Quote Originally Posted by Betelgeuzah View Post
One way to make your game shallow is to think up cool places to go just for the sake of it without any proper context to tie them up to the setting. Very Korean.

Everything should start from imagining the setting and the lore. If they are merely tools to justify the existence of a cool landmark (or a feature), instead of the landmark being the tool to justify the existence of the lore it ties in with, the depth of the world will suffer tremendously.

I wish he was reading this thread, as I feel like he's about to make a huge mistake taking the former approach.

For example, the whole vanilla Vana'diel was set up with a Grand Plan in mind when it came to lore. The areas around Qufim were not barren for no reason- the crystallized trees did not point towards the same direction just because it looked cool- Qufim was not shaped like a crescent because making islands a shape of a crescent is "totally AWSUM". The crags, the drogaroga's spine, everything was a part of the setting.

I hope Yoshida takes some notes from how XI was built, but I wouldn't be surprised if he doesn't understand.
To be fair, if they get an idea in their head of something that looks INSANELY FREAKING COOL, that would make everyone take one look at it and go, "That is the most awesome thing in the history of mankind," I'm sure they could take that idea, take a look at their already established lore, and see if there's a way they could implement it in a way that makes sense with as few modifications to the AWESOME as possible. Taking your example to heart, you don't know if Tanaka and co decided to create Qufim the way they did because they already thought of the lore, or because Tanaka had an image of a really emotive, desolate area and decided to write the lore of the zone based on the vision he had in his head.

Certainly, no one would want an area/zone shoved into the game just for the sake of it being there with no ties to the story whatsoever. That's what we have currently for about 85% of the game. However, so long as they find a way to tie things into the world lore in a verifiable and understandable way, it really shouldn't matter whether the lore spawned the zone, or the zone spawned the lore. Cool is cool, no matter what inspires it.