Yoshi-P lied

[xxmiamorecadenza]

After NA Fanfest (assuming that they're going to announce the next expac there) all there cards should be on the table. Right now just feels like the prologue to Kingdom Hearts 2.

O gawd. That prologue bored me to TEARS when I was a kid.

[AwesomeJr44]

Was there even a Story?

So basically:

Cat girl wants to unlock dimensional teleport so she opens a portal to the evil dimension where Exdeath's black friend is waiting with his four kids. We beat up his first two kids and recruit DeviantArt OC to help us using the magic of friendship. DeviantArt OC then becomes nice after eating a biscuit and helps us beat up Exdeath's black friend's other two kids. As we beat up the last kid, he says "haha I blew up your portal xdd lmao" and then dies. Exdeath's black friend is then waiting on the moon to engage us in a 1v1 duel for reasons of unspecified origin.

Meanwhile in the god dimension, 12 gods are standing in a circle waiting for some schmuck to show up and fight them as they've somehow caught the battle addict virus from the blonde reaper prince before he turned into a dragozord. The hobo heroes ask why said gods wanna fight so bad and get "lol lmao xdd, figure it out yourself kekw" as an answer. Thus the warrior of cringe and his buddies begin to lay the smackdown on Thor, Sailor Moon, a guy with multiple personality disorder, and the rest of them.

Finally, in the distant past, Chain-not-saw Man is angy at his dad, the Bread, for being a poo poo head, but Bread tells him to get over himself. As it turns out, Bread once nuked his wife for the crime of being cringe, and ascended to such a level of based that he tore the cringe from his body, becoming the Chadbread, but unfortunately creating a separate being of pure cringe. The Cringe Lord then takes Chadbread's three closest friends and infects them with the cringe. Thus, Chain-not-saw Man, Chadbread, Not-Elidibus, and the warrior of cringe must defeat the Cringe Lord and his minions to save everyone from something of unspecified details. Once they do, Cringe Lord's cringe palace appears in the modern day, and the warrior of cringe will probably 1v1 Chain-not-saw Man's mom as she does something.

That's basically it. Basically.

[Absurdity]

*snip*

As cringe as this summary is, at least it made me chuckle once, which is more than can be said about Hildibrand since HW or the MSQ's comedy skits.

There's so many huh takes in this...

PvP had more people trying it but it's missing critical features that will let it sustain. Like queuing with friends. Not to mention the netcode issue I mentioned above.

The MSQ dungeons are more boring then ever. Comparing them to trials is a laugh. Two pulls, door, two pulls, boss with two mechanics at best that you can often just stand in with no consequences.

The last BLU update was 5.4 and it can't do current expansion anything.

Criteron dugeons have no replayablitiy at all.

With all that plus some other things like the joke relic weapons, I fail to see how quality has increased.

They spent all of their quality budget on that bread animation in the 6.3 MSQ. I'm not even being sarcastic, custom animations take a long time to make. Why they would spend that much effort on some bread that you see once for like a minute is an entirely different question however.

The dungeon one is comical though, comparing the absolute snoozefest that is dungeon bosses to trials is a hot take if I've ever seen one. It makes normal mode trials sound a lot worse than they actually are.

[Escence]

So basically:

Cat girl wants to unlock dimensional teleport so she opens a portal to the evil dimension where Exdeath's black friend is waiting with his four kids. We beat up his first two kids and recruit DeviantArt OC to help us using the magic of friendship. DeviantArt OC then becomes nice after eating a biscuit and helps us beat up Exdeath's black friend's other two kids. As we beat up the last kid, he says "haha I blew up your portal xdd lmao" and then dies. Exdeath's black friend is then waiting on the moon to engage us in a 1v1 duel for reasons of unspecified origin.

Meanwhile in the god dimension, 12 gods are standing in a circle waiting for some schmuck to show up and fight them as they've somehow caught the battle addict virus from the blonde reaper prince before he turned into a dragozord. The hobo heroes ask why said gods wanna fight so bad and get "lol lmao xdd, figure it out yourself kekw" as an answer. Thus the warrior of cringe and his buddies begin to lay the smackdown on Thor, Sailor Moon, a guy with multiple personality disorder, and the rest of them.

Finally, in the distant past, Chain-not-saw Man is angy at his dad, the Bread, for being a poo poo head, but Bread tells him to get over himself. As it turns out, Bread once nuked his wife for the crime of being cringe, and ascended to such a level of based that he tore the cringe from his body, becoming the Chadbread, but unfortunately creating a separate being of pure cringe. The Cringe Lord then takes Chadbread's three closest friends and infects them with the cringe. Thus, Chain-not-saw Man, Chadbread, Not-Elidibus, and the warrior of cringe must defeat the Cringe Lord and his minions to save everyone from something of unspecified details. Once they do, Cringe Lord's cringe palace appears in the modern day, and the warrior of cringe will probably 1v1 Chain-not-saw Man's mom as she does something.

That's basically it. Basically.

Best summary ever!

[Kyrj]

At this point I'm ready for the man to just let go of 14 and devote all of his time to something else. You're either 100% working on an MMORPG or not at all. If you're tired of working on it, and I don't blame you for being tired of it, then move on.

