Thematic issues. Why all the sci fi.

[Voryn]

It doesn't make sense when said society is friendly and yet people keep choosing to live in their backwards ways instead of advancing technologically with the rest of the world. To this day there are still people training to use muskets in Limsa when obviously superior technology and guns are widely available.

And we have Turali people developing steam trains when they have the people of solution 9 flying carriers despite people moving between the two places at will. ANY rational person would be like. You know what? Maybe we should be working on that.

But nah, they'll spend the next 10 years ignoring all the advancements in mobility in front of their faces to keep riding buffalo and making crude locomotives.

And yet somehow............... We are going to go to other worlds to developing them and restart life. But nobody is developing our own? Like hello?

It does seem like people are slow to adapt, even when it would make sense to do so. Koana’s goal early on was to introduce Sharlayan technology to Tuliyollal after all, and it wasn’t something that was just immediately accepted by everyone with open arms. In the Machinist quests we see people even afraid of technology, as the knights worry about how the introduction of firearms will affect social status as commoners can arm themselves. Outside of the lore, there probably won’t be big changes to the existing areas because this is a game where the differences to each zone over time would only ever be really minor, and combat with swords can’t just stop existing. There’s real life examples of people being slow to adopt new technologies as well.

But I’m personally not finding this game’s introduction of the “sci fi” aesthetic to be strange when considering the context. To me the main offenders are Solution 9 (from a different shard) and anything involving Loporrits (an ancient, advanced, and isolated group) so they make sense. The sci fi aesthetic can show up in other Final Fantasy games. From the ones I’ve played FF8 has Esthar, and Stranger of Paradise has the areas in its third dlc. It makes sense for someone to not like the aesthetic though since it’s so jarring compared to everything else.

[Luluya]

I find the sci-fi elements far less jarring or immersion breaking than the modern fashion and pop culture collaborations that they seem to keep shoving in.

[Valence]

What bothers me with Everkeep is less its appearance out of nowhere, if anything i'm a huge sucker for Star Ocean type stories with a big clash between advanced civilizations and lower end cultures, and it generates a lot of good themes to work on. And that's exactly what I'd like and expect SE to do after such events. They did that with Magitek actually in the earlier stages of the game's world evolution, with an industrializing Eorzea, it was the whole point behind the Ironworks for instance. There was also the Allagan digs that kept fueling the story regularly, with Carteneau, Dalamud, Omega, Ragnarok class spaceships, and the Heimdall ones crashed on the moon (which confirms that what we knew since the beginning, Allag was a space faring civilization already, but how far did they go?). We've seen multiple attempts at integrating science fiction elements and new technologies into the lives of everybody, but the most that Eorzea for instance has been able to do has been with Magitek, because Magitek is a technology that is understood and can be replicated (only to an extent). This isn't for example the case of Allagan aetherochemistry, which is way too advanced to comprehend, and the little that people do comprehend, they can hardly reproduce due to the lack of technological basis to do so (go back into the industrial age and ask them to replicate modern day microprocessors and we'll see how well they can do that with the industrial basis that they have). To me Everkeep/Alexandria is very little different, it's just another advanced civilization that took a slightly different route than Allag, but ultimately had all the same imperialistic needs, just for different reasons.

Sharlayan being able to build a full spaceship just like that though? It was a hard buy for me, even with Loporrit help, and to this day I consider this completely fueled by plotanium because they wanted an epic spaceship to reach the ends of space, and didn't think it through that much (which to be fair, isn't exactly uncommon in Final Fantasy games). I'd have liked them to put a bit more care behind the construction of this spaceship ark in Endwalker actually, like, for instance, having it being made actually on the moon? You know, it makes even more sense because all the loporit tech is there, they have teleporters to transport materials and supplies there, and it's probably a lot less hungry on fuel to take off from the moon than the planet's gravity itself... But well. This to show that, I am not insensitive to having a cohesive vision for it. I'm happy and expecting the writers to consider the impacts of the introduction of such things, and how it clashes with society over time. But again, for the reasons mentioned above, it's not done in a day, and even the Magitek industrialization has been happening over the past decades now and i'm happy to see it's also being expanded and used in the New World for trains and ceruleum extraction among other things.

