Printable View
What do we know about the story of FFXIV in terms of player missions (not just the lore)? One of the best things about FFXI were all the deep storylines and the sense of accomplishment you got for completing them. In fact, that was probably my favorite thing about FFXI.
FFXIV's story was pretty deep, and there's a lot of mystery yet unsolved. From what I've experienced of the story missions in ARR so far, it's going to take it's time answering them. Actually, the early story of ARR is really just introducing more questions, which isn't really a huge surprise since new players would be so lost if it didn't introduce what happened during the Calamity slowly.
Without giving away spoilers, from what I've seen so far, and what I experienced in 1.x, I have high expectations.
Do you know how many missions are going to be available at launch? Are there nation missions like in FFXI or a single storyline?
I've played through all story missions available in the phase 3 beta, and I really enjoyed the story. It was interesting and compelling and really urged me to keep playing. I even did dungeons with complete strangers, just so I could continue the story, and I never did that before while playing an MMO! There's plenty of mystery and the story helps set up some really memorable encounters. Ifrit, damn, that went straight into my favourite boss encounters of the entire series!
So, as far as story goes, from what I've seen during the beta, people won't be dissapointed. What I liked the most was how it felt like my character mattered. That the actions and fights I undertook had an impact, how I felt like I was an actual part of this world, part of this unfolding story. I never once felt that way during my time playing World of Warcraft (Cataclysm), and I did pretty much every quest there was to do in that game. As far as story goes, XIV gives it a run for the money.
I have no idea how it compares to XI's story, having not played XI, but I think XIV can at least measure itself next to some of the better stories of the single player titles in the series.
In 1.x, there was a main story scenario that was shared between all the nations. This was eventually rolled into the Grand Company story line which is basically what started when Yoshi-P took over and started the whole Dalamud falling leading into ARR thing. You did a few missions that got you around all three companies and then picked one. Missions were often shared with only slight differences between the different Grand Companies. The big plot-advancing missions were always shared.
It's unclear how this will work in ARR, but my guess is that there are not independent story lines in each of the nations. Expect these to be fleshed out in quests (many of which appear to have narrative archs tying together several quests that build on one another).
To clarify, in 1.x they started unique to the nation but once they hit the 'bigger stages' they all tied in together. I'd expect something similar. There are also smaller storylines for each of the guilds. The quests, of course, are there too. I imagine there will be a few miniature storylines over the course of 2-3 quests for some NPCs, as I'm pretty sure that was the case in 1.x...