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.