I’ve said this before, but I’m less inclined to criticize the plot for it’s own sake, and more just regretful that it has been done so poorly. You can tell these kinds of stories, and something being bigger than the Titans (who always felt more like Olympians than true primordial mythological Titans, anyway, IMO) isn’t inherently bad or stupid.
But, man, you gotta put care into it. You need time. And you need cinematics. You need the player to be able to react to the world and the world to react to the player, if this is the kind of story you want to tell.
I used to kinda roll my eyes every time someone brought up FFXIV in an unrelated thread, so forgive me for doing it and believe me when I say I understand if this annoys anybody, but I just can’t believe how much your character feels connected to that world and the people, even as a silent protagonist. I used to kind of shill for Blizzard and cover up for them and say, “You can’t really make a silent protagonist in an MMO feel that ingratiated into a story,” but I was totally wrong about that and you CAN, entirely through other characters’ dialogue and a few very linear dialogue choices made by the player.
If they want to tell this sort of intense, emotive, character-driven story that they seem to want to tell, then by all means do it. But do it right.
And if you can’t do it right, either because of lack of ability or Bobby’s greed or something, that’s regrettable, but I totally understand. Lots of beloved games including many MMOs, including Vanilla WoW, ran off of very little “story.”
But what you can’t do is tell the kind of story you’re telling - with character drama, and geopolitics, and questions of morality in war, and complicated cosmic magic systems, etc - in a half-arsed way. It just doesn’t work. It’s literally worse than having little or no story.
This is true especially when you’re doing it with characters and locales people LOVE and CARE about. Burning Teldrassil is FINE if it ends up MEANING SOMETHING. And if it DOESN’T, then the players would have been happier with you just NOT EVEN TRYING TO TELL THAT STORY.
If you just wanna make cool biomes with maybe tidbits of lore that we can theorize about, and the odd whizz-bang-boom short but exciting cinematic here and there, I think I speak for a lot of players when we say we’ll accept that over… whatever is going on right now.
ed out a better zone consept with the snip tool and doodling on a sniped version of my desktop, since I cant share it in any capacity then let me discribe it all to you because I have nothing better to do in between tossing old junk into a dumpster.
