[suggestion] Can we have impactful Dialogue Choices?

[znushu]

There are already games with this feature for there mmos like Swtor and it's a feature that's praised by the community over there. So I'm suggesting to add impactful Dialogue Choices instead of the faux types we have now which changes nothing.

Dialogue Choices like this one which changes both the lore and how the world sees your character would be great to have.


so please can we have Impactful Dialogue Choices, yoshida? please?

[Jojoya]

You mean it's praised by what little community is left over there. I know a lot of people that drifted away from SWTOR because those choices kept them from playing with friends who wanted to make different choices. The only thing left they could do together was the occasional raid and they didn't find that satisfying.

I'll leave the impactful quest choices to the single player games that I also like to play. I'm fine with a static story in MMORPGs so I can play together with my family and friends, and have a discussion about the shared experience instead of spoilers about what happened for them instead of me.

[Asari5]

by impactful you mean to be able to kill a npc who would disappear anyway?

i liked swtor, but the decisions werent really that impactful


i wouldnt say no to something like this but i dont see a lot to gain from it

[smashBG]

I'm not sure how much the game would actually benefit from dialogue trees and branching storylines. It's one of those features that you have to REALLY commit to, or else it just feels half-baked- and that's to say nothing of the technical work required to make it happen. Personally, I think a linear story with occasional dialogue options that exist purely for flavor is fine for an MMO.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Even games built around dialogue trees and choices can't always pull it off well. Shoehorning it into a ten-year-old game like this would never work out well.

[Supersnow845]

It would be nice if even if nothing changed the major story characters actually sorta responded to a set of choices you made

Like if you make it obvious you don’t really support wuk lamat or are uninteresting in the conflict she could become cold towards you, the story wouldn’t change though since wuk still needs you but she doesn’t have to like you so to speak

It would be a nice change over everyone agreeing you are an incredibly powerful and loveable if somewhat dopey dependable companion who’s always willing to help

It’s about the only thing good about garlemald, it was fantastic seeing how the garleans reacted to the WOL who they saw as an evil monster who crushed their empire by proxy and led to the current situation

[Fawkes]

It would be nice if even if nothing changed the major story characters actually sorta responded to a set of choices you made

They started doing this in Shadowbringers. It's mostly just the comic relief choice though, like saying Kupo to Thancred or getting mean looks from Y'shtola.

[Chasingstars]

The dialogue options is for the journey of your personal experience, not for the destination. The only way you would get that in ffxiv is if it was side content where that was the express purpose, a microcosm of something like fallout new vegas if you will.

[GrizzlyTank]

Reminds me of a certain "Meaningful choice" discussion from wow...

All in all it doesn't work in a game like FFXIV. The story is too linear and we stick with our characters for so long that they'd have to include options to swap notable choices or make them not notable to begin with.

Also the mass effect trilogy is a 100 hour experience combined (main + sides). Each FFXIV expansion is 50-100 hours of story with hundreds more for side content, which isn't exactly feasible to "replay" to get different experiences.

[Fyrebrand]

After 10 years of ultra-linear MSQ, there's actually a certain comfort in knowing our dialogue choices simply do not matter and won't change anything significant. They've been consistent about this through the entire game, and if they were to break this rule even once it would make players paranoid about every decision. Every time an NPC asks you anything, people would stop to go check a wiki or ask on Reddit what will happen if they pick A, B, or C. Especially if the choices did make a big impact or even gave you a slightly different reward for the quest. Players would be upset if they felt they picked "wrong."

I like what they did in the Variant Dungeons, where you can pick a path, and even within a single path you can do things that change the ending or even change the end boss's behaviour. But that system works because you can always go back and replay the dungeon and do things differently. If they put that into MSQ, you'd realistically only ever see the one path you picked and it would be as if the rest of it didn't exist. I guess if you wanted to you could do New Game+ and run it again, but most people won't do it and I'd rather the devs put their efforts toward stuff that matters for everybody.