POTENTIAL SPOILERS FOR FFXIV AHEAD

It’s not easy to do storytelling especially for a huge seemingly endless story cause new content must always be made for a MMORPG like FFXIV and WoW. It is possible that little details are missed like, say an NPC saying how they wish their town was liberated and you as the main player/hero/saviour/deux ex machina liberated their town, talk to them again, and they STILL say that they wish their town was liberated.

This can be very immersive breaking especially if the main story was well-written, immersive, engaging, but the characters in it even just the minor ones are like “NOTHING HAS CHANGED”

FFXIV manages to avoid this problem 99% of the time, they have NPCs address changes that seemingly you would think they wouldn’t bother to do so, more important NPCs that you don’t really talk to anymore like say a secondary character in a job class quest-line long ago done can even comment on the recent story progression, noting things that have happened and providing their own opinion based on their character/knowledge on it.

Minor NPC characters ensure they keep up with the main story happenings too, they note major story things that has happened, character death, minor questlines, etc. All this serve to make an even more immersive world that you feel these characters are living in.

Why bring this up? It is very interesting to see an MMORPG keep up with proper storytelling and immersive quality. This is the kind of quality you would expect from a single-player RPG, it is worth noting that FFXIV is a paid subscription MMORPG so there’s more money being actively put into it hence the quality is likely to be better than free MMORPGs in general, even so it’s worth commending the effort they have put in to ensure the immersive-ness of their world-building remains intact. This is the kind of quality we should expect from our games.

Do you have any experience with an MMORPG delivering good story content worthy of an article? Do other paid subscription MMOs compare to FFXIV in this regard? (I haven’t touched WoW or Ragnarok Online, if that is still alive…)

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Stay safe~!
JR