Would you have chosen a starting area where you could join the Empire?

[Lyth]

Starting in Ishgard, Ala Mhigo, Doma, or Corvos might be mildly interesting from a flavor perspective, but they'd probably be better off waiting until we're deeper in the story to explore those options. Garlemald itself is in ruins, so I don't see much point setting a brand new player up at a campfire in Camp Broken Glass. Perhaps after the restoration effort.

[Selvokaz]

Starting in Ishgard, Ala Mhigo, Doma, or Corvos might be mildly interesting from a flavor perspective, but they'd probably be better off waiting until we're deeper in the story to explore those options. Garlemald itself is in ruins, so I don't see much point setting a brand new player up at a campfire in Camp Broken Glass. Perhaps after the restoration effort.

The idea is that this is pre final days Empire, ie around the same time as ARR first starts from the player's point of view when you elect to start in one of the three city-states. You'd presumably select one of the provinces controlled by the empire and start there, and playing through events until such a point where you could defect to Eorzea and likely join up with one of the scions or one of the city-states armies.

[Vyrerus]

Idk, starting in the Empire seems like a bit of a stretch as cool as it would be. Like what happens to your WoL? They ship out believing in the Empire and then something happens to make them suddenly not want to be part of the Empire?

And while we could shoo away the Garlean's lack of aether manipulation, we can't shoo away the fact that Garleans in the Reaper questline have to hide their third eye for fear of persecution. I think it'd be a really unsatisfying experience, even more unsatisfying than playing Au Ra in the masked Yugiri cutscenes.

That all said though, I'd love to start as a fully fledged Ala Mhigan from Ala Mhigo.

If they were willing to put in plausible Garlean origins that lead us to Eorzea, as well as all of the extra tension A LOT of characters would have with us, then I'd be down for it overall I guess. That's a lot of reworks for one race though.

Adding Dragon Age Origins style starting quests does appeal to me.

[YianKutku]

Honestly, no. I don't actually mind if there's an option to do so for other people, but personally I'm just not that interested.

[Jagick]

That would've been an extremely bad idea and created a dynamic in the playerbase that I haven't seen any other MMO handle especially nicely, so I'm going to say that not only would I have not done that, but I wouldn't have played the game if they did.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but this sounds a lot like you're superimposing IRL politics onto a video game. It would be fine. Star Wars Galaxies let you join the Galactic Empire (a power notorious for mass genocide, eugenics, enslavement, and egregious mistreatment of all non-human races.) Roleplay servers tapped into these elements quite frequently and players got along just fine. Because it was a video game.

What's so bad about wanting to play (or roleplay as) the "bad guys?" It's fun and a refreshing change of pace from the sterile perfectly goodie two-shoes hero arcs. Or hell, it would be interesting playing AS the WoL hero despite being a believer in Garlemald. It would serve to humanize an otherwise very one dimensional faction. I find it hard to believe you'd have never played this game just because it was an option available to people.

[Necrotica]

I would love it is long as I could be loyal. None of that Battlefront 2 BS where you defect to the good guys.

Screw being the good guys. Let's genocide some beast men!

[Enkidoh]

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but this sounds a lot like you're superimposing IRL politics onto a video game. It would be fine. Star Wars Galaxies let you join the Galactic Empire (a power notorious for mass genocide, eugenics, enslavement, and egregious mistreatment of all non-human races.) Roleplay servers tapped into these elements quite frequently and players got along just fine. Because it was a video game.

What's so bad about wanting to play (or roleplay as) the "bad guys?" It's fun and a refreshing change of pace from the sterile perfectly goodie two-shoes hero arcs. Or hell, it would be interesting playing AS the WoL hero despite being a believer in Garlemald. It would serve to humanize an otherwise very one dimensional faction. I find it hard to believe you'd have never played this game just because it was an option available to people.

Because that is never what the FF series titles are about - the evil Empire is always the antagonists and you're always thrown in with the loose-knit resistance fighters rebelling against that, or a champion of light and goodness protecting your world from the forces that would destroy it (there are often shades of grey to that concept such as the somewhat shady aspects of Avalanche in FFVII or working with the more liberal or moderate aspects of the Archadian Empire in FFXII, but you're always still the champion of good and the people, and that will never change, it's a fundamental aspect of the FF series).

If you're actually expecting an 'Alliance or Horde' choice in an FF game then you are going to be forever disappointed because that will simply never occur here.

[Jagick]

Because that is never what the FF series titles are about - the evil Empire is always the antagonists and you're always thrown in with the loose-knit resistance fighters rebelling against that, or a champion of light and goodness protecting your world from the forces that would destroy it (there are often shades of grey to that concept such as the somewhat shady aspects of Avalanche in FFVII or working with the more liberal or moderate aspects of the Archadian Empire in FFXII, but you're always still the champion of good and the people, and that will never change, it's a fundamental aspect of the FF series).

