Goodbye Shadowbringers

[Toukichiful]

Have to say 5.3 story was just 10/10 with the fight, will remember that.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

I thought Shadowbringers was amazing until the post expansion patches. Same issue Ive had with every other expansion.

ARR 8.5
Heavensward 10.0+
Stormblood 9.0
Shadowbringers 9.0

[Voidedge_Ragna]

Its hard to explain what Shadowbringers was ... a high-end budget version, with a lot of questionable moves.

Shadowbringers was once again tame ... no one (really) died that was important to the player. Which is a ongoing trend of "everything will be fine" which takes out the treat of the story and makes it unbelievable and yes I'm aware its a fantasy story but it still makes it unbelievable on a fantasy level.

My main problems were:

Story, throughout the entire MSQ the game pushes a narrative of "darkness is not always bad, light is not always good" which is a great flip of the story and then just goes completely 180 at the end "darkness bad again, you are the light", imo the 5.3 boss and the 5.0 boss should've been swapped, now of course the story would've needed tweeks as you cant simply change those 2 bosses and nothing else but i feel like a Light based final boss which we as the shadowbringers fight ... would've nailed it better.

Music, while mostly nice can be put in 2 sections, "recycled" and "we fall". 2 Trials had either a remix of the dungeon boss theme or used it straight. The weapon trials are recycled music, Nier is ... Nier, Eden is a lot FF8.
Noteworthy: Soken was really sick so i can understand this, it however can be felt.

Fights, did we need 5 Versions of Shiva? Yes they are alternate versions but it felt like a LOT of stuff was reused from other FF games or FF14 itself, which is not bad but Eden was basically just rematches, and the weapon trials yea ...

Lack of deep dungeon, they did address this and seemed surprised players were missing it, the missing exp was added to Bozja so that was not lost

Relic was added to late and even missed stages, we jumped over the 2nd to last stage which used to be the non glowly, which can be bought from the replica npc however, they need the relic grind earlier imo.

Lack of additional dungeons, yes the quality did increase a lot of the dungeons we got and one can argue you run these once and then get bored of them, i feel the problem of expert roulette having only 2 dungeons its likely connected to this.

Nier Raid started out real good and then flatlined on a weekly quest that went nowhere.

Personally i dont understand the hype, or how players on day #1 can give 10/10 to a living system that takes 2 full years to unfold but thats how most of the rating have been polled.
ARR>SB>ShB>HW in terms of story
ARR>HW>SB>ShB in terms of quality, which gives high hopes for quality in EW.

[Shin96]

Lack of additional dungeons, yes the quality did increase a lot of the dungeons we got and one can argue you run these once and then get bored of them, i feel the problem of expert roulette having only 2 dungeons its likely connected to this.

Honestly I feel the dungeons only looked better. It's mostly corridors at the end of the day. That's not exclusive to ShB dungeons, but I do enjoy older dungeons more because they just feel different. I don't know if it's the mob placement or surprises, or rose-tinted glasses.

ShB got the story right but the gameplay department.. it depends on your taste and what you consider fun; for me it really wasn't. Also the last stage relics just look like a joke tbh.

[Voidedge_Ragna]

Honestly I feel the dungeons only looked better. It's mostly corridors at the end of the day. That's not exclusive to ShB dungeons, but I do enjoy older dungeons more because they just feel different. I don't know if it's the mob placement or surprises, or rose-tinted glasses.

ShB got the story right but the gameplay department.. it depends on your taste and what you consider fun; for me it really wasn't. Also the last stage relics just look like a joke tbh.

I 100% agree on all you say regarding the dungeon, the problem however is ... if the dungeon wasn't a corridor players would likely beeline to key points and get out asap. The only true "open dungeon" we had was 3.x Diadem, which has its fair share of other problems.

[Lauront]

Its hard to explain what Shadowbringers was ... a high-end budget version, with a lot of questionable moves.

