Would you be ok with a good rival figure for 7.0+?(6.0 spoilers)

[kaynide]

I think the problem there is that you've back-loaded the part of Zenos and Ran'jit that people didn't like the start of. People don't like feeling upstaged for what feels like illegitimate or arbitrary reasons, and your idea is delivering that, but on a different level. A way that almost feels better, but if done poorly, won't be.

You'd have to answer the question of 'why is this person's approach better than ours', and it's going to be hard to answer that question in a way that's both A: widely plausible, and B: satisfying. And if the aftermath of 6.0 in this subforum has taught you anything, it should be that if you call someone else's plan 'good', people who don't like what that might say about them will twist everything they can reach to declare that plan to be Wrong And Bad Actually, no matter who says otherwise in or out of game. And, yeah, you're essentially ending up at the WoW Problem of 'NPCs get all the credit for your victory' from a different direction.

The one angle I think it could work is if you don't make them a rival to us, but to whichever ally of ours came up with our plan. A Counter-Hien or Anti-Exarch, if you will. That way you avoid putting the failure on the player and more on externals, which gives people more comfortable avenues to come at the argument; people who think the original plan still had legs have room to claim that or think of improvements (even if some of it only makes sense in hindsight), while people who disagreed with it from the start can have a good 'I told you so' moment.

EDIT: And for what it's worth, I did the final-final Zenos solo duty as an AST, and it's hilarious because a healer's fairly meager offensive output gives the whole thing an air of the WoL not even really trying, and still winning. For all his talk, Zenos lost a fistfight with a Yu-Gi-Oh player and died, and from some angles, that's a perfect ending for the guy.

lol@zenos

On your other stuff, I think this is a good point; especially since the main character doesn't speak, it would really necessitate using an ally we are working with who has the inferior idea. Probably the idealisy Alphinaud...although I would rather someone else since he's kinda had his moment of being wrong with the Crystal Braves. Maybe the alliance leadership itself.

Within game lore, I think it would ultimately be something like one of the remaining legions asking to set up a colony in the south, with (NPC) being overly insistant that they resettle fallen Garlemald. I see (NPC) being suspicious and trying to find foul play or alterior motives in the Garlean plans (eg conquest, not just permission to set up a colony). The twist being that the people indigenous to the area accept the Garleans, and that the Garleans genuinely want a peaceful transition.

Could easily be Thancred spying and getting mad that he just can't find any faults. Or Alphinaud.

[Jandor]

I quite liked the final fight with Zenos, but I do think it was an odd route for them to go.

It worked very well for my character IMHO, but it was pretty obvious that a good chunk of the reason it was working was because of my choice of race and job.
The whole thing would have come across as pretty ridiculous to me if I'd been one of the short races, or pretty much any of the magic users (apart from maybe Red Mage.)

[Rannie]

The redmage fight with Zenos didn't seem very ridiculous... its how I did it. I did love seeing my character punch him like he did though ^_^

[kaynide]

You should probably try elaborating on your scenario.

I'm not sure what there is to elaborate.

Me: "Something like trying to resettle the Garlean people, but a legion leader with his people’s interests at heart with equipment and soldiers ready to go to lay groundwork TODAY, while the Eorzean Alliance has to debate things or something.I’d like to be in a situation where our character does everything we can to help, but rather than be the savior, we are just in the way… ultimately deciding it is better to support the rival."

You: "What ends up happening is that you end up doing all the grunt work, and then the 'real' hero shows up for a few seconds during the cutscenes to take all the credit."
>I was not talking about some last minute change, especially if we are "doing everything we can to help" before deciding to "support the rival".

Me: "My meaning was a bit bigger-picture than that. Like an entirely different third party with a plan that is incompatible with ours, but still viable…and theirs ends up being better. Basically a 'our ways are not always the best, and we should be open to that'”

You: "That's not uncommon as well. You just team up with your misunderstood rivals to fight the 'real final boss' who was hiding out just offstage."
>I was never talking about a fight of any kind, or misunderstood rivals.



I was literally talking about 2 groups having 2 viable solutions to a problem, probably social or diplomatic, and our heroes coming to accept the other point of view as the way to take, whether it's because it is what people want, or because it is actually a better plan. No last minute theatrics, no stealing spotlight, no 11th hour final bosses appearing.

[Cleretic]

Within game lore, I think it would ultimately be something like one of the remaining legions asking to set up a colony in the south, with (NPC) being overly insistant that they resettle fallen Garlemald. I see (NPC) being suspicious and trying to find foul play or alterior motives in the Garlean plans (eg conquest, not just permission to set up a colony). The twist being that the people indigenous to the area accept the Garleans, and that the Garleans genuinely want a peaceful transition.

I think a general framework of war or war recovery is a good angle, because it sets up a framework where the WoL Standard of 'shake down the biggest guy around' is both a perfectly reasonable angle to take as well as an understandably potentially wrong one. Although I'm thinking more along the lines of perhaps Gabranth in Bozja, where there's an imperial ruler that we reflexively cast as Uncomplicated Bad Guy to overthrow and move on, and we maybe get Hien or Alphinaud's help strategizing that, but there's extra nuance we aren't immediately privvy to that a more local rival is working on the angle for. Using Gabranth as an ongoing example, he genuinely treated the lower classes better than the previous regime, meaning that just reinstalling the old government would've been very unpopular, so if you made a whole expansion about that then you could find out that the rival tactician has been instead planning a way to cut off Imperial support, leaving this better structure while picking off the problem people inside it and preventing their replacements.

