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

[kpxmanifesto]

I particularly love that this was his immediate response to a question about Ascians in particular. It's like he's surprised people even care about them when they aren't named Emet-Selch.

It comes across as the polite way to say "wow, you guys care so much more about Ascians than I ever did!". I know, man. I know. I've played through Endwalker. I know you don't care about Ascians, you don't have to say it out loud.

And even Emet he expresses confusion about, sometimes bordering on resentment it seems, when he draws a false equivalence between him and Hermes and Venat in the very same Q&A, asking why people would resent Venat and Hermes but not Emet. This man truly, absolutely does not get it.

Yeah, that Q and A session was pretty bad. He looked visibly uncomfortable as he struggled to answer fans' questions about the lore, as if he were withering away in his seat. He was pretty much in damage control mode for the entire duration of answering questions related to the MSQ.

[AceNoi]

Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster. This thread has kept me sane for the entirety of Endwalker, knowing that there *are* people out there who can recognize it for the train wreck it is. I had to log on and make my first (real) post in the forum after reaching Floor 30 in Eureka Orthos, because man if that last cutscene isn't emblematic of everything wrong with this expansion.

"WoL, now that you've been inside the tower's unearthed basement that never came up before, what do you think of the Allag and what they did?"

A. They were good people and did nothing wrong!
B. They weren't good but they weren't bad either!
C. They were the most evil people in the world!

No nuance allowed, gotta boil everything down to three simplistic choices instead of just cutting away and letting the player imagine what answer they gave to Koh and her awful new outfit instead.

[Absurdity]

Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster. This thread has kept me sane for the entirety of Endwalker, knowing that there *are* people out there who can recognize it for the train wreck it is. I had to log on and make my first (real) post in the forum after reaching Floor 30 in Eureka Orthos, because man if that last cutscene isn't emblematic of everything wrong with this expansion.

"WoL, now that you've been inside the tower's unearthed basement that never came up before, what do you think of the Allag and what they did?"

A. They were good people and did nothing wrong!
B. They weren't good but they weren't bad either!
C. They were the most evil people in the world!

No nuance allowed, gotta boil everything down to three binary choices instead of just cutting away and letting the player imagine what answer they gave to Koh and her awful new outfit instead.

I haven't done that yet, but I for one am glad to see that CBU3 also subscribes to Bioware's design philosophy of the blue, green and red beam lmao.

[Zanarkand-Ronso]

Can someone explain why G'raha needed to carry an aetheric analyzer? I thought that was what the goggles every scion carries were for.

Actually, wait.
With the Costume Changes, did anybody (besides Kryile, because she is still the 1 Scion that hasnt gone through an Evolution) even keep, much less even USE those Goggles?
So, while its a good question....did they even have them anymore?

[Graeham]

No nuance allowed, gotta boil everything down to three binary choices instead of just cutting away and letting the player imagine what answer they gave to Koh and her awful new outfit instead.

We agree. Three binary choice is remove all nuance. Should be three hexadecimal choice.

[Saraide]

Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster. This thread has kept me sane for the entirety of Endwalker, knowing that there *are* people out there who can recognize it for the train wreck it is. I had to log on and make my first (real) post in the forum after reaching Floor 30 in Eureka Orthos, because man if that last cutscene isn't emblematic of everything wrong with this expansion.

"WoL, now that you've been inside the tower's unearthed basement that never came up before, what do you think of the Allag and what they did?"

A. They were good people and did nothing wrong!
B. They weren't good but they weren't bad either!
C. They were the most evil people in the world!

No nuance allowed, gotta boil everything down to three binary choices instead of just cutting away and letting the player imagine what answer they gave to Koh and her awful new outfit instead.

"three binary choices"

[Teraq]

Hello! Long time lurker, first time poster. This thread has kept me sane for the entirety of Endwalker, knowing that there *are* people out there who can recognize it for the train wreck it is.

I'm using my last day of forum access – because 6.3 sucked this badly I've picked up WoW again – to say that seeing posts like this never fails to bring me joy, because we all have the same story: this fandom is an echo chamber, and we all felt like we were "insane" and alone. I am still getting messages by random people thanking me in replies for articulating what they felt about Endwalker (which is a rather dire situation tbh because I hate to think my rambling rants manage to successfully articulate anything) and making them feel less alone.

Allag has always felt so weird to me, lore-wise. Their civilisation apparently lasted for a millennia, if I recall correctly, and throughout that millennia their entire identity was apparently looking tacky and being Certifiably Bad. I mean, I guess their architecture wasn't literal coffins like Mhach, but at least Mhach had the good taste of, overall, not making me want to gouge my eyes out. There is literally one good thing that has come out of Allag, and it is Mr Patch 5.4 Stupid Sexy Scientist Allagan Laguna. Allag has always felt fake as world building, to me. Basically all Allagan names we know of are these shoe-horned FFIII references, and some of the most important Allagan characters we've seen have always been depicted as literally raid boss models. Endwalker, please stop trying to make me feel anything for the FFIII spoopy skelton man we can't even see emote. I know Yoshitsugu Matsuoka is carrying this whole character incredibly hard, but he isn't nearly enough to salvage Amon's boss model in cutscenes. There's a reason why since 5.0 we've kept coming up with excuses to have most Ascians and Ancients keep the hood and the mask off.

