Remember when this game was good?

[caffe_macchiato]

I do, ARR-SHB were good memories.

Bait thread. It's widely agreed that Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is the best MMO right now and one of the best games ever made. It has a 100% rating on OpenCritic. Pretty much everyone likes it. I cried 12 times during the MSQ. If you don't like it, you can always go back to WoW. Oh, what's that? Shadowlands? Bobby Kotick? Breast milk in the fridge? Fruit bowl paintings? Yeah, thought so. FFXIV won, WoW lost. Get over it.

Mods, please lock. Discussion is over.

[Eorzean_username]

You do realize you're wrong right? The only ascian in Shb is Emet-Selch. The title is clearly referring to the WoL and the Scions being "warriors of darkness" or in essence being rebels against the Light.

Emet-Selch is there as a representative / voice for the collective Ascians/Ancients, but they're "all" present, thematically. Also 5.10-5.40 occurred during Shadowbringers, and involved the extensive stories of Elidibus, Loghrif, and Mitron.

It was pretty much the "Farewell to Ascians" expansion.

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So yeah, "Shadowbringers" refers to the Scions/WOL (bringing Darkness back to the First) as well as the Ascians (the "Bringers of Shadow"), since the expansion reveals the Ascians's actual story, motivations, origins, and history, and decides the (ostensibly) final battle between Ancients and Mortals for control of the Star.

The whole point of the climax at Mount Gulg was to flip the plot's conceit on its head — from being a "Warrior of Darkness" fighting against the power of corrupted Light (Sin Eaters / Vauthry), back to having to scramble to become a "Warrior of Light" (ie, a corrupted borderline-Lightwarden) fighting against the power of pure Darkness again (Ascians / Hades).

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Likewise, "Jet-Black Villains" is deliberately hyperbolic, and refers to the Scions/WOL being "outlaws"/"sinners" on the First (from the perspective of the "dominant" Eulmoran society, and the moral extremist Vauthry) as well as the Ascians themselves (who are empowered by Zodiark/Darkness and, in fact, still trying to blow up the First, and everyone on the Source).

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Even the lyrics of Shadowbringers can be interpreted as being sung from the perspective of either the Ascians/Ancients or the Scions/Mortals.

I mean that's part of the core idea inside Shadowbringers's story — the ambiguity of who's the real "villain" in a story, how that can depend on perspective and who's writing history, whether "Light" or "Dark" is really the more "evil" force (in the Lore's context), etc.

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No argument that the marketing / Fan Fests cheekily hyped up the "BECOME THE WARRIOR OF DARKNESS!" aspect in a deliberately-coy way, but... that's marketing at work.

The internal story itself never tried to promise any sudden off-the-rails turns into becoming a Dark Side playthrough of a Bioware game, and considering the basic principles of FFXIV's design and storytelling, it was honestly just wishful(?) thinking to imagine that the WOL would be running around beheading orphans just to try to correct an environmental imbalance.

[Alexandre_Noireau]

Impressive how some people cannot see the clear decline in content quantity and quality over the years.

Every expansion we get less.
And lately some really uninspired stuff, which comes to replace previous content and is done very lazily. Eureka Orthos for example.

The Variant/Criterion dungeons are not bad, but lack a proper reward structure.
And i think thats a big part of the problems, XIV reward structure/gearing process is all over the place, and most content in is completely unlinked from the main path of player progression: Verticality is damaging the game creativity.

[TheDecay]

Bait thread. It's widely agreed that Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker is the best MMO right now and one of the best games ever made. It has a 100% rating on OpenCritic. Pretty much everyone likes it. I cried 12 times during the MSQ. If you don't like it, you can always go back to WoW. Oh, what's that? Shadowlands? Bobby Kotick? Breast milk in the fridge? Fruit bowl paintings? Yeah, thought so. FFXIV won, WoW lost. Get over it.

Mods, please lock. Discussion is over.

OpenCritic somehow manages to be even more useless than Metacritic user scores. It's amusing really.

Impressive how some people cannot see the clear decline in content quantity and quality over the years.

They do. They simply treat any attack on FF14 as an attack on themselves.

[Striker44]

Impressive how some people cannot see the clear decline in content quantity and quality over the years.

Every expansion we get less.
And lately some really uninspired stuff, which comes to replace previous content and is done very lazily. Eureka Orthos for example.

The Variant/Criterion dungeons are not bad, but lack a proper reward structure.
And i think thats a big part of the problems, XIV reward structure/gearing process is all over the place, and most content in is completely unlinked from the main path of player progression: Verticality is damaging the game creativity.

Perhaps because you're erroneously trying to make claims as if they're objective, when all any of us are doing is giving subjective opinions? Personally, I'm having just as much fun now and find the "quality" that matters most to me (namely - story and music) to be just as good now as it's ever been. I'm not getting any less this expansion compared to others. Your results may vary, but that's the point - we're all providing personal opinions. Nothing less, nothing more.

[Renathras]

There's no implication of the concept of "good"...etc [this whole post, basically]

All of this.

Do people just skip cutscenes or something? Or is it just that psychological thing where people tend to have memories fade/blur over time?

It had nothing to do with "good" or "evil".

