cashew | MMO vs Single Player Story - Plot structure limited by technical constraints

I'm still not over how annoying FF16 is, so I'm going to drill down to a really tiny, specific issue that sort of illustrates the bigger picture of why FF16 is such a failed single player RPG.

The Basics:

FF16 is the most recently released single player RPG entry in the long running Final Fantasy franchise. The project was produced by Yoshida Naoki (Yoshi-P), aka the brains behind the success of FF14.

FF14 is the second MMORPG entry in the Final Fantasy franchise. FF14 had a disastrous launch and was salvaged when Yoshi-P stepped in, revamped the game from the ground up, and build it into the only successful World of Warcraft challenger in the history of MMORPGs.

The Problem:

Despite both being RPGs, there are many mechanistic differences between an MMO and a single player game. The major key difference is that assets in a single player game can be reused, moved, altered, or otherwise repurposed based on a single player's progression; in contrast, the MMO's assets are shared amongst the player base and thus cannot be reused, moved, altered or otherwise repurposed arbitrarily. This fundamentally presents a storytelling obstacle specific to an MMO that doesn't apply to a single player game.

In a single player game, npcs and environments (maps, items, shops, etc.) can be hard coded in the back-end to reflect story progression. If a building burns down in the story, the art can shift to reflect this change. If a new weapon is unlocked, the shops will pull from a different list of items per the progress of the story. If an NPC dies (or party member dies), they can be coded out of the user interface to reflect that death. NPC character models can be moved, animated, teleported according to the story progression's needs. All of this is possible because the game engine only needs to deal with a single player's progression and user interaction with the game.

In contrast, an MMO cannot change the environment, NPCs, shops, etc. based on a single player's interactions, because the environment needs to account for many other users' experience simultaneously. Because a player at the end of the campaign will be traversing through the same maps as a player at the start of the campaign, the maps (and corresponding assets) must remain unchanged so that it makes sense equally for both the veteran and the newbie. While wandering NPCs do exist, they cannot be core for storytelling, as otherwise they cannot be counted on to exist when the player's story progress requires their presence.

To illustrate this difference, let's consider the quest NPC and how it's handled in single player RPGs vs MMORPGs: In a single player game, NPC-A gives you a quest in map #1 with a goal in map #2. The developer has two options when coding this quest, either

have NPC-A wait at map #1 for completion or
travel with the player to map #2 and witness the completion of the quest.

In option 2, the developer would flag the event when the player picks up the quest such that when triggered, the game engine will delete NPC-A from map #1 and place NPC-A into map #2 once the quest completes. This gives players the illusion of NPC-A moving from map #1 to map #2.

However, in an MMO, option 2 cannot be used, because while player 1 is completing the quest, player 2 might need NPC-A in map #1 to pick up the quest. As such, NPC-A is location locked to map #1, which means the only way to write the dialogue involves asking the player to fetch something from map #2 to prove the completion of the quest then return to map #1 and hand it back for the quest reward. The option of walking away from map #1 is simply not possible in an MMO setting. (Yes, with player-specific NPC placement tables, this can be made possible, but most MMO engines aren't capable of keeping track of millions of players' individual progress with every single quest NPC in the game.)

This is the reason why so many MMOs have fetch quests rather than quests that progresses with the main story, which you can complete as you follow the story progression. This also means that MMO story writing is limited by the technological constraint of a shared, persistent world.

The problem as applied to FF16:

Traditionally, FF sidquests are varied and often span multiple maps and progress is gated by story progression. Take the FF7 chocobo breeding sidequest as an example: You first encounter the introduction to the concept of chocobos when you first leave Midgar. Then, once you've gained the airship, you can double back to the chocobo ranch to obtain the chocobo lure materia and start catching chocobos. (Yes, yes, you can also buy it earlier if you want, but resources are much scarcer earlier in the game and if you wait, you get the materia for free.) As you explore, you'll find the Chocobo Sage (inaccessible without the airship), and learn about special nuts and breeding. Then, with some trial and error, you'll figure out how to breed a gold chocobo that then allows you to travel to maps with special materia and makes the Gold Saucer points a cakewalk during chocobo racing, which then gives access to the Ultimate Weapon, which you will use to defeat the final boss.

You'll notice in this description that the sidequest rewards are intermingled with a bunch of other quests, rather than being a self-contained little task. This means the player can work towards other goals while completing the sidequest, making the quest feel integrated in the world rather than falling into "go to point A, kill X many mobs, get reward" trope of fetch quests. This integration is what makes these sidequests feel interesting rather than rote. However, to pull this off, the game engine has to be able to keep track of the player's progress not just on the quest itself but in everything else. While this is easy enough to code for a single player, when you have millions of simultaneous players all at different progression levels, this becomes an absolute headache of accounting.

In FF16, the sidequests are almost exclusively MMO-style "fetch" quests. Either fetch a person or fetch an item or fetch some monster kills. These types of sidequests are due to technical restrictions in a shared world, not because they're in anyway interesting. The fact that FF16 uses MMO-style fetch quests to do most of its world building, rather than putting it into the story itself shows the limitation of having an MMO project director helming a single player game.

Conclusion:

FF16 uses narrative choices of MMOs that stem not from storytelling deliberation, but are the unintended results of technical limitations specific to MMOs. In a single player game without an MMO's limitation (persistent world, shared assets, millions of players all at different levels of progression), the narrative could and should have used traditional RPG storytelling tools to convey pertinent world building information without having to resort to stuffing the lore into a free-floating appendix.

At this point, I am reminded of the criticisms toward FF13 for having a lore log. But the difference here is that FF13 is an easily understandable story without ever having to open the lore log. You can find out more about the world, the gods' war, the formation of Cocoon, but it's not important to understanding Lightning's frustrations at being thrust into the role of a guardian before she was ready. Meanwhile, FF16 stumbles awkwardly through a story of Medieval White Europeans coming to grips with "slavery is bad" for the very first time. And the protagonist learns all this through a series of unconnected fetch quests that asks the player to go kill X many killer bees then get berated by those mean, mean slave owners.

Cringe doesn't even being to cover it.