What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

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Originally Posted by Kazhar

Whenever someone comes to tell us that the opinions here are niche, no matter how polite, the intent is always the same: "you're the minority so you don't matter". Don't act like this is not the case, especially since it usually comes from Striker44 who's a known offender. Or that user just a few post above who's not even hiding it.
So yes, I understand why nobody is having it.

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Hi :)

You can definitely scan back through my posts, because I've never said or even attempted to imply that a comment "doesn't matter" just because it's a minority opinion. My main train is to simply note that it is just an opinion and that it's both more polite and more productive to express it as such. Too frequently I see people working themselves up in this echo chamber declaring "the story is bad and the devs don't care" as if it's some objective fact (it's not), and then getting frustrated when it doesn't bring about change. I point out when someone's asking for a sweeping change to something, that's unlikely to happen when it's an opinion only shared by a very small group and would in the process alienate a much larger group.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Hi :)

You can definitely scan back through my posts, because I've never said or even attempted to imply that a comment "doesn't matter" just because it's a minority opinion. My main train is to simply note that it is just an opinion and that it's both more polite and more productive to express it as such. Too frequently I see people working themselves up in this echo chamber declaring "the story is bad and the devs don't care" as if it's some objective fact (it's not), and then getting frustrated when it doesn't bring about change. I point out when someone's asking for a sweeping change to something, that's unlikely to happen when it's an opinion only shared by a very small group and would in the process alienate a much larger group.

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The thing is, none of us know what the actual majority opinion is on the story.

Because none of us has talked with a majority of players.

So acting like those who don't like the story are the definite minority is wrong.

Some like the story, some don't like the story. Which portion is the minority is unknown and likely will be unknown for the rest of time. There will be things that would indicate such things, but nothing that we players can access that would tell us anything definite. And I doubt even SE would have data enough to prove which side is the minority.

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Originally Posted by CrownySuccubus

I mean, it usually doesn't matter how politely someone tries to point out that this thread holds a relatively niche opinion or that, sometimes, the complaints here come off as toxic. The backlash is still just as ferocious.

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Doubtful. I mean, how can you call US toxic when things like this:

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In the end nothing in this thread really matters. A series of opinions and nothing more. The game will not change. The vast majority of players will love the story regardless. You guys keep this thread alive though if it makes you feel special.

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Are being said by those in the pro-Venat/pro-Endwalker camp? Betcha you were one of the updooters!

I mean, really. What exactly is giving you the moral high ground here? Literally the only purpose of this thread is to express our disappointment in the EW story. It's hardly harming anyone, and there are certainly 10 times the amount of positive pro-EW threads so I really don't see what the issue is if it's NOT that negative opinions of Endwalker aren't welcome on the Fora.

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Originally Posted by Striker44

Hi :)

You can definitely scan back through my posts, because I've never said or even attempted to imply that a comment "doesn't matter" just because it's a minority opinion. My main train is to simply note that it is just an opinion and that it's both more polite and more productive to express it as such. Too frequently I see people working themselves up in this echo chamber declaring "the story is bad and the devs don't care" as if it's some objective fact (it's not), and then getting frustrated when it doesn't bring about change. I point out when someone's asking for a sweeping change to something, that's unlikely to happen when it's an opinion only shared by a very small group and would in the process alienate a much larger group.

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Huehuehue, how interesting....

Suddenly, it's YOU who've "never said that" and cannot verify evidence or provide proof! Whatever shall you do, Striker-kun?

Seriously, though. It's hardly fair for you to say that now, not when you consistently accuse others of making wild insinuations like being the "Ultimate Arbiters of Good and Bad, Right and Wrong". Where'dya get that phrase anyway, Mr. Animu Lord?

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

If they hadn't tried to cram everything into one expansion so they could brush the whole story to the side, they could have built up Venat as a likeable character with some actual plot reasons as to why a Sundering was the only option.

But no, they didn't and the result was pure nonsense that didn't connect at all. The comic is nice, but the best thing SE could have done was not rushed the conclusion to a decade worth of story build up.

