What Forge Ahead Actually Means

[DiaDeem]

snip

Not to go point by point, and though I think you're still reaching for some of them, I'll give you this: Death or not, I can understand if you've felt there's been a de-escalation of stakes in regards to straight out character danger, because to that I can agree.

I wanna round it up, because I don't want us to start going in circles. My main argument is that there's many other ways to have an interesting conflict that lets the characters grow other than them dying or not, and it's a bit tiring to keep going back to the same "they should just die" plot argument. There can be so much more. I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but aveyond had a bit of a point about making characters disagree with each other. Triangle Strategy has a rather awesome party, and they often disagree in their values a morals, and we didn't have much of that with our XIV party. I do believe the Scions have had nice growth moments built on all sorts of conflicts, though I think by now we've exhausted much of what can be done with them, and why I'd be really happy to have a new cast in 7.0

[Striker44]

Take some agency and just block the guy so you don't have to see/bump his threads if you hate him criticizing your favorite toy so much.

Note: Blocking someone doesn't remove threads they start from your view in the forums, only posts they make within a thread that's already been started.

[SieyaM]

So just so I am understanding this, Ultima Thule is supposed to be fine because the characters now blatantly state there are no stakes everyone will be fine and they know they are in no real danger and there is no real sacrifice to be made.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

So just so I am understanding this, Ultima Thule is supposed to be fine because the characters now blatantly state there are no stakes everyone will be fine and they know they are in no real danger and there is no real sacrifice to be made.

I thought it simple really. They weren't positive they'd come out alive. So the sacrifices were real, as they had no way of knowing it'd all work out

[hagare]

Yeah but blocking does nothing. Yeah it removes THEIR post...but if it's quoted then you see it from there. Blocking people will only 100% work if that person never says anything quotable.

Take me for example. You can block me but if I say something and someone else quotes it...

Then "hello there". It's me again. You thought I was gone? No. I live through others.

Now if it actually blocked the quoted lines too...oh YEAH would a lot more people use it. Myself included.

and their thread still pops up.
I wish it doesn't.

[Xirean]

I thought it simple really. They weren't positive they'd come out alive. So the sacrifices were real, as they had no way of knowing it'd all work out

Just gonna throw this out there. Imo it doesn't matter if they don't know if they will come back or not. It matters if the player believes it possible they won't. If this were a game like Dragon Age or Mass Effect then the set up of Ultima Thule works because it would be very possible that you could mess up a choice and they stay gone. With XIV that's just not the case. We know the WoL is going to win in the end, always. If they don't then they die and the game ends, which is just not going to happen unless it's decided to pull a 1.0 again.

[VelKallor]

We know the WoL is going to win in the end, always.

Do we? No.

We didnt know Papalymo would make that sacrifice until the last moment. We had no idea Ysayle would throw herself at that Garlean warship.

We knew we would make it, yes, but we had no idea at Ultima how this would turn out.

[Limecat]

What forging ahead should really be is a system where there's a collectable token you can craft now, that has the requirements of the next unreleased tier of synths. Make it one of those "must be 100% quality" things. Then when that upcoming patch does happen, there's an NPC you can trade the token to for one of the HQ new whatevers.

[Avoidy]

Endwalker isn't a stand-alone story. It's the culmination of the entire game until now. We've already seen the Scions go through their arcs, get beaten down and get back up again, all that. This is the final climax, where they've worked out their problems and move forward as one.

It's just not a very interesting setup to me. Imagine watching a long sequel film where everyone's resolved their conflicts already. Sure it's not a standalone story. But if the characters are mostly staying the same, did it really need to be told? To me, Endwalker just felt like the writers wrapping up plot objectives so they could call it a day. From a storytelling standpoint, it simply wasn't memorable to me the way HW or even ShB was. EW felt like a really plot driven story, while everything before it felt more character driven AND plot driven.

And we've already had that story, so why should we do it again? Do the Scions need to keep getting beaten down so they can go through the same character development over and over?

What kind of question is this? When I brought up an example of a part of the story that I enjoyed, it wasn't because I want them to do the exact same thing verbatim. It was to show that the story used to have internal conflict and consequences, which isn't possible anymore now that the current cast has run its course.

You mean after A: we found out she wasn't really a deity, she was a primal, and B: she outright told us to use the rest of her power to charge the ship?

Yes? To me, these elements actually warrant a lot more discussion and existential dread on the part of anyone who learns the truth. It didn't get enough time to sit.

If you're referring to the part where we help finish the ship, that was before the Aitiascope (in fact, getting the ship finished was a prerequisite to getting to go down there in the first place).

I was referring to that part after the Hydaelyn trial, where you're sent on fetch quests for something or other. You'll have to forgive me if I don't remember the specifics; I just recall going through that major bombshell loredump cutscene and then immediately being sent on fetch quests and feeling really taken out of the story at that point.

There were no burgers involved here at any point. There are brief scenes of the Scions around Sharlayan, because they're basically getting out of the way while the actual tech-minded people get to work. And there's little reaction to Hydaelyn's death because she literally told us to use her soul as a power source.

