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

[CrownySuccubus]

It’s less they had to go because they didn’t suffer enough and more that they couldn’t cope with suffering and move on.

In this case, it's the same thing.

As I said, the writers were trying to convey the idea that a life without suffering is either impossible or delusional. That's the entire reason we see the Ancients during the Final Days panicking and longing to go back to the way things were. The argument is that, without a life of suffering to make them "stronger", the Ancients were ill-prepared for when it finally came. Thus, they were doomed to fall into even more delusional and blissfully-ignorant dreams of "utopia" if they ever got their paradise back.

I could spend all day unpacking the faults with this philosophy, why it doesn't quite work as the writers intended, and why it's potentially harmful, but my point at the moment is just to explain why, to the story's logic, the Ancients were painted as "delusional".

[Sicno]

As an aside, the latest seasonal event made me realise that there really isn't much in the way of suspense left in the game these days. The premise of the event in question is a fashion show and I had a strong hunch that our character would win and that's exactly what happened.

Does anyone else find it boring? I don't play narrative heavy games to have my ego stroked so the idea that the player character succeeds at almost every task - be it major or minor - simply doesn't do anything for me. Even indirect aid provided by the player character usually results in victory for the NPC in question. Which, again, feels boring to me. We don't see or experience much in the way of a struggle on any meaningful capacity it seems. Which is ironic given the supposed 'themes'.

I see I'm not the only one who's making the event last minute :P

After being engaged in this thread for so long it was very funny because one of the options to say is literally "I had a hunch I would win".

And I feel like for this event there was a chunk that was cut off in the middle. Like we went from the introduction to the contest and auto-winning, without any sort of "conflict" in-between to be solved. There weren't even other contestants presented! It feels really off.

It's also off that Redolent Masked Rose is impressed by "quite the unconventional combination", which in the case of the "princess" option is just a standard Ishgardian ballroom dress which has been in the game for soooo long and even involved in WVR quests, and always presented as a 1-piece dress (despite the jacket). What "combination"? And no idea what's "unconventional" about the seneschal outfit.

They're just not trying to immerse us anymore. This was so disjointed. Not long until they have bots writing the quests. Maybe this event was already written by one.

[Iscah]

They're just not trying to immerse us anymore. This was so disjointed. Not long until they have bots writing the quests. Maybe this event was already written by one.

Again, it's a seasonal quest. They've always been mediocre compared to the actual game story writing. It's an excuse plot to hand you items.

I'd love the seasonal quests to have more spark to them, but maybe they don't want to spend actual good ideas on something temporary.

I'm coming up to... four? five? years of playing and seasonal quests have hardly produced anything engaging in all that time. A couple of character skits have been decent, but the core "tugging the heartstrings" plot is always trite. "Here's a person/animal/pet rock who is sad. Help them fulfil their dream! Congratulations, you did it!"

If there are genuine complaints to be made about the writing in the MSQ – and I don't dispute that there are, though I'll disagree with some here on the details – then I think raising the seasonal quests as "proof" is muddying the waters. They're not proof of a recent decline but a longstanding dullness in a specific corner of the game.

[Sicno]

Again, it's a seasonal quest. They've always been mediocre compared to the actual game story writing. It's an excuse plot to hand you items.

I'd love the seasonal quests to have more spark to them, but maybe they don't want to spend actual good ideas on something temporary.

I'm coming up to... four? five? years of playing and seasonal quests have hardly produced anything engaging in all that time. A couple of character skits have been decent, but the core "tugging the heartstrings" plot is always trite. "Here's a person/animal/pet rock who is sad. Help them fulfil their dream! Congratulations, you did it!"

But even then, at the very minimum there's a basic structure questlines usually follow in this game, including events:


-There's an introduction, where they present a character you'll stick with through the questline. They'll tell you who they are and give you a broad idea of what they're trying to achieve.

-There's a basic task to perform, like talking to npcs around town, making some delivery, checking some place, etc.

