(06-17-2015, 11:18 PM)Mae Wrote:(06-17-2015, 05:36 PM)Suviyo Viyo Wrote:This is something I don't get, either. We have that statement from the Dev saying that literacy is rare... yet we have so many quests where we're passing notes around for people. Or putting up notices/posters. And then there's the actual Moogle Delivery Quests. And the 'newspaper' NPC's that pop up for some events. There's only one NPC (quest out in the Gold Bazaar) that I've ever encountered that, when trying to give them a flyer for work, actually said "I can't read". Everyone else, you give them a piece of paper and they read it.(06-17-2015, 02:53 PM)Lilia Lia Wrote: I have been thinking lately of how rare it is that I see people playing illiterate characters, even though literacy is considered rare in Eorzea.
You know, I've seen this stated in the forums here a few times while looking around and I'm a little confused about it. Is there anything in-game that supports the idea of a large number of illiterate people? Because... so far... all I've seen are examples of people being pretty literate in general. Books, logs, journals, letters, etc... all being passed around in quests.... Signs and posters on the walls... Wearable "reading glasses".... Books decorating buildings... etc...
There's also a statement in the Hyur character creation about how Midlanders are taught to read very young or "trained in letters from infancy" if you will.
The only thing I've seen to support illiteracy in game was a one-off statement from a game dev without much elaboration (or racial/regional/cultural specifics). Curious if anyone here could point to more examples from in-game text/lore to support this at all?
I'd LOVE to know though, because I'm thinking of having my character be pretty literate... or perhaps a "book nerd" if you will. It would be nice to know how odd/rare that kind of thing actually is amongst people (or Lalafell specifically) so I can RP appropriately.
On the topic of literacy...
For me, personally, MMO spaces are by-and-large a small taste of what's actually going on. What we see on our screens is but a small example of what the world might actually be if it were going to transfer into reality.
A city-state like Ul'Dah might only have a couple hundred of NPCs we as PCs can interact with when we load up FFXIV, but I'm willing to bet if Ul'Dah translated into the real world, it could hold several thousand people that we will never see in game.
To fully populate a game to make it feel like a real place (yay immersion!), it would require a lot of resources both from the development team and on our hardware. SE has done a pretty good job with populating areas with NPCs, whether they serve a mechanical function for our PvE experience or not, so that areas don't look so empty.
Remember, there's a ton of doors that we can't open. There's places we physically can't put our characters. There's mountains we can't climb and oceans we can't swim in.
So just because the NPCs we primarily interact with are literate doesn't mean the whole population, or even the implied population we don't see, is wholly literate. Or even the majority literate. Educated and literate people are easier to write into a story because the creators making those characters are educated and literate.
Besides, would you really trust a guy who tells you the fate of the world rests in your hands and you have to slay the primal -whoever- for -whatever reason- when the guy couldn't be bothered to learn how to write his own name? I certainly wouldn't.
