Brevity is the soul of wit: Request to fix the horrible writing on XIV's quests

[Agoven]

It's all changing in the future folks...and there will be voice acting for most of the new FUTURE stuff.

I really don't mind reading the wall of text in the cutscenes...I actually think it's rather well written being an avid writer myself.

It's not supposed to be in plain English. I don't know of any SE games since FF6 that have had normal conversation real type text. I wouldn't want that...to sound like you and I were talking. The whole way the text is written is very much in verse to immerse you into the atmosphere. It's poetic...It would be odd to change the writing style now...so let's just enjoy the rest of this storyline and look forward to 2.0.

[Seif]

This is a major deciding factor for me if I'm going to pay to play during the next year.

I don't honestly mind "missing" the warm-up storyline if it's only going to be presented with this level of writing in boxes of text that I can easily read later anyway. But if it's actual FF-quality storytelling then I'd happily fork out the cash without even thinking it over.

I can honestly relate to the earlier comment:

I usually start off wanting to read what the npc has to say ...

I do want to get immersed in the storyline so bad but it always ends up being just so bad that it's incredibly hard to even read because you know it's completely useless when it comes to dong the actual quests.

In XI YOU HAD TO PAY ATTENTION or you'd miss the instructions to your quest. Meaning that not only your character but YOU as a player were listening to what the NPC is saying.

Not so in XIV: you skip the text because A) it's amateurish fan-fic-level writing in a box and B) the quest comes down to following map markers anyway and the text is just completely pointless when it comes to gameplay.

The game designers and writers (yes BOTH!) should read this book because it contains the fundamentals of game writing and honestly for 11 games they got this part done right! What the hell happened?!

http://www.amazon.com/Game-Developme...0305079&sr=8-1

All I can think of is that when Sakaguchi left some of the best SE writers/designers left with him?

[Tempestmoon]

*Reads a wall of text that repeats the same crap over and over again, talking about unnecessary text in game*

This Forum blows my mind.

Lets create walls of text complaining about walls of text. Why do people have problems with large quest dialog excess lore and back story, but they have no problem spending hours upon hours on a forum reading and writing about it.

OP your complaining about the huge quest text, is just as long as the in game text itself.

lore=awesome
more lore = awesome
even more lore = Awesome

I can keep going.

Don't like it, don't read it, Like it, Read it, it is as simple as that.

[ShinChuck]

This you see here is a single conversation with an NPC involved in the quest It kills with fire.

Pretty much all quests in FFXIV, even the most miscellaneous ones, have this horrible unrealistic monologue-like dialog.

I've always played final fantasy titles because of the plot more than the gameplay. One of my favorite games is final fantasy tactics just because of the writing in that game...

so I'm wondering what happened with final fantasy xiv's writing.

I have nothing against the current storyline, hey, so far its great. What I do have a huge issue with, is how every time I talk to an npc I get one or two full screens filled with uninterrupted miscelaneous text.

No cutscenes, no pauses, no movement from said npc (other than a few emotes), no one even answering to these people... they just stand there and spew this word vomit in my face.
Its just unrealistic how these strangers start talking and blurting out backstory and explaining themselves for each thing they say...

I find myself just tapping through the dialog on most quests (Not in storyline missions of course), and I know that I'm not missing anything.

Final fantasy xi (yes, another lets take a look at XI's thread, why not? CoP put me to tears) had great, moving quests... what was said there was believeable and needed to be said. Silences were important too. So its not a matter of "hey, its an RPG, npcs are going to talk to you even though you are a stranger...", its about how much and how little you'd talk to a stranger, and how they all seem to ask questions and immediately answer them themselves...

And I'm still puzzled about the lack of cutscenes in quests.

So please, take this into account and correct it for 2.0 's release.

Yes, yes, and yes. As Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation has said, "Shakespeare wrote that 'brevity is the soul of wit'. It applies to everything, and don't tell me you're arrogant enough to claim to know better than Shakespeare."

Some people like reading lore , some people don't. It's easy to skip if you don't wanna read it.

And here's the problem: no, it is not, at least not up to standard. In virtually any other MMO, the quest text appears in a single box, I am not locked into talking with the NPC, I can simply click "accept" and move on. In FFXIV, you must manually scroll through all these screens, hope you don't inadvertently confirm while spamming the "scroll text" button, and you cannot walk away from the NPC until you do so.


The bottom line is that anyone with solid writing ability can deliver the same lore in far fewer words in a much more technically sound fashion, while still keeping the flavor and feel. We're talking writing 101 here.


Besides, I can't help but think of this when I read some of the examples, like the one in the original post...

[Cendres]

And here's the problem: no, it is not, at least not up to standard. In virtually any other MMO, the quest text appears in a single box, I am not locked into talking with the NPC, I can simply click "accept" and move on. In FFXIV, you must manually scroll through all these screens, hope you don't inadvertently confirm while spamming the "scroll text" button, and you cannot walk away from the NPC until you do so.


The bottom line is that anyone with solid writing ability can deliver the same lore in far fewer words in a much more technically sound fashion, while still keeping the flavor and feel. We're talking writing 101 here.

