A game for 4 year olds

[rxantos]

Sorry, but ANYTHING that is put in the game is canon. A good writer makes sure it NEVER contradicts itself. You do not get a remake unless you can put it in the story. Square is usually good at it. But sometimes they make mistakes, just as everyone else.

The only exception are the minstrel ballads that are supposed to be exaggerations of what you did by the minstrel. And that's because the minstrel doing exaggerations is on itself canon.

[aveyond-dreams]

I think OP forgot that the premise of these quests is that there is a new star composed entirely of Dynamis barking on Ultima Thule's door. The concern about making everyone sing kumbaya instead of falling into their previous lives is that if the new star grows negatively, then it will basically be a second coming of Meteion, except truly unknown rather than having a splinter of humanity within.

Like, for as whimsical as these quests are, there's literally the looming threat of existential destruction. The thing bringing about all the whimsy could just as easily turn sour. It's actually kind of like having a gun held to your head and being told, "You have to smile and have fun, otherwise the gun goes off." Except in this case, it's every living dead soul in Ultima Thule as well as potentially the rest of the universe.

As others have repeated... making me want to make Lyth-like comparisons of alt accounts and what not, all the other Crafter/Gatherer based beast tribe quests are just as non-sensical/whimsical/worth complaining over as this one is. Or at least within spitting distance of this.

You might wanna go beat on a different drum for a while, because at this point you're performing the labor of the negative. There are better uses for your time and thoughts.

Pay attention to things within their full context, please. I understand why y'all don't like this, but you're misrepresenting the quest chain by and large.

The additional information you've just provided just makes the questline seem even more ridiculous. In an expansion where this sort of grandoise+preachy writing is in nearly every direction one looks, it's not surprising that after feeling cornered that some people are going to then lash out against this stuff. Maybe just maybe if the current game wasn't so oversaturated with cosmic-level fluff, this beast tribe would've gone over without much fuss.

Though that doesn't solve the issue of these races being given a second chance while Yoshi tells us we're supposed to find the ancients scary.

[MikkoAkure]

Maybe just maybe if the current game wasn't so oversaturated with cosmic-level fluff, this beast tribe would've gone over without much fuss.

Though that doesn't solve the issue of these races being given a second chance while Yoshi tells us we're supposed to find the ancients scary.

The only fuss is from a handful of posters on a forum ignored by the vast majority of players, let alone the devs themselves. A single quest was taken out of context from the questline as a whole in order to make another tired “Endwalker bad” post despite the fact that previous expansions have had sillier premises for tribal quests, which almost always have been pure fluff that exists as an excuse to have daily quests.


These races aren’t exactly getting a second chance either, they’re dead and gone. They’re not real people. Some of them are simulations created by another simulation. The whole point of the questline is to let their shades find peace in “death” on a planet named after one of the afterlifes in Greek mythology. What would the point of it all be if we just let them continue fighting or kill them all so as to not endanger the new Dynamis star?


Just because it’s fantasy doesn’t mean it needs to be a grimdark setting where bad stuff always happens and everything is drenched in grey morality. The Lord of the Rings is the father of basically every modern fantasy and it’s considered by some today to be “hopepunk” and it’s preachy in themes of hope in lost causes and friendship surmounting pure evil.

The Ancients were written and created by Yoshi-P and his team. They don’t have a specific agenda of spiting them just to make posters on the forum upset. Like what we’re doing with the people in Ultima Thule, their society collapsed but the dead have now accepted it after their loss and moved on just like you should too.

[Lurina]

These races aren’t exactly getting a second chance either, they’re dead and gone. They’re not real people. Some of them are simulations created by another simulation. The whole point of the questline is to let their shades find peace in “death” on a planet named after one of the afterlifes in Greek mythology. What would the point of it all be if we just let them continue fighting or kill them all so as to not endanger the new Dynamis star?

Not to nitpick, but there's a whole quest that challenges the idea that not "real" just because they're recreations and emphasizes that they do have and deserve a future.

[RyuDragnier]

I find it funny that people are complaining about a quest nobody can get to yet. Omicron questline isn't up to that point yet, it won't be for another 3 days, IF that one shows up next.

[Veloran]

It's nothing revolutionary and is still a little preachy, but I think it's a little strange to be so hostile to it just because a handful of reconstructed survivors from civilizations millennia dead are not sufficiently holding on to their grudges. The premise is that the people in Ultima Thule have reached the end-stage of destructive nihilism, where they no longer hate specific things but reject life on a foundational level, and so obviously the quest is about mending their connection to it so they can begin feeling anything again. In that sense, you have to start from the ground up - finding joy in the fulfillment of basic needs, like eating.

