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

[Tama-Kanzashi]

When you have a game as immensely popular as FFXIV, there will inevitably be some small minority disagreeing on anything you can think of. Go practically anywhere outside these forums (even Reddit, usually a cesspool of negativity), and you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase *loves* the MSQ. It's okay to not like it, but to act as if your opinion is somehow representative of everyone when it isn't even close is bad form.

I don't know, I am more willing to guess that the majority of players doesn't care about the story, and with those who do care about it the ones who like it are really loud because 'positivity' usually gets rewarded and those who have concerns are more often than not quiet because they get accused of bashing far too often and too easily. But the truth is that critical thinking doesn't mean you hate something, it usually means you like something and that you are very disappointed and know it could technically do better.

[Vyrerus]

you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase

No, you won't. You'll find the subsection of the playerbase that posts on those sites. The majority of the playerbase doesn't care to discuss the game's writing or story direction. They're in FFXIV for the gameplay, aesthetics, and characters. The story, while widely praised as it has been since 2.0, is usually more or less window dressing / another positive they can comfortably acquiesce to, rather than think about.

It doesn't help to list sites like Twitter or Reddit, where there's an entire social dynamic/algorithmic dynamic etc. Where influencers will block you for any dissent, or you'll get downvoted into oblivion for even mild indifference. Or the algorithm is only showing things and people it'll think agree with you/you will like.

You can see the negative reactions here, because they are allowed to be here, and there's nothing that automatically hides them from you, unless you've expanded your personal blocklist to do so.

[Teraq]

It's okay to not like it, but to act as if your opinion is somehow representative of everyone when it isn't even close is bad form.

I know something that's even worse form: quoting someone then misrepresenting what they've said to build your little strawman.

At no point in that paragraph did Rulakir "act as if her opinion is somehow representative of everyone". She simply said "players", then "I've heard this has increasingly become a thing".

Try again.

Oh and by the way, we know. Why do you think dissent has congregated in this one specific place of the FFXIV social ecosystem? Do you think we are somehow unaware of what the vast majority thinks? How could we even be when the community exhibits this much toxic positivity? We've all been on Reddit and Twitter.

"She really was an Ancient, huh?"

I love how Endwalker does not merely tell without showing you – no, it is actively telling while showing you something else entirely on the side, then pretending you didn't just see that.

[Lauront]

I did not bother trying to introduce or account for the element of Dynamis in my rewrite. It was simply too ridiculous of a device to use in any serious story. Think about the target audience - how in the world are you going to try and pass off the literal power of friendship onto a playerbase that is in their late teens/twenties? By that point that kind of nonsense just isn't palatable or believable.

I will however encourage you and other frequenters of this thread to finish and post all of your respective rewrites, can't wait for these streamers to open the first page of General Discussion and see it flooded with multiple works that are highly likely to outdo and course correct the direction that Endwalker went in. We may as well make this territory our own.

The removal of dynamis is no more than is necessary to steer the story back from the false path.

When you have a game as immensely popular as FFXIV, there will inevitably be some small minority disagreeing on anything you can think of. Go practically anywhere outside these forums (even Reddit, usually a cesspool of negativity), and you'll find that the overwhelming majority of the playerbase *loves* the MSQ. It's okay to not like it, but to act as if your opinion is somehow representative of everyone when it isn't even close is bad form.

So take these other sites representing a minority of the playerbase in their own right as licence be gaslit into the statement that a majority of the playerbase loves loves loves the MSQ? No, I think I won't.

