Endwalker Story sucked and it's time to admit it

[Theodric]

I thought we already addressed the alt issue, no? Someone seems very eager for a rematch.

Hardly eager. I just appreciate clarification and apologies when defamatory comments and false accusations are launched at various posters suggesting that they're just alts of one another and not their own individual beings with their own thoughts, feelings and opinions.

It's certainly water under the bridge and of little lingering consequence if the mistake is acknowledged though.

[Ransu]

Played through it twice now. Still think its amazing. Not as good as ShB, but a solid ending to the ascian arc.

Endwalker fell short of the standard I held this game's storytelling to, so I went so far as to retell the story myself. I believe this speaks for itself as to my thoughts.

Wow that was bad. Thank God you're not a writer.

[thegreatonemal]

There were a lot of Ishgardians that reacted badly to the truth about the Dragonsong War. People that had suffered loss, gone through unimaginable pain over a lie that those in power had perpetuated. Some of them even translated that grief into horrible action, like attempted assassination or deliberately disrupting peace talks.

Yet, curiously, at no point is the “solution” to these people’s outpouring of pain the murder of every man, woman, and child in Ishgard. The solution wasn’t even to murder the opposition. Funny, that.

EDIT: These conversations tend to be extremely circular, so let me provide you with a different thought experiment.

Let us say Aymeric and his friends (us included) wound up being a minority in the Dragonsong War aftermath. The majority of Ishgardians are unable to move past the collective psychic wounds immediately after the revelation, and they decide their course of action will be to summon Thordan as a primal. No arguing of the foolishness of this course of action can dissuade the people of Ishgard from this path.

Do you think the Warrior of Light would then kill every single Ishgardian? Would that be the solution the game would put forth for this situation—and would they have our character enact it?

The solution was to kill Nidhogg, again as he was the only one wanting to fight at that point.

It's circular because you all ignore key elements but lets go through your experiment and I'll show you what I mean.

If they summoned a primal they would be tempered, which there was no cure for. With the help of the rest of the alliance we'd kill the primal and blockade Ishgard while we probably try to research curing tempering. When that most likely failed we'd do what always happened when people got tempered just on a larger scale I doubt every single person would get tempered and we'd filter them out.

[Hurlstone]

I'm honestly not sure how many times and ways "Endwalker sucks!" can be repeated. 8 months isn't long enough to find out, evidently.

Oh I think it will be an ongoing thing, perhaps when 7.0 comes out it will lessen but a bit like how some people regard Stormblood as dull Endwalker will always have divisive elements for others. We are the small minority of players who bother to actually seek out places to speak our views. I find that such topics rarly fade fast in such circles. Perhaps in time the debate on this will not be so… sharply pointed by then, but we shall see.

[ShinyChariot]

...your game lore better.

It's pretty yikes to paint everyone not satisfied with the quality of the narrative as just people whining that they didn't get "their lore". Is it so wrong to have wanted something of better quality, some aspects of which could've been achieved with just a small amount of attention and adjustments? People pretend that we want to change what we got instead of considering the fact that we are questioning why it wasn't done before it was set in stone, when they could've gone in any direction, and why it wasn't more tightly written at an earlier stage. Clearly the people writing the lore themselves should've had some hint of the obvious criticisms that are being brought up.

"But muh development, muh corporate resources, muh cutting content for reasons."

All cool, valid. But irrelevant to the discussion of narrative, and not an excuse.

It is not a completely subjective issue. Though it's not completely objective either, there is enough of a writing standard reasonable enjoyers of narrative understand that we can go to in order to come to a conclusion about a story.

Example : Lord of the Rings trilogy was better than the Hobbit trilogy

"But I loved the Hobbits Trilogy!"

Ok, cool. That adds literally nothing to the discussion.

[Lauront]

The expansion is not even a year old yet and not everyone completed 6.0 in December or even January. Plus, many people have said they initially enjoyed EW, but having gone through it again on an alt or NG+ their impression changed.

