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

[Atelier-Bagur]

The truth is, Shadowbringers was brilliant, but absolutely terrible for the series overall. The popularity it brought and their desire to hold onto it has turned FFXIV away from everything that made it enjoyable in the first place, and it feels as if they now fear doing anything different that departs from what they consider the "safe" formula in case it goes away. The result is that they took what they mistakenly thought worked from ShB, discarded what actually made it so successful, and streamlined and oversimplified most of the game, right down to the plot and characterisation, to avoid anything even remotely controversial that might turn off players and damage said popularity, before padding the empty space with ooh-ahh visuals and inspirational fluff. What we're left with is something that seems bright and flashy on the surface but lacks any real substance, and a paper-thin story that starts to fall apart under the slightest inspection because of their desperate adherence to what they think fans want to hear. The nuances and complexities of ShB never really stood a chance of coming through, because there's too much potential for division and disagreement - the safest route was reverting back to goodly Mother Hydaelyn, blasting Garlemald off the map, and vaguely handwaving away the Ancients (because it never would have worked anyway, so it's fine!) to remove all of that uncomfortable, potential discourse and make it a feel-good story where good and hope (and their review score) wins the day.

Shadowbringers was stupid with the doing away whatever build up they were going for in post-SB. I enjoy it for what it is and its a good story expansion but I'll be forever salty how practically pointless and misleading it was for us to go to the First rather than staying in the Source and having a full Garlemald expansion. Seriously the teaser cinematic puporsefully made you think the story was gonna somehow be about time traveling into the future of Eorzea or something, perhaps dealing with the Black Rose incident and preventing the Calamity that occured during the original timeline (the one G'raha came from after he left the Crystal Tower). It would've been amazing! But nope, we had to have your typical isekai adventures that was massively overhyped by the general audience about "omg you're gonna cry so much, story so gooodz!!xd"

I'm being childish I know, but Shadowbringers was a massive dissapointment for me.

[R041]

snip

Forgive everyone hanging onto Yoshi's every word and let down for a decade, we're just way too invested I guess! We've watched everything slowly boil down into it's most basic elements while WoW is actually making significant changes, but I'm glad you still have ALL of the decade of content you can probably complete in a few weeks, sans the MSQ.

We now wait months for a drip of literally anything and it's like we're told of a feast, but it turns out to be a pea on our plate. We want fantastical changes, not minor adjustments to the status quo with no rewards or reason to do them. It feels like these poor developers work on so much content, for them to not even matter. I'd love to do literally anything in the open world, but it doesn't matter. Everything, even the story start to feel like a bait and switch. "Something crazy is gonna happen, I swear it this time!" Aaannndd nothing.

We have a massive amount of Dungeons, do something with them.
We have a massive amount of FATEs, do something with them.
We have a massive amount of Hunts, do something with them.
We have a massive amount of Trials, do something with them.
We have a huge WORLD, DO SOMETHING WITH IT.

Bozja and Eureka show us that the world content you create can actually be fun and engaging, why aren't you LEARNING FROM IT?

Why is everything a throw-away one and done for MSQ?
Why does trash need massive amounts of health?
Why are there no fun/fluff abilities?
Why do we need 20 button rotations?
Why can't I rank PvP with friends?
Why can't I get exp in open world?
Why can't I get exp for side-quests?


There's no reason to do anything, there's no more variety, and the rewards are severely lacking - I feel like I'm playing FFXIII with how predictable and boring these hallways have gotten. There's no difficulty anymore, the core combat mechanics are so boring and unfun now. It's like the old 1.0 quote "Why would players need a jump button? It's an RPG." - Everything is being made to better cater to bots at this point, no brain required and everything adjusted to strict time to completion guidelines. Because our options are braindead content, or bash head against wall for weeks.

