in from the cold is so stupid

[Payadopa]

I honestly hope we get more experimental instances like that. I was entertained the whole way through. Can't say that about the 'regular' solo stuff.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I would like to encourage the devs to continue experimenting with story instance missions like this. It doesnt have to be overly complex but it goes a long way with presenting a story. Anything to break the usual MMO questing monotony.

[Flatopia]

I love how you hear nothing but how this game is too homogenized, same-y, easy, and otherwise treats the player like an idiot with how simple and faso proof things are but then have a ton of people lose their *mind* at being told to, literally, wait a couple seconds for a monster to turn around before running past them in the most basic of basic stealth missions they could have possibly done.

Heck, it didn't even default to any loss state if you got found, you could literally sprint back to the beginning area and leash the mobs. You had like 10 minutes to figure it out, and even if you lost you could skip the cutscenes and get right back to it on easy mode.

I unironically think a ton of players are freaking out at being asked to think about their play even a little to just progress the story instead of dying and letting the three or seven people drag their avatar through a dungeon or instance at their own expense.

All that said, this is a troll poster and all the people rushing to defend their point is a bit funny.

[Flatopia]

Maybe you should learn to read yourself. Considering I said and know what he used to swap our soul to another body.

"And then uses the body swap tech.....*slow clap*.....well done amazing top tier writing"

Pretty easy to read

Now explain how he teleported and disabled us in the blink of an eye, succeeded where all other Ascians failed? You know, the meat of my post that you completely ignored

Oh that's right.....you cant because it was never explained. It just happened. And hand wave all you like about Fandaniel, he is a Sundered Ascian. Emit Selch was leagues ahead of what Fandaniel could ever hope to be in regards to mastery of magics and power. And thats what he used, magic to teleport us away, not science. Good writing would have had build up to how through cunning and knowledge Fandaniel could accomplish what brute strength hadn't been able too.

That didn't happen, no where even close

I mean

Elidibus did try just that. He tried to throw us into a void and we teleported out. We've also been knocked down/unconcious/slept before by peasants so it's not a stretch that a bad guy could incapacitate us especially considering they explain specifically how he did it.

It's not like Fandaniel said "Oh I could have thrown you into the sun and it would have worked unlike when Elidibus tried basically just that but I chose not to and we always could have and I'm not going to tell you why."

Like we have LITERALLY had ascians tried to tele-frag us before, what are you talking about?

[Elodie_Einsbern]

I mean

Elidibus did try just that. He tried to throw us into a void and we teleported out. We've also been knocked down/unconcious/slept before by peasants so it's not a stretch that a bad guy could incapacitate us especially considering they explain specifically how he did it.

It's not like Fandaniel said "Oh I could have thrown you into the sun and it would have worked unlike when Elidibus tried basically just that but I chose not to and we always could have and I'm not going to tell you why."

Like we have LITERALLY had ascians tried to tele-frag us before, what are you talking about?

What did Elidibus use on us before teleporting us? The binding chains he learned in Pandaemonium.

What did I say in my first post, every time someone had been teleported through Ascian magic they were disabled or willing.

I'll give you that Elidibus at least tried something. It still does nothing to explain how Fandaniel does what the others couldn't.

Being how long its been, I very well could be misremembering all the instances of Ascian teleportation. So prove me wrong, where is there another instance of the Ascians just yeeting someone without them being subdued first? Minfilia, G'raha tia, and our character were subdued before being teleported by Lahabrea, Emet, and Elidibus respectively. I'll gladly take an L to be reminded of another instance of this happening.

And no, stop saying they explained how he did it. They DIDNT explain it, thats the damn point. They explained how he BODY SWAPPED US, not how he captures us with ease. And thats my entire issue, if it had been done well with how he captured us. I would have no problem with it, the only issue I would then have was the ending. Where nothing happens, and its essentially a waste of time.

[Flatopia]

Quote

We were subdued by the same process we were body swapped. Our bodies stop moving, and are rendered useless. We saw this and played this. This is established. Our soul is then shoved into a body that would be otherwise unconscious once it has a soul inside of it.

