Would you have chosen a starting area where you could join the Empire?

[Burmecia]

I would probably make an alt to try how Galmemald start would look like.

I know some people who would have loved this from the start.

[Lauront]

Despite these characters certainly being on the darker end of the spectrum, it says nothing about me as a person. I'm a complete softy IRL and try to be kind to an actual fault. These sorts of things writing concepts a person wants to tap into should never be used to judge a person as first glance and IC actions should never be taken OOC. It's an extremely unhealthy mindset. Last year there was a massive thread in which an OP actually posed a somewhat similar question to this thread. They asked about playing a die-hard Pro-Garlean character and the amount of venom and rudeness this person suffered just for daring to ask about playing such a character was insane. People were treating them like a monster just for even wanting to have such a character and quite frankly anyone who can't separate IC from OOC has no business role-playing in general.

It is one thing to be uncomfortable with certain concepts and to prefer not to interact with it, that's perfectly fine and everyone is entitled to play as they're most comfortable! It's another to begin questioning, hating, or avoiding a person and taking it personally because of what they want to play. That post below me talking about genociding beastmen? I do not immediately see a terrible person, an extremist wanting to act out a fantasy. I am not concerned about them at all. They want to roleplay a particularly dark concept and there is nothing wrong with that any more than a person who enjoys playing Grand Theft Auto or playing as Principality of Zeon (literal space nazis) in the old PS2 Gundam games.

Exactly. At the end of the day, it needn't have anything to do with one's personal morals. 4x games, as an example, routinely put you in the position to commit any number of atrocities, should you wish it. I would hate to see those and other games, including RPGs, stripped of this just because it offends the sensibilities of "moral" busybodies who think their own peculiar sense of ethics and inability to separate fiction from reality extends to everyone, or that something being a "bad look" is reason enough to strip mine a game of such fun elements. If a game dev just becomes too intimidated to implement such elements, I'll go look elsewhere for them. Not like there's a shortage of games out there, other than when it comes to good MMOs. Sometimes it just is fun to play the "bad guy", and I can't say the views of the "Certifiably Good" culture warriors think about it matter much to me on this topic, other than when they're trying to pressure game devs to do away with such choices.

In any case, I think it would be cool if we could join the Empire but it will never happen as the game is now, nor should it without the necessary rework to accompany it. But if it did I don't see a problem with it, nor do I think we should actively fight against it being an option.

Same - wouldn't expect it of XIV, but I'd welcome it if it were done, or if something like it were implemented in a future MMO. I accept that it probably couldn't be done within the confines of XIV in the same way as SWTOR does stuff, but it'd still make for an interesting story avenue, IMO. A future MMO, by contrast, can be treated as a blank canvas with which to be bold and daring.

Buddy, you're talking to Cleretic. They superimpose IRL politicking onto FFXIV all the time and use it promote logic like "If you like to roleplay the Darth Vader archetype in a video game you must be a bigoted genocide apologist IRL as well!"
It won't end well, even if all you'll lose is a little face and a few minutes of your time.



Naturally you decide to nearly immediately prove my point. Maybe make it clearer that you speak for yourself and your perspective alone when airing what you think of "how many people legitimately enjoy playing the villain". I bolded and italicized the points I disagreed with in particular so you'd know what I was disputing. SWTOR has faction-based roleplaying and an evil empire that you can fully be a part of, with the ability to be goody goody lord of evil (somehow) or literally Darth Vader's long lost cousin. You literally get a separate ruler title based on your morality. I'm rather tired of the passive aggressive guilt by association accusations some of those on this forum seem so fond of. Not every topic that crops up here that offends you or you simply disagree with is an "anti-Venat", "anti-Scion", or even "anti-good guy" theorem thinly veiled in a disguise as innocuous. Nor is any of it necessarily political or secretly a ploy by those dastardly evil IRL hate mongers that wanna safely act out their homicidal tendencies in your MMO. Is it truly not possible that maybe, just maybe some people out there enjoy roleplaying as a true bad guy every now and then and aren't secretly Emet-Selch veiled in prettier clothes?

Well said.

I would love it is long as I could be loyal. None of that Battlefront 2 BS where you defect to the good guys.