While I think it's fair to say that a good portion of the playerbase is happy with the story, there has been enough murmuring and dissent to move the writers to do a Q&A, address story mixed messages in interviews and add a follow-up quest to (at least try) introduce nuance that was sorely lacking in base EW. I've seen quite a few mentions even within sites which lean more positive, like Reddit, of how they find the story depressing, and this is not even ancients fans necessarily. Just people who found the way EW presented its "themes" and messaging depressing in spite of its aim to deliver a hopeful message. I would say as time has progressed, the needle has moved, and we are probably in a position where there are two polarised groups that either love or hate the story, both of which are fairly sizeable minorities, and a majority that is content with it but has reservations about this or that aspect, just not story-breaking ones. There is no way to categorically prove this, but there is also no real evidence to claim the story is universally loved, and as Vyrerus put it, there are good reasons to dispute the notion that Reddit (which is slowly beginning to show more dissent on the story), Twitter or Metacritic are the final say on this, in addition to the fact that they too represent a fairly small proportion of the playerbase in their own right (Reddit may boast 600k members but its actual post engagement is far, far below this.)

[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.

snip snip

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.

snip snippy

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.

[Kolsykol]

Emet-Selch himself says in shadowbringers that conquering is easy, what comes after is the hard part. Point was that you need to treat the conquered with dignity. The way Garlean rule has been portrayed and told, even Gaius' rule that supposedly was no different even though it obviously should have been, has always been as bad (and just plain stupid) as possible to justify everyone hating them. Even that stoning scene was less to show Eorzeans as bad and more to show how Garleans don't care unless you're Garlean (and to show why Fordola does what she does). Basically just a grotesque caricature of the worst possible ruler(s).

I dunno why you're dismissing the Eorzeans in that scene so easily tho.
It was essentially both, but it was still the Eorzeans who were stoning one of their own people.

Gaius is a bit weird because he was retconned.
But I think they did a great job at humanizing him in the Weapons storyline, it's one of my favorites in the game.
I think that if Gaius was written today tho he'd be written differently, because back then he was still meant to be the main villain that we wanted to defeat and tbh he kinda felt like was meant to be a '' Vader '' figure he even got the mask and voice and everything.
The writing has come a long way since and I think Gaius proves that too.

I don't agree tho that the scene was '' less to show Eorzeans as bad and more to show how Garleans are '', especially not from Fordola's pov what she got out of it was that her own people were pieces of shit.
She did think that the Garleans looked down on them and let it happen too, but she was clearly more worked up about what the Eorzeans did.

I mean there's a ton of other examples too, it's also worth noting that Garlemald had a ton of foreign soldiers working for them many of who actually committed the atrocities against their own people themselves.
Yotsuyu was also Doman and the people who harmed her and caused her to be how she was weren't Garleans either.

I think the game does a lot more to show how bad Eorzeans are than to show how bad Garleans are.
On some level that's also a matter of screentime, but I don't agree with this characterization you presented.
I think there's a big difference between someone doing what Yotsuyu did and simply not doing anything.
Inaction in the Fordola situation is bad too, but it's not them directly committing a wrong with their own hands/ orders.
It's more like looking the other way, which was also one of the things Yotsuyu criticized her own people for doing too.

Edit: Even with Valens Varro in the Weapons storyline, there's other Garleans in the story that are clearly shocked by his methods.
I don't think they'd be shocked by it if he was the norm.

While I think it's fair to say that a good portion of the playerbase is happy with the story, there has been enough murmuring and dissent to move the writers to do a Q&A, address story mixed messages in interviews and add a follow-up quest to (at least try) introduce nuance that was sorely lacking in base EW. I've seen quite a few mentions even within sites which lean more positive, like Reddit, of how they find the story depressing, and this is not even ancients fans necessarily. Just people who found the way EW presented its "themes" and messaging depressing in spite of its aim to deliver a hopeful message. I would say as time has progressed, the needle has moved, and we are probably in a position where there are two polarised groups that either love or hate the story, both of which are fairly sizeable minorities, and a majority that is content with it but has reservations about this or that aspect, just not story-breaking ones. There is no way to categorically prove this, but there is also no real evidence to claim the story is universally loved, and as Vyrerus put it, there are good reasons to dispute the notion that Reddit (which is slowly beginning to show more dissent on the story), Twitter or Metacritic are the final say on this, in addition to the fact that they too represent a fairly small proportion of the playerbase in their own right (Reddit may boast 600k members but its actual post engagement is far, far below this.)

