Endwalker is the most controversial expansion

[AshaStardust]

Are you sure about that?

Shadowbringers had nearly no detractors. That Endwalker has plenty of critics, well. It should tell you something.

We are out there, though perhaps rare. But thereare a reasonable number of players who feel that Shadowbringers was the worst expansion. Between the boring story involving a meaningless world with unfamiliar characters (who you were expected to immediately love and care about within minutes), to the predictable face-turn of Solus in the end (who was a one-note, clichéd snarky bad guy), and the world itself (the scenery and the awful skybox) there were many things that some players didn’t love about Shadowbringers. To see so many folks really turn against FF14 for the story of Endwalker while they heaped mountains of praise on Shadowbringers has utterly baffled me. I understand that my opinion is not the majority, but people like what they like, correct? I actually really liked the story for Endwalker, being with familiar friends and faces, so seeing the divided opinion of the player base was very surprising

[AshaStardust]

Huh? Endwalker being universally controversial and Shadowbringers being universally praised? I'm not sure which forums/websites you were reading, but that's completely wrong.

Yes, the Endwalker story is controversial, but the expansion is not universally controversial. Yeah, some people were whining about the SAM and NIN changes, and some whine about the housing lottery, but that's pretty much it. The new PvP is generally praised across the board, the new Ultimate is highly praised for being the biggest challenge this game ever had, people outside from those wiping in p3s PF are generally fine with the Asphodelos raid, people absolutely love Aglaia, and they really like the zones.

Meanwhile, Shadowbringers was NOT universally praised. Yes, most people liked the story, but there was a fair share of people who didn't like it. On top of that Shadowbringers was probably the expansion that got the most hate of all, content-wise. People were constantly complaining that we were only getting UI changes and crafter/gatherer content, while getting no Hildi, no deep dungeon, less zones for Bozja than we did for Eureka, Bozja being less social, an Ultimate was cut, Island Sanctuary being postponed to Endwalker, etc.

_________________

And little side-note:
Not everyone hated Stormblood. There's tons of people that really liked Stormblood, even the story. Only the 4.0 MSQ was kinda meh for most, but the patch content was some of the best so far. It was 100% better than Heavensward's patch content that had literally only 1 good patch in terms of MSQ (3.3), while the rest was super boring (3.1, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.5 were really boring). It was also on average better than 5.1 and 5.4, and around on par with 5.2, while 5.3 and 5.5 were generally better.

I hate to double post, but I saw your comment later and you are definitely speaking my language. I loved the SB storyline, it felt desperate and hopeless at times. Zenos felt like a legitimate threat and a villain I truly wanted to save in the end. Everything you said resonates with a decent sized portion of the player base who feels the same way

[Hyperia]

At the end of Shadowbringers 5.0 MSQ, I felt really good, happy, and loved the ride. I wanted to play more in the first and bring more friends to play with me.

At the end of Endwalker 6.0 I felt depressed, tired and my desire to play the game was wrecked. Had it not been for my friends, I would have dropped the game for a long time.

I know they wanted to bring us down a bit as we were flying too high up to this point, but geeze... I felt like they flew us into the ground in a full speed nosedive by saying we were "just adventurers", disbanding the Scions along with all the depressing content leading up to the end of the MSQ. Like, we save the world, the universe and all we got is a pink slip, a bye bye, and have a nice day. The new MSQ story in 6.1 felt too short and did not come close to negating the negativity generated by the 6.0 MSQ.

The only thing that has made me feel good is the Algea 24 player raid, the rest of the content is mostly a downer, or its mood has been negated by the rest of the content. I really want to like this expansion, I really do, but my god are the Devs making it hard...

[ZeraSkiratea]

SNIP....

i get you to some degree, altough my "negative" ends at "being called adventurer" like "no, no i am not, at most i take a big long break, and even if i am not i am not an Adventurer"


The scions disbanding? Logical step, i loved it, it wasnt as much as "get us down a notch" and more that Eorzea, and the entire world needs to start stopping to rely on us as openly as they did near the end. Even if it was a "harsh" decision. heck i was more annoyed that it WASNT actually disbanded but just "publicly disbanded". At least "rebrand" or something, stop calling ourself the scions of the Seventh Dawn. the Seventh dawn arrived.

