Thread: Revelations from Patch 4.56

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.