Why is the WoL so lame in cutscenes?

[KageTokage]

This happens in countless movies, TV shows, and games. If the hero, or villain, would just kill the other when they get the chance, like they probably would in reality, they'd win on the spot.

Instead they have to let the villain monologe, or finish their plan or let them live every single time. Villains let the hero give some speech or put them in an elaborate death trap rather than simply killing them.

In conclusion, characters are morons.

I think XIV has mostly been good about avoiding that trope, so this particular case just came across as a bit jarring.

[LineageRazor]

I know little about video game development so I'd like to genuinely ask: Would it be possible to have the game... just load an attack animation from the corresponding job? Ranged and non-ranged? With how stilted and robotic some of the cutscenes still are, I'm surprised they haven't implemented a way of having a sort of "warrior of light attempts attack here" canned animation in their script. It always seems to stop at "draws weapon and stares menacingly."

Is it possible? Sure. Pretty much ANYTHING is possible when it comes to coding. It depends on how much development time you want to put into it. Is it easy / low-cost? That's a harder question, and really depends on how flexible they made their cutscene scripting engine. I guess they figure that "draw weapon" is prelude to pretty much any violence the WoL might commit, whether it be headlong charge, cast a spell, or loose an arrow. The fact that these different actions cause the WoL to be in different places is likely the rub. Things get complicated when you have to script out the rest of the scene with the WoL potentially being in different physical locations.

Most of the time, it's acceptable, and the most players do is roll their eyes at the obvious corner-cutting (such as Lyse challenging you to a one-on-one, you draw your axe/staff/book/bow/whatever, and the scene fades to black while you imagine the fantastic battle that follows), but in this case the WoL's inaction (and everyone else's really) happened to stretch that tolerance a bit too far for a lot of people.

[Tridus]

I know little about video game development so I'd like to genuinely ask: Would it be possible to have the game... just load an attack animation from the corresponding job? Ranged and non-ranged? With how stilted and robotic some of the cutscenes still are, I'm surprised they haven't implemented a way of having a sort of "warrior of light attempts attack here" canned animation in their script. It always seems to stop at "draws weapon and stares menacingly."

I suspect the answer is that it's possible, but not practical in their budget and time constraints. You'd have to load an animation that makes sense for everyone, or load custom ones. When they do it, they tend to use a generic animation (like in the special Stormblood MSQ cutscene where healer WoLs actually heal someone, it's just a general animation and not a WHM/SCH/AST spell). We saw that in the ShB MSQ with our final attack on Hades: that was a special thing that applied universally.

Not to mention that they'd have to make sure future jobs they add going forward also work with this if they use job specific actions, and that's adding long term work. It's probably not justified within the budget, and I can understand that. But there was an entire room full of people we could have told to do it instead who are easy enough to animate attacking... and eventually that's what happened, it just took an eternity and made everyone else look foolish.

[MrThinker]

I think in certain job quest cutscenes they actually have the player character do certain actions, because the player is guaranteed to be that job when they first view it (unless skip potion), e.g. Twin dragonsong dive on Fauhnem in the lvl 70 Dragoon quest, or the dance with Rhaana Mhigo in the lvl 80 Dancer quest. I have no idea how these scenes are animated if you are on a different job when you view them in the Unending Journey, or if they are in the Unending Journey at all to skip any problems being a different job would have in those scenes.

[Rosenstrauch]

I have no idea how these scenes are animated if you are on a different job when you view them in the Unending Journey, or if they are in the Unending Journey at all to skip any problems being a different job would have in those scenes.

They're in the Unending Journey, but you aren't allowed to watch them unless you happen to be the right class/Job, as I recall.

[Gobio]

To make warrior of light believable, we have to know how we kill all those primal? Do we shoot super echo-beam towards them and they die instantly?

Or do we actually manipulate physical or magical force via the job we have (like dancing...) to do damage and kill them?

[Enkidoh]

Primals when summoned are semi-physical so they can be destroyed like any other enemy (with good ol' raw smashing and bashing) - when their physical form 'dies' it just collapses back into the aether that formed it which returns to the Lifestream. What makes Primals so dangerous though is their ability to temper, that is, enthrall, anyone and everyone in earshot, so any army that attempts to take one down is inevitably brainwashed into becoming Primal-worshipping zealots that would then turn on the rest of their own troops (this is how the Company of Heroes took down Titan pre-Calamity without the Echo, they sent in mercenary troops in three waves, the first wave were basically sacrificial lambs that attacked only to be immediately tempered by Titan, who were then engaged by the second wave right after, allowing the third and main wave of troops to then actually engage Titan and destroy him).

Needless to say, this sort of strategy results in a lot of life lost, which is why those with the Echo (such as the WoL) are so sought-after for dealing with the Primal menace, they don't have to worry about being tempered by it.

[Cilia]

Long story short: budget.

Long story long: the PC can't do a lot in cutscenes because it would require different animations for every job. That alone would blow up the animation budget; add in the fact new jobs are added at a steady rate (2 - 3 per expansion) and that makes it incrementally more expensive and adds a load of retroactive work. Older cutscenes can still be watched on new jobs, and you actually can watch job cutscenes on different jobs in the Undending Journey.

For example, let's say that instead of having Thancred deal with him they added a cutscene where we fight Ardbert in 3.1. That would require a different cutscene for all 13 jobs in the game at the time said cutscene was released, and later developing 5 more for the new jobs added in Stormblood and Shadowbringers. (Blue Mage might not be playable in current content, but it's still a thing.) Now multiply that by every cutscene where the PC could plausibly get into a fight. Dear lord the animation budget.

For practicality's sake what they do now is the best option. The cutscene in Bozja is just particularly egregious in pointing out the limitations of that option.

(The closest they get to exploring "Different cutscene for every job" is actually the 2.0 intro, which does change depending on your class / job... but if you use anything added after 2.0's launch it just switches you to PLD, and all you do is swing a weapon of light at Lahabrea at the end.)

[Veloran]

They could probably get around many of these limitations by having WoL use a particular weapon in a cutscene. Some examples that come to mind are the uses of Louisoix' broken staff as an aetherial blade way back, or the Eurekan sword when you destroy it's avatar. Hell, even the fistfight against Lyse.

Honestly the game really should just assume that WoL has a baseline level of both physical and magical prowess and allow for more of the aforementioned situations. I wouldn't really mind if cutscenes just picked a job by force and had WoL do that ShB trailer quickshift into it to accommodate the situation. That might require at least unlocking all jobs to be manditory though.

[Listrella]

I still remember the end of 2.55 where we allowed ourselves to be taken prisoner by some mooks during the ul'dah sequences, which was ridiculous, we should have been easily able to take care of them as we had beaten the ultima weapon and several primals by that points.