I feel like people are too harsh on Endwalker, though...

From the CGI intro we were getting "The Final Days are here and it's gonna be big". But it ended up being a bit over half a zone in Thav (spend mostly chasing a baby) and one solo-instance in Garlemald. Then we move on to Elpis and don't really see much of "The Final Days" after that.
So the part that was basicly hyped through the 5.x patches and the CGI, takes up a very small part of the story.
Also extra tonal shift after the first trial with the comic relief rabbits that's much too long. (I know we had it with the Moogles, but the point in HW when we met them was very different from the point in EW).
And the extreme padding that was Labrinth part 2.

Besides that as a WAR main, I'm basically just playing the exact same job as in SHB, but now I get to press one new GCD in my rotation every 1 minute.

Endwalker story is… there. It exists. I enjoy it more than dislike it. But as somebody who had once entertained the idea of… self harming, the story’s messaging just didn’t hit me the way it should be. The emotional manipulation was a cheapshot. Knowing this, it’s definitely not a story I would recommend to my younger self or anybody who had less than ideal mental fortitude. It feels like they’re trying to replicate the success of ShB story (which hands down my favorite expac) but ends up picking all the wrong elements to focus on.

Gameplay wise they’re stale af. My main role is further reduced its relevancy & is made redundant in casual contents to ensure the red and blue DPS booboo gets their DF queue pops faster. Adding insult to the injury, job dev have made several questionable, tone deaf, dismissive, ‘beyond m*r*n*c’, and incredibly rude statements toward one from three major roles in the game it makes me wonder why wouldn’t they just come out and say they hate said role so I can just give up giving feedbacks & focus solely on contents that players made themselves in the times of content drought.

Content wise it feels ‘ShB-lite’ which is stale af. DD is low in my list. V&C had some nice concept going on but boy do they failed to hit that ‘midcore feels’ that I missed. No Field Content so that’s sucks. Isle is… isle lol. Relic? Do we even want to call Manderville the relics? Not to mention that all the VFX glows from last step are copy pasted for -all- weapons. That's a lot of corner cutting. How I ‘somewhat’ fixed this ‘content boredom’ is by making shell FC and do submarine/airship-things on my own which is pretty ironic & I’m sure the bar is low as hell if I have to go through all these hoops.

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Originally Posted by Battler-Ushiromiya

Literally only the forums care about this and this is the smallest percentage of the players. Go away dude

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Does rage baiting counts as Red Truth? Lmao

I've been working through the patches and I can't believe how empty the story has become. And I don't mean it *feels* empty, like a lost world, like Promyvion, just literally actually devoid of anything interesting. Running back and forth through a cleared dungeon with absolutely nothing interesting to click on, read, look at, examine, what?

It didn't invoke the same sense of awe that Xarcabard and Castle Zvahl did or the Promyvions did. It was just... okay here's another 4 man and another trial, and some empty space. Way to effort there, team. Thanks for grabbing my interest with some nods to the Old game I loved and then not delivering a single thing worth doing.

The only saving grace is I really like the new character they introduced. I hope we see more of her.

I found EW decent but not spectacular, overall. It really needed to be two expansions as originally envisioned in order to the have time and space to develop the ideas they were going for, though. You can tell they were running out of ideas with Garlemald in particular and just wanted to get past it. Jamming everything together results in a lot of overly compressed storytelling, nothing gets time to breath and develop organically (and the few times it does try to slow down, like meeting the loporrits, become all the more jarring), and the whole thing ends up feeling rushed. It also has the side effect of not giving Estinien much to do; despite his joining the Scions being a big hype point going in, he's taciturn and not particularly scholarly, so when everyone is standing around talking, he's mostly leaning against a wall off to the side somewhere.

And the patch story is pretty clearly a side story padded out to fill in the MSQ while they work on something else, which ironically gives it the opposite problem.

