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

[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.

[anhaato]

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.

Yeah I'm sure they could do story changes like that, but I'm thinking more about the open world exploratory stuff. The zones in 1.0 were all connected with no loading zones, but they had to add loading tunnels because the software (and most hardware people were playing it on back then) couldn't handle having everything loaded in. I think with modern technology they could pull it off, but it would take a fair bit of work to reintroduce the ability to walk across a bridge between Limsa and Lower La Noscea. And that's to say nothing about adding in details to incentivize exploration. Treasure, secret mini bosses, overworld dungeons, and so on. Again, 1.0 tried having all of that but it just didn't work, but I think they could pull it off now.