Zepla: Endwalker is the Worst FFXIV Expansion I have played

[R041]

I'm perfectly fine with nuking us both. Run out the clock, clean out our post limit. If the thread gets locked, then it gets locked.

My goals are usually to meme, so it's not really a stressor for me. Your goals seem pretty aimlessly stressful. lol

[Jojoya]

And more than anything else, " a lot quicker that it used to in older expansions". It's mainly that part back we complain about.

Is part of it content pacing then?

I know they've changed pacing on some of the old content to help with the new player experience. Did some of it subconsciously carry over to current content design when it's not needed there?

I think about crafting and gathering. At the start of Shadowbringers (before the overhaul that was implemented in 5.1), it took me about 4 weeks to get all my crafting/gathering jobs to level cap. It took me a week from when Endwalker early access started to get them to the new level cap.

Was it really necessary to increase the leveling speed not just for old expansion levels but also for the current expansion levels that much?

Same for combat jobs - the numbers squish also included leveling XP changes. Is XP for 80-90 too generious, allowing players to level up jobs so they have less to occupy their time?|t's not a straight one-for-one comparison for me. I only had 4 combat jobs at level cap when Shadowbringers was released. I ended up gaining 350 combat levels then compared to only 210 in EW.

Not a big deal and yet it leaves me with more time to do other things compared to the last expansion. I doubt it's something that affecting most of the posters in this thread. Likely they had all their jobs at 70 (other than the new ones) when Shadowbringers began but it's still something that affects overall longevity.

[ForteNightshade]

You got approximately 160 hours of 6.0 MSQ and roughly another 20 hours of 6.1-6.5 MSQ (part yet to come).

Where are you getting this number? I can go on YouTube right now and watch the entire 6.0 series; literally every single cut scene, in less than 20 hours. I sincerely hope you're not trying to insinuating that the dungeon, trials and even side quests—the latter of which isn't part of the MSQ makes up... 140 hours of content.

I get making a slight exaggeration but this is absurd. The entire MSQ from ARR to EW combined isn't 160 hours of cut scenes.

Just to put into perspective how laughably and ridiculously absurd this assertion is, my friend and I finished the entirety of Endwalker on December 9th at around 5am, denoted by the achievement on our respective profiles. Which is roughly six days from early access. There's only 144 hours in six days. So you're not only saying we literally didn't sleep for nearly a whole week straight but never so much as got off our chairs and altered the very fabric of time itself to invite sixteen additions hours.

Like... come on.

Now that we've established all of EW didn't have even 20 hours of cut scenes, I don't think it needs to be said 6.1-6.5 doesn't either.

I'm not going to pick out every little thing. Just a few points of interest.

You got Sil'dih Subterrane and Mount Rokkon with 3 different difficulty modes each.

Which have precisely zero replayability due to there being no rewards. An issue that has gone both unaddressed or unacknowledged for two iterations now despite it being essentially dead content within a week of its release. Even Variant suffers in this regard as the content lasts for little more than 2-3 hours yet is meant to holdover a 19 week patch cycle.

Don't get me wrong. Criterion is good content. There's just nothing incentivizing it. In a single player game, that's fine as you do it for the challenge and move on. A MMO needs repeatable content to justify a continual sub. Criterion fails at doing precisely that.

You got Dragonsong's Reprise Ultimate.

70% of which was completed in Shadowbringers, per Yoshida's own words.

You got The Omega Protocol Ultimate.

Which became the only Ultimate to date that released with not one, not two but three bugs. It's also, infamously, the only Ultimate so mitigation heavy that it was cleared, on release, without healers. Now that isn't a slight at the content itself per se but a jumping point to how poorly designed healers have become that such a thing was even possible.

You got Eureka Orthos.

Which is a literal reskin of Heaven on High. Which is something you can say about a lot of content, actually.

You got Island Sanctuary.

You mean the spreadsheet simulator no one asked for that has so little depth, Yoshida literally begged people not to rush and put in massive timegates just to artificially stretch what wouldn't have lasted a weekend otherwise? Seriously. In every other area in the open world, you can gather 6+ of any item but in Island Sanctuary it's one per node? Can't imagine why that might be...

Island Sanctuary has less depth than Farmville, a mobile game from 2009.

You got 2 new world boss level FATEs (Chi and Daivadipa) in addition to all the other new FATEs.

Two world bosses that get zerged down in seconds by 500 people to the point of DCing only to be completely ignored because there's literally zero reason to care about them afterwards? It's a cool idea in theory but doesn't actulally do much nor do FATEs as a whole because they haven't innovated on them in nearly a decade.

And a problem with near everything else you've listed is it's all one and done. For the base price of Endwalker, sure, it's a complete package. That is neither the complaint or criticism people have but rather the sheer lack of longevity any of it has. There isn't a reason to repeat it or the content itself flopped.

[SargeTheSeagull]

Fitting that they release a PR survey the day my sub ended so I can't reply to it lmao. Anyway, 90% of my problems with EW are homogenous job design (2 min meta and healers especially), stale reward structure, criterion not being rewarding enough, no adventuring foray, and super formulaic boss design. It's not like EW's issues are deep and systematic problems baked into the soul of the game or anything like that. They're just specific problems that can be solved as easily as they were created.

[AlexiaD]

based post

Pretty much all of this tbh, none of the content she mentions has any sort of replayability, also her MSQ claim of 160 hours is pretty funny, even then, it's just a visual novel basically, not content that you are actually in control of, it's basically a movie

[OgruMogru]

Where are you getting this number? I can go on YouTube right now and watch the entire 6.0 series; literally every single cut scene, in less than 20 hours. I sincerely hope you're not trying to insinuating that the dungeon, trials and even side quests—the latter of which isn't part of the MSQ makes up... 140 hours of content.

