Thread: What's your story?

As an intrepid Final Fantasy follower, I have always found the Final Fantasy series having a deep and meaning story to tell. Whether this is the favorite, Cloud's selfish trek to better understand himself and his history, Tidus's ignorant misunderstanding to his existance or Lightning's personal vendetta, there has always been a journey. This journey, has always been full of spiritual guidance and an element of wisdom and appreciation of your elders.

I appreciate in the realms of MMORPG's, this is no longer a single protagonist, but an open world with many characters playing centre stage, and this was well addressed in FFXI.

There is so much attention to detail to FFXIV that I often feel the heart of Final Fantasy has taken a back stage to the emensely gorgeous detail that is spectacuar graphics, a hugely customisable avatar and an immense inventory of items and equipment.

So, I ask where is the Journey? Where is the fundamental plotline that keeps us on the edge of our seats, asking what happens next? I'm sure I speak for many FF fans when I say we need moments when we fall off our seats because "Oh my god, Aerith is dead, have they really just done that!"

Development is going in the right direction, we now have Ifrit and Grand Companies, but does the plot lines run deep enough? We have a number of quests to partake, but will there be the deep and satisfying Journey with it's core story and additional sidelines that make you feel you are 'playing' a good novel and not just taking part in a few interesting quests?

Reefs: From the standpoint of a longtime player of FFXI who deeply, deeply immersed himself in the game lore: It'll be there, don't worry, these are the same writers, more or less. The lead writer for XI's gone off and done his own thing now, which is unfortunate as he's one of my favourite RPG writers and world/story designers, but the writers for XI who actually turned his ideas into a functioning story are -excellent- at what they do and I'm happy to see XIV in their hands.

The problem is, if it's anything like XI's story, it'll be a slow boiler, with a lot of setup beforehand. The Path of the Twelve "arc" sets up a /lot/ that probably won't be relevant for a while, the current storyline is devoted to the Seventh Umbral Age - which -should- be incredibly epic as it resolves; we're basically paying for front row seats to the Apocalypse, right now, and it's gonna be awesome. Unfortunately whatever plans the writers had were shaken up by the need to reboot the game - it seems to me that the reboot fits in very well with the planned continuity, though, so I'm not concerned.

The fight against the occupying Garlean Empire, the mysteries of Bahamut and the Primals, what they are and what they mean, the nature of the Circle of Knowing NPCs, though - there's already a huge amount of lead-up to this and already at least one moment in the GC quests that made my jaw drop. FFXIV is willing to play rough - there's a fairly small-scale but extremely emotionally intense narrative beat in one of the GC quests involving the delivery of a letter that I'm still thinking about weeks later.

In short, we're still at the "original FFXI" point in the story where there's set-up about an event that occurred decades ago, and this vague looming threat, but going off of FFXI - looking at the narrative of Chains of Promathia, the things you could figure out entire expansions in advance if you were paying extremely close attention - and then the eventual drastic context-shifting revelations of Wings of the Goddess (and, yes, Abyssea's story) - and given Yoshida's commitment to building an excellent game that 'feels like a FF game' - I wouldn't be worried, if I were you.

Hope that helps.