-Upon reuniting with the quest character and having a little bit of chatter a bigger conflict is introduced (with "worrying" music playing).

-From this point the quest structure and objectives vary until said conflict is resolved, but some common points involve learning more about the character and their ultimate goal, and by talking to you while you silently listen they reach some sort of epiphany which lets them resolve their conflict.

-After the conflict is resolved there's some sort of motivational speech and they'll thank you for your help/inspiration even when all you did was slilently stare at them and nod. But this is NOT the end of the questline.

-Meet them again in town. They'll thank you some more and give you your reward.



I feel like in this case they didn't even get to presenting the "actual conflict" and skipped directly to the victory lap.

[Lauront]

Ugh, rant over and bedtime.

Exactly this. Without ample assistance from a variety of sources, they'd fail this "test" outright; they're even more susceptible to dynamis to the point that it consumes them in the process. Much as they would fail Hermes's own twisted "test" outright one way or another. All the while, because the writers don't really want to fully commit to the implications of this "accept suffering" ideology, mankind continues to strive to minimise suffering and towards "better tomorrows".

It’s less they had to go because they didn’t suffer enough and more that they couldn’t cope with suffering and move on. The irony being that Venat suffered enough to take such a drastic action herself, showing that she was also unable to cope with it. Then she proceeded to spend entire millennia entirely alone to bear the weight of what she had done and inflicted on others, leaving her as the only one who actually had to cope with that suffering.

Well, her and the ascians she left alive.

The story may try to present it that way but my real problem with it is (based on the post-Elpis cutscene) she's just throwing a bunch of platitudes at them. This is a society that managed, one way or another, to reduce suffering along a number of dimensions and had Zodiark as a viable means of enacting their plans. She was not providing them with anything concrete to change their stance. I wouldn't have found her convincing either, in their shoes.

Then the Q&A premises a lot of this on her belief that her people wouldn't change - but what reason was she giving them to do so? There's various supposed reasons as to why she didn't want to reveal the truth about what happened, but whatever the case may be, she kept that to herself. All in all, what they may have wanted to convey and how plausible what they ended up putting in is are two very different things. Some people may see it the way they intended; I don't.

Then, throughout the rest of the Elpis storyline, we learn that a familiar/concept with sapience and reason like the WOL is pretty much unheard of. Even Meteion is specifically stated to be unique. So basically, all of their familiars/concepts are basically monsters and animals...and if they're expecting players to dislike Ancients for treating animals and monsters as disposable, they must have forgotten what videogame we're playing. If anything, the charybdis portion shows us that even though they're pretty quick to write off "defective" concepts, they'll still listen to reason and reevaluate with sufficient evidence.

Indeed, and the Elpis sidequests by and large further reinforce this.

So, in the end, the entire premise of the Ancient society being bad because they didn't suffer enough relies on the logic of "trust me, bro". Even the aforementioned dead worlds they offer as "proof" (the Omicron, Ea and Plenty) come across less as worlds destroyed by their own hubris and more like juvenile writing.

Agreed.

It just feels off for the characters who genuinely struggle to all end up killed off by a supposedly well meaning 'herois' whereas those who get every possible advantage and 'I WIN' button handed to them are praised as saviours...despite doing very little of note.

Ah well. The Live Letter is tomorrow and the trailer for 6.1 should arrive as well. I'm curious to see what is in store next, though I'd be lying if I said I wasn't having much more fun with other games at the moment compared to this one.

Yep, pretty much the same here. The ego stroking is not something I care for much and it just feels rather vapid.

[KageTokage]

In this case, it's the same thing.

As I said, the writers were trying to convey the idea that a life without suffering is either impossible or delusional. That's the entire reason we see the Ancients during the Final Days panicking and longing to go back to the way things were. The argument is that, without a life of suffering to make them "stronger", the Ancients were ill-prepared for when it finally came. Thus, they were doomed to fall into even more delusional and blissfully-ignorant dreams of "utopia" if they ever got their paradise back.

