I am so freaking bored of Shadowbringer's story

[GreyTigress]

I'm glad I found this thread, because I feel like I've been taking crazy pills. I have NOT skipped the story, and I am deeply regretting not doing so. This is the MOST boring stuff I've seen in the game since ARR. Aside from the moments we get to see Ran'jit or Ardbert, it's all SHAMELESS filler, like they're deliberately trying to pad it out to get more MSQ skip sales. The characters are utterly forgettable, the Ronkan ruins are a joke of quest design, it just keeps going how dull everything is for the most part. I want to spoon out my eyeballs. Nothing in this story means anything. It's so sugary and vapid. There's no nuance. So black and white -- literally and figuratively. Stormblood was full of consequences and hard choices. This expansion has nothing of the sort.

[Enla]

I'm glad I found this thread, because I feel like I've been taking crazy pills. I have NOT skipped the story, and I am deeply regretting not doing so. This is the MOST boring stuff I've seen in the game since ARR. Aside from the moments we get to see Ran'jit or Ardbert, it's all SHAMELESS filler, like they're deliberately trying to pad it out to get more MSQ skip sales. The characters are utterly forgettable, the Ronkan ruins are a joke of quest design, it just keeps going how dull everything is for the most part. I want to spoon out my eyeballs. Nothing in this story means anything. It's so sugary and vapid. There's no nuance. So black and white -- literally and figuratively. Stormblood was full of consequences and hard choices. This expansion has nothing of the sort.

You know switch your experience with Shadowbringers with my experience with Stormblood and I'd entirely agree. Goes to show you that different people have different tastes because for me Stormblood was the sugary and vapid storyline, as the only time I felt my character had any agency, however false an illusion it might have been, was with the last patch. I can't tell you how much it irked me to sit through 4.0 up till 4.4 and watch my WoL basically scream into the void as the plot was pushed forward by the sheer stupidity of it's characters alone as almost every scenario could have been avoided by everyone sitting down to think.

4.1 and 4.2 were especially bad as that's when the idiot bat was especially harsh upon the characters. What with between Lyse's handling of the Ananta situation (which had no consequences even though logically that mistake should have killed a LOT of people) and the whole debacle with Asahi where from the very moment the Red Kyojin are mentioned you know he's evil but everyone else just keeps on bending to his whims for no reason except that the plot demands it. It isn't till they actually start the Black Rose storyline that it actually gains a healthy amount of stakes, but all that is set up for Shadowbringers in the same way the last few patches of Heavensward were set up for Stormblood.

Seems to me your preferred type of story is less philosophical and more action oriented and that's fair, but I have to question how much you were paying attention if you called everything but the stuff with Ardbert and Ran'jit filler. Especially since Ran'jit is really only there as a foil for Thancred.

[Iscah]

like they're deliberately trying to pad it out to get more MSQ skip sales.

You can only skip to the start of Shadowbringers (at least for the next two years or so) but they do inevitably have an interest in making you spend longer getting through the game.

More generally though, I found a lot of the enjoyment in the game was just seeing the character interactions, and spending more time developing the personalities of the Scions. I was also eager to find out just what was going on with the Exarch.

Do you take interest in the characters, or just the larger plot?

Also have you done the Crystal Tower raids? That was certainly part of why I was intrigued by what might be happening.

[Niyuka]

You can only skip to the start of Shadowbringers (at least for the next two years or so) but they do inevitably have an interest in making you spend longer getting through the game.

More generally though, I found a lot of the enjoyment in the game was just seeing the character interactions, and spending more time developing the personalities of the Scions. I was also eager to find out just what was going on with the Exarch.

Do you take interest in the characters, or just the larger plot?

Also have you done the Crystal Tower raids? That was certainly part of why I was intrigued by what might be happening.

Given that SE is actively reducing the playtime of the game in the last patch, and is praised by casuals for it, I dont think its about time spent in game. The perfect player is the one who pays but ultimately doesnt play.