[Hezhi]

How did this happen?

I don't think it's even about MSQ. Starting in Stormblood, they started making questionable decisions with the direction they've taken with the game overall, or cutting down on content for outside reasons (budget, covid etc). Dumbing down job massively, completely erasing some jobs identity over the years and going radio silence over it, releasing races in an objectively unfinished state, housing memes, PvP memes, not keeping their promises left and right with things such as Viera head gear, cutting down on dungeon/ultimates releases, the absolute STATE of healer aeroglare """gameplay""" in this game for the last 3 years, making asinine job changes *cough* kaiten *cough* none asked for, that sort of thing. All while pumping out cash shop item after cash shop item.
All that is just slowly eroding people's good will, and last year the big influx of people coming from other games brought fresh perspectives with them that led to people to realize that in some aspects of the game, they SHOULD expect better than the things we've gotten.

[Lyth]

Is it bad to be controversial? Anything popular is going to be the subject of discussion and debate.

[Lihtleita]

I was only here for a small portion of Stormblood

theres your problem

[Renathras]

So I read through 12 pages of this.

Honestly? Here's my rapid fire takes overall:

1) I don't want to say anyone's wrong, as a lot of this is subjective.

2) I didn't know EW was "controversial", and this forum is the only place I've seen say it is AS AN EXPANSION (Reddit talks about class design some, but that's a different issue)

3) MY GOD but you people seem to have gotten hit with the sarcastic and/or hyperbolic stick. Or both. Less snark would go a LONG way towards meaningful discussion, folks.

EDIT:

4) People doing something, then acting like a victim when it's done to them (e.g. posting this thread, getting tons of likes, then acting like people who disagree are trying to suppress their viewpoint or something) while insisting anyone who disagrees with them is wrong or attacking them is just...just no. You have a subjective opinion, others have subjective opinions. You're all discussing them. That's fine. Discounting other people's and caricaturing their position isn't helpful.

5) In the words of Team Four Star's DBZ Abridged's Cell (and later Future Trunks): "Multiverse theory's a B....." Time travel in videogames, movies, and TV shows is OFTEN done wrong. Sometimes terribly wrong. The most egregious case I can think of was one of the early Voyager episodes. No, not the one with the black hole where they arrive to investigate a distress call later finding out that it was their future selves seeing them and trying to hail them because the ship wasn't resolving clearly on sensors. I mean the episode where they arrive at a destroyed planet, investigate, some crew fall through a rift into the past a few days earlier, they eventually realize the ship's attempt to rescue them causes the global power system (nuclear or some such) to blow and destroy the planet, stop it from happening, then the entire timeline skips like a record and it shows the start of the episode with the ship arriving, seeing a pre-Warp civilization, and moving on without stopping due to the Prime Directive. Now THAT is time travel that makes no sense and can't even be explained via multiverse theorem because the loop resolved ITSELF into never happening in the first place even though the only way for the event to happen to begin with was the loop happening.

...if that doesn't make you a little confused, congratulations: FFXIV's time travel isn't convoluted.

Few games do time travel as well as Chrono Trigger, but that's praise of that game not condemnation of others. FFXIV features closed loops in the linear (or main) timeline, but also has a split off timeline/multiverse. Both of these can exist concurrently in real life theoretical physics. It's not convoluted or weird to have both. Now, if you don't like it from a NARRATIVE sense (you feel it takes something away from the agency of specific characters), that's a different argument. But also a subjective one of "I don't like it". Which is fine. I won't condemn subjective opinions, I will merely note they ARE subjective opinions, not objective facts nor universally held opinions.

Star Trek has MANY cases of time travel, and many are done differently. Back to the Future was a great series, but the second and third movies are all largely based off of a semi-bootstrap paradox (no, not Marty buying the almanac, but rather when the arrive back in 1985 and it's the altered timeline - by all rights, they should have traveled back to their original 1985 and not known of the change; moreover, the resolution of the story prevents that timeline from even happening, creating a paradox where they should never have known to go back in time to deal with the change). Chrono Cross has a closed time loop with Serge saving Kid from the orphanage fire. And the weird branching paths when it comes to Dinopolis/Fort Dragonis vs Chronopolis.

