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

[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.