Are MMOs and storytelling incompatible?

[anhaato]

I guess this is a different take on the usual "everything is being dumbed down and I hate it" threads popping up lately, but there's a very clear reason content and playstyle nerfs are taking place, as well as the push for solo playability; they want to make the story experience smoother for new players. If jobs have a low skill floor, these new players no longer need to work too hard to hold up against better or more experienced players as they go through content and they can get the story much more easily.

This, I believe, illustrates why very few MMOs have ever tried a story-heavy model, and even less have succeeded. When it comes to battle content in MMOs, the success usually depends on the participation from all parties involved. When failures happen too many times in a single duty, given that it isn't endgame content, people will grow impatient and leave, and the new player who was struggling to perform is set back to square one and not able to continue with the story. Compare this to a single player game, in which whenever you die it only affects you and how many lives you have. You can get back up and try again without wasting anyone else's time, and do that as much as you need to before you clear it.

Initially the game wasn't really affected by this disconnect; back in the days of Heavensward, when the game was more niche, people were ok with jobs being the glorious messes they were, like SMN being able to place 4 dots or every job wanting to level archer for raging strikes. But then 2017 came, and the playerbase growth started to rapidly pick up. Because of this, the number of casual players greatly increased, and jobs were being streamlined in response. Some jank was still there, and while I honestly believe job design was just fine back then (sue me), there were still some jobs that needed some decluttering or there were people demanding it regardless. Square is catering to casuals before anyone else, everyone can see it, so that's how we reached this point after the massive player boom of 2021. By now I think the incompatibility between MMO format and single player story is too much to overcome at this point. No matter how they try to flatten the learning curve, there are always going to be players who don't know how to play near-optimally, or who actively refuse to do so and would rather be lazy or just outright grief.

Honestly, this game and its story would make a killer single player game, like a traditional Final Fantasy. It could even go the route of FFXV, the world is just so vibrant and could make a great open world setting. And honestly, at first I believe they were intending to replicate that with the ARR zones, with fates and instanced dungeons instead of overworld bosses and treasure gauntlets, but they promptly gave up on it as soon as HW came around. Their zone philosophy notably shifted from the world being where the action takes place to a narrative device. If we could revisit Eorzea in a future FF game, like how we got to revisit Ivalice, I'd be so down.

[MiaShino]

By now I think the incompatibility between MMO format and single player story is too much to overcome at this point. No matter how they try to flatten the learning curve, there are always going to be players who don't know how to play near-optimally, or who actively refuse to do so and would rather be lazy or just outright grief.

The issue is not story here the issue is selfish oft needy behavior from groups of persons who feel that failure is not option. I must succeed on first try or game is holding me back from getting what I want, the story. Yup yup you wiped, and? Now get back in there then apply what you learned. Oh you wiped again, no problemo! Was once common for interactive media to be welp, interactive.

What you have is plethora of companies attempting to fist feed video games to crowd that would better be served by passive entertainment such as movies or books.

[CrownySuccubus]

It's not "incompatible", but every business model focused on maximal profits will have a hard limit on what sort of story can be told. The parts of Endwalker players hated, for example (the time sinks at Bestways Burrow and Labyrinthos 2, for example) can be directly blamed on FFXIV's business model to "waste" as much of the player's time as possible. There's also other factors, such as the attempts to make "marketable mascots" like the Loporritz, and the milking of fan-favorite Emet-Selch during the Elpis stoyline), but they still managed to squeeze in a pretty decently-told story.

I mean, I have my issues with Endwalker's plot on its own merits, but it's still a fairly decent story.

The issue is not story here the issue is selfish oft needy behavior from groups of persons who feel that failure is not option. I must succeed on first try or game is holding me back from getting what I want, the story. Yup yup you wiped, and? Now get back in there then apply what you learned.

Given what I said above about how much the story wastes your time, I'm not surprised that people get upset about wipes.

Nothing worse than spending 3 hours trying to get to the next dungeon, then having to spend another hour because somebody keeps failing mechanics, and then just abandoning and going to bed, knowing you still didn't even finish.

[Faafetai]

To answer you main question no they are not incompatible because an mmo usually has a story. The trick would be I suppose with the way this game is going to just separate the two. It was kind of like that in swtor, but there was zero end game content in there. That game was amazing. It was super fun. The story was miles ahead of everything even with its shortcomings. Just the fact that you and 4 others could effect a story or a conversation was amazing and replay able. Each time someone else could win the dice roll and get to say a different option and some of the flashpoints would give you alternate routes with different bosses. The fact they have just changed things to be solo player instances mean they do not want the mmo portion to be the center point for their sales. Many came here for an mmo, there are not many still alive really.

[LisSquid]

A little of column a and b?

One of the things popping up now (that wasn't much of an issue before) is the length of the new player experience. We are aware of the streamers who have blasted through ARR to join us in EW (when they joined late ShB), but these are people playing for a job - not reflective of the average new player who will be spending a lot more time chewing through past expansions.

