(09-29-2013, 10:29 PM)LandStander Wrote: Speaking of questions, I had a question about this one. I know in 1.0 (and I think 2.0) they say that the only reason you are able to communicate with the beast tribes is because of the Echo, yet the beast tribes seem to communicate with a lot more people. You see a uh lizard guy (name escapes me) in Limsa speaking with one of the merchant npcs (its just a little chat bubble). The guy in the Ifrit story line seems to be able to speak with the Mamool Ja. The Sylph speak with the Lalafell lady who mans the front of The Waking Sands. I think if you go into the back room, one of the Sylphs is even speaking with some random NPC. Not to mention the Sylph encampment that is shared with the Wood Wailers (I think) for the level 20 quest stuff.
Is this just because the beast tribes are starting to learn the common tongue..or is the Echo not as cool as they wrote it as being in 1.0?
My personal read on this (which is a little speculative, so take it with between one and many grains of salt
) is that the beastmen often learn the common tongue to interact with others. In fact, the term "beastmen" is really a rather prejudicial one, adopted by the city-state dwellers for a variety of reasons; for instance, Ul'dah has a very vicious anti-beastmen policy, and so they adopted the term to dehumanize them in the eyes of the people (since beastmen get in the way of profits). There's a dev post that speaks to this somewhat obliquely, though I don't have it handy at the moment.I do believe the Echo is still intended to be quite rare, though of course while every PC has it by way of the main scenario quest, PCs are themselves quite rare (being a subset of adventurers, who are a subset of all characters).
EDIT: My bad. There's actually two dev posts that address this. This post talks about how the different city-states deal with beastmen; for instance, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa tend to have relations with some of the more amicable tribes. This other post (specifically, question 7) describes how the term "beastman" is used as racial epithet and why.
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((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
