Tl:Dr at the bottom.
I think a major contributor to this, not knowing the characters problem, is the one month time skip. The diaries somewhat alleviate this, but even then it’s not showing us the characters in detail. It’s giving broad strokes and heavily filtered through said character’s perspective.
The biggest victim of this is Iris, who doesn’t even have a diary so we have no clue how her thought process works or what she thinks of the others. Honestly Iris despite her having more screen time than Neviro is the one we know the least about.
From his diary we know Neviro is the last prince of a lost kingdom, the descendant of the Darkness Curee holder, a drifter, has bittersweet memories of Munera Gardens, and is a middle child.
What we know about Iris: she’s a lost magic user, she’s from Ravenna, her dad’s gone missing, and according to Morden and Neviro rather hot-headed. We don’t even know her dad’s name! Please Vetex just give her a diary so I don’t have to keep scrounging for more interesting characterization for my fan-fics.
Also it should be said, that while Iris can be an interesting character if you extrapolate and speculate heavily from the text, in game she’s just another impulsive redhead with anger issues.
Also I realize I’ve lost the original point about the time skip, but it all kind of bleeds from there since it’s the reason for the diaries in the first place.
I feel like if Vetex played more into the open world aspect of AO and allowed us to explore the War Seas with the crew as companions akin to Fallout New Vegas this could help somewhat. Especially if they have comments to give on certain locations, but there are issues with this. One of course is balancing both pvp and pve, particularly with Morden. Two is I’m not sure if character quest are the way to go, since people could just miss them entirely.
Maybe a better solution would be to have stretches of the story where you pair up with one or more of the crew and have those events impact both the character and the player. Rather then just having one character stay behind not doing anything while you look for clues cough cough Cirrus cough cough.
Tl:Dr The prison arc time skip robbed us of characterization and bonding and Iris needs more development. to do this give a questline (story or side) that develops the relationship between the player and their crew, and for the love of everything give Iris a diary. She needs more characterization beyond angry redhead. (Which I know she does calm down in the latter parts of the current story, however, first impressions are important and for the majority of the game she was angry and aloof. So please write more of her so she can grow as a character, and also give her father a name please and thanks.)
