables that you have to track down, similar to the Bozjan Field Record.

There was an interview that Ishikawa did around the time of Stormblood where she notes that they didn't really have time to go into the motivation of earlier villains like the Knights of Heavens' Ward and what they had been through, in part because there were so many of them. They show up, fight, and then they're gone. If they slowly release collectable lore snippets, it could give players the opportunity to piece together their history without relying on an external source, like the 'Tales from...' series of short stories. That way you can have the spoiler-free base version that allows newer players to roughly keep track of characters, with the full spoiler details appropriately gated behind a codex drop or even from reading through books in the world. You'd be 'lore hunting' in a way.

They could add a 'places' section, but if it becomes more detailed you might end up giving away the 'nature' of certain entities depending on how they're categorized. What it really needs is a search bar.

Also, for players asking for a 'bio' section on the Adventurer's Plate, it would be neat if you had your own little entry in the Codex with space for a quote and a short history.

I just hope future entries on the codex are much more thorough and less biased on certain characters overall. The Hydaelyn entry was a bit hard to read given it didn’t bring up any of the major problems associated with her and just painted her as some benevolent person, without mentioning any of the conflicts surrounding her entirety. Unless it’s mentioned to be specifically written by us or the scions i don’t see a reason for future entries to suffer from that.

See, Hydaelyn’s entry was fine to me and completely in line with how I read her character. lol This codex actually seems to be avoiding the in-universe sources, potentially unreliable narrator style of the encyclopedias and is more a definitive, this is the story as intended thus far approach.

They still leave room for interpretation about things, but it also gives facts as the writing team intends them going forward. Or it’s more like “this is what the people and concepts we talk about here seem like to the characters currently”. And it’s open for updates and changes in the future as new revelations occur.

I can imagine it's a huge undertaking to get this sort of thing even working to begin with, never mind to tune it with the potential of different versions of each entry depending on what point in the story the player has reached (or how the story will develop in the future). Kudos to the team for taking this on in the first place and I'm eager to see how it develops over time.

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Originally Posted by Alleluia

See, Hydaelyn’s entry was fine to me and completely in line with how I read her character. lol This codex actually seems to be avoiding the in-universe sources, potentially unreliable narrator style of the encyclopedias and is more a definitive, this is the story as intended thus far approach.

They still leave room for interpretation about things, but it also gives facts as the writing team intends them going forward. Or it’s more like “this is what the people and concepts we talk about here seem like to the characters currently”. And it’s open for updates and changes in the future as new revelations occur.

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That guy you responded to used to have an explicitly anti-Hydaelyn signature, so he was outright looking for something painting Hydaelyn as a secret megavillain.

I believe a lot of the parts for existing figures like the Scions are based on the Encyclopedia Eorzea with some extra information from after those were published. Which would explain a lot about how they're written both in terms of structure and direction; the Encyclopedia Eorzea is written as an in-universe text by Eorzeans, so you have a very Eorzea-centric perspective on it all even when talking about things that started outside of it, like the Final Days or the First Brood. Which, incidentally, would also explain that poster's problem with the uncritical view of Hydaelyn; who in Eorzea would put to paper anything critical of her?

It also might mean an Encyclopedia Eorzea volume 3 down the pipeline, maybe? While a bunch of the stuff on the Scions and the like is amended from volumes one and two, there's some that are entirely new, albeit not including entirely new information.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Cleretic

That guy you responded to used to have an explicitly anti-Hydaelyn signature, so he was outright looking for something painting Hydaelyn as a secret megavillain.

I believe a lot of the parts for existing figures like the Scions are based on the Encyclopedia Eorzea with some extra information from after those were published. Which would explain a lot about how they're written both in terms of structure and direction; the Encyclopedia Eorzea is written as an in-universe text by Eorzeans, so you have a very Eorzea-centric perspective on it all even when talking about things that started outside of it, like the Final Days or the First Brood. Which, incidentally, would also explain that poster's problem with the uncritical view of Hydaelyn; who in Eorzea would put to paper anything critical of her?

It also might mean an Encyclopedia Eorzea volume 3 down the pipeline, maybe? While a bunch of the stuff on the Scions and the like is amended from volumes one and two, there's some that are entirely new, albeit not including entirely new information.

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I don’t really need to look, it’s there lol.i was just moreso looking for it to be a bit more specific. I think it’s a bit disingenuous to paint it as she only sacrificed herself to create hydaelyn when in reality it was 12 followers whose souls she had wholly consumed, making them unable to reincarnate forever. I’m not here to start an argument though, i just think the entries need to be a little more specific and it left out a lot of details on things regarding her and paints a certain bias. It’s why i’m curious if it’s written in-universe or not.

Again: the use of passages from the Encyclopedia Eorzea confirms in-universe sources. Specifically in-universe, present-day, Eorzean sources (although some of these may be Sharlayan at this stage). Saying that it should elaborate on the allies of Venat that sacrificed their lives with her would be akin to arguing that we should talk more about the individual servants of Egyptian pharoah Tutankhamun; not especially useful, and either very presumptuous or very difficult given we know very little about them.