[Suggestions] Making the world more immersive through Guildleves

[solracht]

I thought of making this thread after reading this one in the General forums: http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...ture-of-Eorzea

The Original Post sums up the motivation behind suggesting these changes.


NOTE:I'm warning you now: this post speaks purely of "cosmetic" and "immersion" changes. There's nothing actually related to gameplay, experience points, skill points, difficulty, or anything of the sort. As such, I'm not expecting anything like this to happen anytime soon. That's understandable.


The storytelling in guildleves is not only lackluster, but the stories themselves feel made up on the spot: the locations the guildleves talk about simply don't exist most of the time, the NPCs mentioned are not anywhere to be found, and this makes them feel random and pointless.

This hurts the way the world feels, as Guildleves (content which you do every day) are about nothing more than random enemies you spawn in a seemingly random location, for no reason at all.

Guildleves, to me, feel detached from the rest of the game world.

Two things to keep in mind:

-There's enough storyline in every Guildleve to make them feel integrated into the world. Some of them deal with very mundane tasks, and while they won't be interesting with this change, it'll definitely help with how you feel while doing them.

-The world has little to no interesting landmarks. The areas feel repetitive, as there's nothing but rock, grass and desert everywhere. Guildleves take you all over the world, and can help to get rid of this problem. As I said, right now it feels like you are spawning enemies in random locations. We need to take the "random" out.


[Suggestions]

Suggestion #1: Instead of giving a bunch of examples to explain this, I took the map of East La Noscea and edited a few things in. The following picture should get the point across:

PICTURE, CLICK ME

As you can see, simply reading the guildleve text and adding the right NPCs, buildings, and objects can drastically change a lot of corners in Eorzea, while making the guildleves feel like they're part of the world. If the development team has time later on, I would like to encourage them to do this.

Some locations used for guildleve objectives overlap right now, but moving them a little shouldn't be a problem.


Suggestion #2: Not all guildleves need to be flagged at the Aetheryte. Some of them could be flagged at their respective buildings/NPCs, after being lectured about the situation by the NPCs there.

I think adding good NPC framework would definitely help: being told by the farmer himself that he's glad we picked up his guildleve at the counter as he sends us off to kill the pests that are overrunning his farm (again) would definitely feel better than reading 5 paragraphs of text to know what's going on.

We can keep the option to teleport back to the Aetheryte after the guildleve is over. These changes shouldn't alter the gameplay or the time it takes to do guildleves.


Remember to "Like" this post if you would like to see something like this implemented eventually. As mentioned at the beginning, these are mostly cosmetic and immersive changes. They would be pointless without the needed rebalancing of Guildleves so most of them are worth doing... but that's for a different thread.

Thanks for reading, and let me know if anything needs to be clarified, as English is not my first language and I may have missed some funny sentences.

EDIT: After having done most of our current Side-quests, I think I'd like to extend these suggestions to Sidequests aswell. Talk about "random enemies spawning". They could definitely use some NPC and buildingsl context too.

[Munba]

These are nice suggestions. I love to be immersed into the world and lore and i think this would be an interesting addition in the "bring eorzea to life" development.

I think you should link this topic in the above mentioned thread, for more visibility.

[solracht]

I think you should link this topic in the above mentioned thread, for more visibility.

I tried that but unfortunately it didn't seem to work out as we expected. I'll probably repost it in the General forums eventually.