Thread: Revelations from Patch 4.56

My thoughts on MSQ:

Overall this felt very "wait, is that all?"... but also a demonstration of why Previews are Bad (and I hate watching trailers for things I'm definitely watching/playing later).

We'd be freaking out a lot more about Mr Enigma and his confirmation that we're going to the First if we hadn't been told about it in advance, or seen him on the poster. It would be the first time we've seen him. The first chance to recognise him. The first time we'd find out where we're going in the next part of the story, and that it isn't Garlemald but the First.

All the wind has been sucked out of the big reveal of the patch before it ever happened. Mystery guy? Yep, seen him. Off to the First? Yep, they told us last week. Why doesn't this finale have any new and exciting things in it?



If there was any question left about Enigma's resemblance to G'raha, his character data looks rather familiar....

(Enigma is missing G'raha's eyeshadow, and the actual face setting has switched from #1 to #2 - but that seems irrelevant since it's a custom model either way, and based on standard face #3 if I remember correctly. Everything else is identical. If it was meant to be not him but a lookalike, I'd expect a different hairstyle or height setting or something.)

That crystal transformation is very unsettling-looking. I'd assumed it was just his hand and the few patches elsewhere, but it looked more like it could be extending all across his chest, growing upwards onto his neck and face... I wonder what's going on. His left arm and feet seem fine, at least.



Did anybody think our sudden transition to Ishgard was rather.... off? Not just in a mood-shattering way but 'unreal', like it was being faked to us somehow. We survived a seemingly mortal blow, were rescued by someone we never saw, woke up miles from the battlefield, and to top it all off, Edmont tells us that Artoirel is just about to depart for Ghimlyt. Wasn't he there since 4.50?

Maybe it's just a translation error, perhaps a shift in tense that they didn't realise was important, but I was already feeling rather disoriented and it all seemed rather strange. And I kept remembering the New Year's poem - "weave ye an azure lie" - which doesn't quite fit but it's still pointing at some kind of deception involving Ishgard....

Still, everything after it seemed normal enough.



Also, what's up with Tataru's choice of outfit design for us?

"I made you some new travelling gear; I hope you like it!"

"Tataru, why does my 'travelling gear' have a hood with a demonic mask I can't even take off?"

"Does it fit? Is it comfortable?"

...

Re. Zenos

Originally Posted by Theodric

Zenos walking towards the slain Garlean soldier suggests to me that he's going to use the Resonance to possess a different body in order to try and reclaim his real form from Elidibus. I assume that there's a good chance that he succeeds, especially with him showing up in Dissidia NT as a playable character.

Originally Posted by Rocl

Also I guess we're supposed to believe the real Zenos has figured out how to swap bodies with the Resonant and was going to take that Centurion's corpse as his next vessel and return to Garlemald.

Not necessarily, I think - he might just be intending to steal a Garlean uniform so he can infiltrate their base. I'm not sure that swapping bodies would achieve much besides saving him a costume change.

Re. unhelpful messages

Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

Also whoever the voice is, I want to smack him upside the head for being so vague in all his messages. If it was so important tell us something more useful than 'throw wide the gates' you jerk.

From the first "calling" we heard in this patch - the frustrated voice saying "why won't you open?" I got the impression that it may not be a deliberate calling at all.

And when we first meet Enigma, he says that this isn't where he intended to meet us. Suggesting that whatever exactly happened, it wasn't planned to happen like it did.

Perhaps we're simply 'overhearing' his not-quite-successful attempts at some kind of portal-opening spell. The calling of the Scions could even be an accidental side-effect - imagine if every time he tries the incantation and "nothing happens", actually someone else is affected and he has no idea!

Originally Posted by KDSilver

I don't know if I may ask this here, but, what is from the game scenario point of view "Light" and "Darkness" ?
What does this mean to "spread Light" or "spread Darkness" ?

Doing "good" things ? Saving people ? = Light ?
Spreading darkness means making them suffer ?

I'm really confused about their definition.

We're all a bit confused at this point!