I could spend all day unpacking the faults with this philosophy, why it doesn't quite work as the writers intended, and why it's potentially harmful, but my point at the moment is just to explain why, to the story's logic, the Ancients were painted as "delusional".

I am still bothered by the sudden shift in focus from "Sacrificing more lives is bad" to "Not being able to cope with the loss of friends and loved ones is bad".

Confirmation that the Ancients who gave their lives to summon Zodiark were trapped in a state between life and death just made the desire to bring them back seem all the more justified, as being unable to return to the star in a society where doing such was seen as a beautiful fulfillment of one's life and purpose and a privilege would've been profoundly disturbing to them. Tellingly, Elidibus sounds relieved upon hearing that they were finally able to have their peace after Zodiark was destroyed.

Now, if they had been intending to undo all of the damage from the Final Days, including reviving those who had been killed by the disasters and beasts, then would've felt a lot more delusional and like a collapse of their society's values.

They were noted as having unfortunate "work accidents" from time to time, but it seems like they largely just accepted it and moved on and I think as long as they utilized creation magicks some level of suffering was going to be present in their lives.

[Rulakir]

I've been slowly going through EW and trying to pay attention to all the details. Got to the lopporits where Livingway says (in regards to Thancred's question about the shards): "We were born of Hydaelyn's love for Etheirys, and the salvation of the people on that star, and that star alone, has ever been our aim." So far, all I've seen is that the rejoinings were a problem because it made imprisoning Zodiark increasingly difficult. My long running theory was that the shards were ever collateral damage, but damn. The irony is this is the mentality people hated about the Ascians.

[Fiel_Tana]

Famitsu, Game Watch and 4gamer released new pre-live letter interviews today. This Reddit thread provides a 'translation of key points' but does anyone know someone who would be willing to provide full translations? Or if already online somewhere, a link please?

I'm curious if there's more explanation to "On the Myths of the Realm alliance raids: “You could say this is close to being an epilogue to the Hydaelyn and Zodiark arc”."

[CrownySuccubus]

Now, if they had been intending to undo all of the damage from the Final Days, including reviving those who had been killed by the disasters and beasts, then would've felt a lot more delusional and like a collapse of their society's values.

They were noted as having unfortunate "work accidents" from time to time, but it seems like they largely just accepted it and moved on and I think as long as they utilized creation magicks some level of suffering was going to be present in their lives.

As I said, I could literally sit here all day and give a point-by-point list of all the problems with Endwalker's philosophy of "suffering-fetishism", but one of the major ones is exactly as you said. A period of time without major suffering or challenge is, essentially, just a time of normality. Acting as if a life without suffering is bad or makes people weak begs what the alternative should be: should people constantly be striving to make every aspect of life worse, just for the hell of it? If there are no sources of suffering and terror, should we make our own until we eventually get used to that, and then make something even worse just to make sure there's still a prerequisite amount of horror?

Like, if we take the Plenty at face value and assume they solved every problem they ever had, their despair over having nothing left to achieve makes no sense because it presumes that no challenges will ever happen to them ever again. Did no one on their planet invent sports or competition of any sort? Were there no natural disasters? Were there never any asteroid/meteor impact events? Did no one bring up the challenge of expanding offworld and into space? If they were so advanced, surely they could have made contact with other species that were willing to learn from them? I guess we're supposed to assume that their world had eliminated any need or worry about such things, but how or why? That's the thing: the story tells us they achieved a perfect "paradise", but glosses over exactly what that means.

[KageTokage]

I think there is a high chance that the future patches will expand the "cafe" at the Nekropolis and add recreations of the extinct races from the Dead Ends so we can perhaps get more detail on what eventually led to their ends.

I feel it's more likely to prove them all the more dissimilar to the Ancients, though. The people of the Plenty were described by Meteion as having eliminated all sources of strife, but the Ancients' creation magicks were probably the single biggest source of strife in their society, yet they chose to simply take mitigative measures through the screening process at Elpis and designated problem solvers like Azem and others as opposed to abandoning the pursuit entirely.