[Spoilers] Eden Feedback Thread

[PangTong]

Not to crap on anyone else's opinion but personally I was a bit disappointed. In terms of mechanics the fights are pretty fun except for the first boss which was about as easy as a dungeon boss. But I'm not digging the aesthetics or story.

- I didn't like that they had the flashiest fight first, it feels like Eden Prime should have been the last boss for the entire series. Having it be the first one messes up the sense of progression, and beating Titan doesn't feel like you've "cleared" something. It's like progressing in reverse.
- It does a poor job setting up a sense of place. The screen just goes black and suddenly you're just in a wildly different location with no sense of how you got there. There's no little instance or hallways or establishing cutscenes leading up to each boss, you just teleport directly into each fight which leaves you feeling confused. Going into Eden itself is especially confusing. It feels like there's cutscenes missing.
- Even though they have new models, arenas, mechanics, etc, I don't like that they are reusing the concepts of primals we've already fought. It diminishes the element of surprise for future raids and I was also hoping we'd get to see some more fresh, original boss concepts, or at least not use boss concepts that are already in the game. If nothing else it could have been an opportunity to create brand new elemental monsters rather than just use the ARR primals again. Similarly with the music, I would rather hear new original compositions rather than more remixes of old songs. We had an entire raid series in Stormblood that was just playing off FF nostalgia, now it's like they're doing that again except it's nostalgia for old expansions of XIV.
- The story really makes no sense. It is not properly established or explained why you need to summon and then kill primals, or how this is meant to help restore the elements to the land. It is very hastily brushed over (something something containment), they clearly don't want you to think about it too much. It feels like a very lazy and quickly contrived plot to justify fighting a bunch of bosses and not like a natural unfolding of a narrative. For the entire 6-year story of XIV, summoning primals has always been a terrible thing, they are walking elemental disaster factories yet now we're summoning them on purpose because this will avert disaster? For some reason? You can come up with theories about why we're doing it, some of which might be accurate, but all you're really doing is trying to fill in the blanks because it's not explained. The true reason is that they needed a bunch of bosses for us to fight and had to think of some excuse for those bosses to exist. (Also all the aether in the Empty is apparently totally frozen and still, yet there are also "currents" we can use to teleport in and out of Eden?)

I like the mechanics for most of the fights and I like that bosses drop 8 pieces of loot now and all bosses can drop any type of piece. But on an aesthetic/story level it falls flat for me, especially coming off the brilliant 5.0 MSQ.

[Losara]

But on an aesthetic/story level it falls flat for me, especially coming off the brilliant 5.0 MSQ.

I really hope they don't let future patches e.g. Patch 5.1 fall to this level of story telling though. The MSQ is brilliant but we want to maintain that level of brilliance in the subsequent patches as well.