[HyoMinPark]

I'm glad I found this thread, because I feel like I've been taking crazy pills. I have NOT skipped the story, and I am deeply regretting not doing so. This is the MOST boring stuff I've seen in the game since ARR. Aside from the moments we get to see Ran'jit or Ardbert, it's all SHAMELESS filler, like they're deliberately trying to pad it out to get more MSQ skip sales. The characters are utterly forgettable, the Ronkan ruins are a joke of quest design, it just keeps going how dull everything is for the most part. I want to spoon out my eyeballs. Nothing in this story means anything. It's so sugary and vapid. There's no nuance. So black and white -- literally and figuratively. Stormblood was full of consequences and hard choices. This expansion has nothing of the sort.

It’s funny that you talk about the story being so “black and white” when quite a few things were muddied with ShB, the largest one being

Emet-Selch’s reveal that Zodiark and Hydaelyn are primals, which we’ve spent the last 6~9 years fighting against and believing are bad.

There was also the exploration of Light and Dark, and how a balance must be maintained between the two; because too much of one has catastrophic consequences—which is embodied by the First in its entirety.

SB didn’t nearly have the depth you’re claiming it did. We were basically hired muscle behind a subpar lead character that got outshined by literally every other character that showed up. Oh, and we spent the entire expansion fighting a villain who was mustache-twirling levels of evil and had about as much depth as a teaspoon.

[Tlamila]

Emet-Selch’s reveal that Zodiark and Hydaelyn are primals, which we’ve spent the last 6~9 years fighting against and believing are bad.

There was also the exploration of Light and Dark, and how a balance must be maintained between the two; because too much of one has catastrophic consequences—which is embodied by the First in its entirety.

The first one is an unreliable narrator, however right he might be, the second one uh...we got all that layed out already back in HW when we met the gang, nothing new, just shown in pictures.

[Elladie]

I'm glad I found this thread, because I feel like I've been taking crazy pills. I have NOT skipped the story, and I am deeply regretting not doing so. This is the MOST boring stuff I've seen in the game since ARR. Aside from the moments we get to see Ran'jit or Ardbert, it's all SHAMELESS filler, like they're deliberately trying to pad it out to get more MSQ skip sales. The characters are utterly forgettable, the Ronkan ruins are a joke of quest design, it just keeps going how dull everything is for the most part. I want to spoon out my eyeballs. Nothing in this story means anything. It's so sugary and vapid. There's no nuance. So black and white -- literally and figuratively. Stormblood was full of consequences and hard choices. This expansion has nothing of the sort.

I am lost for words. If you think this story was black and white .... and sugary? I guess we must have played two different expansions. Shadowbringers is the most morally demanding and ambivalent episode in the story yet

[Bright-Flower]

I'm glad I found this thread, because I feel like I've been taking crazy pills. I have NOT skipped the story, and I am deeply regretting not doing so. This is the MOST boring stuff I've seen in the game since ARR. Aside from the moments we get to see Ran'jit or Ardbert, it's all SHAMELESS filler, like they're deliberately trying to pad it out to get more MSQ skip sales. The characters are utterly forgettable, the Ronkan ruins are a joke of quest design, it just keeps going how dull everything is for the most part. I want to spoon out my eyeballs. Nothing in this story means anything. It's so sugary and vapid. There's no nuance. So black and white -- literally and figuratively. Stormblood was full of consequences and hard choices. This expansion has nothing of the sort.

I'm sorry but what consequences and hard choices were in Stormblood? We lost to Zenos twice but nothing bad actually happened. In fact the resistance didn't even have to abandon Rhangr's Reach after the first loss to him because Zenos got bored and didn't actually finish them off. We didn't even have to come back and reclaim it the resistance just kept it. Do you mean when we revealed our presence in Doma and attacked Zenos again? No consequences there, in fact it actually helped us because Grynwaht chasing us into the Steppe actually helped us rally the Xaela against the Empire.

SB was perhaps the most black and white expansion we've had with the most one note and boring antagonist to date.

SB could have been amazing. The Revolutions song had my hyped for a war story with costs and moral ambiguity, but it just wasn't there.

SHB isn't perfect but IMO it succeeds a lot more than SB did.