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

[Cach]

Hydaelyn was worse.

True.

I still think Yotsuyu pulled a karma houdini, the whole arc went a bit too long and Asahi was rushed and/or completely unnecessary. That annoyed me a bit back in the day. Nowhere near as bad as Venat stuff.

[Rulakir]

Yotsuyu was an entertaining villain, but I thought she should've died at Doma Castle. Her reversion to a 12(?) year old and the subsequent story arc thereafter was odd. Also, while her backstory was tragic it wasn't any moreso than other NPCs we've encountered, like the Miqo'te girl in the arcanist job quests. I didn't personally feel it made her a sympathetic villain and I was fine with that. I don't need to feel bad for every antagonist.

[MoofiaBossVal]

I was really excited when Asahi showed up. "Finally, a decent Garlean officer we will get to interact with!". Then I was disappointed, and Maxima was sidelined and then defected. I wonder what he's doing. He didn't even show up in the final rolequest that wrapped up Garlemald.

[Skyborne]

Hydaelyn was worse. Venat had no tragic backstory, she was likeable until she decided go the arrogant proud angel route.

Not only that, but she was 'vindicated' and 'right' due to a time traveller spoiling her whole plan and having the luxury of knowing everything will be fine and deciding to go all in on 'our' world and maintaining the timeloop as the ancients become the designated fall guys/sacrificial lambs. I wonder what she would have done if she was lost and kept in the dark with no certainty like the rest of the plebs, where the planet could very well have been snuffed out? Bizarrely, the game seems to take the same smug judgemental stance with the codex entry. 5 months later, it's still the most ridiculous and clownish way to ever tell a "you must live with suffering and accept it" moral.

I was really excited when Asahi showed up. "Finally, a decent Garlean officer we will get to interact with!". Then I was disappointed, and Maxima was sidelined and then defected. I wonder what he's doing. He didn't even show up in the final rolequest that wrapped up Garlemald.

Was also disappointed in this... and the Populares just getting destroyed offscreen. That's just my post-StB Garlemald expansion copium mask falling off for a moment again.

[Teraq]

People coming into the thread like "why are you still whining after 4 months"... psh, how weak. 4 months is small potatoes, especially for a story that is actually still on-going. I still enjoy dunking on GOT 3 years after it's done. Happiness is fleeting but spite is eternal. I shall build my blue lizard nest at the edge of the cosmos, this thread its ever-growing Death Star.

that's what i was saying. i just uninstalled. thought maybe we'd get a new cast for 6.1. how do people have the energy to keep posting and being mad for 4 months yet they never quit? the newest 6.1 story didn't look any better. 5minutes of yshtola sleeping cutscenes, nah im out

I still very much enjoy the gameplay right now. This game keeps feeding me the "automated faceroll instance queue rewarding currencies to slowly progress my character" endgame loop WoW has been denying me for 8 years now in favor of its insistance on organized content making any sort of LFD/LFR worthless. ffs as of WoD I couldn't even get dungeon achievements anymore! The recent announcement that WotLK Classic won't even have its late-introduced feature that finally opened up dungeons to me was just another slap in the face. I'm here to click a button and play the game, not deal with the suffering that is the Group Finder as a solo DPS with no friends. God, I hope Venat didn't hear me.


Regarding the Echo and Blessing of Light, yeah, I found that really confusing and, above all, unnecessary. What was their point here? I was quite content with the explanation that it was simply the Echo protecting from tempering, and that the Convocation were nonetheless tempered to a degree because Zodiark was this much of a Giga Chad primal made of the aether of potentially thousands of unsundered humans. They simply retained their free will because their unsundered soul offered more protection to aether corruption. But that would have implied unsundered humans were just better at something... oh no! As for Tiamat, she too was technically "unsundered", as would have been her children, so this explanation may still work for a Bahamut primal they summoned.

This explanation would have also made us Echo-capable-but-still-sundered humans vulnerable to mild tempering by a certain unsundered primal broadcasting her message... Oh but we can't have that. You see, only bad guys temper, and she's definitely good. So much for any sort of tension resulting from Hydaelyn being revealed as a – DUN DUN DUNNN – primal! Glad we sorted that out, huh?

And Venat recognizing her own magic to identify us as a time traveller doesn't have to make the Blessing of Light a tempering ward, either. Just have her recognize her own aether "mark", "scent", or whatever you want to call it, on us and deduce something is up because she had definitely never met us before. No need to change anything about the Echo for that.