And here's the problem with your lame arsed box: it's completely boring and totally un-immersive.

Do not want. Thanks.

Interesting thing I've seen on the TOR forums, people complain they have to go through voiced cutscenes and want easier ways to skip through. Some people just don't want to spend five minutes experiencing the game apparently, it's all about the gogogogogogo. Which is fine, but please don't ask to water down what's already unique about these games.

[Majidah]

And here's the problem with your lame arsed box: it's completely boring and totally un-immersive.

Do not want. Thanks.

Interesting thing I've seen on the TOR forums, people complain they have to go through voiced cutscenes and want easier ways to skip through. Some people just don't want to spend five minutes experiencing the game apparently, it's all about the gogogogogogo. Which is fine, but please don't ask to water down what's already unique about these games.

FFXIV's writing isn't what's unique about it. At least not in a good way. And its not even about the gogogo.

To summarize (for the second time):

I agree.

The NPC need to be a bit more concise. They are so verbose and fond of circumlocution, full of platitudes and roundabout ways of saying the most simplest of statements that might otherwise have been conveyed in half the words and a quarter of the time. It's such a waste of my time. Mine and yours.

Maybe if they add more voiceovers, then it will encourage the writers to pull back a little bit.

I'm all for lore, but when I walk up to a ! over an NPC and get a diatribe of Old English in my face telling me his life story where all he's essentially telling me is that he needs me to deliver some parcels - I feel like the game's writer took his job a little too seriously.

It gets really bad when you can't tell the personality of one character to another. Everyone just vomits these paragraphs of ye olde English and it feels forced. For good writing, it should only take a sentence or two for players to get an idea of who they're talking to, what they're like, and what they want. Not everyone you meet randomly on the street will just give you paragraphs of info without any provocation.

At least make it a conversation, if you're going to.



You made me nearly spill my morning coffee.


(see kids,? one sentence and you know 3 things about me already. that's good writing)

There's also a nice post about how what NPCs seem to be speaking is written and not oral english. But I'm too tired to look for it at the moment... y_y

edit: here it is

I think there are several problems with NPC conversations and the way in which they are presented. I'll focus on just one, though.

In addition to unnatural verbosity, NPCs tend to use language more suitable for written as opposed to spoken English. That goes for word choice as well as sentence structure. I don't feel like I'm being spoken to. Rather, I feel like I'm reading an essay.

Take this example from the quest dialog in the OP:

"Ever since our founding, we have endeavored to archive all extant knowledge, that man might learn of his origin and destiny both."

This is a beautifully written sentence! Beautifully written. Nobody talks this way--not even very smart, very important people.

It may look OK on paper, but just try saying it out loud. Suddenly it's confusing and hard to understand. That's just not how people order their ideas when they talk. Furthermore, while I would expect that character to know the word "extant", it's unnatural to use it when speaking.

[Phen]

I don't mind wall of text, I would like more camera angle changes/mini CS. I dont mind reading a book if its stylish. Theres a reason dialouge scenes in movies arent one single static wide shot.

[Savasana]

*Reads a wall of text that repeats the same crap over and over again, talking about unnecessary text in game*

This Forum blows my mind.

Lets create walls of text complaining about walls of text. Why do people have problems with large quest dialog excess lore and back story, but they have no problem spending hours upon hours on a forum reading and writing about it.

OP your complaining about the huge quest text, is just as long as the in game text itself.

lore=awesome
more lore = awesome
even more lore = Awesome

I can keep going.

Don't like it, don't read it, Like it, Read it, it is as simple as that.

There is so much arrogance and narrow-mindedness in this post.

Is it difficult to imagine that people are using these forums at work/school/whatever where they don't have access to playing the game?

And denigrating the OP and others is not how you support your argument, unless you were just trying to beat your chest.

You resort to exaggeration/ad hominem and failed to understand the crux of the debate. I agree with you - this forum does blow my mind sometimes too.

[ellohwell]

It's all changing in the future folks...and there will be voice acting for most of the new FUTURE stuff.

I really don't mind reading the wall of text in the cutscenes...I actually think it's rather well written being an avid writer myself.

It's not supposed to be in plain English. I don't know of any SE games since FF6 that have had normal conversation real type text. I wouldn't want that...to sound like you and I were talking. The whole way the text is written is very much in verse to immerse you into the atmosphere. It's poetic...It would be odd to change the writing style now...so let's just enjoy the rest of this storyline and look forward to 2.0.

I don't think people really take issue with the style of writing or literary flare. But the fact that characters will launch in to entire monologue/speeches is a bit unnatural, and not the least bit compelling.

[Gathol]

I absolutely adore the writing and localization efforts behind XIV. It's one of my favorite things about it. If you don't like it, skip it? But they put an amazing amount of work into it, and I adore their efforts. It's some of my favorite writing in any game. Keep it up.

Also the example on the first page is silly. The first half of the text is lore setup and exposition, nearly the entire second half is quest instructions mixed with a tad bit of rationalization.