Many forms of fiction do time travel more poorly than EW, and bootstrap paradoxes don't take away character agency in general since their actions were still their own. We even see where Hydaelyn tries to convince her people to turn from their path so that the Sundering WOULDN'T be necessary, indicating she didn't WANT to do it but felt there was no other option. It wasn't a mere token effort. This isn't to say she was right in her actions, but it is to say she still had agency and tried to see if there might be another course.

Of all the things to criticize EW over, the time travel isn't really a great one. You may not like it personally, and that's fine, though. I'm just saying that there is ample room for disagreement and that IS your subjective opinion, not one universally held.

I can also blurb here about the story in general, but c'mon, not every video game story is War and Peace...and thank god for that! Even looking at literary works that have critical acclaim, not everyone likes them. So appeal to consensus (which is often the consensus of academics, not necessarily the general pubic) isn't even a good idea in the first place.

6) In general, forums are a minority of any given community. They also TEND to be all or nothing - either filled with sycophants who love it to death and condemn anyone attacking it, or echo chambers for the other end of the spectrum who hate the way it is and are very vocal in their condemnations. The reality is, neither represents the vast majority of the community. This isn't just a FFXIV thing. Though I'll note these forums seem to be PARTICULARLY pessimistic on the game. As noted in point (2), outside of this forum, the only commonly mentioned problem elsewhere is that people think some Job designs are stale/boring, mainly healers.

7) I do agree with the person that said that old PvP Frontlines felt way better being a healer because you actually could reliably heal. I get they wanted to shift that to personal healing for Crystaline Conflict, but it did screw with the class fantasy of the healers a lot. And the SMN mass Bahamut spam is getting REALLY old, as is the 100% to 0% under a crowd control window with no way to mitigate/get out of it (Purify and Guard are notorious for not working), especially when you can get nuked within 2 GCDs so you get Purify + 1 button then dead anyway, and often that 1 button won't even go off. And even if you survive, there's no diminishing returns on crowd control, meaning you can be immediately stunned/etc again. Hopefully mentioning balancing Frontline separately means they're going to address this.

8) To the people saying Yoshi P clarifying the story is somehow unheard of - no it isn't. He did the same thing in ShB, and they even started the little side story Tales series to address those questions and flesh out some of those characters more. That's not new to EW, nor some dire omen.

9) EW is HARDLY the first controversial expansion. Just off the top of my head, ShB was controversial for the healer changes, and there was a MASSIVE community uproar about DNC not being a healer and the "will we or won't we??" tease where the Devs could have said this early on to prevent the later explosion when it was revealed as being a new category of sub-DPS Ranged Physical, which had previously not been seen as a "separate category" from Melee and Casters (as far as new Job additions goes) to the community. The 5.0 story was generally praised, but there was a not insignificant portion of the community that thought it was trite, contrived, and needlessly edgy and pedantic. MCH mains, crafter mains, and many healer mains (especially AST and SCH) were NOT pleased with ShB, and while it alleviated the healer shortage of SB, it still led to a lot of people leaving the role entirely because of being upset with the changes. SCHs, in particular, felt their kit and Job fantasy/experience of the prior 5+ years was ruined. People STILL complain about Viera and Hrothgar having no/few headgear options, and generated two YEARS of complaining that the races were gender locked, leading to massive Dev resources going to releasing the other genders and working to make headgear for them. Cut content in Bozja, Castrum bottleneck, DR chaos (and now completely abandoned), and horrible future proofing, even when players were pointing it out. To this day, why are the armor upgrades 999 coins? And an Ultimate was due to Covid, but hardly without controversy. The culmination of the simplifying of healing and tanking started in SB was controversial. And let's not forget the NeiR raid, which was initially highly looked forward to and people thought might factor into the origin of the Sin Eaters...but instead it was a long commercial for NieR that was relevant to the plot of THAT series but not FFXIV, and had an unsatisfying and not even certain ending in FFXIV to non-NieR players/fans, leaving MOST everyone dissatisfied. If you call that "no controversy"...

