What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[ReynTime]

But they explained it in a couple of sentences, are you that shocked they wrapped up Nerva's ending like that considering how they handled the Ascian/Hydaelyn storyline? You can tell the new writers were just tying up loose ends so they can do their own thing without the old writing team's "baggage", lol.

That's how I felt ever since 2.0. So much I was interested in seeing where it would be headed from pre ARR got completely swept under the rug or "killed off-screen"...

[Skyborne]

They did actually introduce a potential Larsa-equivalent in Shadowbringers—Nerva Galvus.

Only they kept him offscreen all the way to his reveal in 6.1, where he was dead all along, having turned into a blasphemy. Fun stuff.

Between this and my poor dim deluded view of Regula's "the emperor will have need of you", "actually the empire was POINTLESS and DUMB and was there merely to spread chaos!" -- with little regard for the real sweat and blood the Garleans themselves put into it, and 'Solus' betraying hints of actually having sentiment for his people between the glory be soup ancedote, parks for kids complete with heated pools, pursuit of theatrical arts, being crushed when his son died of illness, etc -- and Varis being kinda sympathetic sandwiched between two ascians only to turn around and make a funny meme face and commence the gassing, I've had enough Garlemald disappointment for a lifetime. Oh yeah, and the Resonance and experiments along those lines that seemed to be dropped after serving its purpose in 4.0.

I think it was ReynTime who brought it up, but it really does seem like Yoshida just wanted to drop any 1.0 baggage, and tying the Ascians/Garleans together was a means to that.

[Graeham]

I did not believe the place I visited was Garlemald. It is the biggest city on the world map, many times bigger than Limsa. When I go there are oil pipelines, one train station, a few broken buildings, and one tower. Everyone ran away after the possessed soldiers attacked. But I have seen many bases bigger than this, and this is the main city.

When I go to Sharlyan, it is not only a big city, but has an underground greenhouse with artificial weather. How is it possible for them to have advanced technology more than the greatest country in the world?

[Jagick]

I did not believe the place I visited was Garlemald. It is the biggest city on the world map, many times bigger than Limsa. When I go there are oil pipelines, one train station, a few broken buildings, and one tower. Everyone ran away after the possessed soldiers attacked. But I have seen many bases bigger than this, and this is the main city.

When I go to Sharlyan, it is not only a big city, but has an underground greenhouse with artificial weather. How is it possible for them to have advanced technology more than the greatest country in the world?

This bothered me too, but it's yet another of example of the game's regions or "overworld" being extremely compressed for the sake of game play. But it is absolutely comical in its execution. For a more concrete example of what I mean, just look at Ishgard as you wander that city. Look out beyond its boundaries and the city seems absolutely MASSIVE both in width and height, something that would take days to full explore were we given more than two tiny zones you transition between in seconds. Then leave the city into Coerthas Central Highlands and fly your mount past (over and past) the the gate supposedly leading to the steps of faith. What you will see is an absolutely tiny and narrow cobblestone walkway connecting to a doll house not much larger than the watch towers already scattered around that zone, and that building is supposed to be the city of Ishgard and the path leading to it are The Steps of Faith, something absolutely tiny and considerably bootleg looking compared to their instance version. It sucks, but expect plenty more zones to get this treatment going forward.

She singled out this thread as an example of trolling on the forums in a livestream she did on twitch. I wonder what she would feel if a fundamental issue she cared about like say Viera hairstyles had a megathread and then along comes another streamer or prominent individual that brands it as an example of trolling too.

Anyway I'm taking a break from arguing in circles and working on a total rewrite concept of the missing Garlemald expansion and a new take on what Endwalker could have been. I don't promise anything as in-depth as the Meracydia expansion concept I did a long while back but hopefully it'll be a more entertaining read than how some of the last few pages of this thread have been.

I can already sense the replies telling me that what I've written is too dark or emotional to be palatable to a playerbase that was enamoured by the slice of life scenes of Endwalker, or too political in the style of Ivalician storytelling with not enough meme sequences. Please look forward to it! With any luck those threads will be called out live on stream as well.

I absolutely look forward to this. Please change nothing in an attempt to make it more digestible for the squeamish. This story could use a little more grit if you ask me.

[Lauront]

This bothered me too, but it's yet another of example of the game's regions or "overworld" being extremely compressed for the sake of game play. But it is absolutely comical in its execution. For a more concrete example of what I mean, just look at Ishgard as you wander that city. Look out beyond its boundaries and the city seems absolutely MASSIVE both in width and height, something that would take days to full explore were we given more than two tiny zones you transition between in seconds. Then leave the city into Coerthas Central Highlands and fly your mount past (over and past) the the gate supposedly leading to the steps of faith. What you will see is an absolutely tiny and narrow cobblestone walkway connecting to a doll house not much larger than the watch towers already scattered around that zone, and that building is supposed to be the city of Ishgard and the path leading to it are The Steps of Faith, something absolutely tiny and considerably bootleg looking compared to their instance version. It sucks, but expect plenty more zones to get this treatment going forward.



I absolutely look forward to this. Please change nothing in an attempt to make it more digestible for the squeamish. This story could use a little more grit if you ask me.

It annoyed me with the Steppes as well. Normally they'll use visual tricks to at least add an illusion of grandeur, but you had entire tribes there in these itty bitty little settlements. While one wouldn't expect giant metropolises, neither would you expect them to amount to a few dozen individuals or so.

[Raoabolic]

It annoyed me with the Steppes as well. Normally they'll use visual tricks to at least add an illusion of grandeur, but you had entire tribes there in these itty bitty little settlements. While one wouldn't expect giant metropolises, neither would you expect them to amount to a few dozen individuals or so.