Tbh I think that if a significant portion felt the way some of you do about the story then the game wouldn't have a 9.4 metacritic score.
Especially since people who feel this way tend to usually be significantly louder than those who don't.
Yes there's no way of knowing for sure and what the actual stats are, but all of the stats kinda speak against you here.

Nothing is universally loved there will always be people who dislike something, but I think it's fair to say that people in this thread are being a bit overly dramatic and are probably not representing a very significant portion of the playerbase.
I know that this isn't a significant representation of anything either, but even Streamers who go into it with a negative or very skeptical mentality with existing audiences they garnered from competing games have still ended up loving it some even calling it the best story they've ever experienced.
I mean there just rly isn't much implying that there's some large group of people here that are so negative about it.

[Jagick]

I literally cannot believe we still have to say this again, again and again in the year of Our Lord Zodiark 2022.

The type of characters I enjoy in fiction does not align with who I am in real life. I have loved villains since I was a little girl. That's just how it is. I cannot stand conflict in real life. I have been removed from my job for being overwhelmed by my own empathy. (Funny that, by the way... there's this dude in Endwalker......)

Amen to this, especially as a role player. I love to play villain characters who believe and do some really heinous things at times, hell, my main is a bandit that routinely robs and even murders when he has to, and I have an alt that is a very set in his ways, racist, elezen inquisitor from Ishgard. These characters that I play say absolutely nothing about me as a person. I also despise conflict, try to be kind to a fault, and am very introverted. The idea of harming another person is almost nauseating to think about. Yet unfortunately there are people in this world (and tons of them in this community) who can't separate fiction from reality and treat you like an inhumane monster just because of the sort of stories you enjoy or personally write. It's sad, really.

I'm an absolute lover of the Principality of Zeon from Mobile Suit Gundam. Does that mean I want to genocide people or commit war crimes? Absolutely not!

[Striker44]

So take these other sites representing a minority of the playerbase in their own right as licence be gaslit into the statement that a majority of the playerbase loves loves loves the MSQ? No, I think I won't.

You are using words. I don't think they mean what you think they mean. Ask anywhere. In game. Peruse the internet. FFXIV's story is overwhelmingly popular. You don't have to like the truth, but it doesn't make it any less true. At least using the same straw man arguments yourself that you and your buddies are claiming against me tells me all I need to know. It's sad some people desperately need justification and can't stand that their opinion is shared by very few. :\

[Rulakir]

Tbh I think that if a significant portion felt the way some of you do about the story then the game wouldn't have a 9.4 metacritic score.

I love how this is consistently the only evidence I see provided of some overwhelming majority thinking EW is good when it's based on less than 1500 reviews, all of which are not positive. I thought maybe reviewing games on there is difficult? No, turns out it's not. Since people continue to bring up the site as some gold standard, I figured I may as well make an account there and give EW the 5 rating it deserves.

Just to clarify, I don't think we're the majority, but I do think there's enough of us to make a difference. Were that not the case then Yoshi-P wouldn't need to "communicate Hydaelyn's not a bad guy" or Ishikawa have to write a quest chain that significantly walks back the positivity (and even justification) of Venat. I understand this can feel threatening if you enjoyed the MSQ. I'm certainly seeing some defensiveness here trying to marginalize our opinions, but it's not just us. Frankly, Yoshi-P having negative feedback at the time of the LL Q&A likely wouldn't have come from the west, which would suggest that JP audiences had similar issues and were perhaps more freely able to discuss them on their social media platforms.

I looked at the comments on one of the character favorites polls in JP shortly after EW's release. One of them described the post-Elpis cutscene as "self-indulgent", one said Venat and Hermes were "co-conspirators", one said the sundering was "selfish", and several criticized Venat for not telling anyone about Meteion claiming it was unfair and she wasn't a sympathetic character.

[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.