Dev Tracker - Discussion

Tbh I thought the neon armor was fake because no way they would make something so ugly.

Weird things happen.

When tartarus mail exists, there's no armor they could make uglier

I cant find the posts nor the interview, but there were way too many onboard with the shared rather specific belief there were ambitions of a huge valhalla themed battlefield.

i know a lot of expectations lay on the final interview a little before the conclusion of TVR, because fujito and the interviewer were talking about a battlefield and fujito replied with "the new area", so it spiraled from there.

that said, I think the expectations of a proper valhalla endgame was absolutely in part because TVR's story put a lot of focus on how the egg was heavily linked to odin and valhalla and how something was threatening its existence. Everything seemed to indicate that we were going to be sent there for a big setpiece fight, but they seemed to give up on it (narratively, but also probably because of budgets) and we got sortie instead.

edit: as far as i remember anyway, i'd have to redo tvr lol.

I can't say, I actually beat tVR more recently. I'm also currently replaying it. Without any pre-existing expectations for it though, it's hard to relate to a lot of the negativity regarding the story. It's not great, not even it the top half of the stories IMO. But saying that tVR is not much better than ACP is a wild perspective.

Dialogue and localization is definitely terrible in tVR, you're exactly right about that. Odin has so many roles throughout the story, few characters in Vana'diel know him by name alone. I almost had to do a double take when Shami casually referred to Odin like his old roommate or something. I'll also concede that the whole cosplay chapter was literally the worst story content (imo) in the game. It doesn't fit the hardy and politically divided nation of Bastok at all. Two things that severely hold back an otherwise fine anthology-esc narrative.

As for the writers, Saito has worked on every expansion for the game afaik. Internally, they refer to him as the "walking encyclopedia" of FFXI story/lore, and he is responsible for making sure that all the new storylines introduced to the game do not contradict established lore. Sometimes, he also plays "producer" for the writers as well, but that was primarily for parts of older expansions. I have some serious questions for Saito regarding the Voidwatch storyline, but that's beside the point.

Sato is the woman responsible for making the story an actual thing. She is responsible for the Windurst path in Rank 10, CoP, SoA, and RoV. She's also probably the biggest fan of FFXI lore in the world. All her contributions to FFXI are passion projects, and she says she is ready to write another storyline as soon as Fujuto asks her to. Cool to see someone involved in game development as passionate as she is for her own contributions.

This is fascinating. I don't know much about your background or sources but this is really interesting. I wonder what her views on pet classes, automatons, cardians, etc. I wouldn't mind if the next storyline (if any) had different angle: Maybe the planet is healing from Chaos and someone is trying to stop that from happening (?) ...I guess that would rope all of the avatars together again like they did in TVR. :/

Regardless of the source, what matters is the fact that a "problem" was there.

Personally I loved the effort, the passion behind TVR. They really tried hard with the little they had, they tried to do something RoV-esque but this time tryin to involve all the npcs and stuff that were left out of RoV.
That in itself was commendable, imho.
They also tried to tie up a lot of loose ends, like the thing about Galka deaths etc.

I dunno, but all that stuff was really, really commendable.
The result though... it's a bunch of retcons that require your standards to be very low to be considered cool or acceptable, imho of course.

I mean, in their defense after creating the mega-epic ending of RoV that connected (almost) everything, it was objectively hard to invent something new on that scale, I'll accept that, but still... the plot overall was quite bad despite all their best efforts and all their low resources.

Jm2c of course. Different people, different tastes.

The only part of tvr that mattered was the ring(reward) at the end, it's exactly the same as every other expansion.

You enternitied the whole story and wiki'd every single place to go next.

Bull!

...2/3 of the neckpieces also mattered, and Perfect Lucky Egg for new players. And I guess Plat. Mog. Belt isn't bad, though I hate HP+10% on my idle gear because blood aggro so I don't use it.

Seriously, TVR has way better rewards than basically every other main mission line.

TVR cut scenes were too long and too much blah-blah.

The story might have been somewhat interesting if you weren't forced to run around the entirety of Vanadiel on endless quests designed to waste as much of your time as possible in order to artificially make the barely there content last longer than the one hour's worth of actual content there is.

But hey, at least the Galkas got one penis out of it that they can all share.

Some of us actually like storylines


That being said TVR is what made me use enternity, between the dialogue feeling completely off, the amount of padding to get to the next real plot beat, by the end i just wanted it done

Some people here seem to have forgotten how long the WotG cutscenes were.

Stuff actually happens in those long cs with 5 different loading zones in said cs

Agreed. Last storyline I actually read was SoA, since then it's been Enter key everything and gimme my sh#t so I can go grind points somewhere.

I guess it depends on when you played it, but the months long gaps in this content when it rolled out made it almost impossible to keep up with the story even if you care.

I'm not as knowledgeable about tVR as I am the other storeis, could you explain what retcons you're talking about?

I mean, Gloom Phantom, aka Boudox, is the expansion heroine. From start to finish. It's a damn shame they hit the trust limit because she should have one like the rest of them do.

