Personal Lore

[SorceressVal]

Are you an individual ? Do you have a story ? Where did you come from? What was your home like? Do you have family ? Did you leave a love behind ? What is your story ?

We all go through the same quests we repeat each others footprints . So what makes us different from one another?

We should have our own personal lore a quest that with a series of choices sets the outcome within at least a few options to give our own warrior a past a life a history other then blinking into existence.

there should be a quest " Returning Home "

Your scion friends ask you to talk about your life before joining their fight . Through choices you choose - if you had both parents 1 or none , brothers or sisters or both or none , a original teacher ( the basics the default skill ) a love interest or best friend or none , where your hometown is and visit speaking to the people set by your choices and seeing a movie or two connected to that . with just a small amount of content you could have thousands of different choice patterns picked because in real life we are unique . It is time the game reflected that more and gave us a past .

Our voices as players is important . I make this suggestion as well as bring up the lack of a active romance system and a voice actor for our player characters NOT TO PUT DOWN THE GAME I LOVE FFXIV AND I WANT TO SEE IT CARRY THE BEST THINGS GAMES CAN HAVE FOR IT REGARDLESS IF ITS SOMETHING I WOULD USE OR NOT ITS IMPROVEMENT IS WHAT MEANS THE WORLD TO ME .

i know all of you who love the game and want to see it grow feel the same . weather its further action with whats in game or adding more to it we all want the same thing a better more complete ffxiv.

[Cilia]

Unfortunately, the nearly-unlimited possible backstories players can come up with for their PCs is at odds with what the developers are willing and able to put in-game. I can't speak for everyone, but I would argue that new content and advancing the story is more important than our personal backstory and how it relates to what we're doing.

You do get a few options to define your backstory - the opening sequence on the carriage, for example - but the unlimited possibilities are prohibitive in implementing concrete backstories. If you want something like that a tabletop game is a better fit...

[Iscah]

Your scion friends ask you to talk about your life before joining their fight. Through choices you choose - if you had both parents 1 or none , brothers or sisters or both or none, a original teacher (the basics the default skill) a love interest or best friend or none, where your hometown is and visit speaking to the people set by your choices and seeing a movie or two connected to that. With just a small amount of content you could have thousands of different choice patterns picked because in real life we are unique. It is time the game reflected that more and gave us a past.

Even if there are "thousands" of exact combinations, they're going to be minimal fill-in-the-blanks differences. "I grew up in [town] with my [parents] [and siblings]. I learned to [skill] from [teacher]...."

It would make everyone's backstories less unique, not more - right now we are free to choose any concept we like for our characters' past, but by laying it out in a quest like that, they're all forced to become similar.


If they were ever going to do something like that, it needed to be much earlier in the game to establish your character's backstory, instead of leaving you to invent your own ideas for so long.

You do get a few options to define your backstory - the opening sequence on the carriage, for example

The carriage ride "establishing moment" annoys me, actually - because the only motivation options you get (other than not-answering) are fame, money and power. What about "for the adventure"? Seeing new places? Learning things? It seems such an obvious answer, and I dislike that the only choices we get are 'selfish' ones.

And then they do it to us again when Yozan and Koharu are asking us why we became an adventurer - those three options again, and a vague one (to the other characters) about going where the wild rose blooms. Couldn't we at least come up with something a bit more inspirational to tell the kids?

[LineageRazor]

The carriage ride "establishing moment" annoys me, actually - because the only motivation options you get (other than not-answering) are fame, money and power. What about "for the adventure"? Seeing new places? Learning things? It seems such an obvious answer, and I dislike that the only choices we get are 'selfish' ones.

Yeah, I agree with this sentiment. It seemed like the carriage ride was trying to shoehorn your character into being a sort of edgy anti-hero type, and didn't leave a lot of room for more optimistic tropes, like lust for adventure or plain ol' altruism. I picked the neurtral "..." options each time, as being the quiet type seemed preferable to the other options I was provided. The sentiment is also portrayed by Derplander's party members in the original 1.0 opening cutscene (particularly the Miqo'te).

As much as I like the Dark Knight quests, I was still slightly uncomfortable about the assumptions they made about your character and how they feel about what they do. I was able to find my comfort zone by rationalizing that it's reasonable to presume that even the most dyed-in-the-wool heroes get tired of the endless struggle after a while...

[Iscah]

Btw not asking this as like "ohohoho I am so important so many hypothetical people think the same as me" or anything. I noticed that lodestone sites tend to have comparatively more people who focus on fight mechanics while some other sites have more RPers, more glamour hounds, so on and so forth. Different collections of players seem to gravitate toward different parts of the game and I've seen segments where I seriously suspect certain options would be celebrated if done appropriately. If it was RPers rejecting a thing that would appeal to people super into fight mechanics I'd ask too. Also not looking for any kind of fight here, just chatting.

Are you saying that you're seeing this conversation as "people who like fight mechanics rejecting a proposition that would appeal to RPers"? Because I think it's the opposite.

I'm not quite an RPer, but I love this game for characters and story. The "undefined" nature of the player-character means that I've had to invent the details myself, and I have multiple distinct characters. I'm still foggy on the details of their pasts, to varying degrees, but I know I don't want to see all of them get the same fill-in-the-blanks backstory. (I rationalise their same current-story by the fact they're actually traveling together.)

