SE enough of the treadmill, please make the game more interesting!

[Avarghaladion]

I see this argument about the story quite a lot. It's typically from people that actually don't give it much thought - but not always.

In most good stories, the hero tends to do quite a lot of menial shit. Seriously, pick up near any critically acclaimed book in the genre of your choice and see for yourself. This is because a story that only focuses on action or epic shit ceases to be a story at all. If you want an example, look at any of "The Expendables" movies. Or anything at all by Michael Bay, really. Is there a lot of epic shit? Yes. Do the heroes ever do anything menial? No. Is the story good? ...what story?

The Warrior of Light in the story of FFXIV is portrayed to be a helpful and humble hero. Somebody that understands some of the inner-workings of politics and understands it's not just about fight this, fight that, fight more. The "errand boy" stuff will always be there in near any MMO. Why? Because they're easy to make.

The thing is, if you actually bothered to pay attention to the entire story, there are very good reasons for you to be the one running those errands. It not only fits with the story, but it embellishes it. It makes the story seem more like a story, and that your character is an actual person, rather than just some walking silent death machine. XIV's numbers are hardly jaw-dropping to begin with and they really don't jive with the visible in game population and participation rates.

In the end, the story shows that true heroes get where they are by doing whatever they can, helping in any way possible. And yes, that means being sent to the Sylphs because of your relations with them. That means talking to political figures about bullshit. And while you are running around, being an "errand boy", the game is foreshadowing events to come.

However, most people can't see this. Why? Because they're the ones that have to do it. And they find it irksome because they refuse to see the reasoning behind it. The story that SE crafted is much like the story in a book, and it involves a lot of epic nonsense as well as political/menial stuff. Not saying you have to like it, but please don't call the story "utter crap" just from your own lack of understanding.

It's the same thing they did in XI but in XI they did it well. The "I am an adventurer on an aduous journey" aspects were well punctuated via intelligent applications of seemingly simple but iconic fights, as should be expected in a RPG. Where there weren't fights there were actually involved quests involving new and mysterious facets of the game, like having to scale the side of a mountain, run a maze, sneak through hyper-deadly zones to acquire specific items etc. XIV is go from point A to point B -> repeat. In XIV we get the same "arduous journey" but the punctuation is in the form of riems of politcal dialog and trash content "encounters" that are over as fast as they start. Yes, the errand boy aspect is important but so is the way it's presented. The politics doesn't have to be an expositional nightmare. It never was in XI or any other RPG I've played.

It's not about being right or wrong, but whether you are having fun playing the game. The whole point of gaming is enjoyment. It's been a full year now and fanboyism has it's limits, see SWTOR, so millions aren't playing because they are just waiting for the xpac but are doing so because they are actually having fun with whatever they are doing in the game.

Or they're caught in the grind. Not like human beings are suckers for repetition or anything... and XIV content is carefully calculated to that effect. Ideally, a game wouldn't have multi-page threads like this but it does and there are enough people who take issue. The alternative to intelligent feedback and rebuttal is the slow dying process experienced MMO gamers are used to seeing.