It wasn’t so long ago that I did a series of columns talking about the many, many references in Final Fantasy XIV to date, although that predates Dawntrail’s release, so there are more now. In the third such column I noted that I could keep going and note more references, and that’s not just idle chatter. There are tons of references to the franchise entries throughout the game, drawing upon the rich tapestry of the series over the years.
Which is interesting when you consider that we are kind of running out of references.
This probably doesn’t sound like a big deal per se, and in many ways it isn’t a huge problem; while franchise pieces get pulled in on the regular, they are references rather than full-on book reports on prior games, after all. But I think it is also worth noting that in some ways it can be a problem. And to do so, I want to raise discussion of another game that has an obvious set of parallels to FFXIV but I generally avoid bringing up. Obviously, I am talking about Star Trek Online.
The parallel with STO is not about year of release or gameplay mechanics or even just “these are both games I like” because there’s something very important to understand about STO: It is a game about Star Trek. This sounds like the most banal statement ever, and it is, but there’s also more going on when you ask yourself what counts as Star Trek.
We’ve had lots of Star Trek video games, comic books, novels, and so forth over the years. But the developers of STO long ago stated that they understood very clearly that players wanted to see stuff from the shows and the movies. This wasn’t exactly a shocking revelation. The shows and movies are the core of Star Trek; everything else is a peripheral thing, a licensed adaptation for people who want more Star Trek beyond what they’re getting otherwise.
But this mandate does eventually lead to a problem because eventually you run out of Star Trek. It was more a problem when the game first launched and we hadn’t gotten any new Star Trek material in a while, but fortunately there was already a lot of ground to cover. There is a lot of Star Trek. You can add lots to the game! And you can slowly add stuff that’s more obscure or more sidelined, like the Voth and the Tzenkethi and so forth. But you still find yourself reaching a point over time when there is just no more Star Trek to add.
On the plus side, sure, this state of affairs didn’t persist forever because new series started to happen! Great. But… a lot of those series also do not map in nicely with what the game had already established. And a lot of them feature prominent elements that, uh, kind of already existed in the franchise. It turns out people like seeing new episodes about Klingons! And that’s great, but if you try to make the Klingons feel all different, people get really mad about Star Trek: Discovery for years because it turns out people wanted the same old Klingons.
There is a finite amount of Star Trek. And that’s a problem when your game is built around adapting Star Trek.
FFXIV is not built around adapting previous games in the Final Fantasy franchise; it is built around being FFXIV. But the thing is that part of what makes a game feel like it’s part of the franchise are those references to previous games. This is the big thing that links this series. It doesn’t have explicit continuity between entries; it has conceptual links. And when your game is built in no small part upon the foundations of the series history, running out of that foundation is… a problem!
Case in point: I have mentioned a few times how predicting new FFXIV jobs is, oddly, getting much harder over time. The big jobs that show up in the vast majority of games in the franchise have already showed up as normal or limited jobs, and for the others, the designers are openly admitting “this doesn’t fit into the game’s design and it isn’t coming in another form” (see: stuff like the phantom jobs preview).
That’s not a problem in the sense that we’re at risk of running out of weapons or ideas for stuff jobs can do; we have no shortage of that, especially when you consider that one of the jobs in this expansion fights with a freakin’ paintbrush. Once you’re arming characters with a range of artistic implements, you really are not at risk of running out of weapon concepts. Rather, it’s a problem in that we can’t predict these things because we have no metric to do so. There are far fewer jobs Yoshida can tease with a careful t-shirt when there isn’t a series history for hypothetical jobs like Warlord or Jester or Fusilier.
But it goes beyond that. I like the fact that Arcadion is a new thing rather than relying on prior big summons, sure, but part of the reasons this has happened is that we are pretty low on big summons who could serve as the anchor for a raid series on any level. Some of this is a change based on necessity. And that does absolutely influence some of the ideas that the developers are going to put forth, in no small part because you still want some of that connection to the core of the franchise.
You can only add fights against big, recognizable enemies from the series history once. There is nothing you can add that is going to have the resonance of Ifrit because other summons don’t have an unbroken lineage of games serving as a summon. And the weirdest and worst part is that there are still further spinoffs away from the main games, sure, but many of those are also highly reliant on the existing franchise references in order to establish that sense of continuity.
Obviously, yes, this has many positive points to it. The fact that FFXIV has run for so long that it has taken on most of the obvious elements that can be borrowed from the franchise? That’s pretty cool, not going to front. It’s really neat that we now have an MMO that covers a diverse range of existing games the way this one does. But I also think it’s important to be aware that this does generate some knock-on effects along the way. It’s that much harder to guess at the future when we’ve reached the end of the backstory you can pull out.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to talk about our recent string of event quests and ask why they’ve generally not been great… while also acknowledging that I think it might not really be a solvable problem in the broad strokes.
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.