SB is the single most controversial expansion in FFXIV's history. That remains unchanged. It's one of those things that is viewed more positively in hindsight, but at the time, people were concerned it would be the downfall of the game if ShB didn't pull another ARR. The post-story patches helped and were generally well received (but note I say "generally" not "universally" - many people did NOT like Tsuyu's semi-redemption arc, nor the writers making her at all seen as a victim of circumstance herself...despite many of these same people later praising the Ascians after 5.0 and believing "Emet did nothing wrong", mind you). The addition of two DPS Jobs and no new tanks nor healers did not go over well. The addition of BLU was controversial and REMAINS controversial to this day, even if that has largely subsided to some people being residually sore over it not being a full Job and people largely seeing it as optional side-content at this point and kind of accepting it as such. That was NOT the case when it was added, and the backlash is likely why we'll never get another one. And this is BEFORE getting to Rhauban Ex and Pipin Savage, which even EW's launch didn't complete with - the only more frustrating thing than being kicked from ques for a popular game is getting early access for said game and only being able to do the FATEs in HALF A ZONE and literally nothing else because you couldn't even level alt Jobs as any solo instanced quests you couldn't do. And at least with EW, the clogged servers made sense to people - massively popular game + WoW exodus + global pandemic preventing onlining of new severs. In SB, there was really no excuse. And the argument of Jobs being dumbed down actually STARTED in SB, not ShB. Eureka got a pretty bad wrap, ESPECIALLY Pagos, too. The entire thing had to be retuned and buffed and tweaked over and over again to get to the version we have today (which is honestly not half bad, though many who were jaded back then never came back...)

HW was somewhat controversial at the time. People were initially unsure if they liked the stronger focus on story and the WoL being "the Hero" (in ARR, you were largely "an adventurer"), a position they doubled down on in ShB and EW and by then, people loved it (largely). Raid design was panned as being exceptionally brutal, with people predicting the fall of raiding in the game due to Alexander breaking guilds. Wonky rotations, complaints of encounters being impossible to clear, healers having to deal too much damage/having too complicated damage rotations (compare THAT to the views now!), tank balance being all over the place, the entire catastrophe that was HW launch AST, MCH being wonky, BRD being widely panned (and reviled) as "bow mage" because of the cast bars of Wonderer's Minuet...and this is before I get into other things.

ARR saved the game, but was not without controversy. That's far enough back I don't remember as many of them, though. But I remember, for example, when NIN was launched the absolutely abysmal ques. DPS ques were so bad, NINs made FATE leveling parties of 7 NIN + healer. (As a baby CNJ/WHM leveling my first time and getting into the 40s when NIN was added, I remember being half-way dragged, half-way riding that wave from around level 42 all the way to 50 because it was faster for the NINs than trying their luck with dungeons). And I remember there being some controversy about Coils, though I don't recall what it was now. AFTER THE FACT, people panned ARR's story as bland and filler-heavy - no expansion since has had as much filler as launch ARR had, so much so they've cut out something like 30% of it now "and nothing of value was lost". People generally recognize that ARR saved the game, but compared to any later expansion, it was bare bones in doing so.

To this day, SB is still the most controversial expansion. It makes me think of FF9. I'm old enough to remember when that game came out and people hated it. I loved it, but the only things the FF community liked were the callbacks to older games. Yet now, 20 years on, it's considered one of the greats. Star Wars has a similar thing with the Prequels being widely panned at the time, but now being loved vs the Sequel Trilogy. And Star Trek has a similar thing with DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise, which were all hated early on (and DS9 was the only one that shook this perception while still in its original run) by a lot of people, but are now looked back on fondly vs Discovery. Hell, Cataclysm in WoW was hated at the time, but some people look on it more fondly now and see that Warlords was the start of the fall. Still others look on Warlords somewhat fondly and insist that BfA was the fall. I tend to side with the Warlords camp with BfA just being the nail in the coffin, but it's whatever.

Point is, EW is not NEARLY as controversial as SB was, and likely never will be.

This DOES NOT mean that criticisms are invalid. But it does mean they're probably at least a bit overblown and that there is a certain amount of "par for the course" in people having complaints about expansions.

