Can we get choices that really matter and have a effect?

[Saix027]

I only wish they woudl stop with this, by now, running gag, "That was a good joke Warrior of Light/Darkness, now go ahead and be our errand boy/girl as usual."
If we not have a real impact then stop with this gag aswell please, optional dialog is nice but not if it turns into a joke by now that our choices not matter.
You know what is also a choice? Quitting the game and unsubbing SE! Some friends sadly did such because of exactly such reasons, fun moments in a serious story can work but not like this.

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

What I saw in that last scene was the final stage of grief: acceptance.

No value judgement necessary.

well that proves my point things are subjected to the person view or believe this is true in just about every decent story. There just isn't this built in effect in anything really a real prime example is the anime Death note, while X amount of people view Light's mission as wrong and evil there are just as many people who believe what he was doing in the story as a good thing. The same can be said of Mr.freeze,ivy and many other characters in storys... thats the beauty in choices is it allows great depth instend of a built in lameness that has little to no story depth by allowing the person to take in the story and view it then take it based off how you would take it if you were really there in your characters shoes what would you choice. This expansion opended up a door that could be taken by the viewer has one way or another.

It's similar to the primals honestly while some people can view them as bad some people can get the beast tribes are using them as a defense no diffrent than any other character asking a god to help them like the ones we get a option from when making a character.


Thats the thing about choices yes it has a price but it also creates real cause and effect and not like basic layout... Its like saying all pasta is the same because its pasta when what choice of sauce you use causes it to have other taste this creates strong storys.

Choice grants real cause and effect walking the same bright light path is the reason why so many goody toe shoe storys are the same thing yes they might have diffrent characters and diffrent worlds/lay out/powers etc but the real fact of it is its booring everyone knows how the story is going to end the second it starts with that kind of story the goody toe shoes wins destroys the great evil with the power of "Friendship" or "light" and I'm sorry but if you know where the story is going from the start its a bad story lol

In this games terms when you split from the scions you know your going to re meet them again you knew the one mage was going to give up his life from the start of meeting him just like you know your character wasn't going to be overwhelmed by warden power from the second you started them brining up "well she is not like the way she was on the first and that worrys me" Had no depth what so ever when you the viewer/player/reader knew nothing bad was going to happan in the end

[Bright-Flower]

I love meaningful choices in single player games.

In an MMO like this though I think it's better to have one consistent story, rather than having branching paths.

Killing the three grand company leaders I'll use as an example. If you have one story path where they live and another where you kill them, that complicates story telling going forward. They basically then can't write those characters into the msq anymore because the msq has to account for them being both alive and dead. The longer the story goes, the more difficult this becomes to both make the choices meaningful and not homogenize the results. I think choices like these are better not only for single player games, but isolated single player games. Mass Effect 3 for example struggled with making the choices of prior games meaningful in many areas. Imagine those kinds of complications but across 4 or 5 expansions or however much longer FFXIV goes.

I'm all for these kinds of choices in one off single player games. But in a long term ongoing story like this, it would just create problems.

Also it would muddy things for RP. Does your character exist in a world where the GC leaders were assassinated or not? In a world where the WOL went rogue and joined with Zenos or not? In an MMORPG I feel it's better to have a consistent main story so that everyone is on the same page, and save branching narratives and weighty choices for single player games.

Some franchises can mtigate this by having new games take place in different places to minimize the impact of the choices from prior games, and provide new ones in a new place, but that also minimizes the effects of the choices you made in the prior game in the grand scheme of things.

While some games pull off branching narratives well my favorite medium for it is actually tabletop games where the DM has full freedom to explore your choices and create consequences for them without having account for developers coding different branches and trying to make a game that can account for all these different choices without development time ballooning.

Alternate endings can be a good thing too, and then a sequel can just pick one of those endings or leave it vague if the consequences aren't extremely different. (Or in the case of ME Andromeda, find a clever way to shift the setting to escape the wide reaching scope of the prior ending. About the only compliment I'll give Andromeda was the cleverness of its premise to continue the ME setting without continuing the old plot.)

But alternate endings are very different from mid story consequences, and FFXIV can't have 'alternate endings' because it's a singular ongoing story. HW was not ARR 2, it was just continuing along the same game. Same with SB and SHB. You can't really have alternate endings at the end of a X.0 patch when you're continuing the msq in a few months with X.1 etc. Or the same with X.55 int Y.0.

It would also be a jarring shift for people that like the current story, to make such a change one soft reboot and three or four expansions in. It's a bit late to say 'okay now are linear story driven MMO is going to become open and choice driven with wildly different story paths.'

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

What I find Jarring Flower is the story seems forced against characters that we all can agree on are correct and have every right to take the action they choice.. even when Emat set asked the twins what would they do they flat out admit they would have done the same as him.

Just like Niddhogg was correct ishgard desevered to burn his revenge was justice ... yet unphased because thats what pathic heros do go against such actions and change nothing just open more doors the same thing over over again

[Bright-Flower]

I wouldn't say Emet was correct. Not any more correct than the other characters. He was willing to do anything to bring back his world, which meant destroying the current worlds. The people living in those worlds aren't going to stand by and let all they know be destroyed for the sake of his. His position is understandable but not any more so than the protagonists. And let's also not forget. Emet winning would mean the WOL becoming a sin eater monster and helping to bring about a calamity, ending the WOL's story rather than continuing it forward. And ultimately sacrificing the WOL and every other sundered being to bring back his world. In a singular game this could make a good alternate ending. Just like at the end of Breath of Fire 4 when you can choose to merge with Fou Lu rather than fight him. But for an ongoing narrative in an MMO like this, that kind of 'side with the bad guy alternate ending' doesn't work because the story has to go on, and having branching paths adds overhead to the story writing process. At BEST they could feasibly have different outcomes for side characters who leave the story and don't come back to it. Anything as big as 'side with emet selch' is not sustainable in the longterm story here.