Although from what they were saying at Fanfest, it sounds like it may not be the Ascian-chaos variety of "Darkness" but a more natural "darkness" of night and shadow. It's still unclear how we do that, but it doesn't seem quite as ominous if that's the case.

There's also Minfilia's previously-stated mission to rid the First of its excess Light.... which presumably has gone askew. (Or is she still just outsourcing all her work to us?)

Though I suppose maybe she's slowed it down enough that we can come to the rescue.

MSQ /10char

Hard to say due to the crystalization, but the enigmatic figure doesn't appear to have any signs of the Scion tattoo on his neck that G'raha Tia should have...

Given they didn't greet us with any form of familiarity either, my bet is it simply being a new character... This patch really didn't bring much with it though... If the Firsts Crystal Tower really is our Crystal Tower, simply time-ported, then I'm still banking on the idea of someone sending it away with the intention of providing more time to build that bright future G'raha said he'd be waiting for. Heck, thinking on it, that kind of spell would probably require an absurd amount of aether, and we've had that whole "thinning aether" plot hanging around since 2.55, with Y'shtola finally picking it back up before taking a nap... Throw in Azys Lla and the Burn as an introduction to the idea of draining aether for absurd land transportation, and I'm banking on that whole plot not being Primal related, but Crystal Tower teleportation related... That draining happening over the past simply because the Tower was also sent back in time?

Still, confirmation we're going to the First to bring back the Scions, it seems. Guess these expansions really are going in cycles; Garlean focus, side adventure, Garlean focus, side adventure. Whether we actually bring them back remains to be seen of course...

Oh, and I felt for sure Zenos would come to our aid, not Estinien... That was really poorly handled too, just a throw away slide showing him... Could have thrown in another Roleplay instance in there to hype up our rescue a bit more, instead it's just "loljk you're fine"... Must say, my disappointment with how Shadowbringers is being handled only continues to grow with this... Spamming 5.0 PvP actions as Hien is not remotely as good as what we got in 3.55 (Gosetsu alone hyped me for SAM beyond words, I watched him like a hawk in that instance), all the dramatic tension from the Scions going naptime (of which there was basically none because this happens to them every expansion) was removed the moment the NA trailer showed Thancred right as rain... Elidibus couldn't even kill off Hien, Lyse or Yugiri? This just... Really falls flat, I guess... Nothing to really get hyped over or invested in, just "We're going to the First"... Confirmation of space and time shenanigans at least, but that's pretty much it...

Hopefully Shadowbringers at least does a better job of its "side" plots than Heavensward did with wrapping up the Crystal Braves/etc plot points... Zenos and Gaius deserve better than that sort of treatment...

Originally Posted by Crushnight

The law of 10:

That's the thing that gets me Elidibus had no idea if we had that auracite or not he really took a gamble on his existence on the very balance he strives for on us not having that auracite and the means to defeat him, that is a big gamble that does not seem to line up with how he has been portrayed up till now.

Agreed Elidibus has been poorly handled this patch hopefully we will get some clarification on his full motives in ShB going to be a long wait XD

On that point...

That's the other thing - the WoL was also acting a little bit foolish here, because he (my one, anyway ) just showed up, with no means of permanently disposing of Elidibus that we know of, scarcely asked a single question as to why the sudden shift in attitude and they proceeded to duke it out. I think the deus ex machina was poorly handled, Elidibus was poorly handled - not even Nabriales was that curt - and the entire interaction was a bit... shall we say, bland? This is world-changing stuff here, and we're seeing Elidibus act in ways unprecedented for him, yet the only aim here was to kill or be killed on both ends. If I am honest, I think they were genuinely pressed for time with 5.0 so near and a tight deadline to meet, so what would normally be a trial with some build up had to be compressed into something shorter. I still think the fight itself was not bad, and it was nice to get soft confirmation on who the voice was, but it's really left things pretty much where they were. I guess I like the outfit at the end of it, too; it's the closest to an Ascian mask I'm going to get.

