Challenge: Write a FFXIV Crossover Patch

Argent Dawn
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You are Blizzard’s creative director on the WoW team.

It is the future. After the release of the latest expansion, with its return of Arthas*, which you helped spearhead, the expected backlash was less than expected. You survived, you still have your job and the company is still rolling in back. You were not promoted.

As detailed here:
Challenge: Bring Arthas Back

For the next nine months, your party sets to work on a new patch, a story that will satisfyingly round out the post-Worldsoul Saga arc, you finally finish detailing the heroic death of Chen Stormstout to Med’an when suddenly, you’re interrupted. It’s the head of Xbox, saying that SquareEnix has recently been purchased by Microsoft, in a blow to Sony.

“That’s great!” you might think, until you’re suddenly tasked with the uneviable job of combining the storylines of two completely unrelated games, not just as a promotional measure, but as one to ‘save costs, and make the company and games more dynamic and metaversal’.

Even if you, reader, don’t know anything about Final Fantasy XIV, you are still in the exact same position when you are given this job.

With precious little time to research anything, as they want this patch next quarter, you are handed an impracticably vast collection of contextless assets and the Other Game’s upcoming script (in roughly translated Japanese), you are forced to work with flawed materials.

Your arguments that these are two completely unrelated games, with unrelated plotlines and characters, fall on deaf ears. Only money talks, and it’s in the interests of Microsoft to have the playerbase subscribed to two MMORPGs at once.

But you’re a good cyber-draughtsman (or daughtswoman, or otherwise), aren’t you? Be thankful it isn’t League of Legends.

What do you do?

A few optional rules, to make things interesting:

  1. You are largely given carte blanche to both games’ characters, lore and plot-threads, with the ability to draw on old material and create new ones.
  2. Whilst elements from one universe may enter another, players may not cross between the two MMORPGs.
  3. The two universes are connected only for this patch. While you can leave things open, the general assumption is this patch will have no sequel.
  4. You must destroy one familiar location in both worlds, to empathise whatever threatens both realities.
  5. You must introduce a MacGuffin that utilises both cosmologies’ differing magic systems in an interesting way. This MacGuffin must continue to be relevant to both games’ storylines after the patch.
  6. OPTIONAL BONUS RULE: One developer is insistent you implement a romantic plotline. You can choose whether to heed them or ignore them.
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Patch will be called “Final World of Warcraft Fantasy”.

Basically what Zovaal wanted to prevent has come true:
Warcraft is going to end. All he did failed, and now we got the Chris Chan-esque “Dimensional Merge” between FF and WoW.

And with the common patented “Blizzard implementation of gameplay” that prefers releasing broken content and fixing it a week before the next big patch comes out we also get all the wackyness of FF and WoW put together.

So a broken mess of a game where mobs are either overtuned or dont spawn at all so you cant finish current content, overhauls of classes and specs that no one asked for. Additionally you got to play through 150 hours of drawn-out story, have to “enjoy” a 3-button playstyle with 1 additional utility through all of it because of the aforementioned class overhauls, just to land in the meaty part of the patch which has a total shift in tone to everything set up before.

Additionally to that there will be a new class added: The Bard. That class of course will make all the others more or less irrelevant because its overtuned and rules most metrics. That class will be available to all races, of course. That class also comes with its own implementation of Musician, so you can torture everyone with the quality music you get to enjoy when you are afk in trade district.

Alongside that there will be new shop items put in place, like these ones:

For 60€ you can buy yourself a “Story-key” which effectively makes you skip the entire content of the patch and maxes out your rep.
For 100€ you can buy yourself a mount that allows 4 people to sit on. No additional benefits. And ground-mount, for the flying one you have to pay 150€.

And for 180€ you can buy the very special “Summoningstone-Elemental”. Basically a gigantic hearthstone-earth elemental that allows you to summon everyone of your raidgroup to your location.

