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

[myahele]

I've never been a fan of Hildabrand and that type of humour, so its unfortunate that he's part of the relic questline. I guess this really is the direction the game is heading?

[ReynTime]

I don't expect future mmorpgs to hold their stories to any good standard. It's drastically easier to tell a cohesive plot when your game isn't going on indefinitely. And even if they take the self contained per expansion approach they will always be held back by the fact they're still mmorpgs, limiting the risks you can take.

Likewise the industry realised the only way to maintain mmorpgs with production quality equivalent to WoW or higher they need to make the game appeal to people who quite frankly want all the progress and reward but don't like the pve content cycles enough to like being challenged and only see the necessity of cooperating with other players as an annoyance.

So I have no faith in Ashes of Creation. And I think I'll be lucky if Pantheon ever fully delivers what was promised from the start.

I think these attempts at making mmorpgs feel like offline rpgs have all been miserable failures at best in the execution. Because the features that make them MMOs will always get in the way.

FF games have very easy to digest writing and they don't really go very deep, but at least prior to XIII (except VIII) they had something that XIV lacks: cohesion.

XIV's writing was doomed from the beginning since ARR was being handled by people who have complete disdain by the foundations after all.

There will NEVER be any mmorpg with the writing of the likes of Mass Effect, the original Dragon Age, Xenogears... XIV couldn't even rehash Chrono Trigger properly since their time travel rules change to whatever is convenient for the expansion. And there will never be a mmorpg that offers challenge at least at the level of the easiest single player Final Fantasy not called Mystic Quest during its main story.

So really the way I see it MMOs are a terrible place to look for anything well written or with balanced difficulty with any level of decision making. I'm really done with the genre entirely.

[Raoabolic]

XIV's writing was doomed from the beginning since ARR was being handled by people who have complete disdain by the foundations after all.

To be fair, the story went sideways after the new writer took over during Stormblood. By the way, don't compare Xenogears with Mass Effect, that's just rude, lol.

[ReynTime]

To be fair, the story went sideways after the new writer took over during Stormblood. By the way, don't compare Xenogears with Mass Effect, that's just rude, lol.

*To xenogears.

They're not in the same level, I just think they're all way better written than XIV. And despite the ending ME is cohesive enough IMO.
Chrono Trigger has a different strength compared to those examples too, or even the numbered FF titles. It just handles the pacing masterfully and the fact they kept to their limits makes its relatively safe story wrap up very neatly in a way few games compare. It wasn't until Cross that they bit more than they could chew.

[Rulakir]

I'm beginning to think this is a dev issue rather than a player issue. Like covid, Soken's cancer, and whatever else we may not know about just wrecked the team so much they can't handle working on anything but fluff now. I'm flashing back to Yoshi-P's comments about how they have to be into what they're doing and I guess what they're into right now is abject silliness. This doesn't bode well for the rest of EW if they considered 6.0 to be so heavy* that the rest of the patches are just going to be nonsense.

* It really wasn't, not with lack of consequences and the gratuitous amount of jarring, immersion breaking 'comic relief' scenes.

Speaking of which, FF14's general brand of humor doesn't work for me either. I just want a good story and it's looking like ShB was the end of that. I'm an adult, if I feel the game themes are too much or that all I want to do is laugh I'll log off and watch a stand-up comic. I don't play FF14 for comedy and trying to force me to 'have fun' with very subjective forms of humor isn't what I'm looking from my gaming experience. FF14 already wasn't as serious or dark as the other numbered titles, but now it's straight up starting to feel like the kiddie pool version of FF titles.

[CrownySuccubus]

now it's straight up starting to feel like the kiddie pool version of FF titles.

Can't really agree with this, either. FFXIV's humor doesn't land with me, true, but I hardly found that uncharacteristic for the series. Final Fantasy humor has rarely ever been high-brow or sophisticated. FFVII did a whole comedy routine based on Cloud bathing with a bunch of oiled-up muscleheads and being picked by the resident r--ist as his toy for the night. FFIX has a segment where you play Red-Light-Green-Light as a frog.

To be frank, the one FF game where the humor was mostly on-the-mark for me was FFXV. (A large chunk of that was Ardyn, but there were funny interactions between the main heroes as well.)

