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

[Escalon]

Snip~ Snip~

WARNING : THERE ARE HEAVY SPOILERS IN THIS POST!!! DO NOT READ IF YOU DID NOT FINISH THE STORY OF EW!!!!

I will try to elaborate about why I think its not that great.

First, the whole setting is really shying away from what this game was before. Traveling to the past like its nothing? Casually teleporting to the Moon that is also an Spaceship and walking there like its nothing? Flying a space ship to the literal edge of space ? Casually taking an elevator down to the literal center of the Lifestream and all Aether ? We are flying to the edge of the universe to fight a "Bird" that for what ever reason can manipulate this absolutely new concept we never heard before on a cosmic scale and wipe whole planets with it.

Everything just feels like its soo far-fetched its not even funny.

The pacing was also all over the place, like right, we are flying to the edge of the universe to fight a "bird", but before that lets just haul around boxes. A lot of quest did not even make sense, like the "famous-infamous" In the Cold quest, that whole quest could be literally removed and it would have done nothing to change the narrative or the progress of the story, all it was meant to do is to use a cheap trick to inflict the player with this "OHNONONO" fear and of course nothing happened, also why did Zenos just walked there ? Fandaniel literally can teleport people around. And thats just one of a lot of examples.

I should note, I did not like ShB, not because it was bad, far from it, I loved the lore we got to know, but because it started to become also quite farfetched, but at least there we struggles with it, unlike in EW where we just can do anything without any problems.

I loved HW and StB since it felt grounded, not this farfetched story about time travel, different dimensions etc. And in terms of overall feel and story, I rank them over ShB and EW.

Not to mention, the whole quality of the game is starting to tank (NOTE: In my personal view). We get zones that are beyond boring, each zone gets 1 to 3 hubs with just nothing in between, there is literally nothing to discover since everything feels flat. ARR zones, even after 8 years, I find interesting places I have not noticed before or were just nicely hidden.

Dungeons dont feel as dungeons but just a story point, a thing we need to do to pass to a place where we need to be. Sure, this was even the case in the dungeons before, but they actually felt like dungeons (we are talking mainly ARR, HW, StB, ShB had like 2) The Dungeons dont need to be tons of corridors and places to explore, but at least give us the feeling that its way bigger than it really is. I give an great example of this, comapre The Swallows's Compass a dungeon from StB to probably closest is Ktisis Hyperboreia and you will see what I mean.


Remember the time where you had vendors who sold different things ? Where you had to travel to buy certain things ? And everything was not sold at 1 vendor ? Was it more tedious ? Yes, but it felt like an living, breathing world. Now its just HUB to HUB.

Thavnair according to the artworks should be such a huge and imposing city, question is, is it really ? Does it feel like a city compared to Ul'dah, Ishgard, Limsa Lominsa, Kugane ? Same can be said about Sharlayan.

I honestly wish that SE will return to the time of ARR and HW with the quality of things that are not just the story but the zones, dungeons, locations and small things like that. Its an MMO, one should feel to be part of a big breathing living world, a world one wants to explore, a world where even after 8 years one can find interesting places.

Oke, this became waaaaay more longwinded than I intended it to be, so I hope you can forgive me for that.
And as said, all those things are only my personal view, I fully understand others people view points about the story and other things.