Quote Originally Posted by KizuyaKatogami View Post
I think part of the issue here is yes, they do use a lot of emotional and thematic framings to make Venat seem right. But that’s the part that doesn’t sit well with people. This is supposed to be a story that has grey morality. Instead they have us support someone who committed mass genocide, but not only that she is revered to as a hero for it. Where’s the greyness?

Also just a side comment but the game definitively doesn’t have millions of players xD it’s far less than that especially now.
I guess i just never really wanted or needed the story to be grey or to be presented as such. I haven't really done much post endwalker content because I'm replaying the story on my alt(and I'm in the middle of shadowbringers so I'm nearing the parts of the story that caused the blood feud on the forum as I understand it). I understand there's a quest where you get a dialogue choice to say Venat is wrong, but again, to me, weighing the dialogue as the end all be all of how we as the player are supposed to feel about things just doesn't work from me. If we were talking about an actual historical event or a deeply serious philosophical proposition, then I would engage in that mode of analysis, but in my experience, no story with identifiable themes survives such an analysis. It isn't even the first time in the series that the end of a utopic civilization and it's people was deemed neccesary for the sake of the plot and themes.

Maybe not concurrent players, but there are around 40 million unique registrations, and it would still technically be millions of only 5% of those finished endwalker. While Venat is a sticking point on this forum, there are also plenty of other things that sour endwalker for people, the comic relief bunnies being one of them. I enjoy most aspects of endwalker, but ffxiv isn't my lifegame like it is to many others, and i believe the closeness many feel to it's world made it inevitable that some would be deeply pained when Ishikawa took the wheel and went the direction she did.