Solo Duties don't feel good, they feel time gated. Duty Support doesn't feel good, it's also time gated. I don't feel like I'm playing a game anymore, I feel like I'm just exchanging my time for reward that forces me to throw my brain away, and that reward is no longer really worth it. Does Yoshi even play this game past the MSQ anymore?

Watching LiveLetters about promised content is basically longer and more rewarding than the content itself. lol

[BaconBits]

Yawn

[DiaDeem]

I found this quote at the end of the Omicron quests which I think sums it all up very well:

[Jatoi]

Honestly, I think Elpis should not be a thing we can return back to whenever. I tend to dislike time travel stories as is, but it's kind of silly to be able to go back regardless. Besides, I think the mystique about the unsundered world was kind of ruined.

[Misplaced_Marbles]

I found this quote at the end of the Omicron quests which I think sums it all up very well:

Or, if we simply get to the gist of it:

[EgilTheStressedMage]

Or, if we simply get to the gist of it:

Story was alright. Mount alone was worth it.

[redheadturk]

The truth is, Shadowbringers was brilliant, but absolutely terrible for the series overall. The popularity it brought and their desire to hold onto it has turned FFXIV away from everything that made it enjoyable in the first place, and it feels as if they now fear doing anything different that departs from what they consider the "safe" formula in case it goes away. The result is that they took what they mistakenly thought worked from ShB, discarded what actually made it so successful, and streamlined and oversimplified most of the game, right down to the plot and characterisation, to avoid anything even remotely controversial that might turn off players and damage said popularity, before padding the empty space with ooh-ahh visuals and inspirational fluff. What we're left with is something that seems bright and flashy on the surface but lacks any real substance, and a paper-thin story that starts to fall apart under the slightest inspection because of their desperate adherence to what they think fans want to hear. The nuances and complexities of ShB never really stood a chance of coming through, because there's too much potential for division and disagreement - the safest route was reverting back to goodly Mother Hydaelyn, blasting Garlemald off the map, and vaguely handwaving away the Ancients (because it never would have worked anyway, so it's fine!) to remove all of that uncomfortable, potential discourse and make it a feel-good story where good and hope (and their review score) wins the day.

All of this. The lightning in a bottle that was shb happened not because Goodly Mother, but because the Ancients were so captivating and fascinating as a culture. It had shadows and nuance, and players are intelligent enough to want more of that.

[redheadturk]

1) I realize this is a very old post but it’s on the front page so I’m going to reply to it.

2) Zodiark has NEVER been evil. He saved the world. The only reason we exist is because his power has been protecting this planet for thousands of years. Hydaelyn was summoned to stop him because the PEOPLE were going to sacrifice the life on the planet to bring their people back. There’s a whole moralistic argument there that can be had about a small minority making decisions for the masses that literally means their demise. Also Zodiark was barely over half strength when we fought him. 6? of the reflections still remain.

3) Ever heard of a paradox? Venat couldn’t stop it. Things had to go exactly as they did, or you wouldn’t have gone to the past and she would know nothing. She suffered for millennia to give us a chance. To fight or flee as our own resolve determined.

Paradoxes result in split timelines 99% of the time. I am ok with that, as most players are.

[Brinne]

Finally hit the crossroads of "not too fatigued to post" and "not locked out of the forums for not logging in." I will fallaciously assume that SE is responsible for both and seethe accordingly.

Anyway, as I mentioned, I pretty much am in agreement with on you on most major points, so consider this basically my just shooting the breeze with someone I've been enjoying discussing with moreso than debating or anything like that, lol. On the other hand, I'm still quite sleep-deprived, so apologies beforehand if I say anything particularly incoherent or embarrassing:

...and then Endwalker (I feel as if most of my posts in this thread could be summed up by those three words alone) responded to the resounding success inspired by such good writing by soundly throwing the entire concept in the bin, cladding its heroes in impenetrable plot armor and protecting them from actually having to experience the message it spent the entire previous expansion trying to convey (???)

