There is a sword of Damocles hanging over Square Enix's writer team, and it's the fact that Trusts exist.
Modern MSQ now have to take into account the necessity of having at least 4 people accompanying you or joining you at nearly any given time, with at least 7 people joining for at least 2 of the trials.
And because they want dungeons to be used for leveling, there always needs to be a setpiece every two levels. That means not only does the minimal party requirement have to be satisfied at some points in the MSQ, it basically has to be nearly always satisfied since there is a dungeon every 10~15 quests or so.
As a result, it's very rare that you get an organic cadence of storytelling, because the story needs to have 4 people at nearly every moment. And if that is not satisfied, the story will literally just bring in people who just coincidentally happened to be in the same area as you, ready to join in as Trusts (see the leadup to, for example, the Aetherfont in 6.4, where Thancred and Urianger basically appeared out of nowhere with the most contrived explanations possible for the explicit purpose of serving as Trust members). It's hard to induce moments of quiet when there are always 4 people around you, and it's hard to introduce intra-party conflict that feels consequential because they need to stick around and still work together to complete a dungeon. That's also partially why Thancred and Urianger's "disagreement" in Dawntrail led to nowhere because they were required for the Lv93 and Lv99 trials.
Another side effect is that they have now added a cost to killing off characters or benching them for an expansion. Killing off a key character now does not just mean that the community might get upset. It also means that they'd have to code up a new NPC to serve as a Trust member. I wouldn't think that this is such a huge cost, but apparently, to Square Enix, it might be. This means SE is much more reluctant to rotate around characters in the story because they want to minimize the cost of designing and implementing new characters for Trusts.
The worst part of this is that they've now stuck to a routine of having a Trust-related achievement every expansion. They cannot make the cast too large, and they also cannot rotate around characters too much because it also has to serve a gameplay purpose of letting you level eight characters up for the achievement.
There are in principle ways, trivial ones even, to completely negate the issue with trusts on MSQ, but Square Enix will never do it because they want to stick to their formula and Yoshi P's hobby is minimizing costs and maximizing efficiency. Can you imagine if every other dungeon in Evercold rotates around new characters you've met to do the dungeon together? Sadly, that will never happen under SE, which is why we'll forever have the Scions in every expansion and they'll be around for every big moment (dungeons and trials) because SE does not want to disturb the Trust formula.
Continue reading...
Modern MSQ now have to take into account the necessity of having at least 4 people accompanying you or joining you at nearly any given time, with at least 7 people joining for at least 2 of the trials.
And because they want dungeons to be used for leveling, there always needs to be a setpiece every two levels. That means not only does the minimal party requirement have to be satisfied at some points in the MSQ, it basically has to be nearly always satisfied since there is a dungeon every 10~15 quests or so.
As a result, it's very rare that you get an organic cadence of storytelling, because the story needs to have 4 people at nearly every moment. And if that is not satisfied, the story will literally just bring in people who just coincidentally happened to be in the same area as you, ready to join in as Trusts (see the leadup to, for example, the Aetherfont in 6.4, where Thancred and Urianger basically appeared out of nowhere with the most contrived explanations possible for the explicit purpose of serving as Trust members). It's hard to induce moments of quiet when there are always 4 people around you, and it's hard to introduce intra-party conflict that feels consequential because they need to stick around and still work together to complete a dungeon. That's also partially why Thancred and Urianger's "disagreement" in Dawntrail led to nowhere because they were required for the Lv93 and Lv99 trials.
Another side effect is that they have now added a cost to killing off characters or benching them for an expansion. Killing off a key character now does not just mean that the community might get upset. It also means that they'd have to code up a new NPC to serve as a Trust member. I wouldn't think that this is such a huge cost, but apparently, to Square Enix, it might be. This means SE is much more reluctant to rotate around characters in the story because they want to minimize the cost of designing and implementing new characters for Trusts.
The worst part of this is that they've now stuck to a routine of having a Trust-related achievement every expansion. They cannot make the cast too large, and they also cannot rotate around characters too much because it also has to serve a gameplay purpose of letting you level eight characters up for the achievement.
There are in principle ways, trivial ones even, to completely negate the issue with trusts on MSQ, but Square Enix will never do it because they want to stick to their formula and Yoshi P's hobby is minimizing costs and maximizing efficiency. Can you imagine if every other dungeon in Evercold rotates around new characters you've met to do the dungeon together? Sadly, that will never happen under SE, which is why we'll forever have the Scions in every expansion and they'll be around for every big moment (dungeons and trials) because SE does not want to disturb the Trust formula.
Continue reading...