Quote Originally Posted by PyurBlue View Post
It is possible, just not with FF14's way of story telling. It's too rigid. You can have a more sandbox MMO where the player has more agency and creates their own role in the world. That's honestly what I expect from MMO story telling, but it's not what SE wants from FF14.
Alright, let me rephase: having a story-heavy game that branches in major elements is impractical as an MMO. Yes, you can have minor branching bits provided—as you call out—they don't alter the endpoint or the overall story arc that much. But if the differences do not actually matter—if you always end up at the same endpoint at the end of the expansion, regardless of your choices—then I don't feel the story actually branches. Branches continue on their own path.

Let's say you chase the Garleans out of an area, and then you go into a town that's been utterly trashed. There's two NPCs who are both looked to as leaders, but they have different ideas on how to rebuild the town, and turn to you to break the tie. One wants to wants to use abandoned Garlean magitek armor to move construction materials, and to salvage the materials from the now-abandoned Castrum nearby, because it will be the most expedient way. The other argues that people saw too many of their fellow villagers die at Garlean hands, and bringing magitek into the town and rebuilding everything out of salvaged Garlean steel and cermet would just be rubbing salt in the wounds.

If you choose the first one, it opens up quests where you go into the Castrum and collect materials, hijack magitek armor, etc. If you choose the second, it opens up quests where you go help get local materials, help rebuild the buildings in the style they were before the attack, etc. At the end, the look of the village and the incidental dialogue from NPCs could be different; in one case you have a village built of metal, and in the other more familiar Eorzean designs. But in the end, the village is rebuilt either way, and when you leave the village and move on, it never comes up again in the story.

That's technologically feasible, sure. Easily done. And if your entire MMO is just collections of questlines like that and no overarching epic that actually significantly alters the world state, yes, you can make it feel like it's branching because that's the entirety of the content. But you don't have an actual branching story at that point, just a bunch of little self-contained decision trees. And if there is an overarching storyline, all those self-contained little decision trees will be largely divorced from it; the choices made in them might affect incidental dialogue in the main storyline, but little more.

But that's not what this thread was about: the title is explicitly 'choices that really matter and have an effect', with the implication that the choices/effects should be in the main story. And the examples given were choices where on one branch basically the known world is destroyed, and on the other branch you save it. On one branch, you continue to interact with all the NPCs you've met previously, you can go back to the starting cities, etc. On the other, you cannot go back to those starting cities because they are flaming rubble—"There'll be nothing left of you but a SMOKING CRATER!", to quote a certain red mage NPC—and at least two other quest hubs would have been erased from existence entirely. I cannot see any reasonable way you can make those two options co-exist within a single game.

In a pure sandbox where each zone has its own self-contained story and never has you backtrack to previous zones or encounter the same NPCs again later, sure, it doesn't really matter if that quest hub behind you was nuked or not; you're not going back there, and the story just moves onwards with no lasting effect on the next zone. But you cannot have those two branches exist simultaneously in a story-driven MMO; after that point of divergence, you are writing two entirely separate stories, at which point you are making two entirely separate games. And if you have choices, plural, of that magnitude then the problem only compounds over time.

I mean, we can argue in circles over whether or not you can handle a fork of that magnitude in sandbox games—or really, if there'd even be the opportunity to make such a choice in a story-light sandbox—but this thread was specifically someone wanting the ability to make decisions of that magnitude, in this game.

I'd love to be proven wrong in this; a story-heavy MMO which supports multiple major mutually-incompatible decision points—including the entire destruction of major quest hubs—would be fascinating to observe. But I am firmly convinced that 'story-heavy' and 'major world-altering choices' are not features which mix well inside the beaker labeled 'MMO', where the narrative has to carry forward indefinitely expansion after expansion.

SquareEnix wants FFXIV to be a story-driven game; that decision opens up possibilities, but it closes off others. The ability to make branching choices which fundamentally alter game state is—so far as I can see—one of those that gets closed off.