Thread: Patch 3.4 - Soul Surrender

Originally Posted by Cilia

Hamlet Defense not coming back (not that I even know what that is)?

Something that could have made the beast tribes, and their primals (heck, maybe even the Garleans) feel like a creditable threat... Not through cutscenes or dialog just telling us they are, but through good old fashioned organic gameplay...

You know... "Show, don't tell" pretty aptly sums up my issues with much of the game recently... How did we go from End of an Era, to this? 2.0 was pretty much perfect, nobody ever needed to tell you Bahamut was srs bsns, you saw that he was in the opening, you saw the destruction from his rampage everywhere... When people then said he was a thread, it wasn't hard to believe... Fast forward to now, and what has Alexander done? What have any of the primals done? There are a few exceptions, but I read;

Yet the Ixal have never forgotten that which was once denied them, and so they seek divine intervention once more─to summon Garuda and beseech her strike down their enemies. In the shadow of the First Mountain, the ritual nears completion, as a brave hero once more races against time to deliver the realm from destruction.

And I just can't take it seriously... What have the Ixali and Garuda actually done, what have we actually seen of them that really supports this kind of stuff? A bunch of Opo Opo are a bigger threat to Hyrstmill than the Ixali these days... Show me they're a threat, the same way Final Fantasy XI showed me that the Mamool Ja Savages were a threat... I don't think they ever said Gulool Ja Ja was dangerous in the story, they let the gameplay tell us that instead, and he was a serious threat, much more so than Garuda, or Alexander, or Odin... There were actual repercussions when he showed up, you didn't just die and respawn for a second attempt, you lost something in those battles... Sigh is that kind of subtlety and world building truly lost on modern gamers? Hamlet Defense could have been a truly amazing addition to this game, both for gameplay and for narrative... Instead they devolved it into FATEs and a bunch of pop culture references... Hamlet Defense was far from perfect, it was stuck in 1.0 after all, but the comparisons to Besieged were there, and one expected a shiny new engine to improve upon things, not the opposite... The lore of this game is really top notch, but some times I feel like I might as well just be reading a book or watching a movie, the gameplay often does very little to support it...

OK, I'm really done this time;

Originally Posted by Cilia