Thread: Endwalker is the lowest point of this game since 1.0

Originally Posted by Theodric

I always found the scathing distaste for ARR to be rather bizarre. It was very common for a lot of players to insist that the game only truly started with HW but...that simply wasn't true at all. ARR had a lot of fetch quests that could and were shortened down but plenty of world and character building took place that had actual pay off in later expansions.

Large swathes of the game's established lore seems to be at risk of just being completely retconned out of the blue. Sharlayan, for example, was established as a sinister and shady isolationist nation that sent assassins to kill or threaten anybody who shared knowledge with the outside world without permission.

Tell me about it. I dont mind Sharlayan how it turned out, but what I find odd is how they ignore one whole faction of Sharlayan (the one who is purely isolationist and used the likes of assassination back then, atleast that was implied) but we dont see anything of that in the slightest in Endwalker. It's like the GoT meme where they suddenly just forgot about that. It's clear the devs didn't had any clear picture for them or changed it midway development. But it's not only that, the worldbuilding at large suffers in one way or another these last couple years.

People can hate on ARR, but the worldbuilding, sense of exploration, uncertain nature of the world was exhibited quite well. We can definitely see, the devs play it very safe right now. Major character deaths are not a thing anymore, points of conflicts (like the pirates of Limsa) were resolved too quickly, Garlemald and the future of it is arguably up in the air (but it does seem pretty safe as well) etc. Points of conflict and the uncertain, always changing nature of the world gets sucked out of the game. I dont know how to feel about it.

Originally Posted by fulminating

But know that the Forum is ever listening, ever watching. Should you continue your escapades here in Ishgard, they will find out.

And they will send others until they have succeeded where I have...failed."

This made me interpret it as a tacitly approved action rather than being entirely behind their back, especially with how whatsherface reacted too. There's other stuff that's less overt, but I'd have to think more about where it is. Think matoya made some comments, might have been some in idyllshire sidequests too?

The worst part is Sevestre is shown a couple of the times in the forum cutscenes, without the formal headwear even but still not adressed. So they didn't forgot, but didn't bother or retconned that part of the story.

(Taped to a tree somewhere.)

I think it's more likely a case of Endwalker intending to be the expansion that emphasised showing the "good side" of humanity, in a bid to both support Venat's view of the world and put the lie to the opinions of the likes of Hermes and Emet-Selch in 5.0 - the problem is that they took it too far, and in their haste to showcase the positive aspects of human nature, it cost them a lot narratively-speaking, and now that the story has concluded and EW's glow has worn off, we're left with the ramifications of those decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm sure the devs are thinking they've got other areas to explore and it's not of much consequence, but a lot of fans have been been anticipating some of those areas for a long time and it doesn't do much to mitigate the inevitable disappointment they're feeling, and they've written themselves into a corner with what is now a really sizeable chunk of Hydaelyn itself.

Moreover, FFXIV was never a game about black and white morality, and ironically in the beginning made frequent use of the basic truth that sometimes, some people are just irredeemable garbage, and all we can do is keep trying our best and set an example for others. I know why they did what they did in Endwalker and what they were going for, but some of it came down to rewriting not only entire subsections of lore but the principles on which FFXIV's writing was founded, and I just don't think the pay-off was worth the sacrifice, especially since it seems to be developing into a recurring theme than a one-off scenario.

Mumbles something about humans being overtly messy may cause certain incidents in the MSQ to be called into question before crawling back under a rock