To compare the stories of World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy 14 online is like comparing a toad to a prince.
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It is an extremely bad, but accurate comparison.
It doesn't matter if Danuser wants to build a story, because he's done so by tearing down all of what came before.
I like how ashy he pronounces the Ascians.
WoW's story has been a series of carefully (and sometimes not so carefully) concealed retroactive continuity changes. Mark Kern said in one of his streams that they were just a bunch of tabletop gamers that wanted to make a video game. They built continuity between Warcraft 1 and 3 but when WoW came about they literally made it all up as they went along. There were no sessions of stepping back to flesh out details of a larger continuity, it was just a series of retroactively adding significance to coincidental occurrences that happened during earlier story writing and adding significance after the fact.
The FF story was meant to be long and huge early on, the WoW story never had that seed planted so there was only so far they could go. The original story never went beyond orcs vs humans so they added all of that in later and as they went along.
Honestly, WoW needs to not try to compete with FFXIV's story based gameplay. That's their niche, and they are really good at it and it won't be easy to compete with it. A good story wouldn't hurt, but they'd do better to stick to the things they are good at. There are way bigger things they need to work on and fix before they start touching on story and lore.
What you said make even more sense after playing EW
This is more reason why the bald baddie was a setup since W3 is just pure bullshit and made up on spot.
Technically there IS a new "evil entity" behind FFXIV. But the way it has been introduced is quite easy to accept it.
Potential Spoiler
To me
The final days we know of since ShB and we know that the all powerful ancient beings could not figure out what was causing it hence their initial doom and actions to recover from it. We always focused on the "how they try to fix the problem" instead of "how they could have prevented the problem" because it was not impacting us. It was the ascians problem. But now that the same is happening to us we MUST find out the source of the issue to solve it. This to me makes sense and feels like something I can immerse in.
WoW is just shitfuckery from A to Z honestly… they do not build on the past they completely rewrite it. They could have probably also done something different but that would have required a minimum amount of effort and pre planning…
When after first 2 min you relise that endwalker basically follows spoiler "vilan in expansion in introduced midway exp". But thay make it work.
this is my personal opinion, but from what i know FF actually didnt plan everything from the start, just like how 1.0 bring dalamud down, its not actually on initial plan, and the story on ARR/HW from my opinion had different style with ShB and EW considering ARR/HW was written by Kazutoyo Maehiro and Storm Blood are the mark of Ishikawa debut on the main storyline iirc, as for Storm Blood its obvious they trying to experiment how to move forward considering how succesful HW at that time, but what FF do better than WoW in this area, they stay consistent even when they changed/add new writer, Yoshi-P as the producer/director still keep the story on the track and make it feels connected to the beginning even when they bring something that completely new and not mentioned in the beginning so its feels like everything are planned from the start,
i dont know about WoW but from what i heard from peoples here and there, its seem that they just moving forward in a way that they do either on a whim/spontaneous or depending on the other team who in charge on raid content/gameplay, so maybe the writer didnt had many choice and forced to scrifice their story in order to fit the other content that maybe already in development long before the story catch up so it was kinda forced to accomodating the content that already there, and without clear direction, so its feels disconnected/unsync at times, but i dont know because i never touch WoW,
ffxiv just need one " answer ".
Ascians are just a small part of a big picture which make FF14 rich and good
While WOW lore always was poor and trash any ways….I always found about bout lore from youtube…..
Ok the huge problem of wow story is because they retcon everything to put the jailer as mastermind and that's ruined the years of lore
In final fantasy xiv since arr we are introduced in Eorzea, the primals, ascians, and galermald empire even we had some hints about ishigard and doma thats why i love final fantasy xiv they respect the lore and characters
**EW SPOILERS** This would be a great point/comparison if EW didn't do exactly what he's condemning WoW for doing. They wrap up the whole Zodiark issue pretty quickly and unsatisfyingly only to then introduce some random fucking villain we didn't even get a hint of existing prior. I could go on about how shit that villain is too, but the point is regardless of whether or not the character is well written, it still subverted the story in a bad way. They are just as poorly introduced as the jailor. But sure EW is 11/10 better than ShB ofc /s, and no I'm not posting this to defend WoW, I don't even play it.
they have said that they plan 2 expansions ahead so they more or less know what the story will be up to 8.0 right now, and also rigth now they are planning the next arc which they have the most most important keypoints planned out across 4 or 5 expansions, like they arent some planning geniuses. Its almost impossible to plan 10 years of MMO story but good writing can work wonders. Like I would actually argue that BFA and Shadowlands had interesting ideas, and would have been much better if Blizzard would have gotten better and more engaged writers.
Steve Danuser isn't being force to rhetcon literally everything that has come before or redeem Sylvanas. He's doing it because he has no fucking idea what he's doing.
I think really at this point WOW has just been milked to where it's just deluded and hardly anyone cares with any sorta story Blizzard would even wanna try and do these days. As much WOW did for MMOs, It needs to reinvent itself.
Long time 14 player here:
From my understanding, imagine that from 1.X until 5.0 the only thing going on is that primals are being summoned by the beast tribes and the empire keeps being a dick. Then in 5.0 you’re told that none of that matters, the ascians (who you’ve never heard about before or have even been teased) are actually behind everything. They have a secret plan and the emperor (or Zenos or whoever) is actually a good guy and was just being mind controlled the entire time by Zodiark who was only mentioned at the start of ShB. The primals don’t matter anymore, the dragons don’t matter anymore, the beast tribes don’t matter anymore, the empire doesn’t matter anymore. Just mustache twirling evil bad guys who want to rework reality, whatever the hell that means.
