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

[hagare]

Then maybe take that issue up with Yoshi P himself or this slide from GDC 2014 about ARR.

so judging from this statement and that nothing has changed, can we make the conclusion that the number of people who are happy with EW outnumbers the ones who aren't? xD

[Xeronia]

so judging from this statement and that nothing has changed, can we make the conclusion that the number of people who are happy with EW outnumbers the ones who aren't? xD

I was more citing complaints are worth twice a compliment and that as said there and the silent leave first. Funny how in the last live letters I don't recall them having celebrations about higher player base numbers like every live letter leading up to EW.

[Kazemon15]

How good a story is is subjective. I enjoyed the story and I'm sure many others did as well. Your opinion that it was lackluster is valid, yes, but so is the opinion of those who found nothing wrong with it. You have the right to complain about it, but just know your opinion is subjective and there are people who view otherwise and can challenge that opinion. There are plenty of stories I feel are bad and I felt Endwalker was one of the best compared to the thousands of anime shows/video games I have played. So yeah... that's my opinion.

[Raoabolic]

Certainly, I think World of Warcraft would be doing much better for itself at present if it hadn't mishandled many beloved characters in the quest to prop up a select few at the expense of others.

I don't know about you, but *I* liked it when they turned Thrall into ork Jesus and then brushed him aside for Garrosh before Vol'jinn took over for an afternoon. The whole situation felt like that one episode of Futurama where Fry was the king of that planet of water people, lol.

[Rulakir]

I really enjoyed Endwalker, like a lot. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and was consistently thinking myself how much I loved this game every time something happened.
It really wasn't until reading these forums til I started to deep think about things that I otherwise thought was fine. Some stuff I think are valid points that even I would like answers to. Other stuff I have read feels like it has kind of removed my own enjoyment from the story the more I see people expressing how disappointed they were.

I've seen this sentiment expressed a lot. (I've also noticed that the OP's upvotes have been consistently increasing as well.) PawPaw (who's since unsubbed and can no longer post) shared her story of how much she loved EW and Venat, so much she watched the cutscenes repeatedly and that's when she starting noticing the cracks in the veneer. Unfortunately, I wasn't someone who was able to enjoy it the first playthrough. The Kairos mind wiping device combined with Venat deciding she wasn't going to do anything differently was the death knell of the MSQ for me. I could've overlooked everything else (even though I hated how Zodiark and Elidibus were handled), but not that.

Typically when you've just enjoyed a good story, when you think back to it the memory of it becomes better and more positive as you analyse and appreciate all its intricacies. Endwalker however proved to be the complete opposite. By merely applying common sense, the whole plot began to unravel. Thus here we find ourselves in a 626 page megathread.

It's even more laughable when you consider that the Omega quest chain further undermined Venat's motives, but I appreciated finally having nuance after it was sorely lacking throughout 6.0 (even though it still wasn't enough).

Its one of the reasons I think that one Omega side quest is the way it is. What better way to poll the player base than to poll them without them knowing. Those who skip story and complain will miss the prompt and those who read and have an opinion will pick there opinion.

I'm somewhat morbidly fascinated by the difficulty some people have had answering that question. I watched a JP streamer spend a solid 6 minutes trying to decide which option to choose before they finally went with "no one". I've also seen quite a few Venat fans on Reddit begrudgingly have to admit what she did was wrong, although, I think Omega's comparison of her to Hermes flew over a lot of heads. This is one of the problems with not addressing her actions appropriately in the MSQ. She is only ever portrayed as being 100% in the right, supported by the entire Scion cast who act as our moral paragons, and there's just never any reason to question what she did.

[Nizzi]

Honestly, I enjoyed Endwalker, but in the same way I enjoyed Stormblood or A Realm Reborn's story. It's not bad, but it's not *AMAZING* as a story either. I think one of the biggest disappointments to me about EW was that Shadowbringers seemed as if it was setting the story up for even further heights in Endwalker, and it didn't deliver on that for me. Shadowbringers made me feel invested in the story and Endwalker made me realize "yeah its been kinda not good more than its been good" and it made me stop caring again. In a way, the blame is on me for getting invested into an MMO storyline to begin with, but I still feel as if the story was being led somewhere and instead they changed it to be a very banal feel-good "never give up and give in to despair!" anime message because of COVID and what everyone in the world has been dealing with since 2020. And you know, that's fair, I can understand not wanting to make something super depressing and instead wanting to make something 'positive' but that's not what Shadowbringers felt like it was leading to. Had this expansion come after another expansion with a Stormblood tier level of writing/worldbuilding, I don't think I would've been disappointed with how it ultimately concluded.

