Review of 6.3 Story Content

[KageTokage]

Really, the gods have a lot of reasons to be less then fond of humanity, but I'd imagine they were designed to have an overly positive view of them in spite of all their shortcomings considering who's implied to have created them.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

Its currently considered as the worst patch in FFXIV's history.

LOL says who?

[Kaurhz]

LOL says who?

A vivid imagination is a very powerful thing, never underestimate it, especially when it comes to spinning up fabricated realities.

[Nizzi]

A lot of people seem to be complaining about the Void/Thirteenth, but as someone who didn't particularly love Endwalker's 6.0 MSQ coming off of ShB, I feel like they're setting up something that could be pretty interesting?
The Thirteenth is basically antithetical to all of the themes of Endwalker, and I kinda love that about it. I know people were expecting 6.3 to be a banger of a story patch like 5.3, but if they're going the direction I think they're going with, I think 6.5 is posed to be a banger too.

Except, when they finally did, the actual motivations of these antagonists is to just die. Seriously? Was I supposed to find this deep or meaningful?

Looking at it from my perspective, I think the motivation they ended up giving Cagnazzo and Rubicante was all that they needed to give them. Coming off of the 6.0 MSQ where the whole theme was "forge ahead, make things better, even if things are bad you must not give up and give into despair" is now juxtaposed by the Thirteenth, a world where they literally do not have that opportunity. They cannot die; they have an overwhelming hunger which eventually makes them try to consume and kill any friends they may have due to the all encompassing desire to feed on Aether. There's no opportunity for "the power of friendship" to save them in a world that has been totally consumed by darkness and has been left to rot. The Thirteenth is unlike the First in ShB, it is totally consumed by darkness and even the Ascians gave up on trying to rejoin it because they considered it beyond hope. There's no possible way for them to "forge ahead and not fall into despair" when their entire world is beyond salvation.

So looking at it from that angle, how do the themes of Endwalker apply to any of the characters from the Void? Hell, if you really didn't like Venat/Hydaelyn, isn't the Thirteenth a great example of how messed up her decisions were and how the themes fall flat to anyone not lucky enough to be from the Source? The millions/billions of lives in the Thirteenth were a sacrifice she made to ensure that You and the denizens of the Source could defeat Meteion. Are they supposed to be happy about that? Should they accept that we get to have a happy ending and languish in their misery for eternity? Or does it actually serve as a good motivation that the only thing they want to do is die, because they've inhabited a world for hundreds/thousands of years that doesn't even give them the choice to "rejoin the great flow", something even the Ancients had? They cannot tangibly improve their world. They cannot fix the imbalance between light and dark now that their world is totally consumed. I think the motivation of "end this suffering" is a great one, especially in light of Endwalker. They're nothing like the civilizations we saw in The Dead Ends; their world was forcibly served as a sacrifice to eventually allow us to be saved.

It's why I didn't mind the decision to try and make Zero see companionship/people as a good thing, even if it did feel a bit rushed. Zero got lucky and got taken to a world where she doesn't need to kill and feed to survive, and also a world where she can die and be reborn as all life is on the Source, just as we were lucky to be chosen by Venat and 'born' on the Source. Isn't it incredibly hypocritical for her and us to then try and deny the same to Cagnazzo, Rubicante, or even Golbez? It's awfully easy to be preachy and wax philosophical about morality and how "damning others to save yourself" is wrong when that is LITERALLY what we did as WoL by going back to Elpis and telling Venat about the sundering and essentially writing the timeline to make her do it. That is LITERALLY what Venat did as Hydaelyn and we got to benefit from that by being on the Source, where as they all got to be damned and left to suffer, especially now that Hydaelyn is dead for good.

I don't think every antagonist needs to have 'deep and meaningful' motivations for them to be a good one, and I think Cagnazzo and Rubicante served their purpose well. I'm excited and interested to see where they go with Golbez, and I'm someone who wasn't particularly interested in the story after 6.0 as well. If they pull it off well and don't go for "power of friendship lmao we saved the thirteenth by telling them to stop doing bad things!" then I'll be very pleased with the EW patch storyline.

[Carin-Eri]

I didn't really want to get involved in this thread, but I AM going to say this.

I've been playing FFXIV for slightly over a year now. I came here from another MMO, of the F2P variety, that I'd played for over a decade - sadly, said game mutated into a FOMO-fueled, loot-box dependent, mess. It didn't help matters that powercreep ruined the gameplay, and the content drops became more and more infrequent and, last I recall, it was only receiving one or two new episodes (each worth about 30 - 40 minutes play time) roughly every four or five months. The Devs all but admitted that their priority was producing loot boxes and cash-shop bundles (£200) over all else.

My answer to my distaste of that game's business model? I quit playing it.

Do I visit that game's official forum to submit posts expressing my displeasure at what happened to the game? No, I don't. I'll admit, I do sometimes post on that game's Reddit page to antagonize the White Knights who, despite everything, think the game can do no wrong but otherwise? I moved on.
And I can't help but wonder whether the OP should perhaps do the same?

[aveyond-dreams]

I didn't really want to get involved in this thread, but I AM going to say this.

I've been playing FFXIV for slightly over a year now. I came here from another MMO, of the F2P variety, that I'd played for over a decade - sadly, said game mutated into a FOMO-fueled, loot-box dependent, mess. It didn't help matters that powercreep ruined the gameplay, and the content drops became more and more infrequent and, last I recall, it was only receiving one or two new episodes (each worth about 30 - 40 minutes play time) roughly every four or five months. The Devs all but admitted that their priority was producing loot boxes and cash-shop bundles (£200) over all else.

