Can we get choices that really matter and have a effect?

[Bright-Flower]

I love meaningful choices in single player games.

In an MMO like this though I think it's better to have one consistent story, rather than having branching paths.

Killing the three grand company leaders I'll use as an example. If you have one story path where they live and another where you kill them, that complicates story telling going forward. They basically then can't write those characters into the msq anymore because the msq has to account for them being both alive and dead. The longer the story goes, the more difficult this becomes to both make the choices meaningful and not homogenize the results. I think choices like these are better not only for single player games, but isolated single player games. Mass Effect 3 for example struggled with making the choices of prior games meaningful in many areas. Imagine those kinds of complications but across 4 or 5 expansions or however much longer FFXIV goes.

I'm all for these kinds of choices in one off single player games. But in a long term ongoing story like this, it would just create problems.

Also it would muddy things for RP. Does your character exist in a world where the GC leaders were assassinated or not? In a world where the WOL went rogue and joined with Zenos or not? In an MMORPG I feel it's better to have a consistent main story so that everyone is on the same page, and save branching narratives and weighty choices for single player games.

Some franchises can mtigate this by having new games take place in different places to minimize the impact of the choices from prior games, and provide new ones in a new place, but that also minimizes the effects of the choices you made in the prior game in the grand scheme of things.

While some games pull off branching narratives well my favorite medium for it is actually tabletop games where the DM has full freedom to explore your choices and create consequences for them without having account for developers coding different branches and trying to make a game that can account for all these different choices without development time ballooning.

Alternate endings can be a good thing too, and then a sequel can just pick one of those endings or leave it vague if the consequences aren't extremely different. (Or in the case of ME Andromeda, find a clever way to shift the setting to escape the wide reaching scope of the prior ending. About the only compliment I'll give Andromeda was the cleverness of its premise to continue the ME setting without continuing the old plot.)

But alternate endings are very different from mid story consequences, and FFXIV can't have 'alternate endings' because it's a singular ongoing story. HW was not ARR 2, it was just continuing along the same game. Same with SB and SHB. You can't really have alternate endings at the end of a X.0 patch when you're continuing the msq in a few months with X.1 etc. Or the same with X.55 int Y.0.

It would also be a jarring shift for people that like the current story, to make such a change one soft reboot and three or four expansions in. It's a bit late to say 'okay now are linear story driven MMO is going to become open and choice driven with wildly different story paths.'