How does the Ala Mhigo boss knock us down and subdue us? He just did it with his device. I don't know what to tell you. it's like if someone uses chloroform on someone and they fall asleep you shout "BUT WHY DOES IT MAKE YOU SLEEP!?"
It just does.
We've seen it do it before on us. This is established that it renders the body inoperable while it works when we fought the dang thing.
He casts magiteck disrupter from his weird soul-sucker chair thing, and it stuns, knocks down, and renders the player character completely inoperable while the process of mindjacking our soul out of our body. It straight up happened. The device puts you under as it works.

Also, if for whatever reason the device that did exactly what we saw performed on us already wasn't enough, and if for whatever reason we need to explain how an ascian could just subdue us prior without warning.
Lahabrea bound us in his ascian prime fight, right? He made little rips in reality we entered that subdued us. Oh, hey, so did Hades! He bound us in chains as well! It was during the boss, I played that!

Oh, ya know, we can even take this a step further, as of currently all casters learn sleep at level freaking 10. Who's to say he didn't just catch us off guard with a uber-powerful ascian-charged sleep spell if you really don't want to accept that the device that yeets our soul, that we've seen subdue us before, doesn't subdue us for no reason other than, literally, he didn't feel like it.

This is the most pedantic of arguing just for the sake of arguing. If you really are sitting there seething at the story because you forgot that the device that he explained he uses, that specifically does subdue the target, subdues the target and are getting angry at people saying that the device did exactly what we saw before then I really don't know what to tell you other than sorry you didn't understand it.

[Floortank]

The whole thing was garbage story telling from top to bottom. And it could have been amazing if done right. I still find it mind blowing how people just give the entire setup a free pass. Let alone the ending of it

Fandaniel is a sundered ascian, and yet he can freely teleport us away and disable us in the blink of an eye. No narrative buildup as to how he could accomplish this, it just "happens". After seeing our character disabled in that chair from the launch trailer, I was left wondering how they would do it. But they couldnt even go the cheap route of having Fandaniel find some Allagan tech that lets him disable a target. Or use a Garlean to betray us, which would have totally been in character. And been so much more satisfying to see from a storytelling perspective as we were trying to help them.

Instead he just yeets us, and they never bother to say how to the player. Leaving this enormous plot hole in the process. Why didnt Emet Selch, Lahabrea, or Elidibus just teleport us into a damn lava pit and kill us if it was this easy? Or any of the disposable rank and file sundered Ascians? The reason was simple, before this, the target had to be disabled or be willing to be teleported. None of which happened to us. Instead we were teleported away and then disabled with no explanation as to how he did any of it. And then uses the body swap tech.....*slow clap*.....well done amazing top tier writing

I expect this kind of writing from dollar store novels. But it just gets a free pass because 14's writers cant screw up. I liked the majority of the expansion, dont get me wrong. But this entire section was garbage

I have my problems with Endwalker, but this is not one of them. The meticulously detailed scene you're looking for isn't in the game because it is far less interesting than the one we got. The unanswered question you are burning to see answered, is answered. They used the technology developed by the "soul extraction" boss from the Ala Mhigo dungeon whose name I forgot. He says it right in the cutscene. I'm sure you've had your soul sucked out during that boss fight at least once. Everyone has. If it can happen to you in the instance, then it is plausible that your WOL got caught off guard by the teleport and "hit with the mechanic" so to speak a moment later.

Why does your imagination need to be spoon fed? It is far less interesting to see the details of what happened piece by piece than to just move forward with the scene that we got. They waved away the boring sequence with a quick explanation so we could accept it and move on with something far more dramatic and enticing.

Fandaniel is a sundered ascian, and yet he can freely teleport us away and disable us in the blink of an eye. No narrative buildup as to how he could accomplish this, it just "happens".

You get moved around and teleported against your will all the time in instances. Do you cry foul about that too? Considering the thread you're ranting in, the answer is probably yes.

Why didnt Emet Selch, Lahabrea, or Elidibus just teleport us into a damn lava pit and kill us if it was this easy?