Stuff and things.

I have to say the section where we play as Hien felt a bit lackluster. Why couldn't we have a combo. The Alphinaud and Y'shtola parts felt nicer, maybe because mages are single spell dependent already
But I hope we get more abilities if this system continues.

If 4.0 had the best .1 patch of of all the expansion cycles, it has the weakest .5 patch out of all of them too.

MSQ

I really do not get what SE is doing with this patch. As a player, I tend to care more about characters rather then places and locations. Currently... I have no reason to care about the 1st Shard. Mainly because from an in-universe perspective, we still don't even know that it's the 1st Shard that is trying to contact us. We've never gone into a patch so blind in-universe. And I don't like it. I was worried about this happening when they revealed where we were going at Fan Fast and I'm even more worried about it now. Everything in this patch makes whatever is happening with the voice seem like a side issue to the Garlemald conflict, which is the conflict the entire story of FFXIV has been heading towards ever since 1.0. And now the devs expect us to seemingly completely drop that conflict for another seemingly unrelated conflict for an entire expansion? I'm having a hard time buying that. Or at least, 5.0 had better do one hell of job selling it's story.

SB had some pacing issues, but the narrative reason we did everything in it made sense. 5.0... to be honest, I'm going to have a really hard time caring about what we are doing when the expansion starts. If SE doesn't give the WoL at least some options of expressing their frustration about the whole thing, I'm going to have a really hard time liking the MSQ this time around. And the expansion hasn't even started. This isn't like not liking SB because after you play it, the pacing issues become super obvious. This is not liking an expansion because you have no idea why this expansion is taking place or where it is taking place. There's not spoiling stuff and then there's not given the players enough reasons to be excited about why the narrative is going where it is going. From the perspective of presenting 5.0 to the players (Doyalist Perspective), SE has done a fantastic job. But from the perspective of presenting 5.0 to the characters in the game (Watsonian Perspectvie), SE has failed... probably the most in FFXIV's history.

But... onto the actual story, as little as there is... the WoL's strength was sold very well, particularly with 4.0 taken into account. Zenos was the first character to beat us so completely, and now an Ascian wearing his skin is having a very hard time doing that. And if anyone would have gotten us out of there when we fainted, it would have been the guy who absorbed crazy amounts of Nidhogg's aether. I can buy Estinean being the one to get us out of there; there isn't anyone else on our level who could do that really.

I'm pretty sure the person we are talking to in the portal space is not G'raha Tia. And not just because SE didn't stick Mi'qote ears on him. We see him in the 1st Shard's CT in the trailer and it feels like he doesn't know a lot of stuff G'raha should know. Including who we are (not our role as the WoL, but who we are as a character) and how our CT is sealed up from the inside. It could be that SE is just being really obtuse with how they handle introducing him G'raha Tia again, but I'd think he'd react differently to seeing us again if it really was G'raha. It just feels like he knows us by what role we play and not as the person who helped kill Xanded and the Cloud of Darkness and make sure there wasn't a portal to the Void at the top of Crystal Tower with him. Also... G'raha should be sleeping in the tower... If it really is him, then either he's not sleeping in the Source's CT anymore, or he is and he's messing around with time travel from the future or being in two places at once, both of which I'm not too hot on.

Long story short, this is the most apathetic I've been to the MSQ going into a FFXIV expansion yet. I really hope SE can turn that around once 5.0 starts.

Beat Tribes

It was cute to watch and I think this the closes Catboi has come to being killed off for real. An ending to the story that started with Kugane Castle was nice too.

Hildebrand

You know the MSQ is having issues when the Hildebrand quests give us a more understandable reason to go to the 1st Shard then the MSQ does. Or at least, a reason to actually care about people who plunged headfirst into a portal that leads who knows where. And given that this is Gilgamesh, it has more lore backing up how they are going to 1st Shard even if that lore is from the meta knowledge of the Final Fantasy series as a whole. Gilgamesh showing up was great and it's always nice to see FFXIV show it's goofy side once in a while.