SE: Please tone it down a hair

[Majidah]

Lol..the writing in this game is quite a few leaps above the forced 'epic' writing of games like Skyrim and Tera >.>

I expect something better of the writers behind final fantasy though.

Fortuitous for we are bestowed with a myriad of wonderous options in this magnanimous world. Perchance the enlightened citizens of Eorzea shall be graced with literary concepts becomming to their most esteemed stature. Mayhap, those befuddled by the complexities of such literary yarns can find a quantum of solace in other avenues of pleasure. (Or a dictionary).

Let's not dumb it down in a world of Fox ^.^b

Okay, now take that one paragraph. Multiply it by 5, make it so no paragraph interacts with anyone else as it'd happen in an actual conversation, and do this not only for important plot related factors, but for any misc NPC that exists.

That's FFXIV.

Good writing isn't just what happens and it isn't just grabbing a thesaurus. Good writing is also how dialog is delivered. And XIV fails greatly at this.

edit:

People, take a look at FFT's rewrite. It uses old english but the dialogs are superv. Can you say the same about XIV? Hell no. There are no dialogs in XIV. Just monologs.

Can you picture a FFT character speak as much as a misc inn NPC in uldah? Get real.

double edit:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_8T2DXAHRs

There. Brevity is the soul of wit.

[Starlord]

I expect something better of the writers behind final fantasy though.



Okay, now take that one paragraph. Multiply it by 5, make it so no paragraph interacts with anyone else as it'd happen in an actual conversation, and do this not only for important plot related factors, but for any misc NPC that exists.

That's FFXIV.

Good writing isn't just what happens and it isn't just grabbing a thesaurus. Good writing is also how dialog is delivered. And XIV fails greatly at this.

edit:

People, take a look at FFT's rewrite. It uses old english but the dialogs are superv. Can you say the same about XIV? Hell no. There are no dialogs in XIV. Just monologs.

Can you picture a FFT character speak as much as a misc inn NPC in uldah? Get real.

That's just how you feel its like, other peoples experience do differ from yours, some agree with you, and some don't. I personally love it so I don't know what to tell you.

[Majidah]

That's just how you feel its like, other peoples experience do differ from yours, some agree with you, and some don't. I personally love it so I don't know what to tell you.

I'm going to go ahead and link everyone to this thread with 102 likes.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...n-XIV-s-quests

Now I'll quote highlights from it.

I agree.

The NPC need to be a bit more concise. They are so verbose and fond of circumlocution, full of platitudes and roundabout ways of saying the most simplest of statements that might otherwise have been conveyed in half the words and a quarter of the time. It's such a waste of my time. Mine and yours.

Maybe if they add more voiceovers, then it will encourage the writers to pull back a little bit.

I don't think you understand what this topic was meant to say. The dialect and vocabulary is fine. What's not fine is that every time you start a quest, you are presented with an entire novel to read and the only way you're interacting with the NPC is by spamming X to make the text go by faster. What makes that worse is that for most quests, once you get past the initial diatribe, you get very little lore text or anything.

Make the NPCs move around or something, give us cutscenes, change the music or tempo, make us answer questions, or simply shorten the dialog. But after the 5th or 6th paragraph of tangentially important backstory that an NPC throws out on our screen, most of us are just hitting X to get rid of it and reading the summary on the journal page.

I may be diverging slightly from the OP's point, but what I have taken away from the original point is this: Fundamentally, FFXIV lacks spice such as dialog. Now in SquareEnix MMOs, you play the part of a silent protagonist. This does not exclude the possibility of dialog, however. The best example I can think of off the top of my head from FFXI would be the Sleepga II line of quests (because they are neither main storyline missions, nor super important quests such as AF quests). In these quests, you follow the exploits of two Tarutaru who are competing streetvendors in Jeuno. The quest introductions are full of dialog between the two NPCs; sometimes they will turn to you, asking for your advice, pausing in the place of your response.

These scenes are quite long, much longer then the posted example by the OP. However, they are for lack of a better word, eventful. Writing, literacy, interest in lore, these things are not limited only to the quantity of text, but the delivery.

I would like to add also, that I love the stories in FFXIV. They are expertly designed in my mind. However, I completely agree with the OP that they are not well delivered when compared to other things we have seen from SE.

I'm all for lore, but when I walk up to a ! over an NPC and get a diatribe of Old English in my face telling me his life story where all he's essentially telling me is that he needs me to deliver some parcels - I feel like the game's writer took his job a little too seriously.

It gets really bad when you can't tell the personality of one character to another. Everyone just vomits these paragraphs of ye olde English and it feels forced. For good writing, it should only take a sentence or two for players to get an idea of who they're talking to, what they're like, and what they want. Not everyone you meet randomly on the street will just give you paragraphs of info without any provocation.

The thread gets really nice after the second or first page, the first page of replies are just people who misunderstood what was written. I recommend reading it.