[Avoidy]

It's obvious to anyone playing the game and paying attention that post-ew is somewhat lackluster because the group's A-Team is off making FF16 great. And all I can say in response to that, is FF16 better be fucking worth it.

[Atelier-Bagur]

It's obvious to anyone playing the game and paying attention that post-ew is somewhat lackluster because the group's A-Team is off making FF16 great. And all I can say in response to that, is FF16 better be fucking worth it.

its also because this whole arc has ended anyway. We're back to ARR levels of build up so of course to a lot of people the story will be boring. You cant have rising action against rising action all the time, thats not how good storytelling works.

[Midareyukki]

its also because this whole arc has ended anyway. We're back to ARR levels of build up so of course to a lot of people the story will be boring. You cant have rising action against rising action all the time, thats not how good storytelling works.

Even then, I really fail to see what the main plot is shaping up to be. An ARR build-up served to introduce the wider world to you, often overwhelming you with different plot points and storylines that would often interject eachother. You went from the City States and their drama, the Void, the Ascians, Goblins, Rogue Factions, Beast Tribes, why we can't access other city states, what's the deal with dragons, what Ala Mhigo is, mentioning the Bozja Incident like it was just a thing that happened, barely acknowledging the existance of other continents, everything Allag related, even Eureka at one point...
Then HSW elaborated further on the Ascian bit while focusing heavily on Ishgard.
Stormblood showed us Ala Mhigo, Doma and gave a bit of focus to Garlemald.
Shadowbringers focused on the other shards, most notably the First and a bit of the Thirteenth, and the side quests were mostly focusing on the revolting conquered provinces.
6.0 resolved almost everything and opened Sharlayan and Thavnair, as well as Emet dropping hints of further content that we knew existed since ARR such as Meracydia.
Most everything else got resolved in sidequests.

Currently the MSQ is focusing on elaborating on the Void. Little else is being opened up as relevant to the main plot in the side quests. Island Sanctuary is an isolated thing. Myths of the Realm is self-contained. Eureka Orthros doesn't seem to have any connecting ties to the MSQ. Variant Dungeons are also self-contained...

We're not getting ARR levels of build up, even though that's what we're supposedly meant to be doing. We're in a similar phase, but the focus is totally different. Rather than focusing on showing us several different things, they're hard-focusing on one story. On one hand, that's great, because the overwhelming and "all over the place" nature of ARR didn't garner it any favours and it can help keep the devs focused and not make stories that lead nowhere. But on the other hand it's kind of making it awkward for future content. Because we're not setting anything major up other than the Void and possibly Meracydia. That really is no different than the average X.4 and X.5 storylines, which serve to introduce the next expansion and hint toward it. From that, it feels like we're just playing a long X.4-5 bit rather than anything being established and introduced at an ARR scale.

[Atelier-Bagur]

We're not getting ARR levels of build up, even though that's what we're supposedly meant to be doing. We're in a similar phase, but the focus is totally different. Rather than focusing on showing us several different things, they're hard-focusing on one story. On one hand, that's great, because the overwhelming and "all over the place" nature of ARR didn't garner it any favours and it can help keep the devs focused and not make stories that lead nowhere. But on the other hand it's kind of making it awkward for future content. Because we're not setting anything major up other than the Void and possibly Meracydia. That really is no different than the average X.4 and X.5 storylines, which serve to introduce the next expansion and hint toward it. From that, it feels like we're just playing a long X.4-5 bit rather than anything being established and introduced at an ARR scale.

oooor its just people being impatient with the story when its pacing is already going by pretty fast with the events of whatever its building up. I will reserve full judgment of it until 7.0 comes out officially but so far its been interesting despite coming off the high stakes with Endwalker. When I say ARR levels of build up, I dont necessarily mean being all over the pace, I mean the slow build up to whatever thats coming, more specifically the patch stories that lead to the bloody banquet, which nobody expected to go down so hard in both stakes and tone compared to what was presented with base ARR. I have a feeling we're going to get a 2nd bloody banquet of sorts in terms of setup but I could totally be wrong.

[Jojoya]

Even then, I really fail to see what the main plot is shaping up to be.

Main plot to what? Post 6.0 is intended to be a short story, complete in itself. YoshiP has told us that the main story arcs going forward will be varying in length depending on the story they want to tell but non will be as long as the Hydaelyn/Zodiark arc was.

The prologue to the new main story in 7.0 won't occur until 6.55, when YoshiP has told us there will be some major unexpected event occurring that sets us up for 7.0.

At best we have hints from the 6.0 cutscene in UT about things we will see at some point in the future.

The ruins beneath the waters of the Bounty - done

The treasure islands beyond the frozen waters of Blindfrost in northern Othard - pending

The golden cities of the New World - pending

The sacred sites of the forgotten people of the south seas isles (lalafell lore!) - pending

Meracydia - pending

True identities of the Twelve - in progress

Other civilizations on the reflections: one is in progress but it's heavily implied we'll get to see others as well

The current post 6.0 story is about 2 different things: the search for and rescue of Azdaja and Y'shtola's quest to find a way to travel freely within the reflections. My guess is that 6.5 is going to wrap up the first (which might very well lead us to Meracydia) and 6.55 is going to be completion of the second - with unexpected results (and the ability to see the remaining reflections).