I get making a slight exaggeration but this is absurd. The entire MSQ from ARR to EW combined isn't 160 hours of cut scenes.

Just to put into perspective how laughably and ridiculously absurd this assertion is, my friend and I finished the entirety of Endwalker on December 9th at around 5am, denoted by the achievement on our respective profiles. Which is roughly six days from early access. There's only 144 hours in six days. So you're not only saying we literally didn't sleep for nearly a whole week straight but never so much as got off our chairs and altered the very fabric of time itself to invite sixteen additions hours.

Like... come on.

Getting their mileage out of that 1970's education [I'm sorry, I couldn't resist]

[Jojoya]

snip.

I will admit that the 160 hours was off. That was the number I remember SE mentioning before EW released and so it's what I used.

I checked the time/date info on my screenshots from the start of Endwalker. If I assume I took 8 hours a day for sleep (which I probably didn't, I was enjoying myself too much), it took me about 75 hours to complete the 6.0 MSQ.

The 20 hours for the 6.x MSQ content is because I have watched the time while completing each portion and it's been roughly 4 hours each time. Believe it or not, there actually is more to the MSQ than cutscenes even if cutscenes are all you can remember.

As for the rest of your responses, none of those have anything to do with what my post was about. Supersnow said they were paying for new content, not to replay old content.

All of that was new content added in Endwalker. It was impossible for players to play that content before Endwalker's release. They were new things to do.

You choosing not to do content does not mean that content doesn't exist. You choosing not to repeat content doesn't mean the content is not repeatable.

You being unhappy about the content doesn't change the fact you can do it if you want to.

Getting their mileage out of that 1970's education [I'm sorry, I couldn't resist]

It's fine, I was definitely stressed out at the time and didn't stop responding when I should have.

[Supersnow845]

I will admit that the 160 hours was off. That was the number I remember SE mentioning before EW released and so it's what I used.

I checked the time/date info on my screenshots from the start of Endwalker. If I assume I took 8 hours a day for sleep (which I probably didn't, I was enjoying myself too much), it took me about 75 hours to complete the 6.0 MSQ.

The 20 hours for the 6.x MSQ content is because I have watched the time while completing each portion and it's been roughly 4 hours each time. Believe it or not, there actually is more to the MSQ than cutscenes even if cutscenes are all you can remember.

As for the rest of your responses, none of those have anything to do with what my post was about. Supersnow said they were paying for new content, not to replay old content.

All of that was new content added in Endwalker. It was impossible for players to play that content before Endwalker's release. They were new things to do.

You choosing not to do content does not mean that content doesn't exist. You choosing not to repeat content doesn't mean the content is not repeatable.

You being unhappy about the content doesn't change the fact you can do it if you want to.


It's fine, I was definitely stressed out at the time and didn't stop responding when I should have.

Saying lapis manulis didn’t exist till EW so really I got what I paid for is so disingenuous to the actual point of my post I honestly don’t even know what to say

[Jojoya]

Saying lapis manulis didn’t exist till EW so really I got what I paid for is so disingenuous to the actual point of my post I honestly don’t even know what to say

Lapis Manulis wasn't the only thing I listed, was it? In fact I didn't even mention it by name. I said we had 13 dungeons added this expansion.

Whether or not you got your money's worth is subjective to you. SE provided new content to us that we paid for.

It is your choice to do it or not. Not liking content doesn't mean it does not exist.

[Shurrikhan]

That's why I bring it up as an issue of player agency. Feeling like you have control over when you choose to blow your cooldowns is fun and very satisfying for many even if the reality is they would probably use them at specific times regardless. Now they feel like that choice has been taken away from them.

Games need to feel fun. There's a lot more fun when you're deciding what to do than when someone else has made the choice for you.

Cool. Then there was at least a better illusion before, perhaps because you'd need to memorize more situations or track more things to make the best choice.

That said, you generally did not hold for buffs anything that wasn't bankable. The buffs were pre-scheduled and you simply played as you would unless you had something specifically as bankable as Mirage Dive or gauge spenders.

Yes, we have more margin on gauge spenders now, but to the point also that what could barely be held for a 90s before can be held for a 120s now, providing the same degree of agency.


Again, I do think it was slightly better back then than now in terms of party coordination rewarded; I just think people mis-weigh the factors that were involved in moving from A to B, which have a lot less overall to do with the buffs' CDs themselves than the availability of the skill which exploit those raid buffs.

My advice, then, is, rather than just rallying around this complexly arrived-at and variously-defined state of the "2-minute meta" (as if we weren't equally fixated on raid-buffs before and 2-minute comps weren't already meta)...

...instead determine what actually instills those net-favorable feelings of agency, because you're probably not actually going to find an overall net increase in that control if going back to Stormblood (where most had very, very little control compared to now over the timing of their actions, even in absolute terms rather than per "obligatory" sync).

And of those parts, look at what you prefer.

• Maybe you want the relative value of shorter-term optimizations like positionals, minimizing GCDs per Iaijutsu prepped, and never messing up a combo to be greater?
• Maybe you want the impact of Crit/DHit variance to be slightly less and would therefore prefer your ostensibly multi-hit CDs to actually be multi-hits (though with your guaranteed Crits still applying to each component strike)?
• Maybe you want a greater number of burst cycles (such as how pre-nerf-Bloodfest caused you to have effectively 4 variations on your minute to minute cycles, instead of just the current 2), or to have a similar effect on how your CDs sync up to raid buffs?
• Maybe you want to gain or lose some "freely timeable" uses of your CDs based on which other jobs are in your party? (If you don't want that variance [which includes just not wanting to lose agency from having previously freely timeable CDs given obligatory timings], either the buffs CDs must be equal or the outliers must be single-target AND you must not be worth buffing.)