With this mindset this is exactly the thought process i'd expect them to follow with cosmic exploration. I just hope they double down on exploring those themes and making them feel realistic (as in, sensical), though. Just introducing it without much care for what it implies would indeed make it stick like a sore thumb.

[Asari5]

the time bubble thing is just something we have to accept. not a fan of it either but there is no way around it.
making certain npc age would be the easiest but they still would have to create new models for them.
then all these places we have been to? destroied by war, filled with rubble and terrible living conditions?
a lot of work to clean that all up for the few people who would go there for a few screendhots. as much as i would like that its not worth the cost.
the whole world developing alongside new discovered tech? they would have to create way too many new models for stuff thats kinda limsa but also high tech.


that whole fantasy vs science fiction though... well i am clearly team fantasy. the only science fiction i really ever like was star wars.
medieval fantasy on the other hand is my everything in fiction.
i know final fantasy isnt pure medieval fantasy... never has been so im not gonna write too much about that.

what pains me though is how we never really got an amazing european medieval place. we have grey, cold, dark ishgard and the thing closest to a medieval village is the place with the chocobo hunters.... and then we have these amazing looking places in the golbez dungeon and alexandria. i love the look of them so damn much.. sadly they are only dungeons

[Jeeqbit]

In an expansion with a brand new continent full of ancient traditions, monsters and ruins to explore... Why do the developers of this game keep derailing into scifi

The answer is because the developers have never confined themselves to a single genre like many other games do. This is likely because Final Fantasy itself, as a series, has often strayed away from tranditional fantasy into scifi and time travel. We have FF's that travel to the moon, to alien worlds, to other dimensions, to other time periods.

This has a lot of benefits. It opens them up to additional themes, which can help shake things up. People may get tired of seeing the same genre always, after all.

It also seems like it is allowing them to try and grab some of the scifi MMO market, who may like scifi clothing and areas to hang in. It's not really that big of a problem for people who don't like it, because in the long term, they can just avoid the scifi areas. It just creates those areas for people who enjoy that aesthetic.

It's not personally my aesthetic, for the most part - cyberpunk is too much. But the space suit and space cabin is a little tempting because it's not quite as overbearing as Solution Nine.

There is so much that can be explored mystically and lorewise in the cultures they are referencing but no. Because robots.

I think they are just setting up the technology that will allow us to travel to those planets and to functionally gather the way we do in Diadem.

Honestly they may as well introduce storm trooper and jedi knight as jobs now.

We have a wide variety of glowing swords at this point, and we've had robes since ARR release.

The next trial is more robots.

I think Yoshi-P said if he had it his way, there'd be no Magitek and it would just be pure fantasy. But the game was built upon 1.0 lore that had that, and there are Final Fantasy games that have robots, and his aim is ultimately to make it Final Fantasy, not fantasy itself.

pretend Limsa Lominsa is still sailing a wooden ship armada with black powder cannons like it has any relevance in a world with gundams and lasers.

I thought that at first years ago, but the explanation seems to be that Eorzeans are just "primitive" as Nero puts it. You can think of it like how the west had mobile phones, internet and electricity, while large sections of the world didn't, and in some cases did not even have roads. They were going through a lot of issues the west had already experienced in its distant past with poverty and disease, before it "solved" a lot of those problems.

exceptions only work when they are actual exceptions

But look at my real world example. The technology in the west isn't an "exception". It's widespread. Many countries are very advanced with technology, yet alongside them exist many countries that rely upon Starlink to have internet at all, and charities to supply food navigating challenging terrain (with no roads) that vehicles would struggle with to help wooden homes that don't survive certain weathers, lack electricity and clean water.

What an irony then, that it was our nations that conquered the rest of the world (via diplomatic alliances or violence) while they (the rest of the world) were zooming around in the space age.

True, and that's the most fictional part about it all. We're the Warrior of Light, the hero of the story, that does something that would not actually happen. Just like the hero in a film (such as James Bond) would probably not survive all the foes fighting them in real life.

[Rinoa_353]

The world is nothing like this. When two societies interact things change for both of them. Pretty much everyone has adopted cell phones and internet at this point. And of all things, transportation and weaponry are the biggest and fastest changes. You don't see any nation sailing galleons do you? Cars have been adopted universally, same with airplanes.

EVERYONE has moved on to guns.