10) No expansion can be well judged by X.0. ARR, SB, and arguably HW were weaker X.0 experiences in terms of systems and stories than EW. Compare the Scions' personalities between EW and HW and you can't tell me the HW ones were better. SB was largely redeemed in its patches, HW 3.3 (the final Nidhog battle) was the true climax of the story that brought it all together (to this day, that MUSIC, man!) with spectacle and heart both, and ARR's post-X.0 content (though still filler-heavy) was leagues better than ARR's base story, with 2.5 upping the stakes considerably and paving the way for HW. NO expansion can or SHOULD be judged in vacuum. And no, "the Devs said 6.0 is the story..."; no, they said it concludes the Hyd/Zod arc. That is a VERY different statement.

11) NO ONE - not you, not me, not that other poster here that you hate, not that other poster here you love that has 50 likes - speaks for the community. We each speak FOR OURSELVES. I hate it when people do this with other things too, from social issues to politics to taste in music. We all can like different things, and that's okay. But we all also speak only for ourselves. Some people may agree with us, but they also CAN and DO speak for themselves, too. This is something people in the modern world REALLY need to start understanding. And even if that WEREN'T the case, appeal to consensus is a logical fallacy anyway because consensus can often be wrong. The world, community, and forum would all be better off if people would do this far less.

12) Do keep in mind that there are a LOT more people playing now than were in SB and even ShB. The WoW exodus was real. My server (Famfrit) still has at least 20 people in que unless I log in during the dead of night/morning, and sometimes even then (weekends). This also means we have a lot of people coming from other games (WoW obviously, but also others and also a lot of single player gamers), so we're seeing a lot more tug on the Devs from different directions from these people thinking USS Last Game did all these great things and FFXIV should too, even if it completely alienates existing players or led to their prior game becoming something they themselves eventually left. So there's a balance there that they're having to walk and we're seeing a lot of complaints from people who are comparing FFXIV to their prior home as well, in some cases positively but in some negatively. And in general, more people = more complaints, since if you have more people, even if you have the same percentage complaining, that ends up being far more individuals when you increase the overall community size.

13) EW is not Warlords of Draenor. EW is not Battle for Azeroth. It might be somewhat like Cataclysm but if Cataclysm was the height of WoW (instead of Wrath), so it isn't even that. History may often rhyme but it seldom repeats, and SE's Devs are not Blizzards. Yoshi P is not Ghostcrawler, either.

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Anyway, a ton of words and sorry this dragged on.

Everyone is entitled to their own subjective positions and opinions. I won't take that away from anyone and neither should any of you. But that cuts both ways.

There are some things I hope they address/change and I have some concerns with the game in some senses...but I've seen nothing so far to indicate that the clickbait title here is accurate, and I think it would go a long way to the community - including the OP - to avoid such hyperbole in the future.

Fair enough?

We all in theory want this game to be the best it can be, and due to appealing to a lot of people, it means there are some things we individually may not like as much (or may even dislike), but doom and gloom isn't helpful. There is some good feedback in here, but the hyperbole and snark tends to drown a lot of it out...

[Shurrikhan]

Shadowbringers had nearly no detractors.

Its job design, especially surrounding Monk, Summoner, Machinist, Ninja, Dark Knight, Warrior, and any and all healers had some definite controversy, and the NieR raids both released and finished to very mixed reviews.

[ReynTime]

We are out there, though perhaps rare. But thereare a reasonable number of players who feel that Shadowbringers was the worst expansion. Between the boring story involving a meaningless world with unfamiliar characters (who you were expected to immediately love and care about within minutes), to the predictable face-turn of Solus in the end (who was a one-note, clichéd snarky bad guy), and the world itself (the scenery and the awful skybox) there were many things that some players didn’t love about Shadowbringers. To see so many folks really turn against FF14 for the story of Endwalker while they heaped mountains of praise on Shadowbringers has utterly baffled me. I understand that my opinion is not the majority, but people like what they like, correct? I actually really liked the story for Endwalker, being with familiar friends and faces, so seeing the divided opinion of the player base was very surprising

In my defence my issues with ShB's writing didn't become apparent until 5.3 came out and I realised the build-up to things I expected were all going to be under-delivered. After finishing Endwalker I look back to Shadowbringers with very different eyes, because I can see now many problems with the writing direction started right there in 5.0.

In terms of content, I always thought ShB was by far the worst expansion (at the time, so far I think Endwalker is even worse) to someone who doesn't give a rat's arse to roleplay fluff.