Thread: Can 7.0 focus on a storyline without the philosophizing

BTW Im going to ask what I asked Mr Art Critic Aveyond the OverLoud: how do you know what you want is what the players want? How do you know that the changes you suggest will be well received? How do you know what you want is what OTHERS want?

You DO NOT speak for the "majority", despite all the bleating we see here.

To go back to the earlier metaphor: you are in the restaurant telling the owner that your "new menu" is what the customers will want...when it could in fact have the direct opposite effect, you are in HIS business telling them "you know best" when in fact you have no way of knowing whether or not what you propose will even WORK? How do you know that your suggested changes are what others want?

How do you know that what you are demanding WONT cause the customers to go elsewhere? Clive Cussler didnt one day decide to go and kill off Dirk Pitt because "we should kill people off to make it interesting with a fresh cast", he was a successful novelist who KNEW because his books were all bestsellers that this is what his readers WANTED.

David Weber decided NOT to kill off Honor Harrington because he KNEW that wasnt what his readers wanted. Just the opposite. The setup and cast they have now in FF 14 are highly successful, and outside this little echo chamber NO ONE here knows whether or not what THEY think is good for the game...will actually be just that.

You DONT know for certain. Admit it.

All I see here is "this is what I think will work"..did it ever occur to any of you that you could be WRONG?

If that hasnt occurred to you, maybe you should.

Originally Posted by VelKallor

You DO NOT speak for the "majority", despite all the bleating we see here.

You say this, and yet you have the hubris to assume that you do. In your absolute failure of a metaphor that you keep insisting on pushing, you're a Karen that yells at people in an attempt to try and suppress opinions that you don't agree with because you find their very utterance offensive. You pretend that some invisible majority agrees with you because you know that your rants could never stand on their own legs as logical arguments. Odd that you would feel the need to do so in such an angry and defensive manner if such opinions were coming from mere 'malcontents'.

Kindly cease and desist.

Originally Posted by TheDecay

The story has thus become predictable. If there are a bunch of soldiers who hate your guts trying to kill you, out of misunderstanding, we already know what will happen: Alphinaud will say "hold your steel", and we won't kill them. Y'shtola might chime in and explain why they have the misunderstanding. We will fight them but not kill them. We will knock them out. They will then recover and stand up, and the writers now have two choices: to make these soldiers come to our side and stay stubborn. Because the writers require that their philosophy wins out, these soldiers will come to our side eventually. Maybe one or two won't, and will get cleaned off either by dying or becoming a villain and then dying, but the vast majority would. So these soldiers are going to stand up and ask "why didn't you kill us" and now the table is set for Alphinaud to espouse his pacifist philosophy for the ten thousandth time.

This is so accurate that it's sad.

Originally Posted by AwesomeJr44

You say this, and yet you have the hubris to assume that you do. In your absolute failure of a metaphor that you keep insisting on pushing, you're a Karen that yells at people in an attempt to try and suppress opinions that you don't agree with because you find their very utterance offensive. You pretend that some invisible majority agrees with you because you know that your rants could never stand on their own legs as logical arguments. Odd that you would feel the need to do so in such an angry and defensive manner if such opinions were coming from mere 'malcontents'.

Kindly cease and desist.



This is so accurate that it's sad.

Predictable? Who here by a show of hands predicted Zodiark would be our first trial? Maybe Hyd being our 2nd. Who here predicted Endsinger would even be a thing or that msq would revolve heavily around themes of nihilism?Who predicted that Zenos would become Shinryu once again and travel the stars to aid us? Who predicted Fandaniel was Amon? Who predicated we'd have a friendly battle with Venat? Hell who predicted Elpis? Like I could ask a hundred of these.

To sit and act Ike everything is oh so predictable is so weird to me. What do you expect us to just start wiping people out who don't agree with us or something? We've always sided more on diplomacy and it'd be jarring if that started to no longer be the case. I'd much rather have consistent characters rather than ones that flip flop at the drop of a hat. BUT thats also why I welcome new ones. I'm at a point where I feel many of yall just want/need a new game

Originally Posted by IkaraGreydancer

Predictable? Who here by a show of hands predicted Zodiark would be our first trial? Maybe Hyd being our 2nd. Who here predicted Endsinger would even be a thing or that msq would revolve heavily around themes of nihilism?Who predicted that Zenos would become Shinryu once again and travel the stars to aid us? Who predicted Fandaniel was Amon? Who predicated we'd have a friendly battle with Venat? Hell who predicted Elpis? Like I could ask a hundred of these.

To sit and act Ike everything is oh so predictable is so weird to me. What do you expect us to just start wiping people out who don't agree with us or something? We've always sided more on diplomacy and it'd be jarring if that started to no longer be the case. I'd much rather have consistent characters rather than ones that flip flop at the drop of a hat. BUT thats also why I welcome new ones. I'm at a point where I feel many of yall just want/need a new game

None of it is predictable. People will be given a foreshadow of something two levels before an event or four quests before it. Then reply with, I knew it! Saw this coming! Even though the foreshadow was only made predictable literally 4 quests ago.

Originally Posted by TheDecay

I should note that no sane person would actually disagree with many of the morals that the game preaches. The problem is that it creates bad writing and is extremely uninteresting and frankly unconvincing. Many of the moral dilemmas set up in ARR have been slowly whitted away, such as the city states' war and racism against the beast tribes. But those dilemmas are good writing. Your philosophy is hollow if there are no dilemmas and implementing it is straightforward and trivial. It's why we don't consider breathing oxygen a philosophy, but we consider eating only plant-based food a philosophy.

Well put. There is quite often agreement on what things constitute desirable or good things. That isn't necessarily what makes morality quite hard. It's the fact that it's not always straightforward to overcome human frailties (cui bono, incentives and past grievances both being big ones), to agree on interpretation of a scenario, to even identify the boundaries of what constitutes a moral agent, the degree to which tradition/past practice of what worked vs "reasoned out" approaches should hold sway, and also that you're often balancing conflicting priorities or 'goods'. And of course in some cases there just is disagreement over what is the good, without that meaning people holding these dissonant views do so out of malice. All of that can be a source of conflict even where an ideal is agreed upon. When it's just straightforward imposition of a moral code, in the way you describe (the way the beast tribe conflict was put on ice is emblematic of it), it's not particularly interesting, and you can add to that the occurrence of broken aesops in XIV ("this looks like that, so it's the same!", sometimes relying on the shallowest of parallels to make a "point".) You really need to be willing to include active back and forth and reasonable counter-arguments both within the Scions and from groups opposing them to make this kind of conflict not just amount to a form of moral bulldozing through any troubles that get in the way. Otherwise it's just a form of preaching.