It Hydaelyn sundered herself, why doesn't First Hydaelyn handle the flood of light?

[Cleretic]

I think a lot of people would do well to remember that FFXIV isn't written in the same way as any other FF game but XI, and hasn't been since, if we're going to be completely honest, somewhere in 2010. Writing for a live service game requires a fundamentally different approach that's more akin to a long-running comic book or manga than anything else; because you can't perfectly predict where the future will go, and you can't easily edit what's already out there, a key part of the writing involves rewiring the parts of the story that were already there to serve the story that you're telling now. The fact that they're doing so isn't a failing of anything or anyone, because a story outline that exists across ten years and multiple writers is inevitably going to change, be refined, and be influenced by newer (and you would hope largely better) ideas.

I think the way that XIV did it with the Zodiark and Hydaelyn story especially was extremely smart, because they used it to accentuate the parts of characters that were needed for the story to work: namely, their flaws. Hydaelyn's info was unreliable because she's been hiding uncomfortable truths and acts for twelve thousand years for a greater good that she can only hope happens. The Scions' info wasn't always accurate because a core part of their story has always been to learn, to become better people with a greater understanding of others. And the Ascians went through more transformations of writer's intent than we can probably count, as they transformed from megalomaniacal monsters to, essentially, horribly broken people trying to bring back an idyllic past that they didn't truly understand.

Could you possibly write a form of FFXIV's story where all of the 'final forms' of those characters were present from the start? Yeah, probably. But the nature of a game like XIV is that they just can't edit those earlier chapters, so those refinements instead have to be written to work with those earlier ideas. And I think a crucial element of what makes all of it work is that they respect what came before, even as they reframe it: Hydaelyn's previous statements are never thrown in the dirt and rejected, even as they're shown to be lies, partially because they're shown to have elements of the truth. I actually think the best example of this is Lahabrea; it would've been so easy to just dismiss him as a completely unhinged raving lunatic who's lost touch with everything just so that we could easily dismiss his whole rant, and other writers might well have done that. But instead they went to great lengths to show how he got to that point, and to give him elements of truth that we can trace.

All that is to say, I hardly think that being able to recognize when something's changed is a flaw of anything. It just means that you can recognize how the game is written.

[AnimaAnimus]

I think a lot of people would do well to remember that FFXIV isn't written in the same way as any other FF game but XI, and hasn't been since, if we're going to be completely honest, somewhere in 2010. Writing for a live service game requires a fundamentally different approach that's more akin to a long-running comic book or manga than anything else; because you can't perfectly predict where the future will go, and you can't easily edit what's already out there, a key part of the writing involves rewiring the parts of the story that were already there to serve the story that you're telling now. The fact that they're doing so isn't a failing of anything or anyone, because a story outline that exists across ten years and multiple writers is inevitably going to change, be refined, and be influenced by newer (and you would hope largely better) ideas.

I would argue that XIV and XI are not written in the same way at all. XIV has had a running narrative with the same protagonists and antagonists from day 1. XI on the other hand was a collection of stories that shared a world but outside a camio here and there, were not really related to one another at all, Rhapsodies being the exception of course. Each individual expac could be a seperate game in and of itself and lose absoutely nothing.

One of the things that, imo, holds XIV back is the fact that is has a running narrative. They do not let us see the world for ourselves because the same group of scholars is whispering in our ears the entire time, informing us of the world the way they see it. We do not get to leave our little bubble at all really, so they have to change and retcon and act like things never happened, like all those minor ascians that just disappeared suddenly. In XI that was not the case for a large majority of the game. We got to know about the Far East through the eyes of ppl from the far East. We got to know the times of the crystal war through the eyes of the ppl who experienced it. They didn't have to do a lot of retconning because the narrative was different and a lot of things that we were experiencing were sometimes taking place in new areas, with new ppl, new lore and new everything, allowing them to tell new stories without taking away from what was. They were also not scared to get really dark while maintaining that hope exists and should be held dear. The end of days in XI would have looked incredibly different than just a handful or 2 of fights in some far off land we had never been to before that we deal with alongside of the same few npcs we have been dealing with things with since the beginning. The same NPCs who are telling us exactly what is going on because theirs is the only way we are allowed to see the world of XIV. The story telling is night and day between the two games, and saying they are on the same level is an incredible disservive...to XI.