I think the worst part to me about Endwalker's story is that it makes me feel a bit stupid for having cared or put any thought into it, discussing it with others, talking about "clues" or "it looks like lore is leading to this" when it feels very evident especially after the liveletter Yoshida did on the story that it was never really that deep to the developers. I feel bad for all of the people who have been truly invested in this story for years because I can and have easily just gone back to not really caring about the story and I'm okay with that. I don't have the same level of aversion to some of the characters that a lot of you do or the Slice of Life scenes etc, so it's not really going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back for me (that will be healer gameplay continuing down this path) but it is unfortunate that the story ever got to a place that made me invested to begin with. I just feel a little bit silly having ever cared, you know?

[KageTokage]

I think the worst part to me about Endwalker's story is that it makes me feel a bit stupid for having cared or put any thought into it, discussing it with others, talking about "clues" or "it looks like lore is leading to this" when it feels very evident especially after the liveletter Yoshida did on the story that it was never really that deep to the developers. I feel bad for all of the people who have been truly invested in this story for years because I can and have easily just gone back to not really caring about the story and I'm okay with that. I don't have the same level of aversion to some of the characters that a lot of you do or the Slice of Life scenes etc, so it's not really going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back for me (that will be healer gameplay continuing down this path) but it is unfortunate that the story ever got to a place that made me invested to begin with. I just feel a little bit silly having ever cared, you know?

Their admittance that they're plenty willing to shelve plot elements the moment they've lost interest in them and that they were surprised about how deeply people were thinking about the story was a bit...disheartening, to say in the least.

It's made me feel like it's really better to just take things at face value because chances are, whatever you think is going to happen or where they're going to go with something is going to be less interesting/satisfying then it turns out in practice, assuming they decide to go anywhere with it at all.

One of the things I was most disappointed by was the fact that Zenos having visions of the Final Days amounted to literally nothing in the end and it felt like a particularly egregious example of them dangling a plot thread in front of our faces then cutting it because they didn't know what to do with it.

[Necrotica]

Seems to be a curse with creative types. "ooh shiny new idea, gonna abandon everything I built up to this point to focus on this now".

The danger of being a fan of anything. The creator cares less about it than you. This wasn't some grand vision and story they wanted to tell. It was a way to make money.

[Rulakir]

In a way, the blame is on me for getting invested into an MMO storyline to begin with, but I still feel as if the story was being led somewhere and instead they changed it to be a very banal feel-good "never give up and give in to despair!" anime message because of COVID and what everyone in the world has been dealing with since 2020.

I frequently wonder what we would've gotten had it not been for covid and Yoshi-P's bizarre need to conclude the story in 6.0, especially after learning internally there's still a lot of interest in exploring the Ancients. Ishikawa said in an interview she was "fine with ending the story at around patch 7.0 or 8.0".

One person I talked with who writes for a living said, "Writing takes a long time and that's not considering the bureaucratic process. So tell me that my story has to be scrapped and rewritten, that my time has been cut in half (the moving of the ending to 6.0 as opposed to 7.0) and that it has to be compressed in far lesser time (No longer than 6.1 to kick things off there) and that the ending has to be something I didn't plan for at all? Yeah, I promise you. I'm going to offer you garbage and you're a fool for expecting anything more."

I still like to think that Ishikawa cares about the story, but her hands are tied. Yoshi-P certainly seems to be the one making all of the decisions to finish up with the Ancients and move onto something else when the writers, JP VAs, various other internal staff, and of course the fans wanted more. I don't know what the deal is.

Their admittance that they're plenty willing to shelve plot elements the moment they've lost interest in them and that they were surprised about how deeply people were thinking about the story was a bit...disheartening, to say in the least.

Yeah, at this point I'm not sure why I should care about the story or characters anymore. Yoshi-P is the polar opposite of me in personality, so I don't feel I have much to look forward to if what we'll be getting from now on is only what interests him.

By the way, did you try joining the thread discord as Alijana?

[Vyrerus]

Endwalker didn't ruin FFXIV's story for me, overall. It did, however, undercut a lot of the Ascians' story arc. Their wind up. The thing I'd been wondering about them ever since they were moustache twirlingly evil.

My guess had been, without taking interviews outside of the game into account, that the developers hadn't really realized all that had been setup for the Ascians. Like, Shadowbringers was made with the intent to write sympathetic backstory for them, but it was supposed to be something easily dismissed come 6.0. Or at least come the finale. The setup was definitely taking the slow but steady approach, fully willing, originally, to give us all of the details.

I guess I'm getting at, not only did they rush it in my eyes, but writer vs. development team expectations were vastly different. It could be the other way around, too.

Of course, I'm the type of person who isn't really wow'd by the game's story on the first go around anyway. I playthrough again on alts, and when I pick up on little things I didn't the first time, I enjoy it more. Endwalker was the opposite. Every expansion beforehand? Every sort of nuance in the book. From subtle facial gestures or pauses in CS dialogue, to showcasing character lore in instanced battles... Endwalker somewhat failed to deliver on every front. I think it's the first expansion where I can confidently say I am going to enjoy the x.1-x.55 of it more than the main story arc of it, as a whole (well other than ARR, but that's because the game was getting its footing then).