Unpopular (probably) opinion about the Nier raids...

[kaynide]

*Possible Spoilers follow*

Loved this game the past several months ive done it. Even the stuff some people claim was tedious. Loved ARR and even the post quests. Pugged coils, Loved Stormblood, as im a sucker for a revolution story. Shadowbringers MSQ blew me away.

What is this Nier raid?? You meet some lalafels with beards, and behind a hidden mine there is basically a city no one knew anything about with A.I. fighting aliens? What?? It felt so out of place...Apparently this was a crossover with a game called Neir that I have never heard of.

This was also the first raid mechanically I failed so hard at but I think it was more to blame with the aesthetics. The colors and textures literally gave me a head ache. The white floors with the very lightly colored orange markers on the ground were very hard for me to see. It was very hard for me to tell what was going on most of the time. I never died so much in this game yet, it was embarrassing. Im not the best raider in the world but I do have heroic WoW and a little mythic experience.

Anyway, I did some googling and it seems this raid was very highly praised by most of the community, so I expect this to be an unpopular opinion but since day one I said I would be fair to the game when I found both positive and negative. I disliked it so much that if I ever make an alt I will go out of my way to not unlock the place. I hope they dont do something that far out there again.

OP, don't want to assume and this is not meant to sound snarky- your join date on the forum says 2021. Is that accurate for your actual join date? Not throwing shade, but that could be why you feel what you feel.

Basically, every raid is pretty punishing when it's "current tier". Even Labyrinth of the Ancients was tough when it was current. Especially Behemoth, holy crap behemoth...

I also forget when they started giving vulnerability for mistakes, but I guess from 3.0 or 4.0 it used to be "make one mistake and maybe ok, 2 and you're dead"- something mostly continued in Nier.

All that said, I will agree that there was more "going on" during a lot of the major fights, but honestly for me if I had to choose it wasn't really that intense compared to like, the Ivalis raids. Cid was really unforgiving for a while there!

I expect as 6.0 comes and the average player has a higher iLVL, Nier will also become a faceroll.

[EorzeaWanderer]

I felt the story started off promising but veered off into nothingness by the end. It felt like we were bombarded with a big ball of "stuff" from other games, and it just wasn't working.

Gameplay-wise, I enjoyed Copied Factory and Puppets' Bunker very much, but the Tower was a dud, in my opinion.

The reason being (and correct me if I'm wrong about this) is that there are no fights or mechanics that take advantage of the fact that you have three parties. R.G. (the 4th encounter) and the last boss are excellent encounters but these could have been 8-player trials in a smaller crossover storyline in my opinion. The other battles have so little going on mechanically and the bosses have huge HP bars; it's just a slog.

I'm just disappointed that they used a major piece of content (all three alliance raids and the accompanying storyline) for a crossover instead of developing the actual lore of the First.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

OP, don't want to assume and this is not meant to sound snarky- your join date on the forum says 2021. Is that accurate for your actual join date? Not throwing shade, but that could be why you feel what you feel.

Basically, every raid is pretty punishing when it's "current tier". Even Labyrinth of the Ancients was tough when it was current. Especially Behemoth, holy crap behemoth...

I also forget when they started giving vulnerability for mistakes, but I guess from 3.0 or 4.0 it used to be "make one mistake and maybe ok, 2 and you're dead"- something mostly continued in Nier.

All that said, I will agree that there was more "going on" during a lot of the major fights, but honestly for me if I had to choose it wasn't really that intense compared to like, the Ivalis raids. Cid was really unforgiving for a while there!

I expect as 6.0 comes and the average player has a higher iLVL, Nier will also become a faceroll.

I thought it was implied that I have only been here this year, by the "past few months" statement. Sorry if that was unclear. I never really had any issues in ivalice raid or any other content ive done, honestly. Maybe a death or two there if I wasnt paying attention, or did not understand a mechanic, once. But in this one I literally had trouble seeing what was going due to the colors and textures in many parts of it. No, I am not visually impaired in any way to my knowledge, and like I said the visuals in there literally gave me a headache. Besides, me dying like a noob was only one part of the issue I had with the content. I did not like the story, its introduction, telling, conclusion, pacing or placement. It was definitely the worst experience with content I have had yet in this game. Of course, just my opinion.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

I couldn't have cared less about a storyline. IDK it just didnt click for me.
And then the Copied Factory, I didnt enjoy running that place weekly, it just...felt bloated, things took to long to die and I got bored and feel asleep.