I've stood in lava in this game. Wouldn't have killed the WOL.

More seriously, though.

1) Emet-Selch wasn't trying to kill us until the final MSQ of the story. For the entire rest of it, he was testing us, genuinely curious to see if we were rejoined enough and thus enlightened enough to be considered his peers. When he found that we weren't, his next plan was not to kill us outright, but to nefariously accelerate the process of us becoming a Lightwarden, a far more horrifying punishment than death at that point. Did you even read Shadowbringers?

2) Lahabrea was certainly arrogant, and perhaps that is why he didn't just teleport us into the heart of a volcano. But it might have had more to do with Lahabrea underestimating us, or simply not having a volcano handy. But I expect that Lahabrea considered that such an alternative would not have been able to stop us. We get teleported into terrible situations all the time, including in the fight with Nabriales, where we get forcibly warped into a primordial space and hit with multiple meteors and it doesn't really bother us. Perhaps Lahabrea's approach is hands-on because he doesn't trust a volcano to be able to deal with Hydaelyn's champion.

3) Elidibus has a far more personal reason for wanting our destruction in 5.3, and everything he does is calculated to make us understand what a colossal thing we have torn away from him. Only then could he carry out our destruction. In his mind, this requires summoning the essences of heroes across reality to imbue himself with the primal archetype of the Warrior of Light and make us fraudulent. A bit grandiose, but I think he considered a volcano an inadequate means of dispatch at that point.

Perhaps the distinction you are so confused by is the one the writer is trying to make obvious. Fandaniel is a small Ascian with much smaller ideas than his predecessors.

[Sauteed]

I'm just glad we're past the Ascians and hopefully whole world going to get eaten by ascians or zodiark stuff. It has been steadily decreasingly interesting for me since the end of HW, and I'm of that minority that was completely uninterested in ShB (it's my least favorite expansion, bar none).. and no I don't really care for the "story" of XIV at all either. Like it is one of the least things I play for. I don't have to froth at the mouth and argue with some random on the internet about how stupid or bad I am or they are for liking it, I can just openly say, it ain't for me, and can't help but chuckle at the people who feel they have to convince me I'm "wrong" for having my own opinions about it. With that out of the way..

Endwalker is supposedly the end of a story that's been going on for a long time. As the amazingly out there Hillary Clinton said thousands of times.. It's Time. Yes, things felt rushed, made very little to no sense, and it was totally campy (probably the best thing about it was the extreme campiness I picked up on basically from the moment when you show up in Sharlayan and Estinien kind of struggles to think of what he's even going to say to the lady at the check in and forward from there). But it's time to just put this behind. Was it exemplary? No. Did things get the explanations and "closure" a lot felt it deserved. No. Do you think, in sincerity after a delay that Naoki Yoshida tearfully delivered the news about they are going to go back and redo the whole thing to bring that level of closure to us? No, I seriously doubt it. It is a game. It's got good features, and a little bit of something for all. I think it would greatly behoove people who need every little snippet explained in perfect clarity to just take a deep breath, push themselves away from the desk or laptop, and just look out the window at the world for a bit and just say ok. And then decorate their in game apartment or something else other than obsess over these little "lore" details or whatever else. This isn't some knock or insult at someone, but a serious PSA.. it's a game, people have poured their hearts into it.. There's no way it's gonna be perfect, but it's good, and entertaining. Enjoy it for what it is.

[Hysorn]

Eh, I enjoyed it, it was nice having a semblance of difficulty during story, I think it accomplished what it set out to quite well.

[SieyaM]

The problem with this scenario is that FFXIV is not a stealth game, has no stealth elements, and gives us no stealth abilities during this scenario. If you want to put something like that in a game then fine, give us tools to use for it don't just have players try to run around visibility cones that we cannot see so we have no idea how far or how wide the mobs can see. Oh yeah and tack on a time limit that we have no idea if it's enough for if we really need to be hustling to finish this. Nothing makes people slow down and strategize like a ticking clock.