Quote Originally Posted by Aldath View Post
I found your take interesting, then I saw your signature and I can't decide if you're a troll or not.
I've been mostly consistent about my stances. I'm also pretty unapologetic about being a FFXVI fanboy, even if I recognize that the game has some flaws in both writing/gameplay aspects. But at least that game didn't waste my time the way that the recent MSQ has in Endwalker with Zero and the various foods they've wasted the animation budget on.

You do not court players like me with stuff like taco cat, let alone the uninspired Timbuktu aesthetic DT seems to be going for. There's no sense of awe, urgency, or magic in that trailer nor in any of the story points that have been revealed so far. Why should I care about an alleged division between the scions when to date they've never been able to commit to any real conflict between them? Why should I care about Erenville who has an even more bland personality than Zero? Why should I trust whatever is going on in XIV when they are at complete odds with the other CBU3 game that I gravitated to so strongly as I did back in the Heavensward days of FFXIV when the game still took itself seriously?

But I guess this was inevitable when you let a writer decide that their characters can go ahead and destroy most of the known universe, leave the world godless, and turn every single bad guy faction into another copypasted good guy faction so everyone can hold hands together. This kind of writing and messaging feels insulting and preachy as an adult, though all in all I find it so much more heavy-handed in XIV compared to XVI.

As I've said before, it feels like every single pillar that held this game up has come crashing down over the course of this expansion. The story got smashed to pieces because they decided to rush it and then went on to use the trial questline as the MSQ. Gameplay for most jobs including my main one feels stale and boring. Content has been a disaster with nothing but bugged releasing like "The winning number is 0!" and other flops like Criterion and Eureka Orthos.

FFXIV in its current form is completely unrecognizable to me and I want to see it do better. Except it can't because at this point I have no reason to believe any feedback that isn't 200% positive is making it through to the proper channels. The situation is severe enough now to go completely drop any pretense of having to sugarcoat or "say a positive thing for every negative thing you say" because Endwalker is just that bad and Dawntrails might even be worse.

They need to do better. Simple as.