Quote Originally Posted by Packetdancer View Post
Alright, let me rephase: having a story-heavy game that branches in major elements is impractical as an MMO.
I don't really agree with that. It's not FF14 being story heavy that makes branching impractical. It's that FF14 has a very particular story, the one SE wants to tell. The hypothetical sandbox MMO I mentioned could be just as story heavy but the story would evolve in a different way. It would be built upon the player's actions instead of restricting the player's actions. In all honesty it would be more difficult to do but far from impossible. I also want to very clearly point out that what is feasible for MMO's in general is different from what's feasible in FF14. Not everything I say can be applied to FF14 because it's not designed to have a branching story.

Yes, you can have minor branching bits provided—as you call out—they don't alter the endpoint or the overall story arc that much. But if the differences do not actually matter—if you always end up at the same endpoint at the end of the expansion, regardless of your choices—then I don't feel the story actually branches. Branches continue on their own path.
This is why I'd like less rigid story in a MMO, but FF14 was not designed this way so I wouldn't expect major branching from it.

Let's say you chase the Garleans out of an area, and then you go into a town that's been utterly trashed. There's two NPCs who are both looked to as leaders, but they have different ideas on how to rebuild the town, and turn to you to break the tie. One wants to wants to use abandoned Garlean magitek armor to move construction materials, and to salvage the materials from the now-abandoned Castrum nearby, because it will be the most expedient way. The other argues that people saw too many of their fellow villagers die at Garlean hands, and bringing magitek into the town and rebuilding everything out of salvaged Garlean steel and cermet would just be rubbing salt in the wounds.

If you choose the first one, it opens up quests where you go into the Castrum and collect materials, hijack magitek armor, etc. If you choose the second, it opens up quests where you go help get local materials, help rebuild the buildings in the style they were before the attack, etc. At the end, the look of the village and the incidental dialogue from NPCs could be different; in one case you have a village built of metal, and in the other more familiar Eorzean designs. But in the end, the village is rebuilt either way, and when you leave the village and move on, it never comes up again in the story.
Why would the village never come up again? FF14 has actually managed to reference past events. This example doesn't seem all that different from the CT references in Shadowbringers. What you did in the past doesn't change how the story ends, but it can have a lasting effect on how NPC's interact with you.

That's technologically feasible, sure. Easily done. And if your entire MMO is just collections of questlines like that and no overarching epic that actually significantly alters the world state, yes, you can make it feel like it's branching because that's the entirety of the content. But you don't have an actual branching story at that point, just a bunch of little self-contained decision trees. And if there is an overarching storyline, all those self-contained little decision trees will be largely divorced from it; the choices made in them might affect incidental dialogue in the main storyline, but little more.
Moving away from FF14, a sandbox doesn't need to be a collection of unrelated quests. Everything you do could potentially have consequences that will change your experience everywhere in the game world. Say in the beginning there are two cities that don't like each other, the player could have the choice to side with one or the other. The result could be being barred from entering the city you chose to side against. Some time later, one of the cities might contain an item of importance that you need for whatever reason. If it's the city that's friendly to you, the item could be easy to obtain. If it's the hostile city then you might end up having to battle for the item.

But that's not what this thread was about: the title is explicitly 'choices that really matter and have an effect', with the implication that the choices/effects should be in the main story. And the examples given were choices where on one branch basically the known world is destroyed, and on the other branch you save it. On one branch, you continue to interact with all the NPCs you've met previously, you can go back to the starting cities, etc. On the other, you cannot go back to those starting cities because they are flaming rubble—"There'll be nothing left of you but a SMOKING CRATER!", to quote a certain red mage NPC—and at least two other quest hubs would have been erased from existence entirely. I cannot see any reasonable way you can make those two options co-exist within a single game.
Making a choice matter doesn't have to involve the destruction of the entire world. So the central example discussed in this thread might not be feasible, but that doesn't make the entire idea of player choice unfeasible. Trying to find a neat and tidy way to branch the entirety of FF14 is kind of difficult because like I said before, the game was never intended to work that way. However I think you can have a meaningful impact on the story without a total divergence in the plot. Deciding on how things are done (build a giant golem to climb a mountain, or use magitek drones to fight your way to the top - the decision was made for us, but it didn't have to be) and who accompanies you are pretty significant.

In a pure sandbox where each zone has its own self-contained story and never has you backtrack to previous zones or encounter the same NPCs again later, sure, it doesn't really matter if that quest hub behind you was nuked or not; you're not going back there, and the story just moves onwards with no lasting effect on the next zone. But you cannot have those two branches exist simultaneously in a story-driven MMO; after that point of divergence, you are writing two entirely separate stories, at which point you are making two entirely separate games. And if you have choices, plural, of that magnitude then the problem only compounds over time.
I still don't see the need for isolated stories to give the player the ability to choose. The branching is only a problem if your story isn't built for it from the beginning (ie FF14). If you accommodate for player choices, they are much easier to handle. One of the most important things to do is to limit what kind of events and how many the player can influence. Destroying the world doesn't have to be one of them. Destroying a particular city sounds easier to work with. This will lead to a major plot split after it occurs, but it does not have to cause such a divergence that the stories afterward are completely unrelated. For example imagine after the player chooses to destroy/save the city a previously unknown army invades the general world that the player lives in. Something akin to Garlemald attacking Eorzea. The army is a threat to the city in question (if it still stands) and all nearby cities and their invasion would happen no matter what choice was made. The influence of the player's choice could be the difficulty of fighting the invasion. Perhaps if the destructible city survived it would mean the forces on the player's side have a large army and thus an easier time defending against the invaders. This could be made evident through all related content by increasing the number of friendly NPC's that fight along side the player. NPC opinion on the player for saving/destroying the city can also be influence from that point on, even expansions later. "Good" NPC's could be hesitant in siding with players willing to destroy a city.

There is also the option to have one story for all players, but to have the sum of all player actions dictate the direction the story takes. So for example, each player can somehow vote to save or destroy the city (it could be a simple literal vote, or it could be that they play in an instance where they side with or against the city) and the majority decision determines where the story goes. This removes the need to manage branches of any kind but the developers wouldn't be able to plan as far ahead in designing the game. It also reduces the individual influence of players, but doesn't leave them completely without agency.

I mean, we can argue in circles over whether or not you can handle a fork of that magnitude in sandbox games—or really, if there'd even be the opportunity to make such a choice in a story-light sandbox—but this thread was specifically someone wanting the ability to make decisions of that magnitude, in this game.

I'd love to be proven wrong in this; a story-heavy MMO which supports multiple major mutually-incompatible decision points—including the entire destruction of major quest hubs—would be fascinating to observe. But I am firmly convinced that 'story-heavy' and 'major world-altering choices' are not features which mix well inside the beaker labeled 'MMO', where the narrative has to carry forward indefinitely expansion after expansion.

SquareEnix wants FFXIV to be a story-driven game; that decision opens up possibilities, but it closes off others. The ability to make branching choices which fundamentally alter game state is—so far as I can see—one of those that gets closed off.
We can limit the discussion to FF14 although the post of yours that I quoted originally didn't specify FF14, but MMO's in general. I still don't agree that you need a story-light game to have player choice. You can have as heavy a story as you want, you just need to include the player's agency in that story. SE already has a story in mind and they intend for us to follow it on rails. That's not good or bad and it's up to players to decide if they like it or not.