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

[SentioftheHoukai]

It annoyed me with the Steppes as well. Normally they'll use visual tricks to at least add an illusion of grandeur, but you had entire tribes there in these itty bitty little settlements. While one wouldn't expect giant metropolises, neither would you expect them to amount to a few dozen individuals or so.

You have no idea how many times I've stood on the bridge leading out from the part of the Steppe we actually got and just stared. What's all that, Square?! Let me explore the rest of the Steppe, dammit!

The Steppe was pathetic and definitely the most egregious zone compression pre-EW. For a “steppe” there sure is hardly any flat grassland, and a whole lot of mountains cutting off the northwest and southeast ends. And they put chasms to separate the east and southwest ends from the actual flatlands that went past them. If absolutely any zone is to have a bunch of empty land, stuff that’s far apart and separated by lots of nothing, I would expect it for that. And what’s wrong with walling off zones without having to invent some silly geographical features to do it? Like any of us would care if they put the boundary in ay the end of walkable ground? Tons of games do that!

Guild Wars II has a pretty good example of this in most of the Human storyline's starting area. Gods, is that game BIG!! At least, I think it is.

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There comes a time when someone can simply no longer believe a storyline is the way it is due to ignorance. Unfortunately, for me and many others Endwalker crossed that line a while ago. Feels far more sinister in retrospect. More like propaganda or attempts to shove a viewpoint down our throats at best, a form of subtle brain-washing and indoctrination at worst.

Also, frankly so many people come in here to be petty trolls and label our thread as whinging and insane leaps of logic to discredit us and warn others away so I can't honestly have any faith in them anymore like you seem to.

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I feel precisely the same as you, Teraq. I'm an empath and have social anxiety to the point I can't leave my flippin' house in my gated community for fear all the people who know me will trigger a panic attack and make me scratch the backs of my hands until they bleed to cope with the stress. As a result, those who go into threads like these to equate liking a fiction empire to wanting to have carnal relations to real life tyrants or some other equally asinine reach is positively infuriating. I'm equally sick of those who attempt to pretend it isn't happening or suggest that they aren't doing it that it's somehow less of a problem.

[RyuDragnier]

Guild Wars II has a pretty good example of this in most of the Human storyline's starting area. Gods, is that game BIG!! At least, I think it is.

A shame the human storyline is the worst racial storyline due to how generic it is.