It's funny because Endwalker does a lot of things that are reproached to Shadowlands, Endwalker does them but good, showing us that it's not just bad writting but also a bad integration of the writting into the game.
ill correct you *great husbandos done right
WoW story has broken him to the point where he hasn't even conceived the thought that EVERY FFXIV expansion deals with the Ascians and primals and is resolved in Endwalker.
My dude extract the materia from your gear so it can start leveling up again. (you can tell its ready by white dots bottom right)
I don't think there's anything wrong with the idea of WoW being a series of individual plots between expacs as opposed to being one big story that goes through many expacs like FF does. But making that sort of storytelling transition is not easy, and its very likely for someone to drop the ball during that shift. Execution is vital, and it seems like they haven't found the way they want to approach that yet.
This guy is so desperate for something good to come out of WoW's story. The level of copium is really sad.
FF14 also makes things up as it goes, it just does a much much much better job
think he is confusing things regarding warcraft and warhammer, the RTS was initially designed as a warhammer game not the MMO and they couldnt get the licence. World of Warcraft was always intended to be a warcraft spinoff
FFXIV's writing is careful enough. The Ascian situation is resolved in Shadowbringers, but when you learn about their backstory you're given hints that "something else" they had to deal with is out there. You're not told what it is because they never discovered the origin of it. That's what we deal with in Endwalker.
I think the difference is the WoW tries to make every expansion story as a stand alone experience. You can even tell they have doubled down on this with the new leveling methods where you only have to play through a single expansion to hit level cap. They want you to pretty much be able to go into the expansion and be able to understand everything and they want to wrap up the entire story in that expansion. If you buy a boost you shouldn't feel really lost in the story.
FFXIV they pretty have had the overrall storyline planned out to last for multiple expansions. You literally will see little tie ins all the time that go back to older content. If you buy the skip in FFXIV you honestly would be completely lost on what is going on and the story really wouldn't have nearly as much impact.
I think both aspects have merits, the wow method lets you focus more on gameplay and a variety of interesting experiences and have a much faster paced story. You can tell an interesting self contained story that is completely localized. You can tell especially how that was a big part of wow design by looking at duskwood, redridge, etc. Each area was a self contained story with a nice quick pace. The FFXIV method lets you focus on telling a good story but it also does limit what you can do and you have to worry more about pacing. You have epic moments but you generally have a much slower build up over the entire expansion. A bunch of random one off adventures doesn't really work nearly as well.
WoW's biggest problem is they stopped focusing on the merits of trying to create fun gameplay and interesting moments and have tried to create an epic story but they failed to realize that without the build up it just doesn't work. You have to build up the characters to have that impact. Part of the problem is the split factions also make building things up impossible. You can't have a character that half the population never experiences the build up for play a major part without those players being completely lost on the impact of it. They put so much focus on trying to make it work that the gameplay and fun have suffered.
4:48 World of Warcraft was an MMO based on the Warcraft universe meant to fix all the wrongs with Everquest. They even hired several former Everquest players to develop WoW. It had nothing to do with Warhammer.
Now Warcraft 1 was originally supposed to be a Warhammer game until the license got pulled but Blizzard didn't want to lose money on dev time so they just released a game called Warcraft 1, but that was in the 80s/90s, was an RTS game, and had nothing to do with World of Warcraft.
I'd describe FFXIV more as a series of novels rather than a single book. Each version is a new book in the series, but the overarching plot was broad-strokes defined from ARR onward. There is too much character development around the supporting cast to be contained in a single book.
Would it surprise you if the FFXIV team didn't know where the story was going to end, but instead they just made sure that no story element from a previous expansion is undone by a current expansion?
TBH, the way WOW tells stories about its lore is kind of like what you would get from your drunk friend who passed out and you asked him what happened last night. Even Blizzard isn't sure how it fits together, if it does at all. You can't just come in at the end and say "Oh, but really here is what happened". People may be surprised about the story in FFXIV, but I don't think any of the players are confused by it. We might have more questions about specific parts and how that went down, but that is intrigue, not confusion. Every expansion in wow I am forced to rethink what I know about the universe. Something as straight forward as Chronicle's can no longer be taken as gospel, even if that is what we were told years back. It's frustrating.
Danuser have too much ego to do what a good writer had to do on his position of new Lead Narrative Designer a few years ago, He had not to modify things to match what he wanted, but to use what others left to build a good story. He wanted his villain and he injected it in.
This said, is Game Director problem not to ask the previous Lead Narrative to write down the barebones of the story for the next X expansions, leaving it to write the story just before the next expansion.
Tremendous amounts of lore about the Ascians is introduced over expansions, but it adds to, rather than contradicting, prior lore. (Generally, I'm sure someone will point out some minor inconsistency or change where they said 'Oh, as it turns out, they don't like vanilla ice cream, they like mint.') It's basically, "Here's the Ascians, they want X." Next expac: "They want X because Y." Next expac: "And Y happened because Z, which is also responsible for A and B.". And so on. So you feel like you're always getting more of the story, but that the story was known to the writers beforehand — more so when they tie back things that weren't obviously connected, but were just sitting there, waiting for someone to connect them. ("Oh, of COURSE! That's why there were all those empty boxes of mint ice cream scattered in that one dungeon!")
What boggles my mind is that when you finish Endwalker and redo the ARR MSQ dungeon again, the dialog given 8 years ago made finally clear. Even the lyric from the song Answer gives clearer meaning and also given hints about what really happened and will happen. It's 1000D chess level writing and concept that no video game in history has ever done.
Yep spot on comparison