What happened to SB (story)?

[TankHunter678]

And now we will be the genocidal conquerors if we push further to kill them. I wonder why no one is thinking of that point? Is it different because you have the Garleans demonised in your brains?

If you automatically equate invasion with genocide then the Garleans are genocidal monsters that need to be put to the sword because of their invasion, subjugation, and enslavement of the nations surrounding their homeland and did not even stop there, working to seize the entire continent they are on and when the going got tough because of the primal threat their response was to drop a moon on it knowing full well it would result in the complete annihilation of all life in eorzea. With the only people against it wanting to conquer Eorzea so they could ship its inhabitants across the sea in every direction to be used as frontline fodder in further invasions across the globe on any undiscovered landmasses in their goal of taking over the entire world for just pureblood garleans to live in.

Us doing a retaliatory invasion of them is just standard politics. If you stretch it a little you can find some parallels to World War 2 in the current state of the story. Not to mention that Garleans who are peaceful are generally accepted by Eorzeans. So us going in and being all genocidal is purely locked up in your head because you want an excuse to ditch the people who have only been fighting defensively to reclaim their own land and the land of their allies.

[Enla]

As for the matter of demonizing Garleans, there's a rather friendly lore nerd over on tumblr who compiled NPC dialogue pertaining to Garlemald and Ala Mhigo that was present /before/ SB was released - and it just further hammers home the point that the Empire isn't as pure as some are trying to make it to be. Especially given the implications with Arenvald and others like him, given that it's heavily implied his situation is rather common and pitiable.
http://mirkemenagerie.tumblr.com/pos...til-stormblood

[OriWhitedeer]

There is a consensus in my FC that Doma and Ala migo should have been patches onto themselves with zones and story development to match. I agree that the zones felt tiny and the story barely had a chance to breathe. There was also a ton of "tell not show" happening that crippled key story moments and mostly affected the expansion's box-art character. We were told Lys did a bunch of leadership/rebellion stuff but we honestly never saw her do any of it. It made the ending seem so hollow to me. Hien should have been in her spot, we got to see him rise up, we got to see his cunning and his strength. I feel like if they wanted a pretty "mockingjay" female protagonist to prop up it should have been Alisaie, not Lys. She has way more of a dramatic character arc in this and would be a believable poster child.

[Kallera]

I hear enough political nonsense and hand wringing ad nauseum. in real life.

I'm just sick of them as antagonists. They are not good antagonists, and their downfall is seen a mile away with how easy it regularly is to kill them. Zenos himself looked good, but all Zenos served was to show them as even more incompetent and flat. I would like better, they can't just be "racist toad with no sense of manners" and "actually kinda decent deserter".

And the idea of sparing relative jerks simply to look good while still making the connotations that they are an unforgivable lot is just senseless.

Kill them or make peace with them.

[BlueLulu]

My biggest gripe is how easily zenos defeated you with little effort even after all the godly beings you've fought against. How is your character who most of the time single handedly fought and defeated such foes get totally punked by some generic evil guy? I'm guessing that armor that zenos wears must be the physical form of his plot armor

[Jandor]

Really what bothered me is how SE basically jokes around about how you supposedly cannot defeat primals alone, while according to the ARR and HW story you do all the time without any help.

Going and getting your adventurer buds to help with whatever fight you're about to take on is done multiple times in both ARR and HW, including for primals. I don't remember every word of dialogue over the course of the MSQ, but I think if I recall correctly it's actually soloing primals that's never really explicitly mentioned, although granted having your friends along with you doesn't make much sense for a couple of primal fights (story Ifrit and story Ravana being the most obvious.)

At the end of the day, the story team tend to leave the dialogue and circumstances open ended enough that you can justify it either way. Although the constant over the top references to your friends in SB makes me think they personally lean towards the 'you're generally not alone' line of thinking.

[Jandor]

SB feels very rushed, unfocused and easy compared to HW. The only major set back our faction suffers is the defeat at Rhalgrs Reach, to which the Scion response is to travel to the other side of the world to stir up rebellion in an unimportant part of the Empire with seemingly no strategic value.

After defeating the Doma garrison of it seems about 20 soldiers, 1 cyborg and a bitter dominatrix it's back to Eorzea where in our absence absolutely nothing at all has happened. So we lead a merry jaunt over to Ala Mhigo, once we get there the Garleans suddenly remember they have loads of weapons that can fly, nearly ruins the whole advance, but thankfully 3 or 4 guys on giant birds flew over from our previous liberation of 'pretty much as far away as possible land' and sort that whole nasty air superiority problem out for us.

Air superiority... you know oddly enough I think that's one of my main issues with the whole war against Garlemald, where the hell are the Empires airships? It's like they couldn't figure out a way for the Alliance to beat them, so they just never had them show up.
Where is the awesome duty where that giant airship Ishgard has tries to hold the wall against Imperial airships while we fly between them fighting the crews and sabotaging them from within? Man, that would have been awesome.

