**SPOILERS** Did anyone else find this new zone to be a complete slog? **SPOILERS**

Respectfully disagree. I love Elpis! I don't ever want to leave and me and my friends are RP walking around while doing the quests. I love how it slowed down a bit and we can just chill in this beautiful zone and learn about the past.

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Originally Posted by Rhysati

I agree with you on this. I also like cutscenes. I like story. I loved the last expansion and my favorite games of all time are all JRPGs.

The pacing here is so jarring that every time I started to get grabbed by the story and interested, the rug was pulled out from under me and I went back to talking to people or running errands like the apocalypse didn't just begin. While I understand why others are saying they love Elpis for the adorable little story, I feel it would make an EXCELLENT optional side-story that everyone can play when they feel like it. Having the entire story come to a grinding hault while you play a bit of Back to the Future just really killed every ounce of excitement they built up for me with the Final Days beginning.

It's like watching Star Wars: A New Hope and in the middle of the attack on the Death Star they just cut to the first 30 minutes of The Phantom Menace. Sure, it is relevant to how we got to that point in the story, but couldn't we tell this on it's own when it isn't detracting from the pacing of the adventure we are currently on?

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I kinda felt this way at the time. But upon completing the story, it really wouldn't do it justice to skim over this part or make it optional.

Without all of the Hermes and Meteion stuff, the final zone and boss would all be entirely out of left field and fall flat as hell.

The story needs the exposition, build up and time spent with these characters in order to work.
If anything, we needed more time in the ancient past.

Literally skipped every cutscene til I got to Elpis.

Was good.

Elpis has been the highlight of the MSQ for me so far.

Elpis was great. The actually awful pacing part was the second half of Labyrinthos.

Elpis is a very well designed zone! Aesthetically as well as regarding the MSQ and lore in sidequests. Teasing Emet was fun!
I also loved exploring the zone. Even spotted a picknick blanket and a plate with apples on one of the floating isles which reminded me of Hermes and Meteions love for sugar-apples.

Hard disagree. Quite possibly one of the best chapters of the story.

Perhaps this is an age/era of media thing. But I treat this game on the same sort of patients I do for a good book. I realize that each grouping of the story as its own tale that has its familiarity growth and escalation periods. Viewed as thus, these resets are not pacing issues. It's literally chapter bookends that players are bypassing without taking the time to mentally reset - a reminder to take your time and absorb what's being presented to you in its entirety.

The game makes you take a moment to breathe and absorb before the next epic chapter unfolds. And I really enjoy that.

I respectfully disagree.

Elpis along with Garlemald were the highest points of the MSQ for me, outside of the final zone and everything that happened there (except for one part that I could have done without). While I will say that the pacing of EW has been kind of all over the place and very jarring at times, Elpis was definitely not an area where I even noticed when things felt “slow” or “too bogged down with lore/info dumps”. I was enraptured the entire time I was there. It was an important moment for our character and for the story as a whole—and completely unexpected in terms of what I had predicted was going to happen at the start of each level chain.

The fleshing out had to be done—you had to develop the relationships and connections between not only your character but the others involved there, and I don’t think that could have been achieved in 5 quests or less. Not with everything we learned. That would create the opposite pacing issue where now things felt too rushed, in my opinion. And, the ending scenes before and after the final battle would have had even less impact. So I have to really disagree with your points there. All in all, it was when I started getting very engrossed in the story.

Versus other pivotal zones that started to drag/wear out their welcome after a while. I found this the most egregious with the Moon after we were introduced to the Loporitts. That felt as if it dragged on for forever, and I was just ready to get off at that point. My best friend that I was doing the story with actually asked another friend of ours that was ahead of us how many more quests we had up there, because we were starting to get bored. And the start of Thavnair was also disappointingly slow, in my opinion. It picked up the second time we were there, though.

But to each their own.

Respectfully disagreed on that matter.
It was very important for us to learn more about the whole thing and the design and everything around it was great imho. And i wasn't even doing a single side quest yet. Looking forward to some experiments to azems familar - us.

Hey to each their own. Happy people are enjoying it. I absolutely despise it and hope I can rush through it as quickly as possible and will never return to it. Beauty of this game is we don't have to like everything and can pick and choose where we want to go. I'm personally absolutely miserable in this area and it seems to never end.