If you're actually expecting an 'Alliance or Horde' choice in an FF game then you are going to be forever disappointed because that will simply never occur here.

Oh I absolutely do not expect it here at all. I do think it's an interesting concept and I just find it baffling that there are some people completely offended by the idea of playing as the bad guys or offended by anyone else wanting to.

[kaynide]

Assuming they decide to, at some point, start the game at 90 (aka the second main story ark), I don’t think it would be a bad idea to have Garlean survivors since essentially they are friendly-ish with the Eorzean Alliance. I don’t mean the empire as a whole, but the group rescued out of Garlemald itself.

Not that I think this will happen, but if it should, that makes a logical starting place of a character that was uninvolved with the events of 2.0 to 6.0

[Cleretic]

What's so bad about wanting to play (or roleplay as) the "bad guys?" It's fun and a refreshing change of pace from the sterile perfectly goodie two-shoes hero arcs. Or hell, it would be interesting playing AS the WoL hero despite being a believer in Garlemald. It would serve to humanize an otherwise very one dimensional faction. I find it hard to believe you'd have never played this game just because it was an option available to people.

So, there's two ways that this could go depending on how they'd take it. And for the most part I haven't really seen either of them be all too especially pleasant. (Warning: I'm gonna get pretty long here.)

Possibility A: Garlemald is made playable while also being explicitly villainous; basically, we get 'a bad guy faction'. I can't speak to Star Wars Galaxies, but I think the problems here are more akin to what you saw from some eras of World of Warcraft, and what I saw back in The Day on City of Heroes/Villains; people generally don't enjoy playing the bad guy, but that hits weird problems when the writers either listen to that and soften them, or make them the bad guy anyway. People have very different tolerances for how evil they want 'a playable bad guy' to be (I remember that two of City of Villains' least popular story arcs were because they were too heroic and too evil, respectively), and it's really hard to walk that tightrope. Again, for the most part people don't want to play that sort of character in full, and the people who do... well, look to the post below yours for why I generally worry about those people and don't much enjoy sharing a game with them.

Possibility B: Garlemald is made playable in a way that makes them morally equal to Eorzea; essentially, an opposed but different good guy faction. That's what you saw from... some other eras of World of Warcraft, but most of my experience with this actually comes from The Secret World. There you've got three playable factions, all of which are different kinds of morally grey and based on different kinds of secret society, which in theory is very cool; the Knights Templar and the Illuminati are ultimately just as bad as each other, but in very different ways. But my experience is that this, contrary to what you'd expect, breeds more animosity between factions. At least if you've got a faction of Actual Bad Guys, everyone knows who the problem people in the room are, and sometimes those people step up to the plate. But in my experience, if you go 'everyone is shades of grey' in an MMO setting, the main argument people gravitate to over time is to declare themselves The Good One, either by declaring their faction to be the moral best, the other faction(s) of being the moral worst, or by writing their character as participating in none of it. Specifically, on TSW the community largely gravitated to either A: Templars declaring themselves to be the moral superior (easily done because a big part of the Templars' form of control was 'look like the heroes and people will assume you are'), or B: opting out entirely and saying their character was non-factional. The people who wanted to actually play the political game were a severe minority.

On top of that, with either of these you face an issue of splintered playerbase. Remember how FFXIV has stopped doing ongoing job quests in part because they're a lot of work for only a small segment of the playerbase? That's also something that happens with faction-split MMOs; if you know that the majority of your playerbase is playing Faction A, why would you make content solely for Faction B? This was actually said directly by City of Heroes' devs; only about 20-30% of the playerbase regularly played villains, so there's just a lot less reason to play it. While never outright stated, the same problems hit The Secret World and led to them canning faction-specific content. I'd say this is a bigger issue for option B than A, because while you can let 'heroes and villains' sit without further commentary and people will get it, a faction conflict intended to be morally ambiguous stops working as intended once you stop giving people content.

So, yeah. I've seen this break bad in two different ways, and I wouldn't have bought FFXIV if they were doing those things. When it comes to an MMO (particularly one I intended to RP in), I prefer a game that puts everyone on the same side and lets us sort it out, and I'm sure you as someone on Balmung know that we very happily do that ourselves!

EDIT: And as for an example that hits closer to home, it also often screws over PvP. This one actually already happened in FFXIV, so we know it would've happened with a factional FFXIV; back before a change in Shadowbringers' patches, Frontlines was divided based on your character's actual grand company, but that led to a snowball effect where people who wanted to PvP would join the grand company that tended to win (usually Maelstrom), and avoid the company that tended to lose (always the Flames). That's actually present to an even worse degree if you make the factions qualitatively different; suddenly, the good guys always win because people usually want to play as them anyway. PvP was bunk in both CoH and TSW for that reason, the playerbases were skewed from minute one.