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

[Raoabolic]

The thought that Twitter is going to end up driving the story fills me with so much rage. I avoid that platform for a reason. The last thing I want to do is play through any type of Twitter-approved storyline, which is guaranteed to be alienating and awful.

Did you not see the ending of EW? You fight Twitter's mascot and then everyone goes, "It's okay, you were just sad. :^)" and the the credits played. Apparently, the only ones who get to be purely evil are the Garleans. Hey, remember the scene where the Garlean general gave himself the "Down for the Count" debuff and got cutscene'd away because he saw everything he valued burn in an afternoon? Nah, neither do I. :^)

[aveyond-dreams]

Thing is Twitter already has the storyline of their dreams in the FFXIV high school manga. If they want a fluff story where Zenos goes to the beach and takes his shirt off while Y'shtola grades english essays, it's there for them.

I dread the thought of the writers potentially making us go from "Scion" to "Student of Baldesion" - a common saying in spanish is you don't want to go from Guatemala to Guatapeor. Being associated with the Scions was bad but at least the title was somewhat passable, being reduced to a student or one of their subordinates would be even worse.

I do not want screentime wasted on obligatory slice of life and meme scenes each patch. Give us some action. Let there be stakes. Actually follow through with the promise of a new adventure instead of falling back on old characters and plot threads, though that ship has already sailed. Maybe they just need to play another video game for inspiration, one that isn't Persona, or read a book.

With some of the more recent examples of messy writing you'd entirely forget that this game even has some GoT actors voicing some of its characters like Gaius and Ardbert. Their talents are wasted if the story continues pivoting towards the likes of the twitter fanbase who finds everything "problematic" while endlessly retweeting fanart of characters with no development like Y'shtola.

Those of us who want a decent Final Fantasy story will likely get one once FFXVI comes out, but without a release window announced yet and Sony endlessly dragging their feet on the reveal, we could be waiting for quite a bit of time yet. You want to see someone grapple with rage and revenge like Estinien did? That's what Clive is shaping up to be. You want a high fantasy world lifted straight out of Westeros with the same style of British voice acting like FFXIV? That's FFXVI for you. Everything that made me fall in love with FFXIV is over there, and fast disappearing from FFXIV itself.

The Void could potentially be very interesting - but the current writing direction would likely ruin it by having us go to the Void equivalent of Taco Bell to eat burritos with G'raha Tia and Y'shtola. Instead of setting up a base in an inn or pub like in ARR/Ishgard we'd be stuck in the atrocious Baldesion Annex, in what is essentially a college dorm room. With the story degrading faster and faster and gameplay following suit as well, then FFXIV's golden age will be well and truly lost.

[PawPaw]

At this point I stopped caring about the story and I'm not sure if I want to buy the third Encyopedpia Eoreza considering even the writers are not bothering to fill plotholes and contradicting themselves so what's the point of buying something that lore heavy.

MFW thinking about the expansion and it's story after beating it
I just wanted eldritch horrors and Zodiark. Was that so much to ask?

Saaame. Last year, when I saw that the first two were going into a reprint, I pre-ordered them both because I'd always wanted to own them; But now that I've seen how little they regard their own lore it all feels a bit pointless. Cancelled them both instead.

[Theodric]

The thought that Twitter is going to end up driving the story fills me with so much rage. I avoid that platform for a reason. The last thing I want to do is play through any type of Twitter-approved storyline, which is guaranteed to be alienating and awful.

Yeah, Twitter is so ridiculously divisive and free of nuance that it should be amongst the last places that the development team look at for feedback. What they should be doing is approaching regular players with surveys readily available through the lodestone. That'd give them a broader range of opinions and feedback to work with.

[anhaato]

The thought that Twitter is going to end up driving the story fills me with so much rage. I avoid that platform for a reason. The last thing I want to do is play through any type of Twitter-approved storyline, which is guaranteed to be alienating and awful.

Nah it’s being driven by Reddit, 1000%. Twitter is the #1 home of Ancient stans, even if they despise the Garleans. At least when I completed the story I saw SOME dissatisfaction in the first couple months, and it’s currently growing. Reddit, on the other hand, defended the story to the death until last month and shut down any opposing opinions. We also know for sure the devs go there for feedback more than any other social media site, while I don’t think they can realistically get feedback through Twitter knowing how the site works.

