6.X Patches Rewritten – Dark Prelude

[MikkoAkure]

Yeah, we're unlikely to ever truly get insight into what exactly went on behind the scenes but it was obvious that the Return to Ivalice/Save the Queen content was being written with Garlemald being heavily involved. The decision to do away with Garlemald unceremoniously and rush to conclude many ongoing story threads with strange abruptness means that considerable rewrites were likely made - so any attempt to claim that things ended as they were always intended to has always struck me as a bad faith take on the situation.

If you actually read the interview, both Yoshi-P and Matsuno say what happened with Bozja.

https://www.famitsu.com/news/202109/27234807.html
In Japanese, I used translator https://www.deepl.com/translator

In context of the Field Notes having flash forwards:

Matsuno: Yes, that's right. Since there are no plans to do so at this time, I wanted to at least mention that Dalmasca has been liberated, so I included it in the War Results Record Book. However, now that I have finished "Save the Queen," I feel as a player that I don't need any more war stories. After the "Battle of Werlyt," I thought, "Dalmasca has been freed from the hands of the Warrior of Light, chan chan! And that was the end of it (laughs).

Yoshida: You asked before. If you were going to do it, you wanted to make it an adventure drama like the one in 5.25.

Matsuno: When I think about the feelings of today's "FFXIV" players, I felt that a war story would be different. There are several reasons for this. One is the current world situation. The world has become closed due to the Corona disaster, people are fighting each other on the Internet, and various things are divided, so it is not a pleasant world. In the midst of all this, one wonders what it would be like to impose even more stress on players in the form of war.

　At the end of patch 5.55, there was a line from Fran, "See you in Dalmasca," which we were actually going to remove. I was actually going to delete it, but I thought that if I replaced it with "See you in Dalmasca when peace is restored" instead of "See you next in the Dalmasca Liberation War," then I wouldn't have to delete it.

Yoshida: I see. So you are saying that there will be more adventures and battles, but that we will meet in the new future. I think this is the last part of the story, and I want people to think about it in the aftermath. Fran also left some things unspoken and swallowed. I would also like to see what happens in the episodes that follow, such as why Lyon does what he does, in the adventure that Matsuno-san describes.

He also mentions that the epilogue ran too long and repeatedly mentions that his writings ended up getting cut due to time for being too wordy and that he often took a long time. He also kept coming up with ideas that he felt were too close to other content and decided against using them. Like how the original idea was for the content to take place in Dalmasca and using time travel but he felt it was too close to ShB's main story so it was instead moved to Bozja and the 5.25 content was made off of his unused ideas for Vagrant Story 2.

I wouldn't count that as a rewrite though, unless it was fully written out. Otherwise every single time they throw out unused ideas would be counted as a "rewrite" when that's a normal part of the creative process.

As for Garlemald, Yoshi-P states in the interview that even back then in the writing phase for Bozja, he wanted to depict Garlemald being torn apart by the different legions and that was the story beat that he gave to Matsuno to base his own story off of. From my own perspective, it was too powerful to be fought against without deus ex machina so it was always destined to be off-screened or demolished by a primal and it happened to be that it was partially both. I certainly would've liked to have visited it in a manner like FFXII, but FFXII had the advantage of having a friendly imperial with power who isn't a defector written into its story from the beginning.

We also know, as per interview commentary, that Matsuno wanted to kill off more characters only for Yoshi-P to deny him the opportunity to do so. Which is another case of the story not necessarily going in the direction that was intended.

Where did he say this? Matsuno said in the interview I linked that he actually saved a character that was meant to be killed. The person Matsuno did say he wanted Yoshi-P to kill off was Fordola, back in SB. But Matsuno was speaking as an outside observer of that, not as a member of the dev team, which he wasn't a part of at the time.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Where did he say this? Matsuno said in the interview I linked that he actually saved a character that was meant to be killed. The person Matsuno did say he wanted Yoshi-P to kill off was Fordola, back in SB. But Matsuno was speaking as an outside observer of that, not as a member of the dev team, which he wasn't a part of at the time.

Well dang, that would have been Tragic. I like Fordola.
And that Healer Role Questline wouldn't have happened if she went away.

[Celine_Aurora]

It's mid. It reads more like an excuse to namedrop stuff from your favorite game than a FFXIV story in its own right. That's why the homages were "shallow": because if I'm playing FFXIV, I want to play FFXIV and occasionally go "Oh it's cool that this dungeon is called the Tower of Babil and has the Magus Sisters", not literally follow around Cecil as he relates or lives a story that makes sense only to him. The thin line behind writing a story with homages and writing fanfiction where the story is just background.