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Agreed, but I also do feel like some of this was becoming...long winded? Im not saying rushing the ending was the right decision. But I also feel like there was plenty of fluff in past expansions that could have been easily cut for a more focused story around Venat and Zodiark, and the ancients on both sides, and why each side could be seen as both right and wrong. I still dont get the usefulness of the majority of stormblood outside giving us prettyboy Zenos. Had they cut out the majority of it and made shadowbringers take its place, and viseversa with EW and shadowbringers so they had more time to explore stuff between venat and the others, I feel like the ending would have felt alot better.

I think a healthy balance can be struck between 'long winded' and 'too much, too fast'. Endwalker tried to cover way too much territory within a very short period of time and didn't really give any of the regions visited their fair share time in the spotlight as a result. Some of us have been waiting years to see specific elements come into the direct spotlight only to have them fall away just as quickly as they finally pulled into the station.

The deliberate efforts to 'subvert expectations' is also arguably rubbing a decent amount of people the wrong way. We ended up fighting both Hydaelyn and Zodiark anyway so if they truly wanted to 'subvert expectations' then maybe having both team up to combat a third party threat would have caused more people to be on board with the premise of the expansion. Pretty hard to consider the story to be 'inspiring' when it's unironically trying to excuse and promote genocide as a good and necessary thing, after all.

As an aside, I'd consider that to be far 'edgier' than artwork calling out how messed up genocide actually is...

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Originally Posted by Treesus

Stormblood? What was its purpose other than Zenos?

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Ok, so, some perspective for you. ARR wasn't expected to do well. It did, so HW was greenlighted, and they had to scramble it together. Lo and behold, they dropped another deadringer of a success, so BAM make another expansion please. So the writer's had to just crap out another story.

With that in mind, Stormblood is actually pretty dang good. It's probably the expansion that was least appreciated at the time(I am guilty of yammering to all of my friends that the game is on the downhill and it only gets worse from here).

To the point though, Stormblood's purpose is to bridge the story. They were still fleshing out exactly what they wanted to do with the Ascians, and that's why we got Zenos/Omega etc. Basically it was a filler arc. A truth that would be attributed to Shadowbringers, but it's actually not true about Shadowbringers (though obviously all periphery characters in SHB are filler cast, for the most part).

We get a more real confrontation with The Empire, as opposed to what'ssupposed to be the moral/spiritual/Emperor's Throne Room sequence with the Ascians. We also get lots of Outer Eorzea/Outside of Eorzea world building.

Stormblood had a decent MSQ followed by fantastic side and .1 to .55 content. Its purpose was to be as entertaining as possible while trying new things, since they figured it would be received poorly anyway. Beyond that, just to give us stuff to chew while they fleshed out the grand story they really wanted to tell.

That's how I see it, anyway.

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Originally Posted by SentioftheHoukai

Doubtful. I mean, how can you call US toxic when things like this: Are being said by those in the pro-Venat/pro-Endwalker camp?

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Because it's not mutually-exclusive? I've had toxic people insult me over my opinions of the game, too. Doesn't change the fact that there have been plenty of cases where I've felt this thread went too far.

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Originally Posted by SentioftheHoukai

Betcha you were one of the updooters!

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Nope.

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Originally Posted by SentioftheHoukai

I mean, really. What exactly is giving you the moral high ground here? Literally the only purpose of this thread is to express our disappointment in the EW story. It's hardly harming anyone

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Who said anything about "moral high ground"? I don't agree with some of the arguments being made, or (sometimes) the manner in which they're made.

Just because someone agrees that the story is bad doesn't mean that they need to agree with every single complaint made about it.

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Originally Posted by GrizzlyTank

Because in hindsight, the entire Zodiark ark ended with Elidibus while Fandaniel just wanted to destroy what was left of it to doom the world.

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The worst of it is I think I might not have been as mad at Endwalker if SE had been honest about this. Oh, sure, the story would still have been... the sort of story that makes use of plot devices like mechanically inconsistent time travel, a bootstrap paradox functioning as the explanation for fundamental lore points rather than actual organic character motivations doing so, a memory wiping device with the side effect of making everyone in its radius dumb as bricks, and a race dependent Power Of Friendship whose exact effects depend entirely on the plot (I'm sorry – I can't say Endwalker writing is bad, you see, because that would deeply wound some people)... but maybe then I wouldn't have had expectations following one of my favorite stories. And I might have been able to shrug it off as just an average JRPG plot attached to an MMORPG gameplay I still enjoy, personally (hence the continued subscription in spite of the update lull that I find hits particularly hard right now for some reason).

