Story and voice acting future

[Onidemon]

First let me say that i am really enjoying the gameplay in this game. It's loads of fun.

As for the story, it is quite weak in my opinion. Compared to other titles in the series, the story here is nowhere near as well written. Coming from Square-Enix it is quite surprising. Other MMO havea much better story and you can tell they actually put a lot of thought and work into it. I won't name those MMOS as i don;t want this to be a comparaison thread between those games.

The voice acting now, it is simply horrible... I never seen such bad acting coming from a big company like square except for some Tales of... games. What happened here? I mean other FF games have voice acting and it is outstanding, so why not here? I tried the french version and it is a bit better and the japanese one is way better. It's like they hired random people to do the voice acting.

I understand that their main focus was on the gameplay and that they were short on time but then again it would have not taken more time to hire better actors.


That being said and done, i don't care too much now that i am enjoying end game content but it does make me worry about future expensions. Can we expect much better content in terms of story telling and voice acting in the future or will this be it? Also, it would be really nice to have more vocie acting and especially outside cutscenes. Like when you talk to some NPCs, they could say something random and there was other cutscenes in the game where there was no voice acting but could have.

[EmiliM]

It's always a challenge to create a good story for an MMO because the world is designed to be persistent: you can't have world-changing events that dramatically alters the landscape or setting since you need to share the same world as someone who just started playing. As a result, the story can come off as inconsequential since everything more or less remains "the same" no matter what happens. Expansion packs will offer better and more believable story progression since they provide the kind of contents that is more in line with progression seen in single player RPGs: new plot along with noticeable chances to the existing world and the introduction of new areas to explore.

As for voice acting, I play in Japanese and all the voice actors are famous pros so no issues there. I've seen the English voice acting in trailers and I just shuddered. I do wish they include more voiced lines though. None of the voiced characters really have all that many lines and it would've been nice to have them be fully-voiced instead of just for a few critical lines in important cut-scenes (awkward when they go from voiced back to mute in the middle of a speech).

[Odd]

I disagree about the story. I haven't played many MMO's, but this is the only one with a story I actually liked.

But I couldn't agree more about the voice acting. Almost every single one was terrible, but especially Minfila's. I loved her until the day she spoke.

[Mug]

They half-assed voice-acting in every aspect. Not only is most of the voice-acting awful (in English anyway), but for some reason they only added it for certain cutscenes. They said it would be added to all "important" cutscenes, yet we have not heard, for instance, any of the primals talk. Now they seem to have abandoned it completely as none of the main scenario quests in 2.1 are voiced.

I think they shot themselves in the foot when they decided to do the voice-overs in four different languages. It's obvious they can't keep up.

[Zezlar]

I really have lost all interest in the storyline. In 1.0 I would jump at it upon release, but it's all fetch task trash now. Why waste my life?

[ApolloGenX]

The main story was incredibly bland... and they didn't even use now common techniques such as phasing for impact.

The extension to the main story in the last patch was just plain garbage. Considering they made this such a solo friendly game, I would expect a MUCH better main storyline.... this didn't even feel like a story, it felt likea flimsy pretext to chase some primals and then attack people that were cooler than your people. I found myself agreeing with the Garleans about the stupid primals and ending this stupid cycle.

[Onidemon]

I get that story telling for an MMO is difficult but i play other mmos where the story was much much better. A very famous mmo out there already has a much better story most of the time. It's way more engaging, full of life and character. Makes you feel part of a special world. ApolloGenX said very well, the story is incredibly bland.

Yoshi-P said he wanted to make XIV the FF VII of mmos but with a story like this and voice acting that not even an indie developper would accept, he's not exactly on the right path. I'm glad he's got the gameplay part right though. Maybe now with the official full game released and with millions of paying subscribers, they can now hire more people and better actors.

[TrystWildkey]

I just wrote a Lodestone blog post about the storyline ^^ So I think I'll copy/paste here since I rather agree with the OP.

Some thoughts on the storyline.

The original storyline for 1.0 may not have been that long, but it evoked feelings. It evoked feelings of mystery and adventure. Feelings that there was a lot of depth beneath the characters, the places in the world, and that the world itself was a living, breathing and growing character all on its own.

I spent some time talking to my husband about how I’m considering dropping the game. I told him that there just wasn’t anything in the current game that I really enjoyed. I also mentioned that I’m still here because this is the same dev team that gave us 1.23, so they have to have some things planned for eventual release that I would enjoy.

Then, he asked a question that he had asked before, but I had forgotten.

He said “How much of the 1.23 storyline may have already been planned by Tanaka and his team? Do we know that Yoshi created the storyline? Or, did he take elements that had been planned for eventual release in 1.0 and speed them up to use them for 1.23?”

That really made me think. Because the original 1.0 storyline, and the storyline in 1.23 genuinely felt like a Final Fantasy. I really cared about these characters and really invested in my character and my journey through Eorzea. It had the feels that I always associated with a good Final Fantasy.

The ARR main storyline didn’t make me care about anyone or anything. The only possible exception to that is the Sylphs and Goblins. Maybe it’s their unique way of speaking that makes them stand out as a race and as characters, but I cared more about poor little Noraxia’s lifeless body than I did about Minfilia and Tataru being taken by the Garleans. Yeah, think about that for a moment. Tataru in the original storyline had a personality, had dialogue, and was a character that I really cared about. Now, she gets kidnapped by Garleans, and I don’t care.

The whole ‘main’ storyline felt like a bunch of disconnected side quests to me. I didn’t even bat an eye when Thancred was taken over. I just shrugged and wondered what new hellish dungeon I’d have to go through while stressing that I wasn’t pressing buttons fast enough.

[Virtuso]

Fully agree with everything TrystWildkey said. The old 1.23 storyline, while not the greatest I've ever seen was miles ahead of this one. It had an actual plot, menacing villains and made me so much more invested in the events of the world and it's people. Here it's just side-quest after side-quest with the "story" just being an excuse to have a reason to go to X location to kill Y boss. It picked up a lil towards the end but overall was disappointing.

This being an MMO really is no excuse as both FF XIV 1.23 and other MMO's I've played have done a far better job of it.

[ToraoKoga]

I like 2.0s storyline. It was very simple and I like all the cutscenes near the end ( in jap audio of course)