Now the other 2 I absolutely loved. I think the Puppets Bunker was my Favorite out of this Alliance Raid Series. The Music definitely helped :3

[Avidria]

I thought the story started off pretty interesting and could've been really good, but it sort of fell off around halfway through Puppet's Bunker for me. It felt like the plot just got kind of muddied and confused, and it was hard to get too invested when the Dwarves' part of the story started feeling so... Forced? Kind of over the top on the interpersonal drama, to the point where it was almost hard to keep track of what was supposed to be happening and what we were supposed to be doing.

I didn't have many issues with the actual fights, personally, but I can definitely see why Tower is causing problems for people. I can definitely see the all off-white color scheme and flashing static causing issues. My only complaint for it personally though is that they reused mechanics a little too much. Also that one Hallway in Puppet's Bunker sucks. Like, badly.

The first two raids make for some great screenshots if you go in and just roam around the solo version though. There are some neat vistas if you get a chance to stop and check them out. I like it for that if nothing else haha

[SannaR]

Snips

There were plenty of people who didn't get the Nier bits of the raids when they came out. Idk which threads you read or saw about them when they came out, but on here many people got told by Yoko Taro fans that was fine. That we should just wait for the ending as that's where the man tends to shine. It's hard to stick a landing when you're trying to do a one off from a series that's known for its multiple endings. The raid story would be like playing a Nier game and getting the default ending of ending A. It's not rushed. At least not as badly as the ending to Bozja that was written in those collected notes. Trying to understand the raid is like someone trying to understand what 2-A is talking about in the ending where she beats 9S in Automata without having seen the stage play those last lines she utters means. Then we got the ending and those who didn't enjoy the story or understood it still went whelp at least the fights were fun? For a lot the whole didn't try to tie it into the world was probably the main factor. The story makes sense as someone trying to figure out why cutting or changing the hair color of an Android in Detroit Become Human makes any sense when that's just part of their human skin codes. Since their hair doesn't exist when they turn off that program.

[Iscah]

Weren't [the Mhachi people] made up along with the raid? There were a few later references but I think they were all after the raid was in. Only established lore I remember from Void Ark was Diablo.

There has definitely been more lead-up than that. We got a history lesson on the War of the Magi (Amdapor vs Mhach) in the ARR WHM quests and it was touched on in the SCH quests (revolving around Nym, a third city-state from the same time). If not in ARR, then the HW quests where it was clarified that Mhach was responsible for the curse-induced plague that destroyed Nym. And it likely got mentioned in BLM as well.

And it's continued to be referenced since, forming part of the background for the RDM quests.

Additionally, we fight not only Diablo but also Ferdiad in post-credits ARR dungeons – the two Amdapori locations, to be exact, so it's been planned out and connected for at least that long.

We've also seen more of Amdapor since ARR, so taking a closer look at Mhach feels like balancing it out. Basically it's a big ongoing part of world history that keeps threading throughout a lot of things, even if the raid itself is self-contained.

[Ranaku]

Yes, a very unpopular opinion indeed. And also a very uninformed opinion too.

Story: <tells you why the stuff is there and what is happening>

Player: "wHeRe Is ThE sTuFf CoMiNg FrOm?!!!!"

I mean heck what do you think how the people of Norvrandt must have felt when the Exarch came out of hot air with his giant crystal tower. I think we are way beyond complaining about the devs using other dimensions and stuff from there ever since...yeah...always!

[DragonFlyy]

I haven't done it yet but I don't think it's a crossover. It's just designed by the same people? Void Ark was pretty weird too. Not sure how these ruins were hidden though I agree. Gotta do it first I suppose.

It is a crossover. With a game series called Nier. Most was developed by FFXIV dev team but the story and the fight mechanics were designed by the creator of Nier.

[Kyrj]

Crossovers have their place and it's not in raids. Leave them as sidequests and MGP grinds and never use them to tell a story as big as this ever again. Bozjan/Dalmasca's story should've been finished in the raid (not in notes lol) but instead we got a crossover that has nothing to do with FF14.