Something that happens sometimes with Final Fantasy XIV is that it takes the team a couple of tries to get a new idea right. Not universally; sometimes things work out well the first time and everyone is happy. But sometimes it takes some iteration before you really get the idea working quite as expected, and that is very much the case when it comes to the game’s role quests.
While the base game and the first two expansions featured an ever ongoing set of job quests for each 10-level band, the ever-growing number of jobs plus the simple narrative necessity of players being mostly confined to the First during Shadowbringers prompted a change in the form of role quests. This also helped with the fact that it was hard to make each new set of job quests tell a unified story covering the same characters in reasonable expansion, and there were always some much weaker lines along with the main ones.
Unfortunately, I don’t think the role quests really worked in Shadowbringers as well as intended. Nor did they totally work in Endwalker. But this time around, I feel like they nailed it… in no small part because they take the temperature down and are wholly optional.
Let’s start by looking back on the history. In Shadowbringers, you had four different role quests for physical DPS, magical DPS, healers, and tanks, each of which covered one of the Warriors of Darkness who fulfilled that role. This did not work out that great partly because the cast of characters for the role quests wasn’t great and partly because these quests were mandatory for the MSQ on top of that. And not for any real reason, just to make sure you had done them. They were arbitrary blocks featuring a none-too-interesting cast of erstwhile allies and a general lack of a good sense of stakes.
Endwalker had role quests as well, but since they didn’t even start until level 85, they made it easy for you to feel you had somehow missed something along the way. The stakes of these quests, by contrast, felt sky-high in a way that made it baffling you were doing these quests based on a role. The narrative purpose was to give some closure to familiar characters like the grand company leaders, and they worked well enough, especially by making the reward just the privilege of coloring your artifact gear. (And this time melee and ranged had their own lines, which was a good change.)
In Dawntrail? Well, there’s some stuff to handle. Get to it if you have time.
This might seem like it’s actively antithetical to making players care, but in a weird way, I find it loops back around and works better. The reality is that metatextually, we as players know that the role quests are optional. They’re little bits of story meant to show off things that don’t fit into the main narrative, enrich the world, and maybe give you some opportunities for exploring places you would otherwise not head back to. If it were truly vital to what you were doing, it’d be part of the MSQ proper.
Instead of trying to make them more important, making them less important makes them more welcome. You can be excited about what they actually deliver, which in this case is a peek back at places that are not part of the main story (understandably so, as none of them is even in Tural) and a chance to learn about the far-flung portions of the continent our main story doesn’t cover. Tural is a big place, after all!
But it also gives you the chance to make your antagonists… well… just a bunch of damn dorks.
Now, full disclosure, I have not done one of the role quest lines at this point,so it is possible that that one features a truly terrifying force of nature. But I suspect the odds are low. Indeed, it seems far more likely to me that the last line has villains more like the other four, who are understandable in their motivations but also openly just trollish jerks. They may talk a good game about exposing corrupt power structures or unfair governments or whatever, but their actual observed values are just kicking sand at people for their own edification.
They’re entertaining in that capacity, though, and they actually say something far more important about the banality of evil in the process. This is a hard problem for storytellers: A lot of people will hear the villains state their motivations (say, “I want to kill half of the universe to avoid running out of resources”) and then will assume that this statement must be something the writers believe to be true, rather than acknowledging that the characters might be… lying. The people who say that may believe what they’re saying, but their actual observed actions make it clear that what they actually want is something else altogether.
A couple of the villains in the role quests claim that they’re doing what they’re doing for good reasons, but you can tell that what they actually want to do is spread suffering because they are mad about not getting what they feel is their fair share. That’s it. And you even know it from first principles because all of them started off by stealing something valuable and acting as if it belonged to them.
So instead of trying to tell nuanced, moral stories tying into the MSQ in multifaceted ways, the role quests happily tell stories about petty, venial people doing bad things because it doesn’t matter to them whom they hurt so long as they feel good about it. If their schemes were a few notches more deadly, it’d be really dark, but instead they feel… not silly, but not world-ending. These people need to be stopped, but they never accomplish much, and you feel good about subjecting them to much-deserved punishment.
And even more crucially, all of the role quests have a reason for why your particular role is engaged in this quest. Either the quests directly tie into something that this batch of jobs can do (like how the Healer role quests are all about cleansing debuffs), or they tie into thematic ideas about what your role is supposed to do… often both. It has some resonance when it feels like you’re doing a role quest because you can shoot things from a distance, rather than “well, somebody has to get the Doma questline.”
In other words, I think this one really got the assignment right, and I’m glad for it. I’ve had a lot of fun with these role quests from top to bottom, and I’m looking forward to the wrapup, but I’m not just looking to that. So good on the expansion for nailing this particular assignment. Let’s see how the next expansion looks.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I’ll have gotten myself into The Arcadion for the most epic of bodyslams (I pray), and so I will be here for a column that is scheduled for one fall! Or something to that overall effect.
Wisdom of Nym: The story beats that really work in Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail
Wisdom of Nym: The actual storytelling issues with Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s Arcadion brings the noise
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail’s delightfully light role quests
The Soapbox: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail, mortality, remembrance, and last chances
Wisdom of Nym: Spoiler-free impressions of Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail’s leveling dungeons
First Impresions: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail is a dense summer getaway for the MMORPG
Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV Dawntrail’s relatively smooth early access isn’t a sign of doom
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