It was clearly established that a controlled shift of a Shard towards one element, while the Source is shifted towards it a bit, will eventually cause that element to overtake the Shard and, due to the Source being tilted towards it, create some kind of funnel/attractive effect, sucking the energy from the Shard (and absorbing/deleting the Shard as an independent entity in the process), which then causes a flood of that element on the Source when it floods it, rejoining with the Source and making the Source (and the people on it) 1/13th (or something, it's probably more exponential the closer we get to 100%) stronger. If a Shard is pushed too far, too quickly, and without the Source being managed with it, then it simply causes the overabundance to collapse the Shard in on itself with that element, which is what happened with the Ascians first attempt, the Thirteenth/Void. After that, they learned to manage the process more carefully. (It's never said what their solution was to that problem, just kind of implied they thought they could figure out something once they finished with all the other Rejoinings and only the Void and Source remained to combine.)

The one thing I think you got wrong, though, is that the Ascians goal WAS to cause the Flood. That would have been the Rejoining. They brought [spoilers for anyone who hasn't done all the ShB Role quests and the bonus questline(s)] Cylvia over from the Thirteenth, had her work with and become a member of Ardbert's group, quest with them, and fight along side them...while all the time secretly also being the Shadowlord conjuring all the darkness and evils they strove against. Finally, she revealed herself to them as the Shadowlord and forced them to "kill" her, and by doing THAT (after purging all that Darkness from the world) and probably then going on to take down the Ascians revealed to be in charge (think how our own WoL fought Gaius as our big bad before fighting Lahabread), it pushed the First far enough towards Light/Umbral to trigger the rejoining.

...the only bit I'm a bit fuzzy on myself is why they traveled to the Source (Elidibus sent them there with a promise they could stop the Flood on the First, which was a lie, but I don't remember the WHY of it, maybe it was to help with that Rejoining...), and when they met Hydaelyn there, she sent Minfilia back to stop the Flood of Light, sparing a piece of the world. I don't think that was Elidibus' plan, though. I think they were sent to the Source to be that other part of managing the element to tilt the Source towards the First just-so to trigger the Rejoining, and us meeting them and the Hydaelyn/Minfilia thing wasn't part of the plan and paused their effort there.

Now, Black Rose was a separate issue, and an accident/unintended one.

Black Rose was supposed to be a certain level of deadly. But in the alternate timeline, the Rejoining with the First DID happen. The Source was flooded with Umbral, which causes stagnation and lethargy/weakness in all things. In effect, when that Rejoining happened, everyone's energy and immune systems, etc, were suppressed. Consider if suddenly everyone on Earth's immune system was cut to 50% effectiveness. Pandemics would run rampant all of a sudden, and be more deadly than normal Even things like the common cold and flu would be exponentially more deadly than they are today. So that's what happened. People were weakened by the abundance of Umbral/Stasis, so when Black Rose was released, it was FAR more deadly than it was supposed to have been, killing off most of the population. (This is the part of the story that was kind of explained, but they didn't explain it WELL, so most people missed that element). Everyone being tilted towards Stasis made Black Rose "Super Effective!!!", and it killed a massive amount of the population, including the Warrior of Light, Scions, and a bunch more.

While the Ascians did intend Black Rose to trigger the Rejoining (I think), it was TOO powerful because everyone's immunity/defenses against poison/etc were too suppressed by the Umbral, and it caused the catastrophe to be far worse. Though we never hear what became of the Ascians in that timeline, it may well have been considered a failure since it killed way too many people, which set back their "repopulate to offer those souls to Zodiark" plan back, possibly by tens of thousands of years.

That was the timeline G'Raha came from (which still exists; a Tales from the Shadows short story says that Midgarsormyr watched them send the Crystal Tower back in time and decided the sentient races were worthy of a second chance, and declared to them he would be their patron), and why G'Raha's soul/Aether is technically as dense as the WoL's, since the WoL had +1 Rejoining vs everyone else on the Source due to reabsorbing Ardbert while G'Raha comes from a world after the First's Rejoining, making his soul that same level of density. It also has some double-dipping with his original self's soul, so his soul is all kinds of weird denseness. The individual Shards seem to be of a kind (so say the First's part was A and the Second's was B and so on, G'Raha has two copies of several parts - all the Rejoinings that happened before the 8th calamity/First's Rejoining, and then has one copy of that shard of his soul), so they don't stack, per se. But G'Raha, like the WoL, has the Source component of his shattered soul as well as 8 Rejoinings (2 of each except for the First's shard of his soul, of which he has only one of), meaning he may actually be more powerful, in terms of soul density, than the WoL if you think about it, as both have the same total number of Shards, but G'Raha has copies of 7 of them as well as of his Source part.

...if it even adds up like that.

At the very least, he's of the same Rejoined level as the WoL is. Which is kind of interesting to think about.

.

Oh, right:

And OP, you're a troll, and this is a troll thread. You guys need to give it a rest. This isn't "constructive criticism", this is just a whiny temper tantrum and a "I want to be popular/on the hate train bandwagon too~!!" type of nonsense thread. Be better, people. <_<

[Iscah]

What got flipped on the First was Light being associated to passivity, while Dark being associated to activity. Which would imply Umbral Light/Astral Dark, rather than the Source's Astral Light/Umbral Dark.

More simply, there are two fundamental forces: passivity and activity, which in extreme concentrations manifest as Light and Darkness respectively.

Apparently the people of the Source never witnessed the more physical manifestations of these forces, and arbitrarily labelled the passive force "umbral" and active force "astral", by chance giving them the wrong names for their true natures.

Meanwhile the people of the First – apparently also by chance – named the passive force "light" and the active force "darkness" because of some poetic thing about colour theory, but it also happens to be the actual truth of their nature.

[Fawkes]

Yeah everything went downhill after this

[Nitelancer]

ARR only server when?

[Reap00]

I do, ARR-SHB were good memories.

The game is still great. Go outside.