I saw a perfect summation on reddit. 'The Empire lost two conquered territories because the guy they put in charge of them was bored'.
I hope the patch content gives the Empire its teeth back, makes us really fight to hold Ala Mhigo and Doma now we have them.

Edit: Just want to say, I did enjoy parts of the SB story. Some excellent moments. Just don't think it fits together as a whole very well.

[Alberel]

Source that's the FF14 1.0 Release.
the guy should have kept his stock... it's worth about twice as much now.

long story short... as i mentioned in another thread... I would like to see the story moving more towards gods and mystical realm. As strong as the empire is, nation vs nation war shouldn't concern the warrior of light. that's why I kinda like HW's story better... but hey.. my friend loves SB story over HW.

The story is moving in that direction though. The various wars that the WoL is getting involved with are ultimately all the result of the Ascians who appear to have very direct influence in Garlemald. If we wish to stop the Ascians and Zodiark we need to stop Garelemald first, and to stop Garlemald we needed to liberate Ala Mhigo and Doma. Yoshi has already told us that the current story arc has two expansions remaining in it, which makes it easy to see that 5.0 is the war against Garlemald and 6.0 is the battle against Zodiark.

This isn't the sort of MMO where the devs just pick a random theme for an expansion. The story, its associated geographical locations and its villains are all pre-planned years ahead. The 4.X patch cycle has a lot of potential for new mystical elements as well due to the reveal of what the Echo is truly capable of. The WoL is going to be trying to learn how to command primals now...

[Dark-Saviour]

Yeah.... Pacing and Scale are the two biggest gripes I have.

The complete destruction of Rhalgr's Reach followed by "Let's send 4 guys to Doma to fix things there! That'll help!" really felt off.
If it were legitimately a split focus tactic, maybe it could do something, but little seems to have been done in Gyr Abania while we were gone, and it's still a questionable tactic to begin with.
But that said, if we sent over a group of our best commanders and the DLF had enough bodies to actually be believable, I could still possibly accept it. Yet the closest to a commander we sent was Alphinaud, and the force consisted of like 5 guys... :-/
That's not even mentioning how the timing of this (and the logistics of the plan in general) would likely come off to the Domans. It ends up feeling more like "We're having trouble over there, so could you guys please rise up and be a distraction?" which would pretty much kill any good will they may have bought considering the attitude in Doma at the time.

Then we have the "OK, we're done here. Back to Ala Mhigo!" part. Honestly, if we were going to split focus, I would not have gone back to Gyr Abania in the initial release. Let it be wholly and summarily crushed following Rhalgr's Reach and have the empire use it as a staging ground for a campaign against the Allied states, then in 4.1+ we could be forced to return abruptly to try and head this off before pushing back to take Ala Mhigo again.

That said, like I said though, scale is one of the biggest problems as well. Doma being only one zone feels more like a county than a country, and an imperial force that has left them oppressed for decades and thwarted a much-better-planned rebellion just a year or so back should not be taken down by essentially a dozen angry villagers, 4 guys on birds, and a couple of friends. In the end, the whole thing felt... inconsequential. Likewise the idea that because they did fight off this force, they're 'free' and we can walk away is ludicrous. The second it was revealed the rebellion was actually making progress, a half-dozen other legions should have shown up and been like 'LOL No.' As it stands the empire looks like a joke...

Except Zenos... Which is another complaint I have. When he summarily trounced us the first time, I was annoyed, but reading online people kept saying "It's cool. They explain it".
But they didn't. Him being a resonant? I could buy that taking everyone else out, but not us. We have a proper Echo and should not have had the same issues as everyone else, certainly not to the extent of being pretty much ragdolls in front of him. But when did he become a resonant? They mention the facility was there to allow Garleans to use magicks, but it seems like he needed Krile before the whole 'Resonance' project thing could come to fruition (unless those other chambers were full of Echo users too, in which case, we just abandoned them it seems). If that's the case, then the first encounter still makes no sense. I'm hoping the line at the end about him being a 'monster' and an 'experiment' ends up leading to the revelation that prior to his own experimentation, he was some kind of super-soldier test-subject. Otherwise it just feels like a poor attempt to make the Empire seem powerful. Which is especially a shame since it's failing to make them look powerful in the way they should be (Overwhelming technical superiority and numbers that can just sweep over a nation).

[BlastHardcheese]

The Zenos duties bothered me just from a mechanical standpoint.

I leveled through the MSQ as a healer, the Zenos presented to us in those duties with the abilities he had couldn't have defeated me on a long enough time line.

It feels hokey when I'm being decreed as having being routinely trounced when I literally stood in front of him for most of the fight not taking any damage and absent mindedly spamming my one damage spell to gradually whittle his bloated, artificial hp bar down until he decided "lulz I win" and hit me with a move I could still have easily recovered from.

Would it have killed them to make him halfway intelligent? "Restorative magics? Interesting, let's see how you handle this" *starts draining mp with auto attacks* or have him break all your armour pacify you, or something... Anything.

Him "holding back" for storyline purposes didn't fix the disconnect for me.