But that's the thing. They told me we were going to get the big dramatic finale of the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc. The big deal that had been going on more or less in the background, after years of build-up. They, quite literally, said they would give me the moon. I'm an Ascian fan – even before 5.0 I had always found them to be the most intriguing element of the story, the real larger-scale plot. I wanted to know more, what they were, what their personal differences were, because I just love villain group dynamics. Obviously, I loved most of Shadowbringers and its patches. My hype reached a fever pitch during 5.2-5.4, because I had always had a soft spot for Elidibus, and 5.2 casually dropping the lore bomb that he was quite literally Zodiark, at the same time as they introduced his counterpart as an actual human character, was huge to me – this is it, we're finally revving up the engines for the real endgame of this storyline, and my boy is finally taking centerstage after getting crucial backstory in 5.0 and the start of a character development in 5.3. 5.3 was, to me, only ever just the first act for Elidibus's character – compared to Emet-Selch fully mourning his people, dying with a smile after having recognized us as his ...very, very good friend... who had bested him and accepting to pass over the torch, Elidibus's arc was quite obviously incomplete, never recognizing us, never truly reflecting on his past self and all of those he lost, never remembering his oath or who he swore it to, dying a crying mess under the weight of his guilt, and us never getting to see him as the acting consciousness of Zodiark – there's just... so much. Literally Zodiark!!

And it wasn't just him: the end of 5.3 and patch 5.4 that followed also went and gave me three Sundered Ascians with the new context of their Shadowbringers backstory, and I loved it too – each of them with their own views on what being an Ascian meant to them, and I wanted so much more of it. Because hey, we have a number of these guys left too! Can't just ignore them! (Narrator: "They could.") And surely, now that the Unsundered were mostly gone (I was hellbent on Elidibus not being gone, either still alive in the Tower or still having part of his consciousness in Zodiark, and as it turns out I was right!...), it wasn't just Fandaniel that would have his... ah, opinion on how to proceed; what about Pashtarot, Halmarut, Altima, Deudalaphon? What do they think about it, and where does that leave them? And what about Gaia? The inclusion of G'raha as a main character left a significant precedent for making side content mandatory – surely the introduction of Loghrif, Oracle of Darkness and Almost-Heart of Zodiark was significant to the plot of Endwalker where we would fight Fandaniel and Zenos for the control of Zodiark?

I remember, right before the February 2021 Fan Fest... YoshiP said something to the effect of "feel free to have high expectations!". Look at the two paragraphs I just wrote; I felt free to have high expectations indeed! I remember all the jokes about Moonbase Ascian when Mare Lamentorum was revealed, housing what appeared to be so many Ancient concepts and records – surely even more juicy info about the Unsundered and how they coped with being the survivors of a genocide for thousands of years!

6.0 was going to rock my world so hard, you guys. I just knew I was going to sob my heart out when Elidibus finally regains control of Zodiark and sacrifices himself to save the world after having remembered Azem and his oath to them. And it was beautiful, always.

Expectations subverted!

https://i.imgur.com/HUC02rF.jpg

I realize nobody asked for this sudden outburst of Elidibus/Ascianposting, but I never asked for the Twitterpocalypse, so we'll all have to suffer through this together. It builds character, except when you're the bad people.

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Originally Posted by Teraq

6.0 was going to rock my world so hard, you guys. I just knew I was going to sob my heart out when Elidibus finally regains control of Zodiark and sacrifices himself to save the world after having remembered Azem and his oath to them. And it was beautiful, always.

Expectations subverted!

https://i.imgur.com/HUC02rF.jpg

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Yep, that was a pretty snazzy lv 84 8 man fight. :^)

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Originally Posted by Raoabolic

Yep, that was a pretty snazzy lv 84 8 man fight. :^)

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And who has a better story than Fandaniel the Broken in a mech suit killing himself to make way for the true plot of Endwalker: ruining the good will Shadowbringers had built up for the Ancients?