Quote Originally Posted by Avoidy View Post
A genuine question to the people who enjoy the story as it is and think these threads are unwarranted: how can you feel any suspense, tension, or enjoyment from a story full of characters who are done progressing and for whom consequences might as well not exist? It's really difficult for me to enjoy this game's story when there's no internal conflict and the external conflict is revolving around people who straight up aren't allowed to die.
Endwalker isn't a stand-alone story. It's the culmination of the entire game until now. We've already seen the Scions go through their arcs, get beaten down and get back up again, all that. This is the final climax, where they've worked out their problems and move forward as one.

When I look back on my favorite characters and my favorite moments in the story, I always come back to the beginnings of Heavensward. I think that moment represents a lot of what was missing in EW, and I'll try to briefly explain why. Consider Alphinaud in ARR. The kid's cocky, overconfident, arrogant, naive about the ways of the world, and sincerely thinks he can leap into the arena of geopolitics and just solve problems by taking dark money to fund a solution. His arrogance gets a lot of people killed, and it sees him exiled. When HW opens, Alphinaud is sitting in the chair staring at his feet looking like Shinji from Evangelion, and you and your band are officially branded traitors. The Sultana is thought to be dead. We have no idea what happened to her right hand man (haha get it). So what do we have here? Consequences. Harsh, realistic, gritty consequences doled out for a character's flaws. And Alphinaud is forced to reflect and consider his flaws while Haurchefant hands him hot drinks and then haurchefant fucking dies and his death produces one of the saddest moments in the game; not from the death itself, but from his father's heartbreaking reaction to it. And he died protecting us, and maybe he wouldn't have had to if we hadn't been there, and maybe we wouldn't have been there if we'd done things differently in ARR. And all these thoughts are swirling amid the larger story of HW, and it's greater for it.
And we've already had that story, so why should we do it again? Do the Scions need to keep getting beaten down so they can go through the same character development over and over?

Meanwhile, in EW, we come up from the Aitiascope after watching Hydaelyn die; this should be huge. This is like watching your greatest ally perish. It's like watching God die right in front of you.
You mean after A: we found out she wasn't really a deity, she was a primal, and B: she outright told us to use the rest of her power to charge the ship?

...And two minutes later we're talking about building a battery for a space ship.
If you're referring to the part where we help finish the ship, that was before the Aitiascope (in fact, getting the ship finished was a prerequisite to getting to go down there in the first place).

I think there was a scene where they all went out and ate burgers to kind of cope, and that was it?? Nobody's even like "hey, hey guys. God is basically dead??? What does this mean?"
There were no burgers involved here at any point. There are brief scenes of the Scions around Sharlayan, because they're basically getting out of the way while the actual tech-minded people get to work. And there's little reaction to Hydaelyn's death because she literally told us to use her soul as a power source.

Or when the refugee ship is built and we make the last minute decision to use it and travel to meteion, even when things seem really bleak on ultima thule nobody even mentions that we took mankind's liferaft and now we're losing, like there's never a human moment of doubt. It feels very frantic, like the writers were just tired and wanted to get the chapter over with. The skeleton was there, but the fat, the details, that make it realistic... were missing.
Were we supposed to stop in the middle of dealing with the crisis to worry about dealing with the crisis? It would just come across as padding, and EW's pacing is wonky enough already.

Imagine if a single scion had just fundamentally agreed with the decision to fight meteion. And I don't mean 'gee guys is this right?' followed by immediately falling in line and boarding the ship. I mean disagreeing so hard that they try to stop the others from even considering fighting because they don't want to blow mankind's liferaft on an uncertainty. Like what if Urianger, rocked by his recently completed forgiveness arc, expressed genuine doubt in our ability to beat the bird and felt like the safe way out was best.
Assuming you meant disagreed and that was just a typo.....The alternative was to let the Final Days play out and kill everyone who couldn't make it onto the ship or the moon (and worse than kill, but we didn't know about Meteion's whole "hoard everyone's souls to end reincarnation" plot yet). Which Scion would you really picture saying "Y'know what, screw it, can't save 'em all" and just leaving people to die? (Not to mention, that was basically Fourchenault's arc through most of EW, so having a Scion randomly repeat it at the last minute would be redundant.)

Or hell, even in post-ew, there's a part where Y'shtola opens a void portal and just starts shoving creatures inside. And she claims it's fine because they're not real, but they're moving around and kind of expressive and I remember several people on my friends list watching that scene and at least laughing at how fucked up it seemed at face value to just march a creature into a portal.
They're arcane familiars. They're like tiny primals. They are literally not living beings.

All this is to say, I'm sick of people reading my posts and being like "so u just want ppl 2 die huh???"
It's hard to take this seriously when your first paragraph is complaining about how no one is allowed to die.

What I want, is for a "story focused MMO" to stop cutting corners on its story and return back to the writing that hooked me in HW. If you're scared to give the main characters consequences, or if they're now so perfectly developed that they can't make mistakes, then we need new ones who can imo. Zero is a good start. Even though I hate her atm, I have to remind myself that I hated alphinaud at first too, and now he's my favorite character. He's also a character who's been useless to the story for a while now, and I can say this even though I like the character because I like a good story more and these characters are hindering it. They're stopping it from breathing.
The post-EW patches have already reduced everyone but Y'shtola and Estinien to basically cameos while we hang out with Zero and Vrtra, so.....congrats? Whether that will continue into 7.0, none of us can accurately say, unless you have a crystal ball handy.

I've said it before, but: Even though I like the Scions, I would like a break from them for a while. But walking back their entire characters just for the sake of drama would be absolutely terrible writing.