How would you feel if you get to create your own nemesis?

[SeiyaSoiya]

Now that the edgy guy is confirmed to not be coming back, how would you feel if upon the next Nemesis arc you begin the story with a character creation screen?

You get to pick any race and gender combo, although certain things such as nameday, voice and deity are locked to one option.

Then you get to play as this character for bits in the story, showing how they go on a journey to get powerful to enact revenge on the warrior of light, for unknown reasons, and build up a whole party of companions kinda like the warriors of darkness in patch heavensward.

They only need 2 voice actors, one for a male character and one for a female, with distinc behavior and mannerisms on each.

I don't think there's ever been an RPG that did something similar, maybe some western CRPGs? but never seen it done in an MMO.

[Kranel_San]

Nice idea, but hard to implement. I'd like to create a female counterpart of me that somehow feels like my lost twin but also like evil or twisted multiverse version of me. Something of this sort

[Cleretic]

I don't think there's ever been an RPG that did something similar, maybe some western CRPGs? but never seen it done in an MMO.

Champions Online, right down to calling it the 'Nemesis System'. They let you pick their appearance, powers, name, personality, all that. There's even a bit of endgame content where the team fights all of their Nemeses as boss fights. It's neat, but very gameable; if you want to farm Nemesis content, pick the powersets that are easy to beat (or at least avoid the ones that definitely aren't).

But the question to answer is why? It fits well in Champions Online, because that game is based on a tabletop system that is in turn based on comic book superheroes; 'make the Joker to your Batman' is a natural part of that formula. But where does it add to Final Fantasy XIV? It actually debatably takes away from its main draw, which is its writing; suddenly they can't write a specific, compelling character like they do so well with, because they have to write a personality generic enough to be anyone's creatable nemesis, no matter if we made a brutish roegadyn or a smart and smarmy elezen.

And then you come to the question of 'what do they do'. Again, Champions could work for this because of what the game was and how it was designed. Story-wise, they had the advantage in that comic book nemeses, especially in the silver age where Champions mostly pulled from, kinda just did a bunch of random weirdo nonsense no matter what their actual character was, so they could play fast and loose with putting them wherever and putting a thin excuse in dialog. It also had the benefit in that the game was actually designed to allow modular enemies; every humanoid character was essentially just one or two stock powersets put on a model, so all the Nemesis fighting styles were pretty implementable. But neither of those are how FFXIV works; again, FFXIV's writing works best in specifics, but this wouldn't allow for that, and so you'd struggle to find good contexts that work, as example, for both a nemesis that wanted arcane power and one that was big on tech. And all bosses are fairly uniquely designed, so if you wanted to give them multiple possible skillsets, that would basically amount to designing a whole new boss for every single one.

And if you throw that last part out, and just have them use one powerset... well, what does this entire exercise produce that's any better than rival characters like Zenos, Ran'jit, or even Grynewaht? Despite ostensibly being personalized, your rival has to be generic enough to work for everyone, which is inevitably going to fall short of just writing an actual character.

This sounds good initially, but I promise you that if it happened, it would be too much work for worse return than if they just made a specific character to act as a nemesis instead.

[Saix027]

Considering Warner Bros literally copyrighted the Nemesis System as a gameplay aspect, I dare say it's doomed. Also, imo it not fits well with this game, we had Chars like Zenos for such by now.

As others said here Champions Online does this well tho.

[Listrella]

I was thinking you meant more metaphorically, like the next antagonist is someone who has a big grudge against the warrior of light for something they did in the past. the warrior of light has killed their fare share of people it's not out of the question that there might be people who want revenge on us.

[MoofiaBossVal]

I don't think this game needs to have villains like it was a shounen anime all of the time. Maybe we could get more non-action villains like Loloritto, or vague background villain circles like how the Forum was characterized in job questlines. Or maybe an expansion without a villain (you could still have real stakes in other ways).

I'm not sure I'd like a customizeable nemesis, as he would be restrained by FFXIV's extremely limited character creator and customization options. Half of the joy of playing a JRPG is the aesthetics so maybe a pre-designed character would be visually more interesting.

[TheMightyMollusk]

I'm already my own worst enemy.

[SeverianLyonesse]

What a fundamentally primitive and puerile proposal.

I object on many grounds, but the most important one I will cite is that this would likely plague the plot with far too much petty rival drama to survive unbiased scrutiny.

I.e., the story, this game's most praised feature (whether we agree with it or not), would absolutely TANK.