A lot of the leadup into Endwalker during even the Shadowbringers patches was so strange, and so much of it didn't actually end up going anywhere, or just ended up contradicted (while sort of pretending the contradictory build up just, didn't happen) - remember the whole thing with us realizing Hydaelyn's treatment of us wasn't a special thing, and we were just one of many scrubs she was automatically hitting with the Blessing with her answering machine? (Part of Shadowbringers's larger, layered thematic point of us understanding we are not exceptional?) The setup with Zenos's dreams of Amaurot? Even beyond the "oh dear" of realizing that Endwalker decided to frames its "ten year finale" around foundational concepts that the writers had only first come up with in the latter stages of 5.0 (Amaurot and the Ancients themselves, the Final Days), the smaller aspects really drives in how hard so much of Endwalker was by-the-seat-of-our-pants scrambling to put together anything presentable was, and really hard-killed the myopic dream Shadowbringers let exist for a while about the writers being so thoughtful and planning things through.

I don't long for a full Garlemald expansion, per se, but I would say that another Garlemald zone or so certainly wouldn't have been unwelcome. In terms of writing quality and thoughtfulness, it was the highlight of Endwalker, and In From The Cold was such an intense experience that implicitly raised so many fascinating questions about our position as the story's "hero" and what we take for granted about it (my pet themes! my pet themes!!!) - that ultimately didn't actually go anywhere. I was basically flipping my lid (in a good way) about the way the gameplay and storytelling interwove to show you the perspective of a non-protagonist in terms of the desperation, the powerlessness, the expendability, how utterly useless the power of friendship was in protecting or saving them - only for the rest of the story to completely unironically power itself on the Friendship Engine full force. Endwalker, writing-wise, isn't just weak and troubling, it's just so incohesive and really does feel like it's a war with itself at points.

As you said, this really contrasts hard with Shadowbringers, which is fascinating in its cohesion with marrying the themes of the various plot/characterization threads of the First - largely, impressively, across the board - and providing us with the necessary emotional context to process the weight of the ending - to the culmination in Amaurot. I sort of feel inclined to think this is a reflection of Shadowbringers, writing-wise, seeming to largely be a single writer's vision who was given a lot of creative freedom, whereas Endwalker feels more like an endless, agonizing duel between dozens of cooks in the kitchen.

With the Scions and Emet, though, the disconnect between how they reacted to him before and after his death was actually a problem that preceded EW for me - it always felt a little inconsistent and pandering to what they felt the players wanted, and I still believe that had Emet not been such a mesmerising fan favourite, the writers would have dealt with him differently in terms of how he's perceived and treated within the story.

Yeah, this is a subjective thing and again, I'm not trying to argue with you and I think your take is totally valid here, just shooting the breeze - the Scions didn't bother me so much with Emet in the ShB patches because I sort of felt enough variety between them. It was okay with me that Alphinaud and Y'shtola referred to Emet-Selch in relatively glowing, sympathetic terms, because as far as I could tell G'raha, Thancred, and later Estinien still didn't give a crap, and Alisaie seemed to have sort of mixed feelings when the subject came up. Part of the issue with Endwalker isn't just the presence of sympathy towards either Emet or Venat, I think - it's the sheer lack of variation, the feeling that they had all synthesized into a single protagonist-party voice, that makes it a lot harder to care about them as a whole as characters. While everyone rah-rahing Venat in EW was really transparent as writers yanking the strings as hard as they can and I've blah-blahed endlessly on why that bothers me inherently, it would have been hugely mollified if it didn't feel like it was everyone, uniformly. That helps create that sense of "insecurity" on a writing level - that if they let a single crack show, the whole thing will break. (And I mean, in the case of the Sundering narrative, this is true.)

