Game Design on fournm

(Revisit for ShB) Musings on the Design of Final Fantasy XIV

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 11:19:31 -0500

So, between the last post and now, there’s been a lot going on – COVID, medical trip, work, working on design of our own project with my wife – but also, I finished Shadowbringers (5.0, at least) and can update these articles for it.

Credit where credit is due – ShB’s work on having a living and breathing world brought me to actual tears. I will be going over major spoilers for Shadowbringers over this article, so if you care, please do not read further. I’m still going to try and not go over major emotional beats in detail, so if you think just general plot direction spoilers are fine, this hopefully won’t ruin your experience.

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Quest Design -- Musings on the Design of Final Fantasy XIV

Tue, 19 May 2020 22:40:31 -0800

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.

Okay, this is the second of the posts about Final Fantasy XIV and this time around we’re going to be going over the lessons they’ve learned over the course of the expansions and then also a bit of what they could still stand to learn in regards to quest design. The developers have learned from a lot of their own mistakes, and, to their credit, Square is actually going back and redoing the main storyline for XIV to streamline A Realm Reborn’s content to be less of a slog. In addition to the main storyline, though, there are plenty of additional side quests and side storylines that have improved in their execution with time as well.

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

Sun, 10 May 2020 16:19:31 -0800

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.

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