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

[AwesomeJr44]

Writing overall seems to have dropped off a cliff. Will ultimately reserve judgment until after 7.0 drops.

I'm kinda in the same boat. If 7.0 is as bad as 6.0 Endwalker was, I'll probably lose any small amount of faith I have left in the writers to turn this ship around.

[aveyond-dreams]

I'm kinda in the same boat. If 7.0 is as bad as 6.0 Endwalker was, I'll probably lose any small amount of faith I have left in the writers to turn this ship around.

There are games with weak stories that can get away with having good gameplay to make up for it. There are games with jank gameplay but have stories so good that you can power through them.

Current FFXIV is neither. The story seems to have been co-opted by individuals who shall not be named that essentially threw out everything that preceded them to prop up their own lacklustre work. I could have forgiven this but as of now my main class only barely plays like the level 50 version we should have gotten back in ARR and my other favourite Paladin got destroyed by a rework it did not need. There is also no repeatable content to take any class in, and with patch cycles extended needlessly the game is now in what feels like a perpetual content drought.

With Yoshi deciding to nerf the final boss of FFXVI and his focus on the easy mode accessories in that game, I have no delusions that combat here will ever see a significant improvement. The story however could in theory be salvaged if whatever comes in 7.0 is completely divorced from the trashfire writing we've been subjected to this expansion - but only time will tell. What is certain is that a handful of people will proceed to seal-clap for anything and everything they put out regardless of how good or bad it is. All while screaming in our faces about how glad they'd be to be rid of us.

GCBTW.

[Rosenstrauch]

Can't help but notice that the last two pages seem... off. Like, enough posts disappeared that it seems like Lurina's post went to the "next" page despite the total page count going down.

Does moderation truly exist on this forum? I wonder what even got deleted.

As mildly alluded to, there's a similar situation in Mass Effect 2. Legion's loyalty mission involves rewriting the Geth "heretics" so that they will no longer worship The Reapers. You can rewrite them or destroy them. It varies according to each third wheel member, but a couple of them quip up with, "Rewriting them is worse than outright destroying them because you're killing their identity." One of the responses Shepard can retort with is something along the lines of, "We can't apply biological ethics to synthetic beings! They're different!"

There's a parallel to this in one of the level 90 dungeon quests. The Omicron only ever stopped their omnicidal strip mining of the universe because they ran out of stronger things to attack, so after the defeat of Meteion, one of their higher ups decided to launch an attack on Etheirys. Sir—I think it was Sir, at least—has you dive into that Omicron's memory in order to "convince" it that an attack on Etheirys would lead to the Omicron's downfall. Which you accomplish by, uh, killing it in a dream, I guess? And somehow this causes that Omicron to do a complete 180 and suddenly want to save all the people Meteion trapped in Ultima Thule (which leads into the Omicron Tribe quests).

Of course, since this is FFXIV and specifically Ultima Thule, any question of ethical ambiguity is thrown out the window. Move forward, see you feel you, etc. Also the presence of the Omicron as one of the Dead Ends strongly implies that their star(s?) is(are?) no more, and yet the threat this singular Omicron poses is played very seriously, iirc.

Also also, that same dungeon strongly suggested that many, if not all of the Omicron's alternate forms, are actually enslaved races that the Omicron conquered and converted into soulless machines. That, of course, gets glossed over too.

[fulminating]

If 7.0 is a low stakes 5 zones of meracydia + not-antarctica with Aenor and the Boulder brothers, I think it could go a long way toward addressing several of the key issues with endwalker.

[Picker]

The best part of this thread is seeing beyondreams complain about an “unneeded rework of paladin” that ruins the job for them after spending the last year crying about “poison mage summoner/dot mage” lmao. I bet they want the old paladin “dot-knight” job to come back rofl, new paladin spits all over the pal job fantasy of using dots!”, “If I wanted to play a non-dot tank I’d play dark knight raaaaaar!”

[fulminating]

The best part of this thread is seeing beyondreams complain about an “unneeded rework of paladin” that ruins the job for them after spending the last year crying about “poison mage summoner/dot mage” lmao. I bet they want the old paladin “dot-knight” job to come back rofl, new paladin spits all over the pal job fantasy of using dots!”, “If I wanted to play a non-dot tank I’d play dark knight raaaaaar!”

Wait is that the job he was praising for playing like a lv50 one in his post? Given his forum description I thought he meant white mage. Wow, has there even been a more unnecessary rework than the summoner one?

[aveyond-dreams]

Anyone who is comparing the Paladin rework to the much needed Summoner one is not arguing in good faith and is hardly worth the time of day to directly respond to. Summoner should have always been an actual Final Fantasy Summoner - not a cheap ripoff from WoW's warlock. Paladin's loss of distinct physical and magical phases is something that stings a lot more than the loss of a flaming trash heap that no one knew what to do with anymore.

Regardless, if you want to discuss those topics further go make your own thread about it instead of clogging up this one with it. At the end of the day the story is still a smouldering waste and I struggle to believe any worthwhile payoff is on the way. A far cry from the hype back in the Stormblood patches and Shadowbringers ones.

[redheadturk]

Anyone who is comparing the Paladin rework to the much needed Summoner one is not arguing in good faith and is hardly worth the time of day to directly respond to. Summoner should have always been an actual Final Fantasy Summoner - not a cheap ripoff from WoW's warlock. Paladin's loss of distinct physical and magical phases is something that stings a lot more than the loss of a flaming trash heap that no one knew what to do with anymore.

Regardless, if you want to discuss those topics further go make your own thread about it instead of clogging up this one with it. At the end of the day the story is still a smouldering waste and I struggle to believe any worthwhile payoff is on the way. A far cry from the hype back in the Stormblood patches and Shadowbringers ones.

Keep the SMN reworks, but add my dots back SE! No better feeling than finishing off a boss with your last tick of bio during a mechanic lol.

[MagiusNecros]

Keep the SMN reworks, but add my dots back SE! No better feeling than finishing off a boss with your last tick of bio during a mechanic lol.

Next xpac Bard will lose their DoTs next just you wait.

[Ranaku]

Idk why people hate the story, we killed mommy and daddy, completely wasted Anima as a underwhelming dungeonboss, went to thousand different places and spent almost no time there, witnessed the creation of twitter by some depressed ancient emo, got told how bad the final days would be but then they lasted just like a week or so and only Thavnair got hit, went to the moon to see that Minfillia has now a fursona, had the father of the twins be so badly written that his actions totally contradicted what he said, lost all out friends...for like half a quest, walked five steps to the end and then summoned all our friends back cause we still need them to deliver exposition, killed our only true friend who the same as us never gave a fork about what was going on (we all know like Zenos we are just in for the loot!).

Oh yeah and now we teach a half breed voidsent the meaning of friendship and food and basic human concepts, guess soon we will open a kindergarten for Zero. We still can't get rid of the old plotlines and i am scared of the still five remaining shards of zodiark out there and all the remaining low Ascians. Cause like the maincast of scions who retired for like five minutes before delivering exposition galore again we can be sure that the writers will never drop the ancients/zodiark plotline.

So much for "Newfound Adventures". The only new adventure i found is literally enslaving myself for Tatarus Island Paradise sweatshop in promise of glam and cool mounts.