After another quiet week we finally review the FFXIV Hatching-Tide 2023 event, and read MogMail! Among the topics is the question of the seventh umbral calamity’s impact on the world, and how FFXIV’s lore is constantly changing.
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:27 Welcome & Channel Updates
8:34 RE: Hatching-Tide 2023 Review
25:23 MogMail: Gear with tails
30:33 MogMail: New players catch-up system
38:55 MogMail: Yoshi-P Surprises
1:09:00 MogMail: Changing lore
1:28:25 MogMail: The Twelve = Dynamis?
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The Hatching Tide story bothered me because the Sylphs were upset because they used to have a festival around this time of year that has been permanently banned because it involved boars and I guess the boars did boar things and people were hurt. So they decided to mess with the Gridanian festival because they're upset about it, which is pretty understandable for some weird little onion fairies.
and instead of including the Sylphs at all or being at all empathetic to the only ARR tribe that's almost 100% sympathetic as its presented in ARR we run around and scare them in tonberry outfits
it's just kinda shit honestly
also the FATE sucked, the best way to do that bs was hopping over to Dynamis (or any other newer server) several days after the event started and having like 2 or 3 people there instead of 40+ and the fate completing in seconds
I think the conversation about Lore is pretty interesting — and I definitely agree with Lukile far more, but I very much disagree with Rollo. I do agree, in theory, with Gyorgy that lore should be malleable kind of like Science, but I think the core difference is there are key concepts that should be stable/written in stone. For the most part I think FFXIV is largely very good about this, and that the Devs do go out of their way to make lore make sense even when they're redefining it. I think that FFXIV is much more successful in this than Star Wars has been recently — especially with the Sequel Trilogy — where so much of the lore post Return of the Jedi has been written and overwritten without much forethought into how to make it work outside of for whichever movie it's relevant for.
I really enjoy being invested in the lore for a game/setting/universe, and I find that when the writers constantly and fundamentally alter aspects of it, it gets… boring and frustrating. Especially from a consumer prospective. I have a lot of old, now Legends, Star Wars stuff that I'm just generally not even remotely interested in anymore because it's not Canon. It's not part of the universe that is getting expanded on, and it's not a substantive part of the universe's lore. It's part of why SWTOR is as bad as it is right now — anecdotally, many of my friends who were heavy into SWTOR (both RP and Raiding) have shifted to WoW or FFXIV because they don't feel like the content respects itself, or the characters in their own stories. It's frustrating for me to pay money for something only to have it later be removed — it feels like a huge waste to me, personally.
While I don't like everything that FFXIV has done and still think there are some gaps and contradictions, I think the FFXIV dev and lore team cares much more about the cohesiveness of their setting than most fictional worlds do — and that's something I really enjoy about FFXIV and what makes its story so compelling and so strong. If they just started substantially ignoring their own lore just for surprises I'd set to get less and less invested.
The conversation about Yoshi-P's surprises kind of reminds me of the Rian Johnson quotes about how he wanted TLJ to "subvert expectations" first and foremost — and I definitely agree with Lukile that in 7.0 I hope that there's less of a focus on the "surprise" because eventually if all you do is chase that high for "how much can we subvert expectations" or "how can we surprise people" it leaves a sour taste in my mouth because it feels like it leaves the foundational storytelling aspects in the dust just for a gotcha.
Bless you, Rolo.
I have always believed that if changing the lore of a fictional world can serve to make the story better, then change the damned lore! 🙂
32:40 i doubt they would do that, simply because it would make all of the story until 7.0 obsolete. And by story i dont mean the big arcs of enemies we killed but all the character developement the scions and side characters went through, not to say that would discard any opportunity to do the cheap knife to the gut with reminding the player about Haurchefant, Moenbryda and Emet. The codex can tell the sprouts who that is but it won't make them care about the references ¯_(ツ)_/¯
yhea, I can easily see it being an optional starting point for new players, with a choice to begin there and get into the new stuff, or start at the original jump in point.