I'm saying there should have been a reaction, because normal people don't emerge from the cave of their own ignorance and then just shrug it off without freaking out a little bit. To me this represented a missed opportunity.

Were we supposed to stop in the middle of dealing with the crisis to worry about dealing with the crisis? It would just come across as padding, and EW's pacing is wonky enough already.

YES. Fuck this is so awkward to write because you keep asking questions like "so what, should we have dedicated TIME to EXPLORE THIS TOPIC?" and my answer to that will always be yes. Absolutely yes. Kill a fetch quest or two and dedicate that time to actually giving the story realistic debate, disagreement, and drama. 100 times yes.

Assuming you meant disagreed and that was just a typo.....The alternative was to let the Final Days play out and kill everyone who couldn't make it onto the ship or the moon (and worse than kill, but we didn't know about Meteion's whole "hoard everyone's souls to end reincarnation" plot yet). Which Scion would you really picture saying "Y'know what, screw it, can't save 'em all" and just leaving people to die? (Not to mention, that was basically Fourchenault's arc through most of EW, so having a Scion randomly repeat it at the last minute would be redundant.)

I did mean disagreed, but I didn't notice because I stop coming here once I leave work lol. The alternative being really really terrible (massive loss of life but not total loss of life) but still better than the possibility of failing and letting everyone die, is exactly what makes those two choices so compelling. Absolutely, give me THAT debate in endwalker please. Fourchenault taking the prissy-bitch route isn't really fair or compelling, because Fourchenault doesn't have the power to fight back against Meteion like the scions do so fourchenault has no choice given his time or resources, but to flee. If it's a scion saying it, then there's suddenly internal conflict; a character's lost their nerve and isn't convinced that we have what it takes. To me, that's compelling. To me, that presents two options that both seem convincing, served up by a character who's able to fight but choosing not to for some reason. I hope you can see how it's different when it's one person saying it versus another totally different person with different circumstances. That's not redundant.

They're arcane familiars. They're like tiny primals. They are literally not living beings.

Yeah, I mentioned that in my post. I'm aware that they're not technically alive. If you go back and read it again, you'll see that that entire paragraph was a hypothetical on how they could have made these old characters compelling in post-EW by giving them selfish but understandable motives that force them to behave in understandable but ultimately damaging and conflicting ways.

It's hard to take this seriously when your first paragraph is complaining about how no one is allowed to die.

It's but one example of how this game's story lacks stakes or any real drama. If nothing bad can happen to your characters, then the climactic moments lack weight. If your characters are already complete, then their 30 hour endwalker storyline feels like checking off boxes on the writer's plot to-do list without any satisfying character growth.

The post-EW patches have already reduced everyone but Y'shtola and Estinien to basically cameos while we hang out with Zero and Vrtra, so.....congrats? Whether that will continue into 7.0, none of us can accurately say, unless you have a crystal ball handy.

Yeah I think I either mentioned it here or in some other post about the story, that I hope they don't just turn Zero into some post-EW filler character who gets removed. I don't even like her, but at least she has issues that can provide space for something different. It's such a low bar but it's better than a cast that's already worked through their shit.

I've said it before, but: Even though I like the Scions, I would like a break from them for a while. But walking back their entire characters just for the sake of drama would be absolutely terrible writing.

In my ideal world, we'd just drop these characters because they're finished. But if the writers are too attached to drop them, then they could make them compelling by making them behave like human beings who occasionally do selfish shit to get what they want. Since the scions are actually so good (in a righteous sense) that they're boring, it would feel kind of weird to make Thancred do something selfish just to see Ryne again, but it would also humanize the guy a lot. In the end, we don't need a crystal ball to know that these writers aren't going to have the balls to do anything exciting with the scions, so for that reason I'm glad they're not as present in post-ew and I hope they continue to stay gone so other characters with their own issues can appear and hopefully be interesting.

Note: Blocking someone doesn't remove threads they start from your view in the forums, only posts they make within a thread that's already been started.

Actually didn't know that, but it explains a lot. Can't say I'm even surprised that the forum block list is about as impotent as the in game blacklist.

Also, formatting this was a huge pain in the ass, I hate this site. If you reply again I'll probably just respond with like a paragraph or something. I've said everything I wanted to say though, and at this point I feel like I've said it twice. If you don't feel like certain areas of the story are worth looking at closely that's fine.

[Turnintino]

Love 'em or hate 'em, I just wish that more of the main Scions weren't Sharalayan-educated exposition machines lol.

Like, regardless of how the narrative uses them, I just think it'd be nice to... idk... maybe have more than one perspective in the main cast.

We have Estinien, who's just... present. And arguably Thancred, since his education was non-traditional compared to the others -- but other than his role in ShB, the writers tend to treat him as more of a tool than a character. If he's not gathering intelligence for us, he's just kind of there (if he's there at all), contributing nothing. And for that reason, I've never found him particularly interesting/compelling. But it's telling, I think, that he's arguably one of the least redundant Scions, both in terms of perspective and utility, and yet the narrative still rarely takes advantage of that.

I personally love characters like Y'shtola, Urianger, and G'raha, but functionally, they (and the other main Scions -- I didn't list everyone because I'm indifferent to the rest lol) are just different flavors of the same role.