As with story:
Some big interdimensional entity called the “Big First One”, who is Azeroth how she was meant to be, sprouts forth and warps the entire world for the patch with alot of crystals. Crystalline mobs, crystal-corrupted people, crystal-environments. Basically the wet dream of a draenic crystalshaper.
And the heroes got to first play through the entire world, doing stuff related to the patch and its tropes. Just to have been put an entire shift in tone with the end of “Azeroth isnt evil, the crystals are actually quite nice” while all you did was to destroy evil crystals.

Goldshire, Silvermoon Inn, Limsa Lominsa and that brothel in that desert town in FF14 have been wiped off the map because the evil big bad guy has at least one redeemable quality. All thats left of it are just gigantic crystalline spikes with long questlines about how these places were struck first.

… thats all of it. Cant wait for Blizz to implement my shop-ideas after I painted them out here. The ingame shop defo isnt utilized enough, we need more avenues to burn money :rofl:

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Somehow Ultima, the High Seraph, returned.

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Oh no, not patch 14.2! That was supposed to complete Arthas’s redemption arc, to serve as the culmination of his entire story! And how am I supposed to tell a self-contained story of such scope in a single patch?

Well… Let’s see what can be done.

First of all, the climactic confrontation with Med’an, and Chen Stormstout’s sacrifice, is moved to the end of 14.1. Med’an reveals his goal: being already a shaman/paladin/mage, he wants to become the ultimate master of every single form of magic in existence to become the Guardian of the Universe, an ultimate cosmic being who could prevent dangers like the Burning Legion or the Old Gods from threatening the cosmos ever again. For such a noble goal, no price is too high.

Between 14.1 and 14.2, we release a story patch for FFXIV. After the end of Fandaniel, the remaining Ascians fell off the radar. Now the Ascian Pashtarot, the preserver of discipline and order, has learned that both Zodiark and Hydaelyn, and even the Twelve, are all gone; the mortals of Etheirys are now left to their own devices, to live their lives without divine oversight.

Clearly this cannot stand. Without divine oversight, without a god to answer prayers and regulate the flow of aether, mortal life will become utter chaos. The remaining Ascians are not powerful enough to create a god — it would require an immense sacrifice of life, like the one that created Zodiark — but perhaps they can steal one from another world.

At this point, Pashtarot is visited by a magician from another world: Med’an, who wants the magical knowledge of this world, and in return he will help Pashtarot transfer Azeroth’s world-soul to Etheirys, to take Hydaelyn’s place as the god-protector of the world.

The patch begins with the Ascians’ brazen attack on Old Sharlayan. The Scions give chase, but are too late: Med’an has pilfered a trove of treasured tomes on different forms of magic from the Noumenon. White magic, black magic, arcanima… Med’an sets up a trap for the Scions and subjugates G’raha Tia with Domination magic, previously pilfered from the Maw during the Arthas arc. With a mind-controlled G’raha, Med’an and Pashtarot commandeer the Crystal Tower and relocate it to Azeroth, to a suitable nexus of magical energies…

Except they overdo it, perhaps because some part of G’raha is fighting back. Instead of just the Crystal Tower, they tear the entire land of Mor Dhona out of the planet, and it vanishes in a flash of light.

Mor Dhona becomes permanently inaccessible in-game following this story chapter. A new collection of NPCs in Limsa takes over the duties of vendors from Revenant’s Toll. The Systemophoroi have succeeded at this stage of their plan, leading up to…

Patch 14.2: Echoes of Eorzea

Invaders from another world have appeared and are after Azeroth’s world-soul. Only the combined might and knowledge of the heroes of Azeroth and Eorzea can stop them!

New zone: Mor Dhona

Mor Dhona has appeared in the Eastern Kingdoms, completely replacing the Alterac Mountains (it was just unused ruins and we were out of ideas for revamping that zone, anyway). The Crystal Tower now sits on a nexus of ley lines in the place of the former Dalaran Crater, Revenant’s Toll has replaced Strahnbrad, and parts of Silvertear Lake have fused with Lordamere Lake.

