Requiring a permit to cross the bridge was bad writing, change my mind.

[Cleretic]

This is what I think a lot of people miss

It doesn’t matter if you “explain” it in game. If it’s bad writing because it’s basically barely disguised plot contrivance then it’s still bad writing

Meaningless nonsense masquerading as a metric. What you call 'good' or 'bad' means nothing outside of the world of your mind, you're just claiming subjective feelings as if they're real facts. FFXIV's 'good writing' does exactly the same things, you just gave it a pass.

Do you even remember why you were kept from visiting the Rak'tika Greatwood before the MSQ sent you there? Or the western part of Amh Araeng? No, you don't, because chances are you never even poked at them, but those barriers were actually even more shallow and arbitrary than 'you need a permit they aren't handing out to get to the place you're not supposed to be yet'. Hell, Shadowbringers has maybe the dumbest barrier I've ever seen in a video game, where we're blocked off from southwest Amh Araeng by a big door with a big pressure plate. Not an inaccessible door, not even a locked door: just a door opened by a switch too big for us. That's literally a stock Legend of Zelda puzzle, and not even an exciting or complicated one, but they give it to us as a legitimate narrative barrier.

But Shadowbringers is 'a good expansion', so you either don't care, or are about to defend it.


Recognizing the reasons for the structure of a game doesn't make it lesser, in the same way that recognizing the turning of a page doesn't ruin a book. The fact that you realized that the permit to Shaaloani is there to stop you from getting to a zone you aren't going to yet isn't because 'Dawntrail Bad'; it's because, after four other expansions, you know how Final Fantasy Fourteen structures itself.

Don't reduce your arguments to 'because it's good' or 'because it's bad'. We deserve better than that, and your arguments deserve better than that.