As time goes on, and new expansions bring us more story, that also means SE is balancing jobs around the capped end. People who have played for a while know new skills come at the cost of skills at the lower level bracket which makes early-to-mid gameplay feel extremely sparse. Hell, I refuse to play RPR below level 90 just because its toolkit feels like stepping on several missing stairs until the lategame. This, to me, is going to be the make it or break it point for the next gen of players. "ARR is a slog" is what gets thrown around a lot, but do we really just mean the MSQ?

The MSQ, as a story with its pacing, is perfectly fine! That isn't the issue. What makes it hard to have the cake and eat it is that "dumbing down" the early game, when the early game continues to become longer than ever imagined, results in a poor experience. I can pick up a regular RPG and after about 20min start feeling just as increasingly powerful as the challenges put in front of me. That's usually the mark where the intro/tutorial falls off, but the tutorial doesn't currently seem to fall off until Kugane Castle (imho, which is generous. I just have heard from recent new players that this is when they stopped falling asleep at their desk).

This is where the solo and group player both suffer. Neither the solo or group player is being given the full experience of content to engage them. You can have a story driven MMO with great success. Else we wouldn't be on the FFXIV forums right now. SE needs to address how their scaling system works, and figure out how to make job kits make sense earlier in the game.


Edit because a misclick ate a paragraph that I will summarize:

It's hard to have a story driven mmo that has impact when you approach a god with 2 buttons of value, and it falls over with a wet fart. SE can do a little numbers magic and retooling of kits to make every step of the MSQ feel as good as it did when it was fresh.

edit edit because it ate another??:

A lot of the disconnect comes from the issues I illustrated above: nothing in the early game prepares you for when things do require you to rise to the challenge. If the MSQ experience was an incline and not a sharp (if we can call it that at this point, but imho with how little the ARR-SB msq requires of you..) increase in mechanical awareness, then you'd have a lot less people upset when they hit that content. It wouldn't be anything they hadn't seen before, and they'd be properly prepared for it.

MMOs and linear narratives can co-exist.

[MiaShino]

Given what I said above about how much the story wastes your time, I'm not surprised that people get upset about wipes.

Could offer whooooole fricken chunk of replies to this for myself annnnd the extended family.

Early Stormblood Rhalgr's Reach was absolute chore to sit through and evidently so fricken bad I suppressed it. Listened to much ranting from two friends who recently made it there, will never forget her quote; "I'm gonna punch this dumb kid" said to Alphy.

Every. Single. Time. the game forces you to interact with objects for needlessly long.

Quests that involve telewarping around all of Eorzea.

Anytime five quest npcs are standing in same room yet you must speak with each instead of doing so through one cutscene. Kinda stoopid..

Footprint hunting can go space its self, stop doing this.

The sheer number of quests that send you out into spot that is conveniently equidistant from every Aetheryte only to kill one or two simple enemies.

Everything involving the Crystal Braves. By the Twelve ARR needs some help. 90% of the quests could be deleted today and it would change very little about the story. Example; The escort the scientist for mister Bolder quest. No one so far has not become irate at this quest.

Job Quests and mediocre job stories that do not even act as tutorials for the job you are playing. Nothing interrupts the flow of adventuring like stop and do four job quests that no longer even give skills due to pruning.

Everything that has anything to do with Ala Mhigo. They are just umm.. just not that interesting. Every quest involving them bored me to tears and at the times caused feist. Will never ever forget a scene where the empire called them savages and they proceed to attempt stoning a child to death.

Countless pointless segways into sub-plots that have little to do with main plot. Seriously, these tangents go on so long that you occasionally forget which plot is even the main plot anymore.

As can play in Japanese or English (I have JP voices but English text so can see the difference for translation) the English. The verbose way everyone insists on speaking tries my patience. Talk talk talk blah blah blah some characters need fifteen paragraphs to say hello. Other times (accepting jobs anyone?) you are given long winded speech about entire history of something. Show do not tell works but all some do is tell. This is different in JP where character might only say "I disagree" while spewing forth two paragraphs in English.

Prompts defaulting to No then asking you yes or no multiple fricken times. Why the heck did the NPC just give me the entire history of the Arcanist guild then require I speak with them again so they could ask if I really really truly wish to join. Then speak with them again to obtain quest to speak with person six yalms away.

Areas broken up into multiple zones without reason. Go into the waking sands > now go into the solar > now leave the solar > now leave the waking sands. It is faster to telewarp to a friend!

Can absolutely understand why wiping in some easy dungeon after enduring two hours of tour de Eorzea might send someone into tilt city. Now if the content were more engaging.. which there is nothing stopping them from doing. Gunbreaker first quest? Sage final quest? Scholar quests? Summoner boss battles? They are plenty capable of not boring players.

[CrownySuccubus]

Also gonna add most "X character is following you" moments. The only one that was done right was the last one with the twins. The rest of them (You and Emet chasing Meteion are the worst offenders You and G'raha Tia investigating the Blasphemies) were just wastes of time.