Setting aside the thematic repetition, the core issue is how easy it is. You just described a battle against existential self-destruction and millennia-old hatreds but it's handled like giving out treats to distract a child from a paper cut.

In fact, I think it's kinda funny that someone tried to bring up Dark Souls as the antithesis, because Soulsborne has also been willing to be really silly. If those games were 100% dour and serious, they wouldn't be fun, they'd just be a miserable slog; it's why they deploy a bunch of silly slapstick traps, why they introduce light-hearted jokey characters like Catarinan knights and Trusty Patches, or super weird creature designs like the basilisks or great serpents. There needs to be a light somewhere in the darkness, or else it doesn't feel like there's any value traversing it.

I think you're forgetting the reason it works, because of the contrast. Yes you have jolly Catarina knights, but in nearly every game their questlines are filled with tragedy. You get the amusement of Patches but he's truly scum that betrays you for treasure at every turn. You get trusty Solaire but he's on a desperate, doomed mission. Light moments and levity and whimsy shine much brighter because they're being balanced by that darkness. But so much of the time, XIV only focuses on the light, the bright side, the silver linings. We never seem to be allowed to lose things, and problems constantly get solved in the most expeditious ways.

And at some point, you stop believing the story. The world stops being a reflection and just becomes a fairy-tail. I think Yoshida said that with everything bad going on in the world he really wanted Endwalker to focus on making the player feel hopeful and optimistic, but paradoxically that makes me feel just the opposite, because it feels fake. Obviously this is something that goes way beyond the Omicron quests though, it's more like the tone of the game as a whole.

The Lord of the Rings is the father of basically every modern fantasy and it’s considered by some today to be “hopepunk” and it’s preachy in themes of hope in lost causes and friendship surmounting pure evil.

As said by people who don't understand Lord of the Rings and what Tolkien thought of the world. He essentially believed that all of history is a downward spiral into mediocracy and the greatest gift given by god (Eru Ilúvatar) to mankind are souls which find no contentment with the mortal world, which can die and truly be removed from it forever. LotR is a way more complete setting than XIV in terms of it's approach to themes of light against darkness and how hope is found or created. The whole climax of the story revolves around the fact that the hero succumbs to evil and cannot resist it's allure at the final moment, only for a twist of fate brought about by a small act of mercy and kindness to save the world. That's a way stronger implementation of XIV's core theme than how Endwalker did it, exactly because it allowed all hope to truly be lost at the most critical time, and allowed the consequences of everything that had happened to weigh forward into the epilogue.

It may just not be fair to compare XIV to LotR, but what I'm getting at here is that there's something missing, elements that make things incomplete. But again, this is all kind of an aside to just these quests in isolation.

[Lustre]

Ishgardians shouldve just given a big tasty cake to Nidhogg, I'm sure all would've been forgiven considering that's how we resolve genocidal conflicts nowadays

[Lyth]

As much as you're no doubt excited to debate over the ideal cheeseburger menu for the Last Dregs, would it be possible to ease up on the spoilers to allow people to experience the content for themselves? Or at the very least, use some [HB] spoiler tags on them out of courtesy.

And some tables unfortunately just don't lend themselves very well to an à la carte service, this one included. I personally find that stories work best when they're left to the writer's own devices to set up the best possible combination without outside interference; table d’hôte.

[RukoBoshi]

Next time do we complain about the seasonal events not being dark enough ?

[Cleretic]

Sorry, but ANYTHING that is put in the game is canon. A good writer makes sure it NEVER contradicts itself. You do not get a remake unless you can put it in the story. Square is usually good at it. But sometimes they make mistakes, just as everyone else.

The only exception are the minstrel ballads that are supposed to be exaggerations of what you did by the minstrel. And that's because the minstrel doing exaggerations is on itself canon.

And incidentally, I would say that the most fun part of even its joke questlines is that they're undeniably canon, that even the silliest of gag stories take the world around them completely seriously and even introduce entirely new lore that has multiple times gone on to be seriously used in the core story.

Hildibrand introduced the concept of a primal being accidentally summoned, which the MSQ later saw in Stormblood. It was the first time we heard the full story of Sil'dih way back in the 2.x quests, a part of the setting we only started going into seriously yesterday. It's still the only story that really discusses Hingan politics. The qitari explain what happened to some of the other races on the First, Good King Moggle Mog XII turned out to be a very real historical figure that heavily recontextualized our previous assumptions.

I actually hate Hildibrand's comedy, but I hang on to every word of its story because the comedy questlines have always provided a crucially different, but no less valid, view of the world the game's set in.