[Lucida3b]

Except the devs are japanese, not many are big english speakers so i dont think they would be checking reddit much at all lets be real.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Except the devs are japanese, not many are big english speakers so i dont think they would be checking reddit much at all lets be real.

They’ve specifically stated they have. The official 14 reddit even has posts to prove it themselves that they do.

[anhaato]

Every so often I dream of a paradisiacal alternate reality in which the game boasted a 15 year storyline instead of 11 years...

Amending this: I would kill off a couple of the scions across the story. First, I would consider Thancred’s last moment being after he fights Ran’jit, but I was ok with him surviving that to further his father figure arc and him getting emotionally unconstipated enough to properly care for Ryne. In that case, I think he would die in the pre-patches of 8.0, having been targeted with despair by the Eldritch horror identifying us as a threat because it’s targeting our planet now. It identifies him as the easiest to manipulate with despair energy. This might seem a bit sudden so maybe there’s a way to add someeee foreshadowing? Not sure. Either way he’ll be offed to set the tone of how much of a crisis we’re in.

Yshtola will use up her draining aether when we go to aid Zodiark, which would probably require an aether jumpstart, far larger than what we required to untemper Tiamat for example.

With Thancred and Yshtola both gone, Urianger… gets to live. He becomes suicidal in the immediate next moment for now having lived to see the deaths of 3 of his closest friends and feels that he doesn’t deserve to live while they’re all dead. The Eldritch big bad sees its chance to attack him next but Zodiark awakens and shields us. From then he must live on with his extreme guilt of feeling like a sole survivor, I think that’s enough psychological torture to not require that he be killed off.

I don’t want the twins to die off particularly, they’re young so they’re kinda symbolic of Da Future so I’ll spare them. G’raha is also symbolic in that he represents the intertwining of timelines, I feel like killing him off after making him the image of a successful time travel expedition to create a new timeline while preserving another would cheapen that. So I think I’m ok with only two scions dying. It would get the point across well enough. Yshtola’s death would be an opportunity for Krile to step up and learn to fill Yshtola’s role in combat.

But, the surviving scions’ personal arcs are over either way, so they’ll be out of the story regardless. As soon as we save the world it’s time to just move on.

[Lauront]

Nah it’s being driven by Reddit, 1000%. Twitter is the #1 home of Ancient stans, even if they despise the Garleans. At least when I completed the story I saw SOME dissatisfaction in the first couple months, and it’s currently growing. Reddit, on the other hand, defended the story to the death until last month and shut down any opposing opinions. We also know for sure the devs go there for feedback more than any other social media site, while I don’t think they can realistically get feedback through Twitter knowing how the site works.

You're probably right - although I would not consider Twitter a great place to go for opinions, and certainly not a broad swathe of them, it also suffers from not being greatly suited to proper discussion given its character limitations and very extreme nesting of comments (to the extent that they're even allowed in some cases); Reddit is the more egregious of the two when it comes to narrative control, and is also by far the biggest "super-spreader" of silly headcanons in this game's community, and very over the top defensiveness of all its aspects. That said, I have noted that there's less of a tendency to downvote bomb dissenting opinions now than there was, oh, close to 6 months ago.

Except the devs are japanese, not many are big english speakers so i dont think they would be checking reddit much at all lets be real.

Like Kizuya mentioned, it has gone on record that they check it, and some of them do seem capable of understanding English, even if not speaking it. Besides, they have staff to do this sort of thing, both here on the forum and elsewhere. They collate feedback and pass it on to the devs.

[Rulakir]

Well, I can't argue Reddit rabidly defended all things EW for months. It's why this thread became such a refuge for anyone who didn't like the story to discuss it. During the LL Q&A I was genuinely surprised when Yoshi-P felt the need to communicate Venat wasn't a "bad guy" because he could not have been seeing that sentiment on Reddit at the time. Even when it comes to Hermes, he said in the Famitsu interview he was surprised people didn't react to him as they did Emet, but you'd never know that as he's practically the darling of western social media and if you don't like him it's because you "don't understand depression" or "lack empathy". -_- He's routinely referred to as the "most human" of the Ancients while based Ishikawa says she figured 80% of players would dislike him.