Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
With each patch taking 4.5 months to arrive, two patches would take nine months and three patches would take roughly 13.5 months. That's over a year and not at all what I would consider killing characters 'left and right' as you suggest.
Each patch is only about 10 quests or fewer and takes a couple days to finish at best if you’re being lazy. Each story arc outside the main expansion is usually 2-3 patches except this void one.

The story doesn’t need to have a prominent story character die every single story arc. That will get tiring and lose any sense of shock value, especially if there’s no point except to cater to your own definition of “stakes” or to thin the cast out.


Many stories have stakes without needing to kill or maim characters. It’s such a lowbrow way to create tension in a story and needs more care than “where it makes sense”, it needs to have an actual purpose. It “made sense” to have Yotsuyu die in 4.0, and up until her last bit I would have agreed, but then we wouldn’t have had Tsukuyomi and everything revolving around that. Killing a character (typically) means completely removing them from the plot, ending any potential stories they could have had, as well as player investment in that character, which is why in many stories there’s plot armor or comic books where no one can die.

Character deaths should have a meaning and if every one of your stories depends on someone dying to move the plot forward then people are going to notice and it’s going to feel like a writing crutch. You might get an “oh my!” moment, but if it happens enough people are going to slowly stop caring. I don’t support the constant fake-deaths either but that’s the same exact thing. Killing Y’shtola after she’s already “died” half a dozen times is meaningless at this point.


At this point it’s also kinda funny that you bring up the Game of Thrones quotes considering Yoshi-P asked his team to watch the series when developing FFXVI.