Just... why?

[Lucida3b]

Yeah the echo/blessing thing is the most unnecassary part that always is the most baffling, while I can portray a lot of things to manipulative or waifuism of venat. That part literally made 0 sense whatsoever.

I know a lore guy complained about that on the forums here

[PawPaw]

Yeah the echo/blessing thing is the most unnecassary part that always is the most baffling, while I can portray a lot of things to manipulative or waifuism of venat. That part literally made 0 sense whatsoever.

I know a lore guy complained about that on the forums here

Yeah I was complaining about it to my friends also. We already know and have known for years that the reason we can fight Primals without being tempered is because of the Echo. We have characters who have the Echo artificially who do not have the BoL who are also completely able to resist tempering, so why suddenly retcon it just to fit in with the narrative of "acktually Hydaelyn is the one that's been protecting us all this time, not the sliver of a dead Ancient's soul and their power that's been awakened inside you since you saw that meteor shower. What a good person she is, right?!

RIGHT??!!!"

[Ishe-P]

Late to this topic but I have thought about and argued with myself about this for a long while.

Endwalker's story will not stand the test of time and I'm glad the Ascian arc has more or less been completed. I would much rather be some goofy adventurer running around doing small, contained stories that may or may not build into a larger arc later. Give me more 'foil Lex Luthor's plot to steal the Diamond' quests, please! SE excels at them, but they are often sidelined for bombastic 5-head action catjams that play at me rather than with me. This newfound adventurer stuff is a great chance to hit the reset button on a lot of that, but I am concerned that we'll just get more of the same. After all, what happens after you save the whole universe? We need something exponentially bigger, apparently.

I do think they need to make the story much less linear. Right now we aren't doing anything of real consequence to ourselves, the story always goes the same way. When we do a dialog button 99% of the time it's just so the NPC we're talking to can say something else. At the end of the day that means my heroism and actions have no impact whatsoever on the world, other than maybe a nod sometimes to past deeds. Whoop dee doo. If my decisions don't matter, it's no longer my adventure and just some adventurer someone else wrote for me. It's not very interesting when viewed like that.

[anhaato]

I do think they need to make the story much less linear. Right now we aren't doing anything of real consequence to ourselves, the story always goes the same way. When we do a dialog button 99% of the time it's just so the NPC we're talking to can say something else. At the end of the day that means my heroism and actions have no impact whatsoever on the world, other than maybe a nod sometimes to past deeds. Whoop dee doo. If my decisions don't matter, it's no longer my adventure and just some adventurer someone else wrote for me. It's not very interesting when viewed like that.

Ever since I started getting obsessed with BotW it just made me think that this was what the 1.0 vision was. Open world, an overarching main story but you can go about it from any direction you choose, numerous interesting locations to explore, tons of side content, overworld battle and exploration achievements, and so on. Something like that just wasn't feasible for them at the time so they gave us ARR which ended up working in their favor and giving us a game format that held up for a while, but now I'd like to believe that they could accomplish this vision and I'd like to see them try to do that in a grand overhaul of some sort.

[Ishe-P]

Ever since I started getting obsessed with BotW it just made me think that this was what the 1.0 vision was. Open world, an overarching main story but you can go about it from any direction you choose, numerous interesting locations to explore, tons of side content, overworld battle and exploration achievements, and so on. Something like that just wasn't feasible for them at the time so they gave us ARR which ended up working in their favor and giving us a game format that held up for a while, but now I'd like to believe that they could accomplish this vision and I'd like to see them try to do that in a grand overhaul of some sort.

I don't think a huge overhaul would even be necessary and I'm pretty sure they've dipped a pinky toe into this kind of water before. All they have to do is just mix it up a little and get a little more subtle than not at all. Something they could do, for example, is take two dungeons and put them in a different unlock order unlock based on your actions. You still have to do them, and the plot still converges at the same place eventually. If my character is, say, a renegade, maybe I'd get dungeon #2 first. A paragon, #1, with different sassy comments from whatever scions might be along for the rides. Any concerns that one dungeon would be less popular than the other could be mitigated via the Trust system, and they can always stick a big fat warning up front saying 'the choice you are about to make will effect which dungeon you play first, are you sure.' And New Game+ could be used to run through the other version. It's so obvious an option I can't see them NOT doing something like that eventually, and is even if it is still a railroad it feels a little more like it was my choice of one.