It's not that shocking considering when there is a "crowd" in any cutscene. I guess more than 2 and less than 10 can be considered a crowd, lol.

[Jagick]

I don't post to prove myself to be right. I post to put my opinions out there in the hope that I might encounter people who share similar concerns for the direction of the game's narrative as well as reinforcing the idea that they're not alone. I also hope that the thread is being read by someone employed by Square Enix who may very well pass feedback along to someone involved in the story.



I imagine many posters have all sorts of different takes on what would be 'valid' or 'reasonable' on any given subject. Ultimately we're dealing with a fictional setting which is primarily there to entertain. It can't please everybody but that's precisely why many favour more variety across the board in terms of how elements within the story play out.

Someone rooting for House Stark in Game of Thrones is going to have very different expectations than those who roots for House Tyrell or House Lannister and so on.



It's why I'm drifting back to single player games for my immersion needs. It never fails to impress me every time I enter Novigrad in The Witcher 3. It's one of the more immersive cities I've seen in an RPG to date. Equally, as far as MMO's go I'd say Divinity's Reach in Guild Wars 2 is a good example of what FFXIV could do if it really pushed itself to its limits.

Even if the city was devoid of life it would have been nice to see, even though I'd prefer to have witness the grandeur and technological powerhouse we've heard about. It kind of makes me laugh now thinking about it, but upon exploring the zone, I didn't feel like I was play FFXIV and exploring the capitol of Garlemald. I felt like I was playing an ancient free-to-play MMO, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine. Tower looming? Check! Mostly empty wasteland? Check! An area with some building ruins but nothing much else to see? Check! A couple demon- I mean monsters roaming here and there to kill? Check! Pet summoned to help me fight? Check! Low graphical fidelity to compliment it all? CHECK!

It's not that shocking considering when there is a "crowd" in any cutscene. I guess more than 2 and less than 10 can be considered a crowd, lol.

It's even more baffling that they seem to have started just copy and pasting those NPCs in even those smaller crowds rather than making them unique. Same face, same clothes, same colors. Really ruins the immersion.

[anhaato]

It annoyed me with the Steppes as well. Normally they'll use visual tricks to at least add an illusion of grandeur, but you had entire tribes there in these itty bitty little settlements. While one wouldn't expect giant metropolises, neither would you expect them to amount to a few dozen individuals or so.

The Steppe was pathetic and definitely the most egregious zone compression pre-EW. For a “steppe” there sure is hardly any flat grassland, and a whole lot of mountains cutting off the northwest and southeast ends. And they put chasms to separate the east and southwest ends from the actual flatlands that went past them. If absolutely any zone is to have a bunch of empty land, stuff that’s far apart and separated by lots of nothing, I would expect it for that. And what’s wrong with walling off zones without having to invent some silly geographical features to do it? Like any of us would care if they put the boundary in ay the end of walkable ground? Tons of games do that!

[MikkoAkure]

I did not believe the place I visited was Garlemald. It is the biggest city on the world map, many times bigger than Limsa. When I go there are oil pipelines, one train station, a few broken buildings, and one tower. Everyone ran away after the possessed soldiers attacked. But I have seen many bases bigger than this, and this is the main city.

When I go to Sharlyan, it is not only a big city, but has an underground greenhouse with artificial weather. How is it possible for them to have advanced technology more than the greatest country in the world?

Most of the city is behind the city walls, we just go to the outskirts. Though I don't know why their senate building is outside the city walls.

As far as Sharlayan goes, it's been around for about 1500 years, has had no wars, and has been constantly doing research that entire time. According to interviews, they've always been intended to be a space-faring civilization going back to 1.0. The Garlean Empire meanwhile has only had magitek for 60 years.

[aveyond-dreams]

Roughly 6000 words of my rewrite of Endwalker and a potential Garlemald expansion done, though formatting and setting up spoiler text/images will take me a considerable amount of time still. Unfortunately I did not manage to include too much in-depth character arc beats for each party member because of my focus on reworking major plot points in general.

Trying to make this all make sense while still salvaging whatever I could of pre-existing material was an incredible hassle. I definitely feel like I burned myself out with the earlier portions and then started struggling a bit with the later portions, but if nothing else I didn't make for a cakewalk zone like Ultima Thule was. Admittedly, I tried for an ending that cut some slack to the surviving characters and (tried) to respect the decisions and sacrifices made by others who were lost over the course of the story. I challenged myself by trying to make some characters that I actively dislike more likeable, or at least opened the door for them to have something of a decent arc in the future.

I tried to cut back down considerably on the preachiness and didn't delve too much into "yay hope!" aside from the moments where I felt it was most appropriate and I severely limited the "despair" nonsense outside a moment where it is used to advance a specific plot point. I think I cut back on the mouthpieces for hope specifically to just one character, if I did things correctly. Shockingly it's not Alphinaud this time, who barely came into mind as I wrote this aside from one single instance. I found a villain who is more enamoured by the vanity of inflicting widespread torment onto people for her own amusement beneath an unassuming facade far more compelling, though I don't feel like I was able to explore this aspect of her character in my descriptions as much as I would have liked.

I'm trying to be as aware as possible when it comes to the flaws of what I just wrote down, and will try to revise it a bit before posting. But no, I'm not apologizing for not including a bunch of slice of life moments in this outline, I was too busy trying to keep the momentum going - something that I feel writers should strive for in their work. Endwalker did quite literally the opposite, instead of a rollercoaster there were times when things proceed apace at the speed of the Disneyworld teacup ride.