The Patreon Letters - July 1, 2017

Hi friends, and welcome to the latest exclusive Patreon letter! It's Jackson here, with the updates you crave. As ever, it's a busy time here at Abnormal Mapping HQ, so I'm going to break down the important happenings for you!

• Yesterday we released Abnormal Mapping 64. It's one of our best episodes, two hours of extremely good Star Wars criticism as we dive into Knights of the Old Republic II, featuring friend of the show, Heather Alexandra for segment 2. You can listen on the site, in your podcast app of choice, or on YouTube! 
• The Amory Score roars towards the climax of the Second Stage Turbine Blade with a bullshit filled episode as Coheed, Cambria and Inferno get their ass to Paris: Earth, a planet which is neither Paris nor Earth, but does have a fuck off swarm of mechanical flies. 
• Tomorrow we record another Goof Zone! Me and Destiny are very excited, if you have any mental health questions just send them to podcast@abnormalmapping.com and we will answer 
• M continues playing through the hella dope Life is Strange, while I just started tearing through Mega Man 6 this week. That's a fantastic game, check in every weekday Morning for new videos. I'll probably be done somepoint next week, and then no more Mega Man. Rip mega man.

That's it on the update front for now, it's time for the actual letter, and I have to begin with some terrible news: I am now an MMO person.

That's right, after a couple prior attempts of getting a few hours in before giving up, I resubscribed to Final Fantasy XIV and it managed to get its hooks in me, so today's letter is just going to be some loose #takes about what it's like playing a new MMO in 2017: it's weird. Let's go.

1: Everything is so quiet.

Around 2008, I played a fair amount of City of Heroes, and even though that game was fairly empty in the wake of World of Warcraft taking all the lunch money, the chat was still constantly abuzz with people yelling about bullshit, advertising their guild, selling gold, the usual. This was also the era where you played a game of Halo and more often than not, people had their headset on. But now, walking around a completely packed city on a full server, you get one guild advertisement maybe every thirty minutes. I ran three dungeons without saying a word.

I feel like this shift has happened across the board online, as things like IRCs and forums started dying down and everyone got a twitter account or a tumblr account. Socialising online is so much less about finding shared spaces, but making connections within networks. And so you load up FFXIV which is designed in the mold of WoW, and it feels like time-travelling to a bygone era that I definitely miss on some level, but can't go back to. I don't want to talk to any of these people; they're probably nazis anyway.

2: The MMO Format and Final Fantasy

When I briefly played WoW, the thing that always struck me was how much I hated questing. You would click on a character, who would give you a full box of text explaining the 'plot' of the quest, and you would almost always move on without reading it. There was a clear delineation between decoration NPCs and NPC questgivers, you would click on the yellow icons, the numbers would go up, and that would be that.

The way that FFXIV changes things is extremely slight in practical terms but ends up being one of the main reasons I like the game so much. Almost every NPC you go up to will have a dialogue box or two of flavour text about the town and their lives, with some leading to side quests, which usually build together into a climax for that town's plot. Quests are given through the dialogue, every character has a voice (arguably too much voice), and the effect is feeling like the MMO format is in some ways a more honest translation of Final Fantasy into the modern era.

Like, Final Fantasy XIII didn't have towns. The transition to fully voiced, lavishly animated cutscenes brought an end to the pantomime animation that defined the series all the way through the PSOne era. And here's a game that, while only half-successful at its more deliberate throwback of theme and aesthetic, feels like it almost accidentally fell onto a format that brought back that specific charm. Exploring the world, hearing the newest settlement theme, getting into light stories with villagers, and then moving on through the overworld is where the game is at its most fun, and it made me want to go and fill in all my Final Fantasy gaps before we move onto X in a few months.

3: The Actual Story

While I love the moment-to-moment recreation of exploring towns like in the good old days, the actual story itself has been, shall we say, strange so far. The story is about three city states, each with their own internal political struggles, who have to unite and fight both the Garlean Empire and The Primals. The Garlean Empire are evil because the have Magitek, The Primals are all powerful Gods (read: Summons) who cause untold destruction whenever they show up. It's Final Fantasy madlibs, it's fine, whatever. I'm not that far into it because of how the story is paced.

What has been really weird, is the consistently strange class politics? The game is about a world recovering from disaster, and so a lot of the people in this world are displaced refugees, desperately looking for some sort of stability. The game attempts to frame the player as an adventurer who is always looking out for the little guy, but has been undermining that with enough regularity that I wonder if it's intentional.

For example, early on you get a quest from a villager who wants nothing more than to own a home. They ask you to check out an auction that has opened up, for houses in the first new development since the calamity. You go, and discover these houses are for adventurers only, You tell the villager this, and they break down in tears over the hopelessness of their empty, meager life. Quest complete, XP cashed, Level up. It's fucking weird.

This is just one instance, but it's a really pervasive thing. I recently hit a cutscene where they talked about how not all refugees are committing crime due to poverty! Some have got honest work!! And this doesn't feel like a commentary on the people saying it, or the world expressing it, it's just a thing that happens and is moved on from. I don't know where it comes from, it's probably just a side effect of making a game this big, but there's definitely a missed opportunity to build to a world that has an ideology baked into its design. The worlds of FFVI and VII felt like statements of intent, and as you progress through Eorzea and get to know each town's story and way of life, there's no reason FFXIV couldn't be aiming for the same thing, but it just doesn't. It's a shame.

4: Dungeons. 

Hey. The part where you play MMOs with other people and have to play your role? It's good. I like it a lot. I understand why people lose decades to them. It's very good.

Okay that's it! I know i focused on my gripes but for all the frustrations, I am enjoying playing the game a whole lot and maybe I'll have more takes in the future. We shall see. No more MMOs this weekend though, I'm off to read a Star Trek book. 

We'll see you next week.

Jackson <3