Agreed, no "but you're basically just going to defect to Eorzea" by the end of it, unless it is a matter of choice. The sort of thing Sentio mentioned, where this is left to player choice, is ideal, albeit that in depth would probably better suited to a fresh MMO.

[KariTheFox]

There's a difference between "playing an evil faction makes you morally suspect" and "playing as this evil faction does not suit the tone or story of the game as written so far".

[Lyth]

Given how nearly all of the objections raised around Endwalker's story in the past six months were rooted in discussions around morality, I find it a bit surprising that those selfsame people would claim that morality doesn't matter to them. But I suppose that the 'who is better' discussion in always intrinsic to shipping debates.

...

I think that the original discussion in this thread was based along the lines that you were thinking, with regards to starting cities. And it's probably something that they could consider implementing for 7.0/8.0 with new players just jumping into the story for the first time. Perhaps you could create an 'alternate' start where players start out in a liberated Ala Mhigo, a rebuilt Doma, or a new Garlean republic, and get integrated into the new story from there. It might be worth considering, given how the amount of MSQ that you would need to catch up on as a fresh player could be intimidating.

I suppose the 'faction' concept is more of interest to players coming in from traditional MMOs, like Warcraft/SWOTOR/Warhammer etc., because they're used to it and faction choices are a matter of personal identity to them. It is the sort of thing that game designers generally regret doing in the long run, though, as anything that divides the playerbase and keeps people from playing with each other is generally a bad idea for your community. Even Warcraft has since realized this. I think that it's fine as flavor, when there's significantly more than just two factions, and when said factions are not actually antagonistic to each other in a way that prevents you from partying together. But this game was never really designed around a faction vs. faction mindset.

[Cleretic]

They want to roleplay a particularly dark concept and there is nothing wrong with that any more than a person who enjoys playing Grand Theft Auto or playing as Principality of Zeon (literal space nazis) in the old PS2 Gundam games.

I will say that, on top of playing 'villains' non-MMO games, I do often play them in single-player games and pick them in other forms of representation (I've got a gunpla collection of exclusively villain suits, because Gundam villains get cooler suits). I'd say the only times I generally gravitate away from the 'bad guy option' in other contexts is when they just fail to give an interesting motivation to it, which happens... depressingly often, actually. The angle I like from villains when I play them is essentially somebody doing what's considered to be morally wrong, for reasons that you'd be able to understand as being morally right. Gundam's got a lot of examples spread through its history, in recent-ish gaming you've got Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Debatably, every single alignment in every single Shin Megami Tensei game counts; I feel a good Megaten game alignment choice should be a Sophie's Choice, and if you're ever completely happy with an ending then either the writers failed or you need to think about what that says about you.

I've never once seen that as an issue, and I honestly think a well-written RPG is a great place to explore that stuff; there's a reason people are still talking about Fallout New Vegas. But I've never seen an MMORPG work well with it, and I think it's because the social interactions and in-game dividing lines lead to people identifying more with their choice and taking it more personally. You rarely see people playing all sides equally; people pick a main sooner or later, start associating with the group that character lands in, and eventually tribalism kicks in. I've never seen a discussion about Fallout New Vegas get heated or personal, because people don't really identify as a Person Who Picks Mr. House. But in an MMO? Yeah, people on SWTOR identify themselves as A Sith Player, and suddenly arguments gain that extra edge. It gets even worse with RP communities, where suddenly there's an extra layer that not everyone is fantastic at maneuvering. It can be hard to tell when seeing someone how much of it is real versus just an act, and it can be hard as a RPer to get across the difference between you and your character. In TSW I learned to be pretty much the nicest person you can be in a text chat, entirely to counter the fact that my character was... frankly, an argumentative ass with some concerning views. That was absolutely the right thing to do, but you'd be surprised how many times it didn't help. (Helped make me a REAL good RP shopkeep and support character in XIV, though.)

And again, on the more practical game-dev side of it all, I think factions work much better in a single-installment single-player game. If you're making something like Three Houses, you don't know which sides are going to be the most popular until it's all done and out, and can reasonably expect a lot of repeat players anyway, so you put in a roughly equal amount of effort all the way through and give every side a fair swing. Whereas with a live service game, eventually you're gonna learn the player distribution, and see that an equally distributed effort is just not worth it.

