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

Writing overall seems to have dropped off a cliff. Will ultimately reserve judgment until after 7.0 drops.

It's amusing that Hildibrand questline tells a better story then the actual MSQ.

And even more interesting is that big potential plot elements are gated behind the crafting questchains in Sharlayan.

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Originally Posted by MagiusNecros

Writing overall seems to have dropped off a cliff. Will ultimately reserve judgment until after 7.0 drops.

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I'm kinda in the same boat. If 7.0 is as bad as 6.0 Endwalker was, I'll probably lose any small amount of faith I have left in the writers to turn this ship around.

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Originally Posted by MikkoAkure

Pearl clutching

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It's not pearl clutching at all. It's mostly akin to the idea that rewriting a person to be fundamentally different destroys them.

The destruction of a people and their society can only be described as evil to said society.

FFXIV only shows us the people in the highest echelons of its society as feeling they can make the grand decisions that affect the whole star. Convocation members, former convocation members, and close friends/lovers to Convocation members. The average researchers in Elpis certainly don't believe themselves to have such grand authority.

Consider this: By the end of EW, Emet-selch considers Hydaelyn/Venat, "The Last of Us." aka The Last Ancient. She herself also considers herself in this way. They do not consider the Sundered to be the same people, even though they carry fragments of that dead people with them forever. Take notice that in spite of Venat knowing we are her fragmented protégé, there is no call from her to remember that side of ourselves. It is ignored.

In this small way, EW itself tacitly confirms that the Sundering was genocide. Which says a lot, considering they bent over backwards to bend the story around trying to hide the evil in that act.

As mildly alluded to, there's a similar situation in Mass Effect 2. Legion's loyalty mission involves rewriting the Geth "heretics" so that they will no longer worship The Reapers. You can rewrite them or destroy them. It varies according to each third wheel member, but a couple of them quip up with, "Rewriting them is worse than outright destroying them because you're killing their identity." One of the responses Shepard can retort with is something along the lines of, "We can't apply biological ethics to synthetic beings! They're different!"

Ignoring that by making the choice for them, we force our beliefs onto them, making them shadows of ourselves.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

It's not pearl clutching at all.

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It is the pearl clutch. Is look at the Venar with the heat then Virus it is surprise by the evil kicking of the pearl. Virus he is double over and clutch the pearl. Then evil Venar say to the Virus henceforth thou shall just walk it off brah. He still limping. He become the 1/14 of what he once was. He pray to the God Meteo to make the whole again. Is show in the famous light novel Miranda Effect 2.

Can't help but notice that the last two pages seem... off. Like, enough posts disappeared that it seems like Lurina's post went to the "next" page despite the total page count going down.

Does moderation truly exist on this forum? I wonder what even got deleted.

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As mildly alluded to, there's a similar situation in Mass Effect 2. Legion's loyalty mission involves rewriting the Geth "heretics" so that they will no longer worship The Reapers. You can rewrite them or destroy them. It varies according to each third wheel member, but a couple of them quip up with, "Rewriting them is worse than outright destroying them because you're killing their identity." One of the responses Shepard can retort with is something along the lines of, "We can't apply biological ethics to synthetic beings! They're different!"

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There's a parallel to this in one of the level 90 dungeon quests. The Omicron only ever stopped their omnicidal strip mining of the universe because they ran out of stronger things to attack, so after the defeat of Meteion, one of their higher ups decided to launch an attack on Etheirys. Sir—I think it was Sir, at least—has you dive into that Omicron's memory in order to "convince" it that an attack on Etheirys would lead to the Omicron's downfall. Which you accomplish by, uh, killing it in a dream, I guess? And somehow this causes that Omicron to do a complete 180 and suddenly want to save all the people Meteion trapped in Ultima Thule (which leads into the Omicron Tribe quests).

Of course, since this is FFXIV and specifically Ultima Thule, any question of ethical ambiguity is thrown out the window. Move forward, see you feel you, etc. Also the presence of the Omicron as one of the Dead Ends strongly implies that their star(s?) is(are?) no more, and yet the threat this singular Omicron poses is played very seriously, iirc.

Also also, that same dungeon strongly suggested that many, if not all of the Omicron's alternate forms, are actually enslaved races that the Omicron conquered and converted into soulless machines. That, of course, gets glossed over too.