On top of that, it concludes with the true villains all along going "Now we can do the true villainy bwahahahahahaha" Wasn't it supposed to be garbage when WoW did it at the end of every xpac cycle?

[WhiteArchmage]

Where did he say this? Matsuno said in the interview I linked that he actually saved a character that was meant to be killed. The person Matsuno did say he wanted Yoshi-P to kill off was Fordola, back in SB. But Matsuno was speaking as an outside observer of that, not as a member of the dev team, which he wasn't a part of at the time.

Matsuno also wanted to save the Blades when he found out about the cure for tempering only to be informed that on that very same patch they clarified that once the body is transformed (as the Blades were), untempering them was impossible. So if we had what Matsuno wanted the body count would've been much lower, not higher.

[aveyond-dreams]

To say nothing of the fact that despite the Bozja relic content having a strong focus on storytelling it is the Hildibrand relics that are deceptively framed as having a 'story focus' this time around. Utterly bizarre, though perhaps Yoshi-P is truly taking a hands off approach to FFXIV these days in order to focus almost entirely on FFXVI.

Once thing that has been made abundantly clear this expansion is that when it comes to storytelling, the audience they cultivated back in the Heavensward era are the last people they aim to please these days. We are not the target audience. The people who are amused by the 6.3 "open sesame!" scene in Myths and Loporrit fans are.

Funny how I was able to breathe some life into Feritas and Altima without resorting to such antics. Instead of a book falling on Altima's head, better for her to show her defiant personality by calling out the hypocrisy of the warrior of light. Instead of eating dumplings or hamburgers, Feritas shows the player that he's still a shady individual by eliminating Rosencrantz in an underhanded way with the rest of the party none the wiser.

These are not characters that we can expect from the people who are currently in charge of things like Myths of the Realm. I demand more than bland, "light-heartened" characters that add next to nothing of narrative value other than whatever deus ex machina the plot will call upon. I do not believe that FFXIV will ever give us a Kain Highwind, a Shadow, an Auron, or a Benedikta ever again unless Hiroi somehow manages to assuage my fears in 6.4. To think we went from the Ivy and Ysayle to this.

I suppose writing joke characters for fanservice is easier than writing ones that are complex.

[Celine_Aurora]

Once thing that has been made abundantly clear this expansion is that when it comes to storytelling, the audience they cultivated back in the Heavensward era are the last people they aim to please these days. We are not the target audience. The people who are amused by the 6.3 "open sesame!" scene in Myths and Loporrit fans are.

Funny how I was able to breathe some life into Feritas and Altima without resorting to such antics. Instead of a book falling on Altima's head, better for her to show her defiant personality by calling out the hypocrisy of the warrior of light. Instead of eating dumplings or hamburgers, Feritas shows the player that he's still a shady individual by eliminating Rosencrantz in an underhanded way with the rest of the party none the wiser.

These are not characters that we can expect from the people who are currently in charge of things like Myths of the Realm. I demand more than bland, "light-heartened" characters that add next to nothing of narrative value other than whatever deus ex machina the plot will call upon. I do not believe that FFXIV will ever give us a Kain Highwind, a Shadow, an Auron, or a Benedikta ever again unless Hiroi somehow manages to assuage my fears in 6.4. To think we went from the Ivy and Ysayle to this.

I suppose writing joke characters for fanservice is easier than writing ones that are complex.

Don't forget "Froth and foam!" My God I cringed myself in another dimension when I saw that.

Still, if the writers wanted to do that, they could write our current characters seriously, without anime antics, without needing to lift them from a different game.

I don't know how true it is that they are going for a different audience, though. Maybe the people who liked the Ivy when XIV was basically a wartime story and the people who like G'raha eating a borgar now when it's more lighthearted can be the same audience and we are just supposed to let our hair down a little after Endwalker and STAKES.

Maybe whatever is set to happen in 7.0 (and of which we should get a glimpse in 6.5, I think) will assuage your fears. We'll see.

[VelKallor]

Instead of eating dumplings or hamburgers,

I am mindboggled that you are STILL fixated on this.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Something something OPs storytelling capability is only a 3, so he can't talk back to the devs, who are at least an 8. I think that was his logic about Y'shtola and magnai.

[Knot_D]

As expected...



Even Skiros's story way better.

[Atelier-Bagur]

As expected...



Even Skiros's story way better.

The gif is disturbing