This character could have been main villain for an expansion

[Tunda]

I wish we had an expansion length with this villain.. design wise and story wise is way deeper than DT whole story

but we got sphene

[genuine_stranger]

And forfeit the chance to speak Wuk Lamat?

I perceive the stench of heresy!

[Tunda]

And forfeit the chance to speak Wuk Lamat?

I perceive the stench of heresy!

Wuk lamat I let you down.. please keep the peace to our nation
WE WANT PEACE
PEACE IS THE SOLUTION
HOW TO LIVE WITHOUT HEARING WUK LAMAT SPEAK OF PEACE
WUK LAMAT IS THE PEACE MAKER

[TheMightyMollusk]

The Void story barely had enough to it to stretch across patch content, and you want that as a whole expansion?

[Tunda]

The Void story barely had enough to it to stretch across patch content, and you want that as a whole expansion?

Writing overall went bad after EW but at least we would love to stop talking about peace for an expansion or two

[Kaurhz]

Yeah, no...

Gonna have to disagree, he didn't really have much more substance, and to be honest there was barely enough behind the character to go for just post-expansion story, let alone for an entire expansion.

Which is literally the exact same problem that exists with Wuk Lamat. So as far as I am concerned, same problem even if Golbez were a main villain.

[Cach]

How many players do you guys think have 0 knowledge of Final Fantasy IV (or any of the saga in general)? I think they could've replicated the story 1:1 and the majority of the playerbase wouldn't have noticed it (I mean, they kinda did but not really).

More on topic, The Void could have very easily been a new set of maps for a complete expansion. It would need a complete story rewrite tho, recycling Golbez and the 4 fiends as main elements of a whole expansion would have been beyond lazy.

It was a complete waste using it as the 6.x patch series.

[LilimoLimomo]

Durante wasn't the worst FF14 villain, but he was a poorly constructed villain. Dude decided to try to commit genocide to get what he wanted, when literally all he would have had to do was ask nicely.

"Oh, y'all want to no longer live eternally and deathlessly in the Void? And to do that you need to die in the Source? Yeah, sure, come die here, it's no skin off our backs."

That fundamental oversight makes his character silly and hollow. There's nothing to explore or learn from this character because the entire conflict he heads can be resolved with a 5 minute conversation.

EDIT:
On reflection, I assume that the entire point of this thread was to encourage people to realize that at least Sphene wasn't as bad as Durante. And if that's indeed the case, well-played, and that's a reasonable point.

[ovIm]

NGL, i clicked this and expected Soreel Ja.

Golbez did not have enough meat on him in this incarnation, and the EW patch stories were not that exciting imho.

[CuteBucket]

Golbez was a boring villain who I didn't care about at all. Maybe if I'd played FFIV I would care, but I haven't. I don't want some villain from another game to just get copy pasted into XIV, at least not as MSQ. Side content is fine if they want to do obvious crossover events, but the MSQ has always been careful to only make allusions to previous games while never directly lifting characters and plots whole-cloth from them. Until 6.x patches. Don't lean on the plots and characters of old FF games as crutches. Use them to inspire something new that still feels like FF.

That said, I will give Golbez one thing: His motive, while simple and kind of stupid, had some amount of logic behind it. The 13th lost its aetherial sea, so there is no life, death, and rebirth there anymore. If there was a way to rejoin it with the Source without causing mass destruction, one could argue it would be a mercy to the people of the 13th to finally be able to return to the aetherial sea and no longer be monsters forced to cannibalize each other for aether. Golbez wanting to do something to save his world, even if it harmed the Source, is understandable. Maybe with more time and thought and an attempt to be more original, he could have been a lot more interesting.