[Lauront]

Given how nearly all of the objections raised around Endwalker's story in the past six months were rooted in discussions around morality, I find it a bit surprising that those selfsame people would claim that morality doesn't matter to them. But I suppose that the 'who is better' discussion in always intrinsic to shipping debates.

You really do appear to struggle to understand what it is people say, what with this bizarre tendency to immediately strawman it into some bizarre confection of your own. We're not saying morality doesn't matter to us, but that 1) no real moral evaluation follows from a person's preferences or choices in a game and that 2) for some of us, we enjoy a range of choices in what manner of responses we can give in specific scenarios. As Lurina already articulated to you, before your utterly bizarre and disingenuous deflections to pretend you weren't trying to lump her into a specific group, there are a multitude of reasons as to why people disliked EW, many of which focus on story construction, and even insofar as the moral element of it is concerned, this can be broken down further into topics such as the message the game is showing, and whether this is even something the writers would intend for it to say when the implications are fully spelt out, the inability to distance one's character from approving of this whole affair, the recurring rules for thee but not for me aspect to it, and more besides. As far as I am concerned, the below poster is perfectly right in the best way forward with you:

If you've degraded into thinking this is about "faction shipping" and that people are seriously posting on alts here just to further their arguments, that's reason enough for me (And a lot of other people) to stop trying to engage with you.

[Lyth]

I think it's perfectly fine to enjoy exploring amoral choice options in a game setting. It doesn't make you a bad person. Likewise, some people do see morality as very clear cut and dislike transgressing those boundaries. I can see why people could adopt either mindset, and it's just a personality thing. What I don't understand is dancing between those two stances as it feels convenient. If you want to condemn the story on the basis of its moral choices, it doesn't really make any sense to also demand more opportunities in the story to make moral transgressions with the same breath. Just common sense, really.

And you're welcome to issue out whatever instructions that you like to your group. This influences maybe ten individuals at best, from the post counts, so it's no loss there. If anything, the lack of circular rebuttal posts will make my own discussions in here simpler and more straightforward. I'm sure that the rest of the lore community will soon be requesting that same courtesy from them as well.

[KizuyaKatogami]

I think it's perfectly fine to enjoy exploring amoral choice options in a game setting. It doesn't make you a bad person. Likewise, some people do see morality as very clear cut and dislike transgressing those boundaries. I can see why people could adopt either mindset, and it's just a personality thing. What I don't understand is dancing between those two stances as it feels convenient. If you want to condemn the story on the basis of its moral choices, it doesn't really make any sense to also demand more opportunities in the story to make moral transgressions with the same breath. Just common sense, really.

And you're welcome to issue out whatever instructions that you like to your group. This influences maybe ten individuals at best, from the post counts, so it's no loss there. If anything, the lack of circular rebuttal posts will make my own discussions in here simpler and more straightforward. I'm sure that the rest of the lore community will soon be requesting that same courtesy from them as well.

I don’t think the person who called forum posters stupid and admitted to trolling on the lore forum should be talking about circular discussions lol.

[NekoMataMata]

Well, the starting zone does a couple things - it introduces us to one or two of the scions, gets the foot in the door with a city state leader, and eventually puts us down in front of Satasha.

I'm not sure how a Garlemald starting zone could do that eithout some major retcons, or feeling incredibly rushed.

I can see it happening in a way of the WoL defecting from Garlemald at some point in the level 1-15 starting quests but I feel that would defeat the purpose of having Garlemald as a starting zone, wouldn't it?

I really can't think of any way that you could possibly end up following the rest of the MSQ otherwise.

[Selvokaz]

Maybe it's because I never played WoW beyond a day on the free trial, but I never got a sense of creating "factions" from this idea, just an alternate start that would take place at the same time as the starts of the other city-states and eventually sync up with them and force you to choose one of the existing grand companies as normal. I remembered from my brief time in the free trial that the pandas started on their own separate from everyone else but still had to choose a faction once their starter zone was done.

It was only after my initial reply that I remembered the trouble of the class guilds in ARR and that's what determines where new players start. A new player starting in say Garlemald as an artificer would lose out on the hunt log mobs native to Vylbrand in the early levels as well as the first few class quests not to mention access to the market board.

I'm pretty sure you're the only person who understood what I was getting at, but this thread has been entertaining I suppose.