Nidhogg's initial revenge may have been justified. But the problem with Nidhogg is his vengeance carrying on so long. 1000 years in an endless war to punish Ishgard over and over again. Even after the people who committed the crime he's angry about have been gone for hundreds of years. Nidhogg lost any justification when he went from punishing the guilty to punishing everyone generation after generation.

[linay]

As a SWTOR player, I don't really care for "choices that matter" because, to me, it only matters if it affects future events, which means that the writers have to tell different versions of the story for each player choice and it gets too complicated for my taste (plus, I'll have the urge to create alts to see different versions of the story, which I feel is the opposite of ffxiv's strength of playing as one character).

I do agree that it's probably better to not have choices at all if they're inconsequential, but the different responses are fun to see on their own, so I'm ok with them in general.

[splinter1545]

I think it would be difficult to do on a grand scale, but I personally wouldn't mind our choices effecting quests in a minor way, such as skipping an objective or so. Would make some of the filler quests more bearable if I could somehow make them shorter.

In terms of the grander scale of things, it can still work but then it would basically be like a Telltale game in which you think your choices really matter but in reality they don't. The events that HAVE to happen either happen earlier or later, but will still happen. Now, they can do 2 branching storylines (which would make NG+ more appealing to the general userbase) that ends the same way, so something like the canon storyline (what we have now) and a anti-hero storyline or something similar. But due to how ambitious this could be, it will only really be used in major expansion drops, but the patches can reference whatever choices you picked on your prior run through it (rather it be the initial run or a NG+ one).

[linay]

In terms of the grander scale of things, it can still work but then it would basically be like a Telltale game in which you think your choices really matter but in reality they don't.

Ooh, I think I would hate that the most as now I would think that the story(teller) is lying to me. If it matters, then it should matter, if it doesn't, then just make it obvious as well.

[LolitaBansheeMeru]

Ooh, I think I would hate that the most as now I would think that the story(teller) is lying to me. If it matters, then it should matter, if it doesn't, then just make it obvious as well.

this is the thing about choices mattering is sure maybe you hate it but its no diffrent than those of us who hate the flat out hippieness of hero story that flat out dismisses everything just because of a set morality or "its wrong" there for you bad you must get destoryed nonsense which is really screwed up honestly.

With choices matter you can decided if you want to keep on with the disimissal nonsense hippie hero bs
or you can choice to take a path outside of that and choice to not only understand where those characters are coming from but also to work with them.

As for the other thing you said about Alts: there already is a reason to have 20+ alts and that is fantasia cost way to much and you might like multiple races for multi things

that and that is also a real life choice if you want to have 3-5 alts for diffrent story paths thats on you not the system of choice you can be happy with just one of your choices as long as its the choice YOU would make.

[Packetdancer]

Again that is incorrect one of the first mmos aka Dark age of camelot pulled it off and pulled it off easily and I was in elementry when that game came out and it was able to pull it off just fine

I'd love to know what your definition of 'branching story' in DAoC is, honestly. Because mine is not something I associate strongly with my memories of DAoC, and so it makes me think that different people in this conversation might be using the term in different ways.

There's a difference between minor things like "which choice I make here determines which NPC faction I can ally with and do quests for", which is actually easily done (though not always popular) and "which choice I make here has massive implications for the direction of the main story quest in a story-driven MMORPG". SWTOR is an example of one where people bring up player choice... but SWTOR's also one where they eventually threw in the towel and basically dropped an expansion rebooting the storyline so they didn't have to keep carrying those choices forward.

Other games have also tried variations on it, but it tends to be 'a choice that happens once across the entire playerbase and then affects the rest of the game going forward from there'. An example might be the first year's Halloween event in the original Secret World; the Templars were the ones who ended up doing the most to aid the cats, so suddenly there were eleven billion cats all over Temple Hall, and from then on in the rest of the story, there were little nods to the cats' gratitude to the Templars. (And how protective Sonnac became of the cats by the time Tokyo rolled around...) But it wasn't like players who showed up later could choose whether or not to aid the cats—that choice was made once, and once only, and for the entire playerbase. The Matrix Online had something vaguely similar in the 'live event' system, which also eventually fell apart.

From what I gather, even World of Warcraft did something recently where players got to pick who they were siding with in a particular power struggle... and I also gather the way that was implemented was not popular. (At least with my WoW-playing friends who are now asking about "hey, so I'm looking for a new MMO, how's that Final Fantasy one you play?")

If you don't have the illusion of choice, the decision tree quickly becomes unmanageable if the game's terribly long. If you can choose one of three things at the beginning, and in one of those an NPC dies, and then you can choose two more things off of the first choice, three off of the second, two off the third... after a certain point, you're writing dozens of differences for every possible story path, and the number increases fairly rapidly the longer the story goes on, unless you slap a thing down, say "okay, you got an ending, but nothing from before matters past here", and restart the story from a blank slate of everyone at the same state.