Living Worlds -- Musings on the Design of Final Fantasy XIV

As mentioned in the description, heavy spoilers for A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and Stormblood follow. If you are interested in the story of any of these and not finished with it, you should really wait to read this post.

The evolution of Final Fantasy XIV over its various expansions shows some truly learned lessons and fascinating choices about the stories we tell and how we tell them. There a few aspects of this I want to talk about, so I’m going to have a series of posts about the design of Final Fantasy XIV and some of the lessons that I think other MMOs (and games in general!) could stand to learn from it. I wish I could incorporate details from Shadowbringers into these, but I am not yet through its content and don’t particularly feel like spoiling it for myself.

The first of these posts is about having a cohesive living world of the game that properly takes into account where players are throughout the story. In a world with an infinite amount of time for game development and storage space on various media, this would hopefully never be seen as a problem – developers could just enumerate all of the various possibilities in the story and then iterate every piece of dialog to include reference to the current happenings in the world. Since this isn’t realistic, and it isn’t fun to require full completion of every quest line before changing the state of the world, I think there are some interesting things that can be done here – and Final Fantasy XIV has an interesting way to go about it.

I want to start with some of the constraints that the game has that other MMOs might not. Similar to XI, the original Final Fantasy MMO, a single character in XIV is technically all a player needs to be able to experience all of the content in the game. Your character is not fundamentally tied to any of their selections – you can change your class/affiliated nation/specializations at will, which means that over the course of a single character’s life they can see every piece of storyline the game has to offer.

XIV makes fantastic use of this. If you have Carpenter leveled, later Blacksmith quests that send you back to the Carpenter’s Guild will have the guildmaster jokingly comment how he «feels a bit betrayed» by the stench of the forge about you. The Dragoon questline puts you in a fabled position supposed to only be held by one person a generation – who is still alive and makes several quips to no longer being unique. Even past this, optional storylines will be referenced in other quests where people will comment about their doings with you and things they learned alongside you.. or if you haven’t experienced that, they’ll just politely comment that it’s nice to see you again. Progress specific dialog is everywhere in the world of XIV, and it usually feels really good.

And that’s where we run into problems with trying to fit this into overarching narrative plotlines that drive the main storyline.

Heavensward, the first expansion, in particular gets this wrong. The entire central story that drives the expansion is the Dragonsong War, a thousands-of-years conflict between Nidhogg and the nation of self-isolated Ishgard, predicated upon a murder and a lie told by the High Houses of Ishgard in antiquity – the High Houses aren’t any more powerful than the others, in reality, they just banded together to keep their involvement in the war’s beginning a secret.

This makes for an incredibly compelling narrative, since the expansion feels very focused and driven throughout the plot. You are fighting the Dravanians under Nidhogg in almost every area of the expansion, and they are heavily featured time and time again. The enemies that you find in the overworld are the dragon armies, showing just how outnumbered the isolated nation of Ishgard finds itself. Almost every quest ties into this central narrative, even for the crafter jobs – you are helping people reclaim their honor as dragonkillers, you’re fueling the war effort.

This cohesion falls apart the moment that you finish the main storyline of the expansion.

Suddenly, every quest is about helping the war effort for a war that is no longer taking place. The hand All of the enemies populating the world? Minions in a war that has ended, and while «there are stragglers» is the official explanation in-universe for those, the lack of foresight in the design continues to break immersion time and time again when going through small pieces of content that you didn’t finish prior to the end of the expansion.

Dragons are welcome parts of life in Ishgard at the end, and the isolation between Ishgard and the other nations is over. Even in Azys Lla, the ruins of the nation of Allag, there are heavy Imperial forces that continue to fight you – even after you form an alliance with them to try and prevent the world from falling to ruin! As much as I loved the world of Heavensward while actively going through the story, I try to avoid spending too much time in its areas now that I’m done with it so that I don’t have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of what’s going on.