[Lyth]

...

Again, I'm not really sure what you're looking for narratively. This is still fundamentally an RPG and a video game, so there will always be stories that are better suited to either a book or movie format. You certainly could write a story where someone else is the 'true' protagonist, like the Garlean Legion commander in your story, and you're just there as a PoV character. But to work your way through that story, you're still going to have to work through a series of levels and dungeons, because that's the nature of the medium. So the player is left with the sense that 'I did all these tasks to progress the story, but this author self-insert character walks away with the trophy at the end of the day'. It still gets done fairly often in MMOs - Lost Ark being one of the more recent examples of this trope.

The 'my way'/'your way' duality is artificial because this isn't a choose your own adventure story. So 'my way' is whatever the author decides it to be. This is still an MMO, so while you can offer the player up different flavored variations on the same answer 'heroic/sarcastic/silent', all roads lead to Rome because you can't really have a divergent storyline with multiple endings (unless it's your last expansion ever). So you can tell me that this is my way, then tell me that I'm foolish and wrong and this other cooler character is right, but we're still eventually going to have to team up and fight Final Boss extreme because that's the narrative structure of this medium, and that's the constraint you have to work with.

[kaynide]

Again, I'm not really sure what you're looking for narratively. This is still fundamentally an RPG and a video game, so there will always be stories that are better suited to either a book or movie format. You certainly could write a story where someone else is the 'true' protagonist, like the Garlean Legion commander in your story, and you're just there as a PoV character. But to work your way through that story, you're still going to have to work through a series of levels and dungeons, because that's the nature of the medium. So the player is left with the sense that 'I did all these tasks to progress the story, but this author self-insert character walks away with the trophy at the end of the day'. It still gets done fairly often in MMOs - Lost Ark being one of the more recent examples of this trope.

The 'my way'/'your way' duality is artificial because this isn't a choose your own adventure story. So 'my way' is whatever the author decides it to be. This is still an MMO, so while you can offer the player up different flavored variations on the same answer 'heroic/sarcastic/silent', all roads lead to Rome because you can't really have a divergent storyline with multiple endings (unless it's your last expansion ever). So you can tell me that this is my way, then tell me that I'm foolish and wrong and this other cooler character is right, but we're still eventually going to have to team up and fight Final Boss extreme because that's the narrative structure of this medium, and that's the constraint you have to work with.

This is still not connected to anything I am talking about. I never mentioned having divergent storylines…? Or even choice?

I’ll repeat myself: a story about the hero learning that what is ideal for them/their friends might not be what others want, and coming to accept what others want.

I mean realistically what I’m saying here isn’t that far off from Heavansward where we learn Iceheart was not wrong in her plan despite being against us originally.

I’m not sure why this is even a debate- I posted my idea, which is all this thread was supposed to be.

[Lyth]

It's a forum, such is the nature of this place. It's just a discussion.

Villains in this game tend not to be unilaterally 'bad'. FFXIV has a fairly good track record of rehabilitating past expansion bosses, the main exceptions being Heavensward's Thordan VII and Nidhogg. It's not uncommon for you to find yourself fighting side by side with a previous rival. Likewise, having you fight for the 'wrong side' only to team up with a previously misunderstood rival is really just a variation on the same theme. Ysayle didn't really feel significantly different in that regard.

The constraint that I'm talking about is in the game structure. An expansion is going to have something like six dungeons and three trials, with the final encounter being the ultimate villain for that expansion. So how do you apply your concept into that narrative structure?

You can't really have an unwinnable fight as the final encounter. You can't have all the parties involved walk away from the conflict and agree to disagree. You can't persuade check the final boss. You still have to have that fight. So who is it going to be?

It can't really be your rival character now, because they're narratively in the right. It doesn't make sense to kill them off, briefly regret doing so, and then go back to farm them for drops. So that just leaves us with the mysterious and villainous third party that was pulling the strings from the background all along. Or maybe *surprise* Big Boss was the bad guy all along.

It's also worth noting that your 'character' isn't really a 'character' per se. There is no 'character growth', because they're by and large just a player avatar. So you're not really teaching them a lesson. What you're doing is artificially elevating this other character, which the playerbase may or may not buy into depending on how well they are written. And that ties back to the credit issue that I was referring to in other MMOs where you play side-kick to an author avatar.

That's why I was saying that certain concepts just work better in other mediums.

[Atmaweapon510]

FFXIV had a lot of issues with sympathetic villains before Natsuko Ishikawa took the reins. Estinien, Ysalye, and the the Warriors of Darkness go through some of the most bizarre 180° personality shifts in a very short timeframe, going from sadistic with maniacal laughter to their current incarnations. Zenos was a dumpster fire 2D character that she somehow managed to salvage parts of in the last moment, although she couldn't really write around the powerlevel metaplot he introduced which led to Ran'jit's questionable effect on the story. I really want to see where she goes if she can craft a rival character from the ground up.

[KageTokage]

I did always find it really awkward how hard they tried to push the Warriors of Darkness as villains basically right up until where they reveal the truth of their motives.

There was no logical reason for them to behave the way they did in universe and it mostly came across as a really forced effort to make the viewer think they were evil so there would be more shock factor when the opposite proved true.