SE: Please tone it down a hair

[Rydin]

The writing is not difficult to understand, but at the same time it isn't incredibly well written either.

To debate that though, we need to separate the dialogue from the story.

The Underlying Story is amazing... but at times it's needlessly convoluted. Generally, a confusing story can aid in the misdirection the writer is trying to get across, and the more confusion present intensifies the "Aha!!" moment
In FFXIV, the shroud of mystery seems overdone. the writers definitely slow walk you to the point....
Everything up to the Level 46 quest would just be the opening scenes in an offline RPG....

I bet you're wondering why, in a thread about dialogue would I bring up the story

Because they go hand in hand. The dialogue is made to build on that mystery concept.
The 7th Umbral era poems and such are actually not bad. NPC's are just unusually verbose, in a Charles Dickens sort of way.
Dialogue for the sake of words... for the sake of time...

And much of it is preference. The dialogue fits the setting for the most part. I just personally DETEST pirate speak (And pirates in general). I've never seen one Pirates of the Caribbean in it's entirety, so of course I'm going to hate all Limsa dialogue.

And part of it is the lack of voice. The writers kind of failed to give each important NPC idiosyncrasies in their speech to bring out their particular personality, but thats not always easy through text only communication. A lot of movies don't do that either, but then the actor is able to take the dialogue and make it unique to that character.

Dialogue and story are such complex systems that one could talk about them ad infinitum, but I do think the job quest NPC dialogue has gotten MUCH better, and for that reason I look forward to NPC speech in the future

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

I could go kick the shit out of a twelve year old and that doesn't make me a bad ass

Skyrim is famous for having ridiculously bad dialogue (See: Arrow to the knee)
If a game only aspires to have better dialogue than Elder Scrolls, then it will forever wallow in mediocrity. Why not aspire to be great!
I would be insulted if I wrote something and someone said "At least it's not SKyrim"
Why even compare it to a game... why can't we have dialogue on par with "No country for Old Men" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"