My answer to my distaste of that game's business model? I quit playing it.

Do I visit that game's official forum to submit posts expressing my displeasure at what happened to the game? No, I don't. I'll admit, I do sometimes post on that game's Reddit page to antagonize the White Knights who, despite everything, think the game can do no wrong but otherwise? I moved on.
And I can't help but wonder whether the OP should perhaps do the same?

And this is exactly why people like me need to speak out against people like this. You're still in a honeymoon phase with this game and can't see it's decline. I've been here since day 1 of ARR. I can. And I refuse to let you and the other people who can't see how the story went from bad in EW to worse in the patches along with the continued degradation of combat gameplay tell me that I can't speak my mind or that doing so is wrong.

FFXIV needs to be better than what it is now. For everyone's sake. Goodness knows that you only stand to benefit from that. You lose nothing from having more long-lived and better designed content and a story written for the intended audience as opposed to a crowd that I struggle to size up. There have been instances where people are so inexplicably attached to the Scions that I genuinely do not know if these types could even sit through the last Harry Potter movies where they ramped up the stakes and the protagonist side took some serious losses.

But then again I seem to remember someone similar telling me that "picking up mercenary party members isn't realistic" (only for the next patch to pick up Zero by way of a Crystal gizmo we just magically happened to have picked up moments before) or that "the WoL is still relearning how to trust food" so I'm not about to consult some of the people on here for their opinion on what constitutes the calibre of story FFXIV deserves.

Never before has it been so easy to tell who here has actually been consuming other media apart from this game and who hasn't. It was the Bloody Banquet and stuff in that vein that got me to take this game seriously. Not some Deviantart OC ripping a bun in half.

[IkaraGreydancer]

And this is exactly why people like me need to speak out against people like this. You're still in a honeymoon phase with this game and can't see it's decline. I've been here since day 1 of ARR. I can. And I refuse to let you and the other people who can't see how the story went from bad in EW to worse in the patches along with the continued degradation of combat gameplay tell me that I can't speak my mind or that doing so is wrong.

FFXIV needs to be better than what it is now. For everyone's sake. Goodness knows that you only stand to benefit from that. You lose nothing from having more long-lived and better designed content and a story written for the intended audience as opposed to a crowd that I struggle to size up. There have been instances where people are so inexplicably attached to the Scions that I genuinely do not know if these types could even sit through the last Harry Potter movies where they ramped up the stakes and the protagonist side took some serious losses.

But then again I seem to remember someone similar telling me that "picking up mercenary party members isn't realistic" (only for the next patch to pick up Zero by way of a Crystal gizmo we just magically happened to have picked up moments before) or that "the WoL is still relearning how to trust food" so I'm not about to consult some of the people on here for their opinion on what constitutes the calibre of story FFXIV deserves.

Never before has it been so easy to tell who here has actually been consuming other media apart from this game and who hasn't. It was the Bloody Banquet and stuff in that vein that got me to take this game seriously. Not some Deviantart OC ripping a bun in half.

Give it up, Jesus christ. You aren't saying to make things better, you're saying to make things how YOU want them to be. That is fine until you proceed to act like your way is the one n only good way forward. If they're in the honeymoon phase you're in the grumpy old man phase. You sir are NO BETTER than the folks you call out. Wake tf up

Btw you should take that person you quoted advice

[Saraide]

And this is exactly why people like me need to speak out against people like this. You're still in a honeymoon phase with this game and can't see it's decline. I've been here since day 1 of ARR. I can. And I refuse to let you and the other people who can't see how the story went from bad in EW to worse in the patches along with the continued degradation of combat gameplay tell me that I can't speak my mind or that doing so is wrong.

FFXIV needs to be better than what it is now. For everyone's sake. Goodness knows that you only stand to benefit from that. You lose nothing from having more long-lived and better designed content and a story written for the intended audience as opposed to a crowd that I struggle to size up. There have been instances where people are so inexplicably attached to the Scions that I genuinely do not know if these types could even sit through the last Harry Potter movies where they ramped up the stakes and the protagonist side took some serious losses.

But then again I seem to remember someone similar telling me that "picking up mercenary party members isn't realistic" (only for the next patch to pick up Zero by way of a Crystal gizmo we just magically happened to have picked up moments before) or that "the WoL is still relearning how to trust food" so I'm not about to consult some of the people on here for their opinion on what constitutes the calibre of story FFXIV deserves.

Never before has it been so easy to tell who here has actually been consuming other media apart from this game and who hasn't. It was the Bloody Banquet and stuff in that vein that got me to take this game seriously. Not some Deviantart OC ripping a bun in half.

If harry potter is the best example you can think of then I think it really is for the best that the story doesnt cater to you.

[Kaurhz]

FFXIV needs to be better than what it is now. For everyone's sake. Goodness knows that you only stand to benefit from that. You lose nothing from having more long-lived and better designed content and a story written for the intended audience as opposed to a crowd that I struggle to size up.

See the problem here is you're conflating your own personal taste and preference as being an objective statement, which is false. You stand to gain a story that is better aligned with your own preferences, and other people potentially stand to lose a story for something that may not be aligned with their own personal preferences. The story is subjective and you simply dislike it whilst others may like it.

[caffe_macchiato]

antagonize the White Knights who, despite everything, think the game can do no wrong

Same