Shadowbringers was once again tame ... no one (really) died that was important to the player. Which is a ongoing trend of "everything will be fine" which takes out the treat of the story and makes it unbelievable and yes I'm aware its a fantasy story but it still makes it unbelievable on a fantasy level.

My main problems were:

Story, throughout the entire MSQ the game pushes a narrative of "darkness is not always bad, light is not always good" which is a great flip of the story and then just goes completely 180 at the end "darkness bad again, you are the light", imo the 5.3 boss and the 5.0 boss should've been swapped, now of course the story would've needed tweeks as you cant simply change those 2 bosses and nothing else but i feel like a Light based final boss which we as the shadowbringers fight ... would've nailed it better.

I feel the same on that front. I'd go even further and say with a bit more tweaking you could have Innocence finish off 5.0, Hades 5.3 and leave Elidibus for later exploration, which would require more substantial tweaks to the story as-is, although that already seems to have been tweaked to move forward more quickly with wrapping up the existing arc with 6.0 rather than 7.0. What they did achieve is disentangling darkness and light from evil and good, respectively, (and the same frankly with regard to the associated primals, i.e. Zodiark and Hydaelyn), and I am looking forward to seeing how they resolve it in EW. I'd have liked to see a bit more "meat" to becoming the WoD, rather than just a title, but it is what it is...

Lack of additional dungeons, yes the quality did increase a lot of the dungeons we got and one can argue you run these once and then get bored of them, i feel the problem of expert roulette having only 2 dungeons its likely connected to this.

Yep, they need to re-think this going forward, IMO.

I agree with a lot of your points, and while I enjoyed chunks and parts of the story, I also don't subscribe to the view of "best story ever". It's good, it has some nuance to it, but not perfect. Mechanically, absolutely agree with the stuff you raise. Irrespective of whether some of it was due to COVID or not, it was felt.

[Andy_T93]

Storywise Shadowbringers rocked
Character wise Shadowbringers rocked
Location wise ARR and Heavensward beat it (imo)
Dungeon wise I still preferred Heavensward (Tho Mount Gulg was great)
Raid wise Ivalice was better than Nier
Eden Raids were top so far

[Barwara]

Shadowbringers and Heavensward are the best in my opinion. Didn't cake too much for Stormblood, although patch msq was better than the actual expansion msq.

Heavensward has a special place in my heart. ;w; But Shadowbringers was very cool and really enjoyable to play from start to finish, and I didn't feel like I had to slug through a lot of filler quests. Nice zones, nice gear, nice dungeons to go all around. Plus it was interesting to have my character finally struggle a bit during the storyline.

I AM looking forward to the story's conclusion though, and to how the game will develop beyond Endwalker.... hopefully it will become more open-world.

[Poporito_Popoto]

Music, while mostly nice can be put in 2 sections, "recycled" and "we fall". 2 Trials had either a remix of the dungeon boss theme or used it straight. The weapon trials are recycled music, Nier is ... Nier, Eden is a lot FF8.
Noteworthy: Soken was really sick so i can understand this, it however can be felt.

Do you know...LA HEE?

[Jirah]

Shadowbringers (disregarding job beef) was pretty good, then the story patches came out

Dungeons were incredibly bland and the advent of trusts really ruined them to glorified solo instance

Eden was a mixed bag, a lot of the fights were just forgettable in NM. But no one cares about NM so the savage ones were standard with 1 or 2 honorable mentions and 1 very blatant dishonorable one. Fighting remixed primals just seemed so…idk boring

Nier is weird, like stupid weird even more so that they tried to make it plot focused. And it was abit too easy compared to Ivalice that I wasn’t really sure we fully wiped at all

Trials were top notch tho….warmachine being story focused was nice but zero voiced lines in the whole arc, very boring weapon designs, and generally inferior mechs compared to stuff like SOS & 4lords which were varied diverse and fun.

No deep dungeon no new housing district only 1 ultimate compared to SB content speaks for itself. SHB is alright