Is there more running around in tVR than other story content?

I've played through almost all the story content twice and if you follow the story to unlock home points, survival guides, etc, I'm not really sure if this is true. There is a dungeon-crawling element to RotZ and CoP that is kinda lost in the modern MMO beeline.

I will say, putting Uran-Mafran behind the Altepa gate is a bit insane.

A whole lot of them, but mainly the existance of Prime Weapons, which was retconned as the "original" ones, which actually served as models for the Relic ones.

Then the Galka stuff with Odin and the eye and the talekeeper.

The existance of Chaos itself.
Blah blah, all stuff that was inserted into the FFXI storyline through a series of retcons, to justify having new antagonists and new parts of the story to explore.
After all, other than a plethora of side stuff, there's not a lot of "main" things to explore in FFXI after RoV.

Retcons aren't necessarily bad though, as a plot device.
I could name a plethora of examples where retcons have been used incredibly well.
Most of the time though, they're just an "easy" escape for script writers and, as such, not really a good thing.

Talking specifically about TVR I'm a bit on the fence. I don't think they were incredibly bad, I wouldn't go as far as to say they fit in like a perfect tetris piece either though.
Jm2c of course!

Yes!
Granted there's a lot of "useless running around" in most other FFXI main storyline content, I wouldn't say the difference is HUGE but yeah, it's there.
I think it got further emphasized by the episodic and slow release of the story, which really took a long time to finally get to a point where you felt something was happening.

They even made it gold, just like the OG Chaos.

I apologize, I meant Chaos within FFXI, pulled out of the hat and retconned as a key figure in the history of Vana'diel.
Chaos was of course an already very well known thing in the FF universe!

This is fair. I thought this was a bit cheesy. It would have been a lot cooler if Primes were modified Relics, and they dove further into the lore of the Hydra Corps.

Was this a retcon? The only explanation we had for the Galka Reincarnation Process was Gumbah theorizing that the miraclesalts of Gustav Tunnel reversed aging. But he wasn't sure of this.

Is this a retcon too? I feel like it's moreso, just adding lore. Chaos might not have been in the original writing of the story, but writers are allowed to add things to the world. In CoP, it suggests that Alexander was buried deep beneath Gustaberg, but I wouldn't call ToAU a retcon. Also, Atomos and Siren were way bigger shake-ups, I feel.

You and I have different definitions for the phrase, "not a lot" . From the war between Celestial and Terrestrial Avatars to the impending Antica armageden. Or from the eventual Gigas return to Rhazowa (the northern continent), to the conflicts ravaging the Mithra homeland on Olzhirya (the southern continent), there was a ton of story they could have jumped into. All these story ideas are way more interesting to me than tVR, but would require new zones, new content, and a lot more cutscene work to properly flesh out.

Further more, a ton of plot details in tVR were referenced (very loosely) in the Ultimania that came out in 2008, so retcon may be a bit of a stretch. The mystery of why the middle lands were so dead for milenia after the meltdown was definitely a contributing factor.

FFXI has always toyed with this. There is a lot of contradictory lore given, but it's because lore is usually explained from an under-informed character. FFXI's always been opaque with its lore, which is something I appreciate. It's weird when a game's world has perfect encyclopedic knowledge of its own history.

Same here. My opinions on tVR are just that, opinions.

Please allow me to further elaborate, because I think we perfectly agree at least on this point.
There's A LOT of stuff that they could have explored, and that would be perfectly fit and very interesting, but it simply did not fit their criteria.

They wanted something that:
1) could allow to re-use zones/settings/npcs stuff. Clearly they didn't have the dev resources to develop new thing, would need a new expansion for that
2) they wanted an antagonist with a story that felt on an epic scale. As dangerous and bad as previous cosmic-level stuff like Promathia, Cloud of Darkness etc. And frankly I think it's (almost?) impossible to create something like that after the explanation they gave with CoD moving within the FFXI multiverse and devouring stuff, with Promathia, Altana, Odin, Alexander and everything else tryin to "protect" our Vana'diel from CoD's detection.

"Inventing" Chaos and retconning it so it's always been there and we just didn't know about it is probably the best they could do to fit those criteria.

Personally I would've loved a plethora of other untold stories but those would've felt less "cosmic epic" and would've needed way more resources, it simply didn't fit their criteria alas.


Edit:
Also, as I tried to explain before but probably it wasn't clear, enough, Retcons in themselves aren't necessarily bad.
I mean CoD was a retcon too, pulled out of their ***, but to me it "fit" the story incredibly well, it was a good retcon.
Chaos instead? I don't think it was an overly bad retcon, but to me it wasn't a particularly good one either.

What's less cosmic? If we keep going in that direction, is "more campy" what you mean? I can think a few local problems I'd like to see:

Even more problems in Dynamis
War between the different kinds of mandragora
Galkan Civil War (Pick the topic they fight about)
Help Aurix with his new career choice
Star Onion Brigade averts the Apocalypse
Vanadiel has a global warming problem
Fodder mobs spontaneously Transform and Dietmund thinks he knows what's causing it....