Stop trying to make Amon-Fandaniel-Hermes happen, Endwalker. Amon-Fandaniel-Hermes isn't happening.

Oh, and please don't mind the very obvious, weird unfunny troll that has somehow escaped moderators for literally 8 months straight, even though mods have just proved they're monitoring this thread because a certain poster's recent message was deleted. We're pretty sure by now, thanks to an unfortunate slip-up, that it is a most eminent figure of the lore masters' guild with a very particular grudge. Names matter, after all.

[Atelier-Bagur]

I'm using my last day of forum access – because 6.3 sucked this badly I've picked up WoW again – to say that seeing posts like this never fails to bring me joy, because we all have the same story: this fandom is an echo chamber, and we all felt like we were "insane" and alone. I am still getting messages by random people thanking me in replies for articulating what they felt about Endwalker (which is a rather dire situation tbh because I hate to think my rambling rants manage to successfully articulate anything) and making them feel less alone.

Allag has always felt so weird to me, lore-wise. Their civilisation apparently lasted for a millennia, if I recall correctly, and throughout that millennia their entire identity was apparently looking tacky and being Certifiably Bad. I mean, I guess their architecture wasn't literal coffins like Mhach, but at least Mhach had the good taste of, overall, not making me want to gouge my eyes out. There is literally one good thing that has come out of Allag, and it is Mr Patch 5.4 Stupid Sexy Scientist Allagan Laguna. Allag has always felt fake as world building, to me. Basically all Allagan names we know of are these shoe-horned FFIII references, and some of the most important Allagan characters we've seen have always been depicted as literally raid boss models. Endwalker, please stop trying to make me feel anything for the FFIII spoopy skelton man we can't even see emote. I know Yoshitsugu Matsuoka is carrying this whole character incredibly hard, but he isn't nearly enough to salvage Amon's boss model in cutscenes. There's a reason why since 5.0 we've kept coming up with excuses to have most Ascians and Ancients keep the hood and the mask off.

Stop trying to make Amon-Fandaniel-Hermes happen, Endwalker. Amon-Fandaniel-Hermes isn't happening.

Oh, and please don't mind the very obvious, weird unfunny troll that has somehow escaped moderators for literally 8 months straight, even though mods have just proved they're monitoring this thread because a certain poster's recent message was deleted. We're pretty sure by now, thanks to an unfortunate slip-up, that it is a most eminent figure of the lore masters' guild with a very particular grudge. Names matter, after all.

Too bad you and everyone else in this thread aint no different because I bet you believe Shadowbringers's story was top tier unlike me who believes it wasnt that good. I'm in the Stormblood msq was actually really good crowd. WHERE'S MY ECHO CHAMBER HUH!?

[Kazhar]

Too bad you and everyone else in this thread aint no different because I bet you believe Shadowbringers's story was top tier unlike me who believes it wasnt that good. I'm in the Stormblood msq was actually really good crowd. WHERE'S MY ECHO CHAMBER HUH!?

I don't know why you care so much about people's opinion on Shadowbringers. (Especially here, since it's mostly about 6.0)

You're free to dislike Shadowbringers. It wasn't perfect, and in some ways it started a downward spiral for the story even if it wasn't clear at the time. (Before the usual suspects come arrest me for my crimes against "objectivity/majority", I'm only stating my opinion here). And yes, Stormblood's story, while flawed, did a lot of things right.

Most, but not all, people I know who expressed their dissatisfaction with 6.0's story did like 5.0, but I wouldn't say it's closely related to 6.0's perceived issues.
I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be impressed with Venat, Hermes, Labyrinthos 2.0 and Ultima Thule even if Shadowbringers didn't exist. I wasn't even a big Ancient / Ascian / Zodiark fan before Endwalker. (Ironically the story team's best efforts at making them unsympathetic made them more sympathetic to me)

[Vyrerus]

"three binary choices"

AceNoi used binary wrong, for sure, but...

01000001. 01010100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100100 01101001 01100100 00100000 01101110 01101111 01110100 01101000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01110111 01110010 01101111 01101110 01100111 00100001

01000010. 01010100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100101 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101111 01100100 00100000 01100010 01110101 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100101 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100010 01100001 01100100 00100000 01100101 01101001 01110100 01101000 01100101 01110010 00100001

01000011. 01010100 01101000 01100101 01111001 00100000 01110111 01100101 01110010 01100101 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110011 01110100 00100000 01100101 01110110 01101001 01101100 00100000 01110000 01100101 01101111 01110000 01101100 01100101 00100000 01101001 01101110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 00100001 00001010

Three binary choices!