I guess FFXIV's "crime" here, as it were, is that everything is so padded and stretched out that when a joke "Doesn't Land", you have to watch the plane crashing in slllllloooooooooowww motion. Whereas most prior examples in the series just ripped the bandaid off quick.

[Rosenstrauch]

I guess FFXIV's "crime" here, as it were, is that everything is so padded and stretched out that when a joke "Doesn't Land", you have to watch the plane crashing in slllllloooooooooowww motion. Whereas most prior examples in the series just ripped the bandaid off quick.

This is it for me, at least.

EX: The entire moon section could be roughly summarized as "Twenty minutes of trying and failing to protect the world's greatest hero from an omnicidal clown, then upwards of an hour of getting Found In The Alps by comic relief rabbits".

[Tama-Kanzashi]

Having more light-hearted scenes is generally alright and not a problem, but FFXIV lately struggles heavily with the fact that you have to be very, very careful where in the story you decide to utilize them.

Having fast food while you are fully aware that in other parts of the world people are getting their souls shredded due to the apocalypse is just bad placement for that kind of scene - it would belong to the very start or the very end when there is no other, highly time-sensitive issue that needs to be addressed.

The loporrits did not feel like a natural continuation of the moon, they just were sudden, unfitting comic relief after we were exposed to some important information and fought a very important fight - and once again, we know that the Final Days are going to start all over, and having a bunch of furry creatures beat the dead horse that was the constant jokes about Rabbits! Carrots! was just jarring. But the loporrits are a whole other can of worms in itself.

And we will not talk about Y'shtola's magical girl thing and her happily sending her familiars into the great unknown.

If you are not careful with where and how you place these scenes and comedy beats, then you end up with a jumbled mess that can be stressful to digest at best and jarring and outright annoying at the worst.

[KizuyaKatogami]

Can't really agree with this, either. FFXIV's humor doesn't land with me, true, but I hardly found that uncharacteristic for the series. Final Fantasy humor has rarely ever been high-brow or sophisticated. FFVII did a whole comedy routine based on Cloud bathing with a bunch of oiled-up muscleheads and being picked by the resident r--ist as his toy for the night. FFIX has a segment where you play Red-Light-Green-Light as a frog.

To be frank, the one FF game where the humor was mostly on-the-mark for me was FFXV. (A large chunk of that was Ardyn, but there were funny interactions between the main heroes as well.)

I guess FFXIV's "crime" here, as it were, is that everything is so padded and stretched out that when a joke "Doesn't Land", you have to watch the plane crashing in slllllloooooooooowww motion. Whereas most prior examples in the series just ripped the bandaid off quick.

Those other games typically have actual consequences for either the world or the main cast though, so those light hearted moments are somewhat warranted. Whereas literally nothing happens to the main cast and it hasn’t happened in so long. We have the entire moon arc basically taken up by slice of life rabbits wanting us to play dress up. This is then mimicked at the 2nd labyrinthos visit where we spend a huge chunk of time playing tour guide for a bunch of rabbits.

[CrownySuccubus]

Those other games typically have actual consequences for either the world or the main cast though, so those light hearted moments are somewhat warranted. Whereas literally nothing happens to the main cast and it hasn’t happened in so long. We have the entire moon arc basically taken up by slice of life rabbits wanting us to play dress up. This is then mimicked at the 2nd labyrinthos visit where we spend a huge chunk of time playing tour guide for a bunch of rabbits.

As I've said elsewhere, Endwalker is the "Final Disc" of the FFXIV story. It's the "Hero's Return" portion of the tale where said heroes apply what they've learned into overcoming whatever the final adversary of the plot is. Sure, more dire stakes would have been cool, but it didn't make or break the arc. However, with that said, the reason the problem is so pronounced is because of the constant fake-outs. If you're not going to kill anyone in the main cast, then fine.....but stop trying to pretend that you might.

Having fast food while you are fully aware that in other parts of the world people are getting their souls shredded due to the apocalypse is just bad placement for that kind of scene - it would belong to the very start or the very end when there is no other, highly time-sensitive issue that needs to be addressed.

But that hadn't even happened yet, by that point in the story.