I just think it's ridiculous that anyone thinks in a current expansion that criticism and negative feedback is going to stop after a certain period of time. You've got at least another year of it and that's not including anyone who doesn't start playing until after 7.0. EW is simply too divisive to stand the test of time being remembered fondly vs. controversial, it will at the very least be another SB in the library of expansions. Worse, because it was the finale.

This isn't even going into if 7.0 isn't good and more people will start to question why the arc was ended prematurely to usher in a 'lackluster' story.

Indeed - they had a cessation of sales after all and we know from the LB figures a good chunk of the playerbase has yet to clear EW fully. Plus we just had a patch, plus another short story elaborating on the 6.0 story. Is it any wonder that this matter is still being discussed? It's hardly the first to be discussed long after its conclusion, but said "conclusion" isn't even fully done with yet. Seems a trifle disingenuous to complain about people still discussing the matter, much less to attribute it to "echo chambers" - irony abounds, I suppose.

In this very expansion we had an entire zone dedicated to the story of a population struggling with the collapse of their worldview and several horrible truths. Efforts were extended to grant them empathy and assistance at every turn. Some of them, before our eyes, chose self-destruction and death out of despair - this is more direct evidence about a "bad reaction" than Venat ever had in regards to her conviction to bar information about the Final Days and the universe at large from the Ancients, but we didn't decide based on that the Garleans could never change and slaughter them all either.

The Sharlayans as well - after all, the SGE quest deals with a would-be experimenter quite similar to Athena (or a certain someone's faction if we look at it through the lens of forceful 'evolution'), which the Forum does its level best to cover up. Some people hid something, that means it's now fine to hide the circumstances of what might avoid planetary genocide in the sundered world, too!

[PawPaw]

Just going to ignore her faction trying to convince the Convocation and being rebuked are you?

No reason to ignore something that never happened. She never told the Convocation the truth and thus was never rebuked for it. We are told by two different Convocation members over the course of ShB and EW (not to mention her bestie, the Watcher) that NO ONE had any idea what the reason was behind the Final Days.

Maybe you're mixing this up with her music video where she scolds some faceless strawmen in a courtyard during the Final Days before punishing them all via genocide because they don't bend to her will? Oh, except the Final Days had ended long before with the creation of Zodiark and she couldn't sunder anything until she had become Hydaelyn and fought, and fought and fought until she beat him. So maybe not?

[Brinne]

The Garleans got the treatment they did because the course of their lives, having already been filled with hardship before the Empire's collapse, let them grow the resilience necessary to endure that loss. Some of them, anyway (re: Quintus). The Ancients' lives had little to no hardship, so when shocked with the Final Days and the price paid to stop it, they were unable to swallow that price and demanded a refund and return to the old status quo.

I really want to know what the exact threshold is for prior suffering before a crisis hits, in time, quantity, and quality, that means we flip to opting for "empathy and extending help" rather than "murder." And how it's calculated, and who gets to do the calculating.

[thegreatonemal]

No reason to ignore something that never happened. She never told the Convocation the truth and thus was never rebuked for it. We are told by two different Convocation members over the course of ShB and EW (not to mention her bestie, the Watcher) that NO ONE had any idea what the reason was behind the Final Days.

Maybe you're mixing this up with her music video where she scolds some faceless strawmen in a courtyard during the Final Days before punishing them all via genocide because they don't bend to her will? Oh, except the Final Days had ended long before with the creation of Zodiark and she couldn't sunder anything until she had become Hydaelyn and fought, and fought and fought until she beat him. So maybe not?

Might wanna go rewatch the 5.2 cutscenes where one of her faction did try and convince them with what Venat had told them so far.

[PawPaw]

Might wanna go rewatch the 5.2 cutscenes where one of her faction did try and convince them with what Venat had told them so far.

Which was a whole lot of nothing. As confirmed by the short story. So what did they try to convince them with EXACTLY?