It's certainly a strange position to take, but I give some of the blame to Endwalker for the horribly clumsy and offhand way it tries to justify that thought process with that level 87 cutscene in Amaurot. I'm still a little perplexed that was how they handled the great summoning, and the war between Hydaelyn and Zodiark that supposedly followed. It was so bizarrely rushed for what in any other circumstances would and should have been one of the most pivotal and climactic reveals/ moments of the entire series, and if anything I would have even been tempted to give it a cinematic of some sort (I guess perhaps it wouldn't have been a very good look for Venat, though.) So many strange decisions surrounding this expansion.

I've found it frustrating (again, my subjective impression is that this was more prominent among the Western fanbase) since the days 5.0 was hot off the presses - long before Endwalker - how eager people were to make assumptions about the Ancients to absolutely reject the sort of self-reflective challenge Shadowbringers set before them. Framing their fate as inevitable, out of our hands, ultimately ascribed to themselves, to take the "terrible" burden off of ourselves for making the choice between two deserving populations, that their fall was clearly "due to them playing gods" or "due to their own hubris" or "it was inevitable because of their creation magic" or "defeating Emet-Selch at the end was about fascism," (as a sort of aside: I think you can criticize Emet-Selch to the ends of the earth for using fascism as a tool, but whether he himself ascribed to fascism as an ideology is a different conversation - though I think perception of this and how much it matters is a factor in how personally forgivable one might find him or not) or the extremely fun prong of "well actually as someone who can confidently speak for the dead, they wouldn't even want to have been saved anyway" - anything that rejected Shadowbringers's incredibly not-subtle assertion that the final battle in the Dying Gasp was absolutely not about good versus evil, but need versus need, and that both sides were desperately fighting because they equally and truly wanted to live, and wanted a future.

Like, yes it's fiction etc etc, but seeing the lengths that people are willing to go to still villify what was explicitly and deliberately presented as a group of good, innocent people as worth fighting for as we are is a bit a harrowing, and yeah, as I said, that tends to, for me, personally override concerns about Emet-Selch's personal morality as an individual. Emet-Selch is absolutely worthy of being hated by anyone under the sun and I'm not really interested in arguing that specific point at all - but I find it frustrating when conversations about the Ancients de facto become conversations about Emet-Selch - they're not the same thing! That the Ancients as a people end up villified as a whole because there's a bone to pick with a single member of their population who described them in hyperbolic terms in the midst of his self-justifying mental gymnastics. It's okay - emotionally appealing, even - to condemn them because, heh heh, that sure would stick it to that Emet-Selch who claimed they were "perfect," huh? Well guess what, jerk, not only were they not perfect, they were so IMPERFECT they can't complain about being massacred and don't deserving mourning! How do you like them apples!

That sense of "starting from the conclusion of Ancients Bad and therefore violence against them is a Grim, Inevitable Necessity and working backwards from there by whatever means necessary" - well, you can go further with this for Hotter Than Hottest Takes that I generally feel cautious about voicing or speaking for, but the history-erasing aspect, the "literally breaking them down into component parts with more utility" aspect, and the Ancients also being referred to as "the first people" in the narrative makes me go a little bit out of my mind when I think about it too much. Justifying violence against people not-us because of material needs and trying to cast them within a moral framework, a matter of cultural or societal superiority, sure is a tried and true pattern of humanity, and while this is ultimately just a commercial, throwaway MMORPG story, it was harrowing to see how hard people cling to these things, and being absolutely confident in their assertions that the text agreed with them that the fundamental point is that these other people are Other and therefore Not As Worthy as Us - even in the face of a story really, really explicitly trying to object to it and disrupt that way of thinking. It's hard embedded. Endwalker then happily playing into peoples' worst impulses in this regard was, well, disheartening.

As I said, I don't doubt that Endwalker had pure, earnest intentions in comforting the player and making them feel better in a world full of struggle and despair - but I think as a result of thoughtlessness, rush, ill-planning, Hydaelyn, tunnel-vision, what have you - they did it in a way that basically presumed I was a pretty bad, self-centered, ultimately self-serving person, and chose to "comfort" me in a way fitting with that, so in the end, it actually made me feel worse, overall.