Where to read the entire lore of FFXIV.

[LineageRazor]

Ok, just like wow. They are lore books but thankfully the game content is not cut and added on books like how WoW does, which breaks immersion.

Weeeelllll…

I'm not sure how WoW does it, but there IS a significant chunk of lore in this game that has been cut, and now can largely only be found on the forums and in books. That's the entirety of 1.0, the original release of FFXIV. it was a tremendous disaster, but the lore of the current game is built on top of the lore from that game. Every now and then, the writers will resurrect some tidbit or other from that game into this one, and it become relevant again, like the starfall. (Just as often, something from that game is quietly retconned and forgotten, such as Ascians having no shadows.)

Not sure how much that affects your immersion, but it's something to consider!

[sciencebot]

Weeeelllll…

I'm not sure how WoW does it,

It's possible they've gotten better over time, but to engage in some gentle and only slightly exaggerated ribbing of my WoW-playing friends, as I remember it...

(Spoilers through Shadowbringers MSQ)

Imagine Patch 2.5 only had the Ishgard stuff, and all the important stuff about Nanamo and the Scions was in a tie-in novel, and got maybe two lines of reference in the game.

Heavensward is just the Nidhogg story, and the entire rest of the patch series is raid-focused on dealing with that. If you don't raid, you have to watch a cutscene on youtube to know what happened to Nidhogg. Thordan gets resolved in a novel and the Warriors of Darkness thing is both introduced and resolved in the last patch as a bonus raid.

The lead in to the Ala Mhigo rebellion is a short story on the website and a limited time in-game event. There's a novel about it, too, but all three versions -- the event, the short story, and the novel -- contradict each other on important points, for some reason. They come up with the idea of letting casuals queue for an easy mode version of Stormblood raids, which climaxes in the final patch with Shinryu. Omega showed up in the start-of-expansion event, but you only find out what happens in that plotline in a novel; the B-Plot is that Zenos isn't dead, but they don't mention that in-game, so a lot of people playing just don't know about it.

ShB comes along, and nobody knows what the story's about: people stopped running the Warriors of Darkness raid during Stormblood, because it's outdated content now! In Patch 5.4, we will finally discover why Emet-Selch was so evil (he was corrupted by drinking some purple juice).