Complete outdoor activities to earn a new currency: Allagan Tomestones, which will be used by the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and their allies to learn the secrets needed to breach the Crystal Tower!

New renown faction: Scions of the Seventh Dawn

Y’shtola, who happened to be in the Rising Stones when Mor Dhona relocated to Azeroth, is leading the research into the new dimensional rift that formed between Azeroth and the Source. Complete the campaign to help Y’shtola join forces with Khadgar and the Kirin Tor to establish a permanent portal between the two worlds and bring in the other Scions and reinforcements from their world!

New raid: Crystal Tower

Using the vast aether reserves of the Crystal Tower, Pashtarot and Med’an plan to bring about a small Calamity that will fuse Azeroth’s core, including the world-soul, with Etheirys. To stop their plot, you will first have to foil their plans to summon primals at carefully calculated places of power across Azeroth, battling new versions of Ifrit, Titan, Garuda, Leviathan, and more!

New activity: Eorzean Brawling Club

Adventurers from Eorzea have traveled to test their mettle against Azeroth’s greatest! Duel all kinds of Disciples of War and Magic — paladins, red mages, dancers, samurai, and more! (Basically, FFXIV playable jobs as solo bosses.)

New allied race: Miqo’te

The Eorzean Adventurers’ Guild is expanding its operations to a new and unfamiliar world, and the first batch of would-be heroes has already answered the call to explore Azeroth! By popular demand, the catgirls and catboys come to World of Warcraft first, with viera and hrothgar possibly to follow in later patches if the stars align just right (but probably never, we all know this is the first and last crossover patch).

When asked if lalafell would be playable in WoW, a Blizzard spokesperson said, “Over our dead bodies”.

New cosmetics

Through outdoor activities, renown rewards, boss drops and more, earn a variety of cosmetic rewards, such as chocobo mounts, moogle companion pets, and tonberry costumes!

New feature: Multiclassing

Thanks to the Eorzeans sharing the knowledge of making soul crystals, Azerothian adventurers can now pursue multiple career paths. You can now level any number of non-hero classes on the same character, with each class having its own separate levels, and switch between them at the press of a button just like switching specs!

But how does the story end?

Pashtarot’s plan is foiled, of course, at the nick of time. There are no philosophical conversations — WoW is not a good medium for that, all the deep introspection of the villains’ motivations should be reserved for the FFXIV patch. But with his final villain banter, he reveals that there is a primal of immense power present on this world — none other than Elune! The so-called goddess was in fact summoned into the world through worship, though we don’t yet know when and how. Perhaps she herself would tell more if we found a way to talk to her.

Through someone’s heroic sacrifice, the Crystal Tower is collapsed so its power cannot be used for evil ends again.

However, Med’an escapes. He has done what he wanted to do: mastered Eorzean forms of magic in addition to Azerothian ones. He has completed the Prismatic Keystone, formed from fusing Azeroth’s six cosmic forces with Eorzea’s six aspects of aether crystals, and escapes to continue his quest for power across the universe. What other worlds will he visit, and what horrors will he unleash in his nonchalant disregard for the safety of the very denizens of the universe he wants to protect?

Find out in World of Warcraft 15.0: Heralds of the Stars, the long-awaited cosmic expansion!

(Because we just know Blizzard likes the acronym HotS!)

…But we sidelined Arthas for the sake of this patch, what are we going to do with him now? Crap.

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Kind of want a fight where the tanks have to perform a block sequence of a otherwise raid-wiping attack, similar to the Susano trial - Having this epic moment of being someone who can stop something so ridiculous with sheer power and determination.

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I had made this thread partially as a joke, but honestly- everything you’ve written here sounds fantastic. It’s something I’d genuinely want to play through.

It’s a pity I’m unaware of any equivialent FFXIV RP forums, I’d love to ask them how they’d handle their game’s half of the story.

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It’s just a giant gold saucer darkmoon faire crossover

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I deserved that!

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