There's also the "stealth" quests.

[Broken_Wind]

I guess this is a different take on the usual "everything is being dumbed down and I hate it" threads popping up lately, but there's a very clear reason content and playstyle nerfs are taking place, as well as the push for solo playability; they want to make the story experience smoother for new players. If jobs have a low skill floor, these new players no longer need to work too hard to hold up against better or more experienced players as they go through content and they can get the story much more easily.

Trying to tone down the bloat in combat is not a new player or story topic.

Its more of a game that goes after a large audience issue.

Some people find long complex rotations fun, others find it tedious.

People like to use SMN as the poster child, but they also took a very smooth class with an intuitive rotation and turned it into a more complex class (MNK)
So I don't think everything is as one sided as people make it out to be.

I don't like the changes they are making. SMN feels better to me now, but it changes the gameplay completely. I hate new Monk. I see no reason to remove that ability from SAM. The overpower change was not needed and I preferred the cone.

But I see people blaming things like 'story' or 'controllers' (the latter of which is ridiculous because button bloat is probably a bigger issue for keyboard players without an MMO mouse than it is for controller players) when these changes are fairly common in the genre, especially for an older game.

Combat is only a small part of what makes an MMORPG an MMORPG. Story and MMORPG are absolutely compatible.

[Illmaeran]

I don't think they're at all incompatible. It's more a factor of proportion and how integrated the two are. WoW and ESO had an overarching story, but the player wasn't as involved in it as say, LoTRO and XIV. It also depends on peoples' tastes. I personally love the amount of story XIV has and how it's integrated into all aspects of the core game. The fact that there are/were multiplayer-required elements was something I appreciated, likely because I don't care about wipes and optimizing efficiency. That being said, I believe the increased amount of solo play access for the MSQ is a fantastic thing as it allows people to progress in the story on their own terms while also being able to interact with the community if they choose.

No, I didn't just contradict myself. The increase in solo play opportunity allows the player to determine how integrated the multiplayer aspects of the game are during their progression through the story. The multiplayer elements of the MSQ in my opinion enhance rather than detract from the experience, but I'm playing this game because it's a story-based RPGMMO, not an MMO with a coating of story to justify the RPG element.

As far as the streamlining of jobs, I don't think that's an issue of story v. MMO, I think it's simply how a lot of games are headed these days. Ease of play isn't related to story, but it is related to an MMO. It makes financial sense to make game play as smooth and low on the frustration factor as possible to appeal to the widest crowd as possible. I quit raiding in WoW (right before Icecrown in Wrath) and LoTRO because of the skill bloat and (to me) difficult rotation requirements. If it hadn't been for other aspects of the game, I'd have quit them both then and there. Since the jobs in XIV are more manageable I've stuck around for a long time and even enjoy normal raiding. If the job difficulty had remained at, or even more than, Heavensward levels, I would probably have played through the MSQ, leveled gatherers and crafters then unsubbed until a few months before the next expansion. As it is, I play almost daily and enjoy nearly every minute of it.

As Elden Ring's so profoundly shown, single player games are where story and difficulty shine. MMOs and difficulty don't get along very well anymore these days.


I think every video game player should have to play through one of the old Konami side-scrollers originally designed for arcades before moving on. That will teach you how to deal with frustration over getting killed often and easily.

[Rhysati]

No, absolutely not. Story and MMORPGs go together wonderfully when it is done well. A great example is the game that FFXIV borrows heavily from in a lot of areas: Lord of the Rings Online.

LotRO was the game that originated housing districts for player housing so that you'd have neighborhoods. The FFXIV housing districts are nearly identical copies of the concept. But more importantly, LotRO was the first MMORPG that I am aware of that had a main story questline. This was something MMORPGs didn't do prior to that, but LotRO did it very well.

The main story quests in LotRO took you from quest hub to quest hub and brought you along on a journey through the world. And then you'd do the quests at those hubs(unlike here where more of us ignore any sidequests that don't give us something we need like aether currents) before moving on to the next main quest down the road. And most importantly, it didn't actively lock you out of content or stop you from doing whatever it is you wanted to do.

That's where FFXIV's questing has made a grave error. The main story would be fantastic in and of itself if it wasn't a long, painful slog that only the most hardcore fans care about so much. It actively prevents you from doing things you want to do when you want to do them. Everything is locked behind progression of that storyline and this is where we run into so many problems.

If a new player just wants to level up, do dungeons, play with their friends, etc and don't care about the story? The game should let them do that. And if someone(me in this case) is working on an alternate character and doesn't want to experience the entirety of the story again in order to do all the things I want to do? I shouldn't have to.

Stories in MMORPGs can be fantastic. LotRO, Guild Wars1&2, SWTOR, The Secret World, etc all did it just fine. FFXIV's story just gets in the way of playing the game itself. That's the major problem.