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

[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...