To its credit, some of the side quests aren’t possible to start until after the war is over, and those tend to feel much more cohesive. Progression gates are a common feature in MMOs, but these are gated behind progression in the main storyline so that the world is known to be in a certain state. The quests from the Moogles of the Churning Mists to rebuild an ancient monument to the friendship between man and dragon, in particular, has many references to Knights uneasily realizing that in a slightly different world they would have been attacking dragon children instead of helping them with playing games… while of course, you continue to do exactly that throughout the overworld of the area. Sigh.

A Realm Reborn, the base game, does very well in weaving together all of its various plotlines for this. Considering it has the highest potential due to the initial scope at its launch, it’s impressive how few problems there are with this. It benefits heavily from your character being an unknown in the world during its events, however, and also having just come out of a world-changing cataclysm (the Calamity) prior to the events of the story. Omission still counts, however, and most of the questlines are self contained and only fill in details about the shared characters of the world.

Unfortunately, ARR does get this wrong in a few places in regards to its overworld – though it gets it wrong in the much longer run. There are a few Imperial outposts that are well established in the «late» areas of the content. These are heavily populated with both Imperial soldiers and their warmachina. Over the course of ARR, you end up destroying and shutting down most of these bases to stop the deployment of a secret weapon… which then continue to be populated with all of the same enemies as before. The Twelveswood around Gridania has a few FATEs (temporary quests that appear on the world map) that are based on the premise of Imperial scouts from the bases in occupied Ala Mihgan territory attempting to probe the defenses of Gridania. This has no side effects in ARR itself, but in the long term…

Stormblood, the second expansion, does its best to avoid this problem with the overworld and has had a very mixed reception from the player base partially because of it. Like Heavensward, it is driven by a pair of central conflicts – trying to free both Ala Mihgo in Eorzea and Doma in the Far East from Imperial rule. Early in the story, the Ala Mihgan Resistance suffers a devastating loss, which leads the player to trying to make the war an effort on two fronts simultaneously in order to distract the Garlean Empire. The attempt is successful and through a series of fast-paced dungeons and single-player instances with decisive battles, the forces of Eorzea liberate both nations and there is singing of the anthem of the newly risen Ala Mihgo in its victory.

What is fascinating about this, however, is that… there are no Garlean forces to be found virtually anywhere on the world map of Stormblood. Despite how much of the story is based on the existence of the conflict, the overworld enemies are made up of animated constructs, looters, wildlife, ghosts, and overgrown flora – but there are no Garlean forces. They exist solely within those dungeons and instances and individual spawns that happen from quests, because the final state of the world makes no sense to have Garlean soldiers roaming about. Even the Garlean outposts that the allied forces take control of are either lowly-populated outposts when you find them or cleared through a dungeon prior to giving you access to the area at all.

This is the part that breaks ARR – Eorzea has no active Garlean fortresses any longer, so why would there continue to be probing excursions to expand their control? How in the world is there an endless supply of warmachina in bases that are destroyed and cut off from the empire?

But the interesting approach of Stormblood doesn’t stop with the overworld, it relies heavily upon those aforementioned gates to start progression of quests. You can’t start the Goldsmith quest line, which is to help rebuild the fledging free nation of Ala Mihgo’s economy, until after Ala Mihgo is free. Similar circumstances happen with other crafting questlines and Doma – the game locks events that will reference changing the world until after that change to the world has happened, and anything prior just talks about «the unrest» in vague enough terms to mean that the rebellion is either ongoing or recently concluded.

While it’s unfortunate to keep players who were focused on the crafting aspects of the game held back by their progression on the main storyline, the narrative really benefits from the wait. It wouldn’t be possible to tell some of the fascinating stories (which are going to be their own post) without this delay, and so far the result on my experience of the game has been that Stormblood is my current favorite expansion.

I would like to see more games take this into account – if you have random battles, maybe certain enemy types vanish from the world as you progress if there’s no reason for them to still be around. You have to be careful with this, since you can’t similarly require items from any of those enemies to show up in later content, but it would be an interesting tool for keeping the illusion of a player’s actions actually mattering on the state of the world that doesn’t require rewriting thousands of lines of dialog or massive changes to the physical landscape of areas.