As I said before - if it was established from the start that this character had a clear story, I wouldn't mind so much, but when I've been left to come up with my own characters (and I do feel like they're my own, even if they're following a preset story) then it's jarring when the game puts them "out-of-character" or suddenly drops critical new details that we should have always known about "ourselves".

I'd be much less bothered if this was a game with a fixed character, and we were learning more details about that character. But this is my individual character, which makes me feel protective about them in a way that I wouldn't care about in a different story.



Also, this forum is in an odd place as far as discussing lore and story goes. Discussions "should" take place here in the Lore forum, ideally, but it seems that the majority of forum users don't even look in here. Sometimes story discussions get launched in General Discussion (where 90% of forum conversation takes place) but as soon as they gain any degree of busy-ness they get shifted here by the mods - and usually die because none of the people who were involved are coming here to continue discussing it.

As much as I like the Dark Knight quests, I was still slightly uncomfortable about the assumptions they made about your character and how they feel about what they do. I was able to find my comfort zone by rationalizing that it's reasonable to presume that even the most dyed-in-the-wool heroes get tired of the endless struggle after a while...

I hated the Dark Knight quests, especially when they put specific words in my character's mouth that they'd never say even at their most frustrated. And the very dark descriptions in the journal entries - hating people for being weak and that sort of thing.

I rationalised it by deciding that Fray wasn't my character's dark side at all, but a separate entity that had taken over and was trying very hard to convince us that he's really part of us.

Don't know how long I can continue to insist on that take, but certainly for the Lv30-50 storyline.

[Jaywalker]

Snip

Naw, I was just giving an example in the bolded bit. Point I was trying to make was more that different people have different tastes in general. Sometimes the fight mechanics versus story oriented players bit does happen but here I get the sense that it's more there are different opinions on a gameplay possibility. Mentioned elsewhere but a lot of the time on this site people seem to get nervous about that difference in case it takes something away or imposes on them, and near as I can tell that concern seems like it's happening here. Ex. I love the dark knight questline and think it adds a lot of depth and interest, but I also understand how it wouldn't fit with every WoL and how it wouldn't be every player's cup of tea. I get you don't want that interpretation forced on your WoL and that's fair, but I also don't think dark knight's questline should not exist because there are plenty of other, lighter quest options available too. And if you want to play the job but don't want that quest to be canon for your WoL, I don't see any reason not to make a headcanon around the way skip potions work for example. Tbh I could see that being really interesting writing even, sometimes simple scenarios are. Overall feeling is people have varied tastes and it helps keep stuff interesting.

I'm actually not an RPer either, for what it's worth. I'm kind of similar to you though in the sense that I have a main and several alts who I've developed various personalities for, some with distinct backstories while others are works in progress. I also like to keep things "original flavor" in the sense that they generally don't run in direct contradiction to canon storytelling. I hardly expect that the game would be able to account for everything every player can come up with, but I don't think things would need to be as limited as you've voiced by any means. I'm saying this from both the standpoint of being a writer myself and from having played other games where backstory options were presented. Also I'm used to liking works where there are a lot of versions of canon, so for me picking and choosing what seems appropriate is pretty normal.

In FFXIV (particularly with the huge range in race, location, and tone options) it wouldn't be beneficial for SE to make any backstory stuff too specific. I truly don't think you'd need to worry about that. And like I said, [...] as a reply option frees things up. So if even with very broad, simple options, if say your WoL is in fact a sentient animated fungus and has zero family to speak of... when asked you can [...] and maintain that lol.

But stuff like "do you have family", "do you have a home", "do you have any regrets", "were you happy before all these WoL misadventures"... that's pretty harmless I think. I personally like when there are dialogue options for my WoL, but if you don't then the [...] includes you too.

I generally figure it's better to have more options for people than less though, as long as it can be done sensibly and well. Me chattering here is mainly because I do think there's a way to do this without running into the stuff you're concerned about (which I think are fair points!), and I'm just bouncing ideas on this around.

On forum placement ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ not my forum/not my call but this seems like it might be okay since it's more about where/how personal lore might hypothetically be implemented than discussing established lore? Idek.

Also Iscah! This is delayed/unrelated, but I didn't see initially in that design challenge thread and edited in additional info, but using existing pics would be fine if you want to do it! :O

[Ilan]

snip...

How can someone dislike one of the two only good class stories in this game?

[Fenral]

It also indirectly benefits the player for them to be as vague as possible about player backstories. Rather than railroad players into one of a list of predefined origins, simply not saying anything allows players to head-canon whatever they want as there is nothing to contradict. Granted, it means any earlier relationships you had will never be depicted in game, but I believe that's what other players are for.

[Gula]

Absolute pass. One of the reasons I hate Korean cash shop games is because they sort everything out for you, in Archeage's case, even your voice and body type. XIV being open ended and up to the player is one of the best things about it. Your past doesn't really matter when there's Garleans knocking [read: shooting] at Eorzea's door and you got Primals to kill.

[Draginhikari]

I much prefer our character backstories to keep relatively vague and up to interpretation. Makes writing and considering character stories outside of the MSQ far more interesting to think about.