This is all inevitable, because things, whether old or new cost money, and a government can't in good conscience keep investing its resources into obsolete technology so they can be conquered on a whim. As soon as new weapons are introduced changes come in fast and furious.

You may want to rethink that when there are literal ancient hunter gather societies still in the stone age deep in the Amazon and more on Earth today, so their statement is correct.






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

[genuine_stranger]

You may want to rethink that when there are literal ancient hunter gather societies still in the stone age deep in the Amazon and more on Earth today, so their statement is correct.






https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncontacted_peoples

Except for the fact that these tribes are pretty much isolated from the rest of the world and don't interact with cultures outside their own, so their exposure to technology is mostly limited to what they've known for centuries.

[IceEyes]

Because devs release dlc with templates, which means that it needs to be filled out with something. And apparently, they haven't been doing it well lately.

Not just DT writer sicking with this. For example u can watch on genshin, what get most scandal patches with adding South American cultures what ruin all game esthetician, due to the fact that many things are woven in extremely roughly and sloppily.
I am a big fan of sci-fi and fantasy, but ff14 just doing this bad.

In general, I attribute any wildness to the fact that all worlds are still subject to the same rules, so it doesn’t matter whether you shoot with a bow or a laser. We avoided most injuries and risks with magic and very rarely resorted to technology anyway, so why should this world as a whole use technology when it gets along just fine without it?

In addition, I cannot agree that the world does not react to changes in any way; rather, the locations are simply frozen in a certain plot chronology of MSQ. If u watch on some jobs (like sch, or mch) u can notice have theire animations changing in more sci-fi and technological style. Art of War III looks much morn modern then default version, also when u use chain stratagem u literally recall computer displayes (from simple magic book, lol).

The problem with FF14 is that it itself does not know what it is as a world, so we get a terrible mess.

In short, the writers came up with a green sun, but never bothered to clearly explain why it looks the way it does.

Overall, I would prefer to have full-fledged adventure DLC in mesoamerica setting, with hunts on big dinosaurus, throne drama and more simple but more brutall, smart viliians (big fun of Indiana Johns and Tomb Rider /sulking in corrner).

Also sci-fi and the Golden City could be limited to savage and aliance raid quest chains.

In any case, if our "fantasy" world not modern, how u can explain a lot of miqote in 2B pants and swimsuits in ever cutscene, raid and Limsa, lol?

[Rinoa_353]

Except for the fact that these tribes are pretty much isolated from the rest of the world and don't interact with cultures outside their own, so their exposure to technology is mostly limited to what they've known for centuries.

That's true but this also applies to Alexandria on the other end of the spectrum, they were isolated from their world for centuries until they arrived to The Source. One other example that would be better are the Amish, they are intertwined with our modern society but are still living in the 18th century technology wise for the most part. The problem I had is that it felt really rushed, 7.0 should have been only about Tural and the Skyruin as the big bad and then have 8.0 be about Alexandria to be able to explore the 9th Reflection and see how the Storm Surge had destroyed that world, that was what I really wanted to see more off.

[kaynide]

Except for the fact that these tribes are pretty much isolated from the rest of the world and don't interact with cultures outside their own, so their exposure to technology is mostly limited to what they've known for centuries.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but a more apt "but these people don't accept modern tech" would be more applicable to, say: the Amish, African tribes, the Bedouins tribes of the middle east, or perhaps the Mongolian nomads. In most cases it's that their lifestyle just doesn't need the tech in question, they're entirely unaware of the tech or they accept certain/specific tech that assimilates to their way easily.

In the case of Gridania, I see it as an Amish situation. They don't want black powder because it'll make the elementals mad. Bows and spears make sense here, sourced from local materials.

Ul'dah similarly is run by essentially a mob. You wouldn't want your population to have high tech to become a threat to you.

Limsa honestly doesn't really make sense, unless we get some kinda weird lore retcon that actual inertial energy (aka projectiles) can beat magic shields, whereas lasers bounce off. Unless the cost of magic energy (Ceureleum/crystals) is high/unreasonable at a large scale. But then again, we have literal teleporters, and teleporters that can send without attunement so why are we even shipping things by boat at this point is beyond me.

None of this even mentioning the building-sized 3D printers we have on the moon. That's where the game is bonkers to me. How is anyone homeless at this point? or starving?