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Originally Posted by Vyrerus

It's not pearl clutching at all. It's mostly akin to the idea that rewriting a person to be fundamentally different destroys them.

The destruction of a people and their society can only be described as evil to said society.

Consider this: By the end of EW, Emet-selch considers Hydaelyn/Venat, "The Last of Us." aka The Last Ancient. She herself also considers herself in this way. They do not consider the Sundered to be the same people, even though they carry fragments of that dead people with them forever. Take notice that in spite of Venat knowing we are her fragmented protégé, there is no call from her to remember that side of ourselves. It is ignored.

In this small way, EW itself tacitly confirms that the Sundering was genocide. Which says a lot, considering they bent over backwards to bend the story around trying to hide the evil in that act.

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Why do people always ignore that Emet-Selch in ShB explicitly says the Convocation's plan was to generate a massive amount of life purely to kill it in order to bring back the Ancients who originally "sacrificed" themselves? Venat's "sundering" solution is typically seem as the "better" option because the simple fact is that a massive genocide was going to happen no matter what. The only question was whether the victims would be completely innocent beings or the people who were going to murder them in the first place.

As for us as "Azem," part of that is obviously the natural development of a story over a decade resulting in some retcons - the other part - I'm genuinely curious if it's even possible for sundered beings to "remember" their other parts. We only know about Ardbert because we physically interact with him, and despite knowing now that we're a fragment of Azem, it doesn't somehow give us the ability to reach out to or remember our other fragments or past self. Put simply, I don't think Venat "ignores" who we are because we're fragmented; I think she "ignores" it because there's literally nothing that can be done about it, anyway.

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I'm kinda in the same boat. If 7.0 is as bad as 6.0 Endwalker was, I'll probably lose any small amount of faith I have left in the writers to turn this ship around.

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For me, if the writing continues being as good as I found it in EW, I'll continue loving this game. A bonus if we keep most of the hundreds of thousands of players, maybe add a few more, and weed out the sad naysayers who are so bitter they can't stand the thought of other people being happy :).

(Oh, and going back a couple pages, I've stated numerous times the support for why the echo chamber of negativity here is minuscule in comparison to most players. You can ignore it all you want, but it doesn't make it any less true. Heck, it's frequently the bitter cabal who provide the info...)

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Originally Posted by AwesomeJr44

I'm kinda in the same boat. If 7.0 is as bad as 6.0 Endwalker was, I'll probably lose any small amount of faith I have left in the writers to turn this ship around.

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There are games with weak stories that can get away with having good gameplay to make up for it. There are games with jank gameplay but have stories so good that you can power through them.

Current FFXIV is neither. The story seems to have been co-opted by individuals who shall not be named that essentially threw out everything that preceded them to prop up their own lacklustre work. I could have forgiven this but as of now my main class only barely plays like the level 50 version we should have gotten back in ARR and my other favourite Paladin got destroyed by a rework it did not need. There is also no repeatable content to take any class in, and with patch cycles extended needlessly the game is now in what feels like a perpetual content drought.

With Yoshi deciding to nerf the final boss of FFXVI and his focus on the easy mode accessories in that game, I have no delusions that combat here will ever see a significant improvement. The story however could in theory be salvaged if whatever comes in 7.0 is completely divorced from the trashfire writing we've been subjected to this expansion - but only time will tell. What is certain is that a handful of people will proceed to seal-clap for anything and everything they put out regardless of how good or bad it is. All while screaming in our faces about how glad they'd be to be rid of us.

GCBTW.

If 7.0 is a low stakes 5 zones of meracydia + not-antarctica with Aenor and the Boulder brothers, I think it could go a long way toward addressing several of the key issues with endwalker.

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Originally Posted by Graeham

the famous light novel Miranda Effect 2.

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I'd read that. Lmfao. You're a treasure, Graeham.

The best part of this thread is seeing beyondreams complain about an “unneeded rework of paladin” that ruins the job for them after spending the last year crying about “poison mage summoner/dot mage” lmao. I bet they want the old paladin “dot-knight” job to come back rofl, new paladin spits all over the pal job fantasy of using dots!”, “If I wanted to play a non-dot tank I’d play dark knight raaaaaar!”