No, not really. I think the criticisms are all reasonable and deserved.
Endwalker had big shortcomings. Having no long form content in a liveservice game is just weird..
The latter half of the MSQ was a loveletter to FF4, and if you didn't play the game it kinda just fell flat. (I did play FF4 and loved it, but it must be said)
Balance, oversimplification and homogenisation are actively ruining people's enjoyment of the game. (Just look at the attrocious state of the tanks and summoner)
Reward structures sucked, and every piece of content we got died the same day it released except for savage and Ultimates.

EW did many things wrong.

Honestly, even with some nitpicky flaws, the story is good and engaging. At least when you compare to the other MMORPGs from the last 10 years. Even the patch storyline, I defnitely don't mind it. It seems like the 'special episode' from an anime franchise, between major seasons.

I feel that the issue is with the game systems (relics, difficulty, no field exploration, job design, etc...) and apparently many of these issues are tackled upon Dawntrail. Well, I only believe when I see, but at least I have some hope that DT will be objectively better than Endwalker when it comes to those things.

6.0's story was fine. Not amazing, but I enjoyed it well enough. Patch story pissed me off so much that I not only started drinking to get through it, I god damn swapped to lalafell. If the story's gonna treat me like a joke, then I'll be a damn joke.
As for the content... ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. I've barely played this expac because there was basically no long-form content, especially since I've already done everything I've wanted to do in the past 2 expacs.
Pretty weird that they gave us two tome weapons this time, the hell was up with that? I don't even remember if I finished one.

I'm seriously hoping DT gives us Stormblood levels of content, I want to be drowning in things to do (though I may be biased since I started in SB), otherwise that'll likely be the end of my WoL's journey.

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Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk

It also has the side effect of not giving Estinien much to do; despite his joining the Scions being a big hype point going in, he's taciturn and not particularly scholarly, so when everyone is standing around talking, he's mostly leaning against a wall off to the side somewhere.

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Shadowbringers and this expac were the only ones I started to actually like Estinien in. He was historically presented as this epic, flawless, always-there-just-in-time-for-no-reason hero and something about him just really irked me. I hated every scene he was in. And he was in every. single. freaking. scene.

Until they presented him getting taken advantage of at a shopkeep.

I thought they did a better job with his writing lately. He's not flawless, he's not epic, he's a guy with a lance like the hundreds of thousands of other guys with lances in this world. He just didn't take a bath at the right time and ended up in a situation. But he's got a heart of gold, and I genuinely enjoyed spending time with him in these last patches.

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Honestly, even with some nitpicky flaws, the story is good and engaging. At least when you compare to the other MMORPGs from the last 10 years.

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I agree that it's better than any other modern MMO out there. I tend not to compare it to those, I compare it to its immediate predecessor, especially since they have taken to borrowing so much from it (and the single player games, for that matter). Sometimes it feels like the team fed the BG wiki into ChatGPT and then asked it to generate era-appropriate content for a Far Eastern area, and bam, we get Alzadaal Undersea Ruins as a braindead 4 man.

This team can do better.

This expansion did something I didn't know was possible. It took an enemy that has been on my radar since beta 2.0 and made me absolutely forget he existed by the time I was level 86... Just peak writing there, folks. And look a whole village of Jar Jar Binks level characters to take that underwhelming tension and flush the rest of it down the toliet. You had me following at the edge of my seat. A dude just killed himself to preserve what he believed in, and now I'm helping a space rabbit make clothes. Bravo...

Seriously, that's why I said Stinky Poo Poo in my post. This expansion solidified me in thinking Shadowbringers and Heavensward were flukes. Much like Empire Strikes Back and Andor are for Star Wars.

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Originally Posted by Souljacker

Until they presented him getting taken advantage of at a shopkeep.

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That's actually the moment I started to hate him.

He is this awesome hero who travels the world alone and he has no idea how to deal with situations like that?

That was just out of character and bad writing.

Sure he must not be perfect and should have flaws. But keep it reasonable.